5 NFT Projects Under $500 Very Few Are Paying Attention To (But Must).
Most folks are overlooking these lower-risk assets that are already showing signs of price growth as financial conditions start to improve.
I am currently visiting Cape Town for a family wedding, which is making it challenging to produce content.
I wanted to resend this piece, which was initially sent to paying members some months ago. It’s a healthy reminder to those who read the original and an insight for all members that I hope brings you tremendous value.
To show your support for Carrot Lane and my work, please consider upgrading your subscription.
I appreciate it more than you know.
Richard Branson, a UK business mogul, once said:
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later.”
This speaks directly to those folks sat on the fence about NFTs.
They can’t see why people would own these assets or why they would ever be significant, but the true answer is that the first use case is art. And art, over the years, has always been the centre of activity in culture since we were drawing on caves.
We’re now experiencing a digital renaissance period where some of these pieces, which are classed as historically and culturally significant, will hold immense amounts of value.
It’s just a numbers game.
The power laws of supply and demand, combined with the extreme scarcity of these assets, create an incredible opportunity that many are missing.
Most people convince themselves that the good assets are out of reach, but there’s low-hanging fruit everyone’s too blind to see.
The purpose of today’s piece is to hopefully get a large, succulent apple to bounce off your noggin so you finally get into some of these low-entry assets that’ll likely have upside.
But first, let’s scan out for a moment and look at the macro picture of the space. Currently, the market cap of NFTs is $7 billion, up from $4 billion just two months ago. And, no Tom, Dick, or Sally even knows what an NFT is.
Interestingly, when we take a trip down memory lane, we find that the market cap of all NFTs reached $17 billion in 2022.
So, from where we are today, there’s still a 2.5x upside to reach where we were last cycle. But then, from the $17 billion starting point, we should see a 10x rise in new participation in the space, just based on a basic log trend of where we were at the start of the cycle.
The entire Crypto space will have gone from $1 trillion to around $10 to $15 trillion.
The other dynamic that people are missing is that because these assets are expressive, and some make up people’s online identity, namely PFP projects, they find it incredibly hard to sell.
So you have this weird dynamic with each new wave of participation where the assets fall into stronger and stronger hands.
It’s why I believe, on a project-by-project basis, some will rise faster than a politician’s promises before election day.
Many of the 250,000+ NFTs in general will be lousy investments, but some will be incredible, and if you lend me your ear for a moment, I’ll share a few.
(NFT market cap).
The staple of every NFT collection.
I might sound like a stuck record here, but if you’re into NFTs and you don’t have a Curio Card, what are you actually doing?
The collection pre-dates CryptoPunks, the OG in the space.
It was the first experiment in artists getting paid digitally for their work, which is what the entire space is now built on top of. The project has a market cap of over $100 million alone.
The allure, from how they rejected XCOPY’s work, to how they experimented with seven different artists with different styles, to how the art takes you through a passage in time and tells a story, and also how they manipulated the supply mechanics with some artists only having 250 pieces, in effect telling collectors not everyone is going to be able to collect the entire set…
They were playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers.
The locked-in historical significance minimises your risk exposure, because the most eyeballs in the space (and in the mainstream) come into CryptoPunks, but that attention and those buying flows will always spill into Curio Cards, which predate Punks.
The entire collection of 31, including a missprint, has been auctioned off at Christie’s and Sotheby’s for over a million dollars. Many shrewd investors got into this project. It currently has an entry price of $450.
Now is the perfect time to seize a floor token and claim a piece of internet and art history.
I will be ramming the price down people's throats in 12 months, not sorry.
Female-led projects will dominate.
Next on the list is World of Women Galaxy.
World of Women is the first-ever female-led project, which gained huge notoriety in 2021 when Gary Vaynerchuk shared it with his Discord server.
I remember because I was walking laps around my park, clockwise, trying not to lose my mind during the first stint of lockdowns. I left my phone at home, which, from personal experience, is not advisable during an NFT bull run. Lol.
Reese Witherspoon, Cameron Diaz, Madonna, Logan Paul, and a hit list of other celebrities got into WOW’s first release, which later saw a 750 ETH sale of art at Christie’s in the same year.
