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Navigating Influencers In The NFT Space
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Navigating Influencers In The NFT Space

Who you can trust and why

TSF
Jan 10
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Year for the ages

This has been a crazy 12 months in NFTs. Sales volume on OpenSea has skyrocketed from $3.5 million in December 2020 to $3.2 billion in December 2021. That makes for an astronomical increase of ~91,000%.

Source: https://dune.xyz/queries/3469/6913

One of the side effects of such insane growth is the rise of NFT “influencers” on Twitter. A good number of people have gone from little to no followers to amassing tens or even hundreds of thousands in a span of less than 12 months.

Twitter avatar for @tropoFarmertropoFarmer 🍌 @tropoFarmer
forget BAYC, my follower count did a 1000x this year to 100,000. fucking crazy. turns out that parking my fat ass on twitter 24/7 and shitposting DOES work. thanks for the support, y'all, really do appreciate it 🙏🍌 wen @verified
Image

December 23rd 2021

23 Retweets668 Likes

These people come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are more likely than others to have your best interests in mind. What I will attempt to do is describe the different types and share the unspoken context you should understand when digesting their tweets.

Water cooler of the metaverse

NFT collecting is the most fun and engaging things I have ever done. It’s also daunting for beginners. There is so much to learn before you feel comfortable making decisions on your own.

Enter NFT Twitter. The default water cooler of the metaverse. With such large sums of money sloshing around, the stakes are high. For every bit of genuine educational advice, motivational platitude, or hilarious shit post, it’s possible you come across a rug pull, pump and dump, or deceptive promotion.

On the path towards clarity on that front, let’s start with some definitions.

NFT Influencer: For the sake of this piece, NFT influencers are twitter accounts with more than 50k followers that focus predominantly on NFTs. Their opinions carry significant weight when it comes to buying and selling particular NFTs. They quite literally influence the market. I posit they come in 4 main varieties:

Pure Collector: for lack of a better definition, Pure Collectors are influencers that neither directly market products, nor create or build. They invest money for the joy of collecting and in search of portfolio appreciation. Within collectors there are flippers, holders, and every combination in between.

Flippers operate on a short term time horizon. While they sometimes get a bad rap, they do provide necessary market making functions for the ecosystem. Holders operate on a long term time horizon. They invest in projects early and rarely ever sell. Many people deploy a strategy combining these two approaches.

Marketer: one of the beauties of web 3 is that everyone becomes a marketer when they have an ownership stake. However, there are some people looking to more directly sell you things in one form or another. They may take money to promote projects, play a “community” role within a project, serve as an “advisor” or “consultant” that gets a cut of the mint revenue, or sell their time in the form of a paid group or discord.

Creator / Builder: this category is made up of artists, developers, and founders or employees of projects or companies in the space. They are the lifeblood of the space and the reason we are able to collect what we love in a frictionless global marketplace.

Hybrid: combination of the Marketer and Creator / Builder category. Often times they are involved across a variety of projects as investors, advisors, consultants, or “community” aka marketing roles.

Where the chips fall

Slotting influencers across these categories was extremely difficult. Movement across them can be fluid based on as little as a single tweet and I have limited information. It’s also highly likely that I have inadvertently left people off and for that I apologize. It goes without saying that there are good well intentioned people across all categories and each one serves a necessary function in the space.

Unspoken context

Pure Collector
  • Rarely does anyone tweet about a project before their bags are already packed

  • You likely will not hear from them before they sell those bags

  • Long term holders are more likely to share your interests than flippers as they will not be selling their position anytime soon

    Twitter avatar for @dingalingtsdingaling @dingalingts
    Just added 2 more #BAYC to the collection! Still buying, still holding #ApesTogetherStrong Very proud to be the #1 @BoredApeYC holder. 🦧💎🙌
    Image

    December 4th 2021

    132 Retweets2,107 Likes
  • Everyone will be quick to remind you of their winners, but rarely do you hear about the losers

    Twitter avatar for @DiscoverXnftThread Guy 💫 @DiscoverXnft
    Influencers when price goes up: haha I told you never fade me Influencers when price goes down: 🦗 🦗 Remember, EVERYONE is taking L’s. You only see the wins on Twitter Don’t get caught in the fomo & noise. No one wins every trade.

    January 10th 2022

    3 Likes
  • The more followers someone has, the less likely you are to benefit from their advice on particular projects as others will have already beat you to it

Marketer
  • Marketing is a vital function in the space, but not all ads will be properly disclosed

    Twitter avatar for @ElectionDayMad1Franklin @ElectionDayMad1
    A thread 🧵 on me misleading people for my financial gain (~18 ETH) via my tweets about a rugged project, Expansion Phunks (@XpansionPhunks). Keep reading to find out what I did:

    January 4th 2022

    58 Retweets447 Likes
  • Not all relationships to projects will be properly disclosed

  • They do not care whether prices goes up or down because they are getting paid either way

  • They are often privy to insider information, whether good or bad

Twitter avatar for @Zeneca_33zeneca.eth (3,3) @Zeneca_33
It's actually insane how much "inside information" i'm privvy to, in terms of news that gets dropped for projects that inevitably causes a huge floor pump Really makes you wonder

January 9th 2022

25 Retweets537 Likes
Creator / Builder
  • Artists will do self promotion, which is fine since you know where it’s coming from and they have an incentive to add value to collectors

    Twitter avatar for @DrifterShootsDrift @DrifterShoots
    Goodmorning. “Where My Vans Go” floor piece currently listed at 29.5 ETH. This photo was taken at the abandoned six flags theme park in New Orleans
    Image

    January 10th 2022

    25 Retweets243 Likes
  • Builders will be biased towards using their own products or services whether or not it is the best option available

  • People in this group will often support their close friends when it may or may not actually be a good investment

Think before you ape

As with most things in life, everything comes down to incentives. That is especially the case when considering who to trust and when in the NFT space. If you keep that in mind and always do your own research, you are much more likely to come out ahead in the long run.

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