On April 16th, the Moonbird collection was launched. The pixelated owls could be minted for 2.5 ETH. A few hours later they went over the counter for over 20 ETH. It seems that the project has staying power, just like the punks and the apes.

It was the most successful launch of an NFT project of the year. In two days, 280 million in sales were made. In 24 hours, more volume was traded than the Apes in the past month combined (The Bored Apes are the most expensive and most traded NFT collection today).

The Moonbirds, like the CryptoPunks and the Bored Apes, have several more or less rare features (hats, crowns, colour, etc), which partly determine their value. Buyers of a Moonbird receive the intellectual property of their owl and may thus do anything with it: build a company around it, for example.

Membership benefits

Moonbirds fall into the category of Profile Picture NFTs. But much more is possible with them. Owning them is tantamount to being a member of a club. Over time, this provides Moonbirds buyers with all sorts of benefits, both in the real world and in the Metaverse being built around the project. Think access to a Discord group of your own. Creator Kevin Rose, Web3 Venture Capitalist, also envisions an application in which membership is linked to the real world and provides benefits there.

Nesting instead of staking

To build a sense of community and prevent buyers from "flipping" their Moonbird right away, nesting has been introduced. You could call it a form of staking for NFTs. In the course of months, your owl builds its nest and for that you, the owner, are rewarded with future airdrops. Nesting is not live yet but coming soon.

Long-term vision instead of flipping

The Moonbird mint comes from the Proof collective. That's a club of 1,000 art collectors. The club's membership card? Of course, an NFT. From the beginning, Proof has placed less emphasis on making a profit on NFTs and more on the long-term view. Hodling art, so to speak. You could see the launch of Moonbirds as an expansion of the membership circle.

The already mentioned Kevin Rose was also the founder of Digg, one of the first social news sites, in 2004. He talks about how much easier it is to be profitable as a company and as a community because of NFTs. It is a new revenue model that makes advertising unnecessary: "We had 38 million users at Digg and were still not profitable. We were living in an ad world, which led to bad business decisions. Now we're in a beautiful new world where we don't have to sell our users anymore. We make revenue from royalties."