The DeGods NFT community has shaken up the NFT space in a big way. With a current floor price of 1,200 SOL, or more than $26,000 (as of writing), the DeGods collection has shot up into the top five most valuable NFT collections across all chains, coming in after Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and Moonbirds. The collection has more than 4,100 unique owners and is one of the highest-ranked Solana projects on both OpenSea and Magic Eden.
Its sister project, y00ts, which launched in September 2022, saw similar popularity, attracting the interest of several celebrities, including Allen Iverson, Wayne Rooney, and Howie Mandel.
Two of the most well-known and respected Solana-based projects, DeGods and y00ts made headlines when their teams announced they’d be leaving the blockchain in 2023. The projects will bridge to Ethereum and Polygon, respectively. Given the imminent bridge, the hype, and DeGods’ Cinderella story comeback from the end of 2021, now is an excellent time to refresh your knowledge on what the DeGods project is and how it’s changing the face of Solana NFTs.
What are DeGods NFTs?
DeGods is a deflationary 10k PFP collection of gods clad in a creative aesthetic combination of modern streetwear-meets-ancient-deity vibes, with an emphasis on building utility for its community.
How many DeGods are there?
There are currently 9,465 DeGods NFTs in existence, as the team has burned the remaining 535 (more on that later). They feature various traits ranging from Common to Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare, and Mythic. Some of the Super Rare and Mythic traits in the collection include the Divine Robe, the Heaven background, Night Vision Goggles, the Mythic Helmet, Smoke Ring, and more. The rarest trait in the collection is the Medusa Head, of which there are only 25 in existence.
Where can you buy DeGods?
Collectors can purchase DeGods NFTs on the Magic Eden, Alpha Art, OpenSea, and Solanart marketplaces.
Affecting the value of the entire collection further is the fact that DeGods NFTs can be burned.
When the Degods team first announced the project on Twitter in September 2021, they did so by detailing its plans to institute what it called a “Paperhands Bitch Tax,” a 33.3-percent tax levied at anyone who listed their DeGods NFT below the mint price. For a time, project developers sent the funds from that tax to a treasury wallet they used to buy back the cheapest DeGods NFTs on the market.
And here’s where things get interesting: The DeGods team burned all 535 of the NFTs it bought back with this treasury wallet. This resulted in the lowest-ranking pieces in the collection, those in the Common category, becoming increasingly rare and driving up the collection’s value overall.
What are DeadGods?
DeadGods was the DeGods NFT upgrade that allowed collectors to buy a “fine art” version of their existing NFT. Starting on March 31, 2022, DeGods holders could pay 1,000 DUST (the community’s utility token) to obtain the new version of their NFTs (which featured the same rarity but had their attributes re-illustrated).
As the team added the DeadGods NFTs to the metadata of collectors’ original NFTs, they are considered the same and can’t be sold separately. In this way, the introduction of DeadGods didn’t inflate the collection’s supply while adding to its value. It was a much-needed shot in the arm for holders and grabbed the attention of many people outside the community. The new NFTs look like undead and decrepit versions of their original counterparts, and the community celebrated the artistic upgrade.
When did DeGods mint?
DeGods minted on the Solana blockchain on October 8, 2021, for 3 SOL each. While the team did a great job of building anticipation for the collection, both the lead-up to the mint and its immediate aftermath saw a great deal of controversy.
The DeGods team had offered allowlist spots to community members through “bounties,” essentially having people film themselves doing pushups or chatting about the project with friends and family members. Unfortunately, bots mucked up the mint, causing the project to sell out in less than ten seconds. Thousands were unable to mint, and the community quickly labeled the project a rug pull. The floor price crashed, and the team set out to build the project back up.
In the coming months, they launched a handful of products, like de.xyz, a webpage dedicated to providing people with Solana NFT resources, and DePalace, the project’s “private forum.” Regardless, the project’s floor kept plummeting. Things were going so badly by November 2021 that at least one team member claimed developers felt like abandoning the project altogether.
In January 2022, DeGods axed the Paperhand Bitch Tax once and for all and introduced the DUST token. Shortly after the token launch, the team relaunched the DeGods collection with the DeadGods upgrade, and things began to turn around for the project.
What is DeDAO?
DeDao is the community’s decentralized autonomous organization. It gets its funding from the DeGods’ 9.99 percent marketplace fee, which is split into two parts. 6.66 percent goes to DeDAO to help fund project development, while the remaining 3.33 percent goes directly to the core team.
The DeDAO leadership, which consists of DAO Leads, The Divine Council, and the DeAlpha Team, also holds community raffles and works together to decide on DAO acquisitions.
For example, one of these acquisitions saw DeDAO buy a basketball team in Ice Cube’s Big3 Basketball League.
What is DUST?
DUST is the DeGods community token created to drive utility in the project further. It is an SPL token on the Solana blockchain with zero starting supply. The team aims to cap the supply of DUST at 33,300,000. The only way to mine DUST is to stake a DeGods or DeadGods NFT. Staked DeGods earn 2.5 DUST per day, while staked DeadGods earn 7.5 DUST per day.
However, DUST is listed on the DEX Raydium and is available for purchase with SOL. The leading utility of the token is to transform your DeGod into a DeadGod, but collectors can also use it to take part in raffles, auctions, and mint future collections. The DeGods team also claims that the DeDAO will actively seek opportunities to integrate DUST utility into other significant projects in the Solana Ecosystem.
Bridge to Ethereum
On December 25, the DeGods team released a statement that the project would officially bridge to Ethereum in Q1 of 2023. In a video posted to his Twitter account, creator Rohun Vora, known in Web3 as Frank III, addressed the Solana NFT community, thanking devout SOL collectors for their support and stating that he and his team realized that to grow, they would need to explore new opportunities.
“We believe now is the time to take a calculated risk and embark on a new journey,” said Vora. Following his video, Vora also participated in a Twitter space where he answered questions and provided more context to the announcement.
In the space, he made parallels between streaming services (like Netflix and HBO Max) contending for intellectual property and blockchains racing to create the most robust NFT platforms. He also noted that an argument could be made that DeGods had capped out on Solana, saying, “It’s hard to accept, but it’s been tough to grow at the rate we want to grow. If Ethereum is where we have to go to keep growing, it’s what we have to do.”
Overall, the project and its leadership have shown themselves to be incredibly resilient. And this latest move continues to prove it. If you scroll down to the bottom of the DeGods’ website, you’ll find three short sentences encapsulating the developers’ approach to their NFT community: “We tried some shit. We Learned some shit. Now we’re trying some new shit.”
It’s the perfect encapsulation of the attitude Web3 entities should adopt if they want to create something of substance, whether in a crypto winter or not.
