WTF Happened with y00ts?

At 4:45 a.m. this morning, the y00ts started their reveal in a surprise move from founder Frank Degods, starting with a reveal every 3 minutes until the website went live. 

By mid-morning, the site was live and holders of the y00ts t00bs were all able to mint their y00ts and see the revealed product.

The y00ts are all over on the NFT Twitter timeline, and people generally seem to like the art, but the price action has been rough.

The floor price started falling this morning (down to 80 SOL), then rallied back to ~95 SOL, before falling back to 71 SOL at the time of writing, in what appears to be a downward trajectory. The t00bs were near 130 SOL this morning, now down to 100 SOL.

And the timeline is starting to fill up with FUD.

So the question is - What happened? Why is the price down?

Well, after reading community sentiment, it seems a few misses and poorly set expectations by Frank are likely leading to this price action. The primary negative feedback out in the community is tied to the royalty switch, the lack of rarity in the outputs, and missed expectations regarding the art itself after the lengthy delay.

Royalty Switch

Frank was a leading voice in the support of Magic Eden's switch to optional (zero) royalties, which was a cause of a lot of FUD against Magic Eden. This hurt several smaller projects who relied on those royalties and anecdotally was a driver of the recent dip in Solana NFT demand.

He also set the unrevealed t00bs royalties to zero percent, down from 5 percent, in support of this change to a zero royalty NFT world.

Fast forward to today, and the market expected y00ts to be 0 percent royalty. Yet they aren't 0 percent. The royalty is 3.3 percent.

That's a relatively low and "reasonable" royalty amount, in line with other projects. But the user base expected 0 percent - and that was a miss.

Lack of Rarity

The next issue noted by the community - the rarity structure is fairly flat.

Perhaps it should have been expected with the project having a custom trait mechanism coming in the future, but there are not many unique traits in the set. There are 40 1/1s on the collection, but besides those, the traits are all pretty evenly distributed. 

Only a few traits are carrying a premium. Right now, just the Pyrite Crown (150 SOL) and the McY00ts Polo (130 SOL) command a premium nearly 2x the floor. The next rarest trait, the Banana Hazmat, is at 100 SOL, 50 percent over the floor.

That takes away from the rarity lotto, that several NFT traders enjoy playing. 

Frank has stated he wants aesthetics to guide pricing, and that is fine, but this market loves rare lottos. 

Art Expectations Post-Delay

The project has been on thin ice with the community ever since the initial reveal was delayed.

The t00bs were minted on Sept. 6 with the expectation of the reveal coming soon. At the time of mint, the project had tons of momentum and had several ETH-native traders jumping over to Solana.

Then the delay crept along and that momentum fell off. Now it's almost two full months later.

With the reveal today, many seem to align with Adam Hollander's (@HollanderAdam) take below - the art is good, but not worth the wait. Several are comparing it to the original art, that was famously thrown out by Frank weeks back.

Prominent coin trader and Solana NFT "degenerate" Rain (@rainnen23) may have summed it up best:

The art seems fine, good even - but it may not be enough to win people back after the delay and to overcome the royalty switch FUD.

What's The Bull Case?

There are plenty of positives for bulls to feel good about.

For starters, Frank is still one of the most important founders in the early NFT space. He had the #1 spot on NftInspect's profile global reach rankings for weeks before his recent Twitter break. He held a spaces last night at 3 a.m. ET and had 800 people show up. He has one of the biggest and strongest followings in the NFT space, and he knows how to capture attention.

His original project DeGods still holds a 230 SOL floor and is the #1 project on Solana in market cap and total volume. That ecosystem just gets stronger with the y00ts addition.

And back to the art - it really is good. As more people spend time with it, the favor may swing back as some of the FUD disappears. Just check out this deep dive on the glasses trait by NFT Doctor (@NFT_Doctor33).

So there are reasons to be optimistic.

If Frank can find a way to overcome the early FUD, he could turn this in to a great come back story. Plenty of people will be watching.