Polkamon IDO Recap: The Successes, $1 million in Gas Fees Paid, and Polkadot’s Growing NFT Scene

If the crypto and the NFT revolution won’t be televised, then it will be tokenized with a bit of blockchain provenance as sauce.

And it is happening.

A few block-buster NFT sales later, and the world is sensing yet another opportunity with Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs, being the name of the game.

It is interesting because if scalability and high Gas fees problems are eliminated in legacy platforms, then there will be a perfect environment where, as they say, everything goes for this rapidly expanding sub-sector. 

Polkamon is a NFTs project on Polkadot. With Polkadot, there is interoperability, opportunity, scalability, and, yes, ultra-low fees. It is what collectors yearn for, and Polkamon plans to take advantage of Polkadot’s irresistible offering.

What is Polkamon?

Polkamon is where you’ll find ultra-rare digital monsters representing birds and dragons. They are unique, inimitable, and built on the blockchain since they consist of rich meta-data that give them special characteristics. 

However—even though they exist with different colors and horns, they don’t have the same kind of rarity. Like in Pokémon, each Polkamon digital card is unique, yes, but varies in value—a twist that makes the whole NFT thing interesting.

Polkamon is the source of all these unique animated and unique blockchain-based collectibles. Each digital monster is, in reality, an NFT that can be unpacked using Polkamon’s native currency, PMON. There will be only 10 million PMON tokens.

Interestingly, this token, PMON, complies with Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard but resides not in Ethereum but Polkadot.

Polkamon digital cards can be integrated into other games, blockchain products, and even art. Besides, each PMON token can be staked alongside a Polkamon monster.

The Polkamon Egg Event 

By Mar 29, POLS token holders had to claim their Eggs directly from the Polkamon website under the POLS pool. 

These eggs are virtually attached to a user’s ETH address—to reduce Gas fees, and were limited in number—only 100, understandably being an NFT. Once each egg hatches, the holder will know whether they landed on a super rare dragon or bird worth a fortune. 

Because of VC involvement, Polkamon also organized for 80 participants to receive an ultra-rare “Moonrock Capital x Morningstar Ventures”  Silver Baby Dragon as an NFT in the community pool. This needed to be claimed by Mar 29 as it granted access to the Polkastarter IDO.

Receivers of both Polkastarter and Silver eggs hatching into baby dragons participated in the IDO for up to $500.

In total, 11,000 eggs were claimed, paying Ethereum miners over $1 million in Gas fees.

The Polkamon IDO

For how Polkamon is designed and the limited supply of PMON tokens, it was no surprise that the Polkamon IDO was a success, generating hype. The team reached their funding target on the same day.

Polkamon announced the IDO on Mar 31. It was preceded by the team muting their Telegram channel. There were 128,571 tokens set aside for the public, and each PMON token sold for $0.40.

Users could swap their ETH for PMON. For each ETH, one would get 5181.35 PMON. However, to ensure a fair launch, an investor could only purchase a maximum of 0.275 ETH.

The Polkamon team hoped to raise 13.13 ETH, but at the end of the IDO, they had swapped 128,571 PMON, reaching their hard cap and raising 27.77 ETH—or roughly $$49.3k, according to Etherscan.

According to Polkastarter statistics, 6,439 participants made 19,607 transfers.

PMON tokens were released to private and public investors on the same day.

The Significance of Venture Capital Involvement

Part of Polkamon’s success stems from venture capital interest. For instance, Moonrock Capital and Morning Star Ventures incubated and supported the Polkamon project. 

To expound further and highlight the significance of their participation, Moonrock Capital is a serial investor, channeling funds to various successful DeFi projects. They are investors of Ramp DeFi, Linear, and others. At the same time, they are incubators of three projects, including Polkastarter and Polkamarkets.

On the other hand, Morning Star Ventures are investors of 12 projects, including Kattana. Kattana’s unique artwork has already left a positive impression with the two funds.

