"Oh Shit" vs. "Boom": Badkidification of Cosmos

Polkachu Team | 2023-06-11

BadKids is one of the most successful NFT collections on Stargaze. Most people will point its success to its high market cap, but I attribute its success to its cultural allegiance to the builders in the Cosmos ecosystem. The price is just the downstream effect.

Race Between Culture and Price

An intern has wisely said, Every NFT Project is a Race Between Culture and Price. In the piece, I divide NFT projects into a 2x2 table of price vs. culture, among which the "Low Price, High Culture" category holds the highest promise to become blue-chip.

Low Price, High Culture: This is where the new blue-chip NFT projects are made. Since culture is difficult to create out of the thin air, these NFTs initially get grass-root adoption from a cultural "elite" already rising under the radar. This cultural "elite" is culturally rich but financially poor at the time of the initial alliance... Currently, BadKids NFT is following a similar path to be adopted by a loosely affiliated group of Cosmos builders with a strong builder culture.

We are in a prolonged bear market. While it makes all of us have fun being poor, it is a healthy gestation period to create the next blue-chip NFT collection. Slowly, many Cosmos builders have adopted BadKids at a reasonably low price as their primary identities on Twitter . On the other hand, the bear market has prevented the celebrities of the old world (say, Jimmy Fallon or Paris Hilton) from rushing into the movement with money, which they have plenty.

"Oh Shit" vs. "Boom"

There are two mental models to approach NFTs: "Oh shit" vs. "Boom". The former emphasizes on people and the latter on price. In an "oh shit" world, NFT acquires people of prominence culture; in a "boom" world, people acquire NFT at significant price.

"Oh shit": "Oh shit" is typically used to celebrate a cultural taste-maker when they join an NFT project. The emphasis is on people, because they bring culture to the NFT project rather than the other way around. It celebrates the horizontal expansion of an NFT collection to the cultural prominence. It cares about who becomes the next acquirer regardless of how much they pay to acquire it. When a NFT community adopts this mental model, it feels enriched by every new member who adheres to the existing culture but also brings something unique and extra to the mix.

"Boom": "Boom" is typically used to celebrate a new high-price sale or a new ATH floor price. The emphasis is on price, as it is the yardstick to measure success. It celebrates the vertical price increase of an NFT collection. This mental model cares about how much value a project extracts from the next acquirer regardless of who they are. When a NFT community adopts this mental model, it feels enriched literally by the increasing wealth that their ownership accumulates.

Once you understand these two mental models, you will suddenly realize that most of the NFT takes you see on the daily basis are just different variations of "boom". In some rare occasions, you might seem some "oh shit" attempts when an NFT project tries to acquire some fading culture elites, only to see them dissipate when the hard time hits.

New Elite Formation

Most NFT projects start out as undifferentiated renderings of monkey heads and end up becoming graveyard of JPEGs with an on-chain pointer. An NFT project can only avoid the decay into irrelevant by attaching itself to a new emerging "elite" and adopt its culture. After all, an NFT project does not inherently have culture; people do. Without such adopted culture, an NFT project withers over time.

That's why it is so interesting to see that Cosmos builders and BadKids have organically found each other in this bear market. Builders provide the culture and BadKids provides a distinct but unified identity. And that's also why I have a bag of "oh shit"s to highlight all the builders that I respect when they adopt a BadKids avatar. They are the reason why Badkids is Badkids.

As Marc Andreessen has famously said, every technology change is also a societal change. If crypto indeed holds the technological promise that we have envisioned, it means that we will see a sea change at the societal level too. A new cultural elite will emerge beyond the geographical boundary. Who knows, maybe they will adopt an NFT project as their shared identity.

This is why the "boom" people are so fundamentally short-sighted. The price itself is never the true potential of NFTs in a crypto economy. When you start to let your mind wonder and imagine the societal changes that we will see in the coming decades, you might hear a whisper to yourself, "Oh shit".