Nakamigos: The NFT project that aimed to repeat the success of CryptoPunks

The Nakamigos NFT project just blew into the Web3 world like a hurricane and created a fantastic furore. The public mint of the collection took place on March 23, 2023, and in just four days the newcomer project surpassed the all-time NFT giant Bored Ape Yacht Club in the number of sales of all time. At the end of March, the trading volume of the new project on the secondary market exceeded 7.5K ETH (about $13 million). Many experts considered this achievement unexpected, taking into account the current state of the market.

How did Nakamigos manage to win the laurels of the new favorite of the NFT race? What is this project about? What are its prospects? Our crypto experts analyzed the collection and answered these and other questions in today’s review.

Nakamigos Official Links

• Official site https://nakamigos.io
• Twitter @Nakamigos – over 31k followers

What is Nakamigos?

Nakamigos is a PFP collection of 20,000 24×24-pixel NFTs. The appearance of these NFTs is very reminiscent of the style of the legendary CryptoPunks. The roots of the name of the Nakamigos collection can be found in the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin. Thus, we get Nak + amigos, that is, “friends of Nakamoto”.

MINTING SOON
GET ON THE LISThttps://t.co/4SyycWR88u pic.twitter.com/U4w6o4S5pc

— Nakamigos (@Nakamigos) February 16, 2023

At the time of minting, users could mint NFTs from the Nakamigos collection for 0.008 ETH, which was about $15 at the time. Nevertheless, token prices were growing by leaps and bounds. For example, Nakamigos #7762, featuring a hoodie character and orange helmet, sold for 1,690 ETH, and Nakamigos ghost token #3648 sold for a fantastic 16 ETH.

Nakamigos project has no roadmap, no special utility, or any physical items to claim. But it has a much more interesting background, which we will tell you about next

Nakamigos in numbers

• A public mint of a collection of 20,000 NFTs took place on March 23, 2023.
• Minting cost was 0.008 ETH (about $15 at that rate).
• The total volume of secondary sales exceeded 28k ETH (more than $60 million at the current exchange rate).
• The floor price is 0.445 ETH (about $900), which is 56 times more than the minting price.
• Average sales range from 0.45 ETH to 1 ETH.
• The most expensive #5187 was sold on March 29, 2023 for 20 ETH (over $36k at the time of sale).
• Total 5,624 unique holders (28%).
• Only about 11% of the collection (2,250 pieces out of 20,000) are for sale, among them the offers range from 0.445 ETH to 420 ETH. Such a high listing rate can be explained by the newness of the project, hence the high percentage of speculation and the determination of the “weights” and demand for tokens.

Data (including exchange rates) are given at the time of publication (April 17, 2023)

Nakamigos types and attributes

Nakamigos NFTs have an impressive array of attributes:

• Cape (3)
• Chain (2)
• Facial Hair (3)
• Glasses (7)
• Hair (13)
• Hat / Helmet (35)
• Headband (7)
• Headphones (5)
• Mask (2)
• Mouth (3)
• Ninja Outfit (3)
• Shirt/Jacket (81)
• Smoke (1)
• Tie (3)
• Type (12)
• Vest/Armor (6).

Among all the attributes, the dominant one is the type of character, which determines the rarity and uniqueness. And the other attributes build a complete image around it.

Who founded Nakamigos?

The Nakamigos project was created in March 2023 by a diverse team:

• An anonymous group called HiFo Labs @HiFoLabs. Despite the success of the project, HiFo Labs remains a kind of “dark horse” in the NFT world. The company has no Discord channel of its own and no other social media accounts except Twitter. Nevertheless, the team’s emphasis on commercialization rights for token holders is quite curious and may indicate a larger, as yet undisclosed, intellectual property rights goal.
• That said, one of the reasons for the dizzying success of the collection is the participation of Sartoshi @sartoshi_rip, OG crypto artist and NFT influencer. It was he who played the lead fiddle in the creation of the popular mfers collection (2021). When Sartoshi left the mfers project in June 2022, it caused a lot of talk, and many users considered it rug-pull.

