Cardano and NFTs… What a story! A long time ago my friends, Cardano used to be bullied for not having functional smart contracts, no NFTs and no use cases for digital art. This period is long gone! The CNFT space (NFTs on Cardano) is booming like no other blockchain and the variety of art you can now find on Cardano is limitless. However, it’s fair to say that one marketplace is dominating the others: the JPG Store one. In fact, you’ll find plenty of CNFT collections on it but today, I want to talk about my favourite collection on Cardano: The Ape Society. What is it? How to invest in it? And why do I plan to invest in it, by the way? All the answers are in this article!
1. What Is The Ape Society?
The Ape Society is a CNFT collection of 7,000 unique apes looking very very good. Check by yourself. Look at this badass ape, I’m not sure I want to mess with him:
The collection floor price is a shy 1799 ADA at time of writing with nice volumes:
The art is very funny, and objectively beautiful with different styles, families and vibes:
Finally, it’s something I would hang in my living room and it is a criteria for me when I consider an NFT for my portfolio.
2. The Roadmap, The Project And The Team
The roadmap contains multiple things: “cabins”, “families” and the development of an entire ecosystem with their $SOCIETY token. Cabins are an interactive 3D virtual world to customize with the $SOCIETY tokens:
What are those tokens? It’s a currency to use within their world for in-gallery improvements, merchandise and benefits to come in the near future:
Then, the concept of “families” is coming soon and will group the apes in 35 different families coming with different types of perks:
The 7 classes of apes are craftsmen, artists, explorers, merchants, military officers, royal advisors, nobles and kings:
In fact, each class goes with a list of perks that you can find on the homepage on their website. You can stake your ape, and some perks, for example go with a multiplier. So, yes, you can generate a nice passive income with multiplier based on an ape.
For staking, I recommend watching this video, explaining how:
What about the founding team? Well, as expected, the team is full of apes:
Their Twitter accounts have been created recently but they are already quite popular already which shows some sort of popularity that you do want to see:
In fact, influence of founders matter in the NFT world because it drives adoption and eventually impact the success of the project. I always have a quick look at their Twitter to check who they are and if they get some traction.
3. How Do I Buy An Ape?
Go to the collection page and pick an Ape. You can then connect one of your wallets first, with a wide diversity of choices depending on what type of wallet you actually like::
If you have enough funds (not my case on the screenshot, oops!), you can then buy it by simply clicking “buy” on your favourite ape, priced in ADA:
Alternatively, you can make an offer at a lower price to challenge the owner with a price more interesting for you, ocassionaly it does work and makes you feel very smart:
In fact, this can be a technique if the Ape has been on sale for a long time: the seller might be impatient to sell and accept your offer straight away.
Another piece of advice before buying, make sure you get a cheap ape with very rare attributes that you can find on the property tab:
Once you’ve chosen your ape and triggered a buy, after the validation of the transaction: it will be yours. You can see the list of NFTs you own in your wallet and it should appear within a couple of minutes after the execution of the buy. In fact, this ape will be visible not only on JPG Store but on any marketplace connected to your wallet: the blockchain has recorded that you are the owner of the asset, independently of the exchange you will be using in the future.
4. The Ape Society As An Investment
The first thing I like to look at when I invest in an NFT collection is the history of price and volume because it tells if it’s in an uptrend or downtrend:
Here, it’s been a slow and consistent ramp up in the middle of a dramatic bear market.
First positive point.
Indeed, usually the price (here is in ADA) of weak NFTs tend to collapse during bear markets, even priced in native token. It’s not the case here. It’s been maintaining itself at nice volumes and at 1k+ ADA in price.
Another important thing to look at is the ratio supply/owners:
In fact, the distribution is quite balanced: 2227 owners for 7001 items, it’s 3 NFTs per owner on average which is quite decentralized.
The volume (14 million ADA) since launch is impressive. The data is taken from JPG store but JPG store constitutes most of the volume for NFT smart contract transactions:
Also, The Ape Society collection is in the big names in term of market capitalization on the Cardano blockchain:
You want to pick the blue projects for a bit less risk but potentially less returns. The purple projects are very high risk very high potential returns. Your NFT investment portfolio should be shaped depending on your risk appetite but you need to know the risk you’re taking.
Also, another good point is the traction on Twitter. I ALWAYS look at the number of followers on Twitter, making sure it’s above 10k:
In fact, this is something I also monitor over time with scripts to verify that the adoption curve is still going up and up… and up.
5. Conclusion
I love The Ape Society for its art, its roadmap and its on-chain stats. The project has been stable during the bear market and didn’t collapse. This is an extremely important point for me to invest: it proves that the project is solid and a store of value in times of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Moreover, the collection is an interesting trade-off between alpha expectations (young project on a young blockchain) and relative stability as it’s coming straight from a very violent bear market and survived it. Also, I would definitely hang the art in my living room like a Modigliani and appreciate its large bands of colours applied on a rock-n-roll theme. Moreover, you can “stake your art” and generate a passive income with it, which is an interesting perk.
I would also like to say, because it does matter, that this article is NOT sponsored. I don’t know the founders and I’m only sharing my tastes and investment plans openly: it’s really me supporting the project because I do believe in it.
Thanks for reading.
Disclaimer: this is not financial advice
