👑 long live the kingdom
The Saudis take over the NFT world.
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The Big Story
Remember Goblintown.wtf?
That irreverent free-to-mint NFT collection that amassed massive hype through its goblin noise-filled Twitter Spaces and influencer partnerships and made $7 million in sales volume within days?
Well, it has a new rival in town: The Saudis.
The Saudis is the latest free-to-mint, performance art-driven NFT collection that has taken the industry by storm.
The project, consisting of 5,555 CryptoPunks-derived NFTs, was sold out within hours of launch on July 9. Each of these Ethereum-based NFTs is unique and algorithmically generated from over 80 traits. Owners receive a "Sheikh status" in the project's "kingdom," and are granted access to all of its upcoming events.
Within the first 24 hours, the collection ranked #1 on OpenSea, hitting 4,774 ETH. Its floor price, which once surged to 1.3 ETH ($2,413), currently stands at 0.72 ETH. So far, the entire project raked in $7.7 million in sales volume, driven by hype generated by its Twitter followers.
#MAXBIDDING
It's been a while since the NFT community has seen such buzz surrounding a new project, and particularly for a CryptoPunks derivative.
Since its mint, fans of the collection heavily rallied their support on Twitter, sharing some Saudi Arabia-inspired meme videos.
Even during the mint phase, The Saudis Discord was bursting with energy:
Some controversies
But as is usual with performance art-driven NFTs, the launch attracted a barrage of controversies.
I. Scams on Discord
Several users on The Saudis Discord reported their wallets being drained by scammers. Typically, Discord moderators restrict the use of @everyone and @here to only officially recognized accounts. But in this case, the scammers tagged everyone and “sent a link on general chat and said it was 2 stage we should mint before it mints out.”
While the pseudonymous founding team has yet to comment on the issue, the incident once again highlighted poor security issues rampant on the popular social networking platform.
II. Serial NFT Sniper
The team behind the project had around 4,500 NFTs reserved for their whitelist, and only 1,000 were available for public minting, with a maximum of 2 mints per wallet. Still, one user found a way of circumventing this requirement.
Rightblock, the anonymous infiltrator, set up a contract and minted almost half of the public supply through several different wallets controlled by them. Then, they redirected all those NFTs to their main wallet to trade on OpenSea.
They made over $100,000 from selling these NFTs before The Saudis team became aware and disabled their right to transfer NFTs to other wallets. In response, Rightblock began listing them at lower prices until its floor price reached 0.001 ETH, preventing other users from buying them.
To set a precedent, The Saudis decided to punish them with "MAXIMUM LASHES."
III. NFT influencer wars
Twitter users like Fanta and JasonCline accused Farokh, a popular NFT influencer with over 300K followers, of engaging in a pump and dump strategy. He claimed that Farokh knew about the project beforehand and was able to mint more NFTs than the pre-described wallet limit.
Although Jason later clarified that Farokh never promoted the project, other users like John_ACW said that such a move from an established influencer is analogous to subtle shilling.
But that's not the end of it.
Some people also accused the project of racially stereotyping the MENA culture. Meanwhile, others speculated on the founding team's ethnicity, saying people belonging to the region wouldn't empower such stereotypes.
Is it all bad timing?
Following its weekend highs, The Saudis collection has since dropped 64% in the last 24 hours. It is currently ranked #6 on OpenSea.
Still, the crypto community celebrates the project’s success as it’s the first popular collection to launch since Ethereum plunged more than 50% in June.
For quite some time, people were desperately looking for a positive sign, especially amid the massive market sell-off, heightened inflation worries, and halting withdrawals by crypto lending platforms like Celsius and Vault.
While it’s still too early to predict whether The Saudis can maintain their momentum in the long run, the community remains hopeful.
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