May 10, 2023: Based and Millama Pilled 🦙💊
The most successful Vyper NFT in history opens to the public
For every great narrative, there’s an equally great counternarrative.
Consider the NFT space: it’s all over.
Counterpoint: we so back? What if NFTs didn’t die, but they just morphed into Ordinals on Bitcoin.
Or if you prefer to stick around Ethereum, the NFT death arc shows pockets of life, depending where you look. For instance, if you’ve ever dreamed of owning a Bored Ape, the 45 ETH floor is your best opportunity this year.
Meanwhile, the Milady floor price has dropped a casual 4x over the past month.
We all know VC thot leaders pivoted from crypto to AI. Except, though, when they need to put some money into Pudgy Penguins.
Millama
Let’s not bury the lede though. I like to trot around my home and act like a llama. I don’t know why but I just enjoy doing this.
Last year I had the privilege of speaking at ETHLatam, where I discussed why Vyper lagged Solidity in the NFT space.
We’re all eagerly anticipating the release of Vyper 0.3.8, in part because the release of TriCrypto-NG may hinge on this update. Yet we feel we already need to update this talk following the emergence of the successful Llamas project. Just over halfway through the mint process, and it’s already become the most successful Vyper NFT launch in history, with a half-decent shot at becoming a blue chip project.
For those not familiar, the project has ambitious aims, far outclassing the typical PFP generative art project. The Llamas actually could compete favorably against the run-of-the-mill PFP projects thanks to its bespoke artwork, but the team has much grander plans. The Llamas intends to build an entire digital reputation layer atop the Curve ecosystem, becoming an anonymous workforce and coordination marketplace.
We currently sit near the end of phase 1. The next phases will involve implementing some of the more innovative concepts, including a badge system inspired by the GMX Blueberry Club used as a digital identity layer by incentivizing targeted actions with reputation. This would unleash the power of the Llama community through a permissionless jobs marketplace and convert their passion into an unstoppable workforce.
Whether or not they fulfill this ambitious Phase 2, we’ll of course have to wait and see. Yet it’s incontrovertibly true their highly successful release has already exceeded expectations.
Phase 1 involved a fast-paced series of auctions, with new llamas on the auction block every hour or so (bids in the last five minutes extend the auction an additional five minutes.) Just over half the llamas have been auctioned as of last week, when bidding was restricted to members on the whitelist.
Drilling down on some numbers, the story of the whitelist phase of the auction was quite the success. For context, the whitelist auction consisted of 144 total llamas, with 414 addresses approved for the whitelist (primarily via engaging with the community through the project’s pre-launch phase). Each address was restricted to two llamas, meaning somewhere from one-third to two-thirds of the community could walk away from the auction with a new llama.
We’re not professional economists (this is neither financial nor camelid advice), but we interpreted this to mean it was perhaps the best opportunity for everyday users to snag a “cheap” llama. Within the 414 addresses of course existed some whales, but also plenty of smol-sized wallets who might get their opportunity if the whale wars fought themselves out.
If there would be a discount window however, it would be extraordinarily short-lived.
Throughout the entirety of the auction, only a small handful sold at a discount for under 2 ETH. Instead of losing steam towards the end as whales got limited, in fact the final few auctions showed sign of picking up steam towards 3 ETH, where the floor currently sits. In the end, 149 of the 414 whitelisted addresses would actually participate in the auctions.
Closing out the whitelist phase of the auction, the average win price cleared over 10x the minimum bid price of 0.2 ETH. A hefty 343 ETH would be raised for the treasury, giving the team plenty of dry powder to build out the rest their far-reaching roadmap.
In a few hours, the unrestricted public auction will open up. We can’t predict exactly what will shake out. Perhaps jealous bystanders will drive the bid price significantly higher in a bidding free-for-all. Or perhaps the emergence of memecoin driven gas pains will suppress bidding.
If we simply extrapolate horizontally, the team will have over $2MM beleaguered US Dollars worth of assets, which will be put towards various flywheel assets.
Already we’ve seen the Llamas NFT insert themselves into the broader flywheel ecosystem. Stake DAO overwhelmingly supported a 100K SDT grant,
Similarly, enough sites have updated their UI to support the Llama project that the copypasta may begin trending.
For more background on the project, we recommend reading through the Llamas Notion site.
See also our prior interview with the team:
Or more recently, last week the team joined Leviathan News for an update:
Public bids open later today. 56MM millionaires in the world, just 1111 llamas, you do the math…
Disclaimers! Author contributed some dev help to the team and was received two Llama NFTs unsolicited in return.