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Nifty News: NYT says NFTs in pandemic-fueled bubble, Polkamon eggs produce $1M gas …

Having just flogged an NFT column for half a million dollars, the New York Times is now wondering if perhaps the whole scene is in a bit of a bubble?

In a March 30 article, Art’s NFT Question: Next Frontier in Trading, or a New Form of Tulip? author Scott Reyburn questioned the sustainability of the current NFT bubble in prices and drew comparisons with the Dutch “tulip mania” of the 1630s.

Tulip mania for anyone who doesn’t hodl flowers, was a bubble in the Netherlands that saw prices for a single tulip bulb rocket up to a high of 6,700 guilders in February 1637 — enough to purchase a house at the time.

The NYT suggested that perhaps history was rhyming, given the similarity between the COVID-19 adjacent NFT bubble and the bubonic plague-driven Tulip bubble:

“It should also be pointed out that febrile speculation in assets that have no physical existence has flourished during epidemics, when people spend a lot of time indoors. Tulip mania coincided with an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Netherlands that killed a fifth of Amsterdam’s population between 1635 and 1636.”

The response from financial authorities to the pandemic has, of course, also inflated asset prices across the board, so perhaps NFTs have also been a beneficiary of people having too much money and time on their hands.

The article concluded with an apt quote from 1637 Tulip mania satire, The Rise and Decline of Flora:

“It has been a madness.”

SuperRare raises $9 million

NFT marketplace SuperRare has has raised $9 million from its series A financing round.

The platform announced on March 31 that the round had been led by Velvet Sea Ventures and saw investment from popular figures such as Mark Cuban, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Ashton Kutcher. SuperRare noted:

“In just three years, the crypto art market has already grown to be a global phenomenon over $400M in size. This investment will allow SuperRare to accelerate growth, serving significantly more artists and collectors as digital collecting nears more mainstream adoption”

The platform intends to use the funding to expand “the core features of SuperRare into more scalable, social elements like chat and personalized feeds”. It also intends to improve market mechanics and auction functionality, extend “supported artwork formats further into VR and programmable media” and hopes to implement layer-two scaling.

Polkamon Eggs, the latest NFT craze

Decentralized exchange Polkastarter has joined the NFT mania with the launch of “Polkamon” animated digital monster collectibles.

Early adopters of the project were offered the chance to participate in the “claim your eggs contest”, which saw 125,000 users claim a tokenized egg that had a chance of being “hatched” or minted into a Polkamon NFT.

“In gas fees alone, we estimate Polkamon fans have spent more than $1 million claiming eggs for their chance to participate in our upcoming IDO on Polkastarter,” a blog post noted.

The project is now verified on OpenSea, and the highest sale at the time of writing is for a silver “Moonrock x Morningstar Babydragon” at 22 ETH, worth around $39,000.

Another OpenSea user appears confident in the project. After buying a “Polkastarter Babydragon” for 14.94 ETH, they currently have it listed for 54.99 ETH (worth roughly $100,000).

Second crack at NFT house sale

Property investor Ivan Malpica has sold a 50% share in a St Louis house that he put up for sale as an NFT on Mintable in early March.

You can buy half this home in St Louis via Mintable for less than 30 ETH

Unfortunately, he tells Cointelegraph he sold it offline to a “new partner who did not have crypto or ETH” and instead sold it for cash.

“I received a lot of interest in the first real estate NFT, but the new buyers wanted to partner traditionally,” he says. “Since there was a lot of interest I decided to create a second NFT to try again on a new property.” He has just listed a 50% share in another St Louis property as an NFT on Mintable for 29.7 ETH.

From NFL to NFT

Former NFL-star turned actor Veron Davis, has followed Rob Gronkowski and Partick Mahomes into tokenized collectibles with a drop on Rarible today.

Davis played in the NFL for 14 seasons and won the Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos in 2016. The drop consists of five open editions and a one of one which depict career highlights from Davis’ career including trophies, Super Bowl action shots, and even a tokenized “rookie season” action figure of the star.

The auction is due to close on April 4.