Dropping NFT Prices… Every minute. Every day.
Today we’re dropping a brand new marketplace on the NFT industry.
I’m actually reluctant to call it a “marketplace” because doing so will immediately draw comparisons to other NFT marketplaces in the industry – and our “marketplace” looks nothing like any of those. Or at least very little like them.
I like OpenSea. I’ve been using it ever since I bought my first MLB Champions NFTs on ethereum way back in 2018, and I’ve been using it ever since.
I also like, and have deep respect for, the newcomers like Looksrare, X2Y2, Magic Eden and Byzantion & Mintable and Atomic Market before them, among others. They each fill a void in features or blockchain coverage that OpenSea is missing, and were born from passionate teams who are looking to push the industry forward.
Our passion is rooted in the fun we had during the “pre-rocketship” period of NFTs from 2018-2020. Those first MLB Champions NFTs I bought weren’t from OpenSea. They were actually bought directly from an on-chain marketplace for MLB Champions where everything was a Dutch auction (well, kind of).
Those of us who were around during that time had a blast waiting to see which player was going to “drop” next during the multi-week primary sale. Traits were randomized (long before they were even called traits), and you never knew what was going to show up. Then the prices would drop… constantly.
If you wanted an NFT you could have it. No gas wars and no getting out-bid. In an on-chain Dutch auction, the first person to submit and confirm a buy transaction on the blockchain gets the NFT.
But if you wanted some of them at cheaper prices, that’s where the thrill came in. How long are you willing to wait for the price to decline? What if someone else grabs it first? What if something else drops that you want even more?
Then you could even drop the NFTs you purchased (or earned as a reward during the MLB season) back onto the same marketplace.
The entire experience was a lot of fun, but certainly not perfect. Many secondary auctions had unreasonable ending prices, for instance, and many had starting and ending prices that were the exact same, functioning instead as boring fixed-price listings. So the marketplace eventually became cluttered with stale listings and ultimately resembled what you see on OpenSea today - a large order book, 99% of which are overpriced and tedious to browse as a buyer & manage as a seller.
CryptoSlam actually recreated some of this fun in 2019 by hosting a couple “Power Hours” for the MLB Champions community that featured nothing but Dutch auctions with prices going to zero. Everyone had a blast and no, none of the prices actually made it all the way down to zero. Not even close.
When given proper visibility, Dutch auctions are very efficient in finding the fair market value of NFTs and are particularly useful for NFTs with unique traits that aren’t necessarily “floor” NFTs.
In February 2021, we did the same thing for the rapidly-growing NBA Top Shot community. We called these “Power Drops”.
In each case, buyers and sellers were both left satisfied and hungry for more. But we had bigger plans… and we had our hands full keeping pace with the exploding NFT industry, given our mission to track any NFT on any blockchain that anybody cares about.
We set out to build a thrilling, massive multi-chain “arena” bringing together NFT buyers and sellers that had everything we loved about Dutch auctions and left out all the stuff we hated about NFT marketplaces in general.
We decided not to build it onto CryptoSlam.io. We’re fortunate to have thousands of users who visit CryptoSlam.io each day and trust us to provide industry-wide NFT data and analytics. We felt that our marketplace deserved to be on its own brand.
So instead, we chose to use our CryptoSlam data to power a brand new sister-property called DroppingNow.
On DroppingNow, we’re introducing the concept of “all-in Dutch auctions”. Everything is going to zero and sellers can’t cancel the auctions. You read that right. As a buyer, there’s nothing more annoying than following a Dutch auction for a while only to have the seller get cold feet and cancel it. Also annoying are auction ending prices that are above the realistic fair market value. Prices will continuously decline on a “decay curve” at a fixed rate roughly equal to 25% of the most recent price per day.
Will this turn away some sellers? Of course it will. The NFTs that sellers are reluctant to go “all-in” on are probably best for a fixed price marketplace or to remain in the seller’s wallet anyway. I suspect if they dig deeper into their wallet they’ll find other NFTs (or bundles of NFTs) they would go all-in on.
But we haven’t left out motivated sellers… We’re also introducing innovative and rewarding Tokenomics unlike anything the industry has ever seen. Any seller who drops NFTs on our platform will earn ERC-20 $DN tokens and ERC-1155 DT tokens giving them a claim on the transaction fee charged to the final sales price of future auctions. Details here.
And what about buyers? With all prices going towards zero and no way for sellers to cancel? They’ll be there.
There aren’t typical marketplace fees taken off the top of every transaction and we didn’t pre-mint ourselves a bunch of tokens to pump and dump. Instead, every fee is tokenized and processed in real-time. Droppers earn tokens, authors earn tokens, and even we earn tokens.
Oh yeah, and in typical CryptoSlam fashion, it’s already multi-chain. At launch we’re supporting Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche with more to come.
It’s bold, it’s different, and it may take a little while to get the hang of. But once you do, we’re confident that you won’t be able to take your eyes off of it.
Thank you for hopping on this journey with us, and we can’t wait to see you on DroppingNow!
Randy Wasinger
Founder / CEO
CryptoSlam ⚡