Sartoshi decided to make a big show of leaving the project and minted a special sartoshi – eos pass collection. However, in February 2023, Sartoshi returned to the NFT world to announce the Nakamigos project, in which he was very involved. Sartoshi told subscribers that the new PFP collection will consist of 20,000 tokens and that eos pass holders will get a chance to mint the collection for free the day before it becomes publicly available on March 23.

Although there is no official information indicating Sartoshi’s specific role in the Nakamigos team, some speculate that Sartoshi is the artist of the project who prefers to remain anonymous.

• There are also rumors in the NFT community that the project is somehow connected with Larva Labs, which was originally behind the world famous CryptoPunks collection. Users came to this conclusion after seeing the external similarity of the two collections, as well as comparing the license agreement for obtaining IP rights from Nakamigos and Yuga Labs. However, there is currently no evidence to support this assumption.

Not Larva
Not Yuga
Nakamigos pic.twitter.com/z7b6BmA4Jc

— Nakamigos (@Nakamigos) March 28, 2023

• WestCoastNFT @WestCoastNFT, which has experience in working with some of the world’s largest NFT projects (e.g. Doodles, mfers, etc.), was also involved in the development of the project. Their staff created the custom Nakamigos smart contract and handled the mechanics of the minting process. They also ensured complete randomness in token minting.

Why are Nakamigos NFTs popular?

The rise of the project was largely due to effective marketing, which influenced the value of the assets, even though the creators of the collection did not present any roadmap. Nevertheless, Nakamigos remains a popular project. Why? Here are a few reasons why these tokens that look like CryptoPunks are in demand:

• The project team grants commercial rights to NFT token holders, allowing them to monetize the tokens as they see fit (although this granting of IP rights is not a CC0 as we all know it).https://twitter.com/nftnow/status/1640778802765635591
• The team donated 24 honorary Nakamigos NFTs to famous personalities, including Farokh, Zeneca @Zeneca, Art Blocks creator Erick Calderon (Snowfro), NFT trader DJ Seedphrase @seedphrase, artist XCOPY and other NFT persons. Such distribution largely contributes to the growth of the collection’s popularity.
• Involvement of famous people brought in by the Nakamigos project. The well-known digital artist and co-founder of CrypToadz, known by the nickname Gremplin @gremplin, offered Nakamigos owners the opportunity to purchase his work Fry Harvesters in exchange for burning Nakamigos NFTs.
• A reference to the CryptoPunks project, which was once a mega-popular collection.

Nakamigos Idea

Since the Nakamigos project does not have an official Discord channel, it is more difficult for it to communicate with its users and broadcast its idea. Apparently, the focus on close interaction with the community is not a fundamental value for the project.

Their interest is different. Judging by the appearance of the collection tokens, representatives of the project seek to revive the former popularity of such a project as CryptoPunks, rethinking it in a new way and adding to it several new characters.

Nakamigos Roadmap

The Nakamigos project does not have a roadmap. But it is highly likely that this is not a team flaw, but a targeted strategy.

Nakamigos Ecosystem

As such, the project has no ecosystem. However, soon after the successful launch of Nakamigos, derivative collections began to appear. Among them, of particular note are the following ones:

• Nakamigas @NakamigasNFT, a series of pixelated female avatars,
• Magamigos @Magamigos, a collection released to support former US President Donald Trump.

Magamigos

The Magamigos collection uses elements of Nakamigos artwork and features from the Trump Trading Cards set. The NFTs were minted within hours of Donald Trump’s indictment. The name of the collection has a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogan. Despite the fact that Magamigos has no website of its own, let alone a roadmap or whitepaper, the project managed to raise 150 ETH in trading volume (about $279,000 at the then exchange rate). The authors of Makamigos even launched a giveaway of Nakamigos NFTs, which gathered dozens of comments and likes.

https://twitter.com/Magamigos/status/1643461666997190656?s=20

The total trading volume of Magamigos on OpenSea exceeded 165 ETH and the floor price is 0.004 ETH.

