Moonbirds is generating a lot of buzz in the NFT space right now, having launched on April 16th and generating $280m in sales in two days, more than Bored Ape Yacht Club. Moonbirds consist of 10,000 images of owls.
Moonbirds was created by PROOF Collective, an NFT group co-founded by Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. PROOF launched in December 2021 and contains 1,000 NFT passes, with members including Gary Vaynerchuk and Beeple.
Moonbirds is the profile picture project of PROOF (PROOF NFTs have no artwork). 100% of funds raised by Moonbirds goes to PROOF Holdings Inc, a True Ventures (a VC firm which Kevin Rose is a partner at) backed web3 media company planning to use the funds to expand their team and launch new products that create value for the community. The floor price of a PROOF NFT is currently 139 eth, and of a Moonbird is 40 eth.
PROOF is also the name of a podcast by Kevin Rose that focuses on NFTs.
PROOF membership gives holders access to a private Discord channel, early access to the PROOF podcast, free access to in-person PROOF conferences and meetups, airdrops, and unique NFT minting opportunities. In the future, PROOF is planning to distribute weekly NFT deep dives (3-5 page PDF reports), weekly highlights PDFs (created by PROOF members designated “curators”), a full-time events organizer to create regular expert panel sessions, and building of future projects.
Moonbirds NFTs basically just give holders access to a private Discord channel, airdrop eligibility, IP rights, and early access + discount to PROOF conferences.
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I think PROOF is very interesting because it is basically like a private alpha group + NFT curation group where membership is for sale, with the public-facing element of the PROOF podcast, Moonbirds, and whatever metaverse type project they make with it.
Shareholder vs. NFT holder
In a traditional corporation, shareholders are practically powerless unless they’re wealthy enough to own enough shares to get a board seat or buy a sizable portion of the company (eg. Elon Musk offering to buy Twitter). As an average Joe owner of a stock like MSFT, you practically have no influence over the company, and can basically just buy and hold.
NFT holders on the other hand have a lot more influence over the success of their project. Of course much of this is due to the significantly smaller scale of NFTs vs multinational corporations with trillions in market cap and hundreds of thousands of employees, but NFT communities are a different kind of organization altogether because (1) much of the value is in the community (2) the bottoms-up nature of NFT communities.
The more NFT holders contribute to their community such as by sharing alpha in their private Discord chats, the more valuable the community and thus the higher the NFT prices.
Despite NFT projects generally being created by just a founder or two, the NFT project itself is a bottoms-up organization where NFT holders have the power (assuming they have IP rights). Anyone is free to create whatever they want for their community. For example, if another PROOF member wanted to create another PROOF podcast or NFT newsletter exclusively for PROOF members, they very much could do so. If it turns out to be valuable, they would be rewarded in the subsequent increase in the value of membership.
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I’m admittedly still new to researching the NFT space, but it will be very interesting to see how these NFT communities play out
Note: I do not own any Moonbird or PROOF NFTs
J. Savage 