Where Are They Now? Street Fighter on Wax
This is a series dedicated to learning from poor financial decisions in honor of Sports Illustrated's story about former Cincinnati Bengals running back Ickey Woods.
Read the first entry and the preface here.
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Down-right. Punch. If you know what this means, then you know that E. Honda is not a car, your first crush was Chun-Li and you’ve done a Gladwellian 10,000 hours of tiger uppercuts before Tiger Woods ever did his first uppercut.
If you don’t know, that’s the code for a Hadoken, a special fireball that would emit from the hands of Ryu and Ken at their opponents in the Street Fighter video game series.
If you don’t know — and you were into NFTs before January of 2021 — then you were probably buying Ringers for half an ETH.
I however, was buying Guiles and Dhalsims for 100-500 $WAX.
For me, my early NFT days were about nostalgia. I was already deep into my cardboard collection that I re-opened after finding NBA Top Shot, so getting into Street Fighter NFTs and putting more money in there felt…smart.
Oops.
The Street Fighter Drop
The much-anticipated Street Fighter Series 1 drop came in February and the packs (all 65,000 of them) went fast. The next 24 hours, while I sat on my newfound riches looking at my estimated inventory volume, more than $1 million in secondary sales happened.
It was in these first few days after the Feb. 18 sellout that the highest sale for any Street Fighter NFT took place: this Collector’s Edition, Pwr: 5 Ken, which sold for 75,000 $WAX (currently $9,270) on Feb. 21. AtomicHub’s current suggested price for that rare Ken NFT is about 200 $WAX ($24).
In about June of 2021, I exited the project, trading most of my rare Blankas and Ryus for a bit of ETH and a .crypto name (should have done ENS). I kept a few Chun-Lis, Dhalsims, and Kens for the love of the game, thinking that maybe in a year, I’d come back and they’d be worth thousands again.
One Year Later
My exit and the declining floor price of the collection didn’t deter Street Fighter from dropping more supply. in January of this year, Street Fighter sold out 1,000 Street Fighter Classic packs for $100 each. In July, there were 40,000 more packs dropped onto the market.
I'm not the only one who has given up on the set. The @CapcomNFT account (Capcom owns the Street Fighter IP and game) hasn't tweeted since March of 2021. The Wax Twitter account held a collector's challenge for the Classic set back in February and hasn't tweeted about the project since.
"It’s been over a year since s1 dropped, I'm guessing Capcom probably moved on from these and Wax doesn’t need to hype this as they know Capcom isn’t ready to budge and they moved onto gaming NFTs and know collections like these get stale/stagnant/forgotten if there’s no updates," said Discord user PauleyG in the Wax Discord. "You’d think s1 selling $millions and (Street Fighter Classic) selling out would be enough to encourage Capcom but we haven’t heard anything since the collection challenge was over."
All three sets have done 24 million in $WAX (about $2.9M at the July 9 price) since its inception. But only 448 $WAX ($55) in the past 24 hours.
The floor on the first series and second series of Street Fighter NFTs is similar, around 0.67 $WAX (7 cents).
The newest set has a floor of 25.57 $WAX ($2.55).
And the floor on my Series 1 Ken? 23 cents. Now that’s a down-right punch to the face.