Second Edition of Nakamigos by Beeple

On April 3, 2023, renowned digital artist Michael Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, announced his plans to create a second issue of Nakamigos. After this news, the floor price of Nakamigos reached 1 ETH. In less than two weeks, 4,851 tokens were sold. However, the story did not continue in earnest. As Beeple himself admitted, he just wanted to create an additional hype around Nakamigos.

fuck the floor price, I’m just aiming for everyone to be weirdly aroused by nakamigos

LOLOLOLOL!!! 😂😂😂🫦😂😂😂

— beeple (@beeple) April 12, 2023

How much do Nakamigos cost?

The public minting of the collection of 20,000 tokens took place on March 23, 2023. The minting cost was at 0.008 ETH, which was about $15 at the time. At the same time, the collection began trading on secondary markets, showing a strong positive trend from the very first days. The average selling price was as follows:

• March 26: 0.12 ETH;
• April 3: 0.8 ETH;
• April 9: 0.9 ETH;
• April 14: 0.63 ETH.

At the moment, on April 17, 2023, the floor price is 0.445 ETH, which is 56 times more than the minting price. On average, the latest sales are range from 0.45 to 1 ETH. And the total volume of secondary sales amounted to more than 28k ETH (more than $60 million at the moment).

The Most Expensive Sales of Nakamigos

The most expensive sales are led by the following NFTs from the Nakamigos collection:

1. #5187 sold on March 29, 2023 for 20 ETH (over $36k at the time of sale);
2. #3648 sold on March 28, 2023 for 16 ETH (over $28k at the time of sale);
3. #4020 sold on April 3, 2023 for 14.69 ETH (over $27k at the time of sale);
4. #1771 sold on April 4, 2023 for 11.3 ETH (over $31k at the time of sale).

Where to buy Nakamigos?

Currently, Nakamigos can only be purchased on the secondary market, on marketplaces such as OpenSea, X2Y2, Blur and LooksRare.

How to buy Nakamigos?

1. Remember that initially you need to connect your crypto wallet with self-storage to the marketplace of your choice.
2. Next, find the official collection using the search bar on the marketplace.
3. Analyze and choose the NFT you want to buy; click on it and then on the “Buy” button.
4. Or you can bet on the token you like. Make sure you leave enough ETH for gas or transaction fees. If the seller approves your bid, the deal goes through.

Should you invest in Nakamigos?

The Nakamigos NFT project has had a serious impact on the NFT market landscape, getting many crypto investors seriously interested. Despite the project’s young age (it is less than 1 month old at the time of writing this article), it already has significant reasons for investing:

• The aesthetic appeal of the design,
• The possibility of obtaining the rights to use the brand for commercial purposes,
• The intrigue enveloping the origins of the collection.

All this creates an aura of mystery and attractiveness around the project.

But this, of course, is not all. There’s even more to come:

• Commercial rights,
• Possible connection with Yuga Labs,
• The most important reason is the connection to big names in the NFT market like Sartoshi, Beeple, Gremplin, Farokh, Erick Calderon, XCOPY, Zeneca and others. As we know, the power of influencers is boundless and can make an information bomb out of any project, which is certainly the most important stimulus for multi-million dollar sales. And the reference to the legendary CryptoPunks is icing on the cake.

As the Nakamigos project continues to evolve, its potential is likely to expand. This may lead to further adoption and integration of the collection into the broader Web3 ecosystem.

In any case, do your own in-depth analysis and research when investing in NFTs, and then make your own decision.

Opinion of NFTmetria

The Nakamigos project is worthy of attention if only because it is a successor of the famous CryptoPunks collection. However, it is not very clear how Nakamigos will develop in the future and whether it will be able to consolidate its success on the NFT market, where the competition is quite high.

Some suggest that the main factors attracting attention to the project is the mystery of its origin and the anonymity of its creator. Others argue that the project rose just because of a deliberate reference to the legendary CryptoPunks and the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of Bitcoin.

In any case, Nakamigos project has definitely already made a name for itself in the NFT world, and it will be interesting to see its evolution in the future.