And from memory, the floor price of WOW (first edition release) reached 15 Ethereum floor price.
98% of the NFT space is made up of male participation, but when we rewind to Web2, 58% of buyers who make up consumer brand spending are female. That means over 50% of the would-be buyers aren’t even in the space right now.
On top of that, data shows 78% of women are more inclined to support female-led businesses.
As one giant cherry on top, World of Women—the original project—has 43% of its holders coming from other blue-chip collections, which is the largest out of any collection that doesn’t include punks.
So the capital rotation that’ll happen here will be insane.
World of Woman Galaxy, their secondary project with a supply of 21,475, is at a great entry price of $165.
It’s all locked in by being the first.
The 2nd ever 10k PFP.
Someone said to me the other day, “What's a PFP?”.
It stands for profile picture.
The point being, some of these NFT projects are based on characters. What folks then do is change their profile picture to the character they hold, but over time, these NFTs become their digital identities.
Which is another reason why they become incredibly hard to sell.
PFP projects gain the most attention simply because people are signalling them on the timeline, which leads to a reinforced cycle of attention and buying flows.
Someone on that dinosaur app where dreams go to die—LinkedIn—said to me, PFP projects were a fad and would die out. I nearly fell off my chair laughing. There’s no hope in hell that’ll happen.
Why do you think Facebook is introducing an animated version of your profile picture? Think about it. We spend more time online than we do in the physical world, and digital identities will be valued more, not less.
CryptoSkulls is the best historical project that’s a PFP outside of CryptoPunks, obviously. It has the social signalling element, and the price is already up 6x from when I first shared it on the timeline.
As soon as it dropped to 0.05 ETH and ETH was around $1200, I got really loud about it because this is where they were in 2021. And I felt that folks who got in during 2021 had price-anchored themselves to that 0.05 ETH.
So, there was a significantly higher chance of it increasing in price and ETH rising.
And yes, it’s still a good time to buy.
Because ETH still has a way to run, and the previous floor price of Skulls was nearly 4 ETH or $15K last cycle.
If you circle back to the market cap of NFTs and where they’re going, these are still very much underpriced when you factor in their close ties to CryptoPunks (which were the first).
There’s such an aggressive mispricing here, like snagging beachfront property for the price of a garden shed.
Here’s the collection CryptoSkulls.
Veefriends Series 2.
While I can’t see around corners or know what will happen, I believe VeeFriends Series 2 will be the best-performing asset this cycle.
It’ll increase by the highest %, because the demand for the assets in the collection will far outweigh the supply.
And honestly, it won’t even be close.
Previously, this collection was at 1.2 ETH. Now it’s available for 0.06. That’s a 20x just to reach previous all-time highs.
But the part people don’t see, and because I’m a geek with the data, is that 93% of this collection hasn’t moved in over 3 years.
If this were Bitcoin, we’d be raving about it from the rooftops.
So, people aren’t selling because they have a connection with these expressive assets.
Then you have the founder, Gary Vaynerchuk, who has 60 million followers across social media. He owns the largest social media marketing agency in the world. And now he’s teamed up with Topps Chrome to sell physical cards.
There’s a run of 40,000 boxes in year one, and then it’ll be scaled to a wider audience in 2026. But for context, Topps does $100 billion in annual card revenue. If VeeFriends captures even 0.5% of that, that’s $500 million just in card sales.
But the most amazingly clever thing about this cross-pollination with the digital assets
is that the digital version is the rookie card, and there are only 55,000 individual cards.
The physical cards sold out in seconds.
Wait until folks realise the digital version, which is the project's provenance, is available for less than some of the physical cards.
$300 for a VeeFriends Series 2.
(This one is a no-brainer)
Wrapped Strikers
I recently wrote an incredibly in-depth blog post on this project.
It’s the first-ever sports NFT project based on the most popular sport in the world.
In fact, Soccer is so popular that it draws in 10 times the audience of every single US sport combined.
I did an entire piece [here] where you can drill down into the details, but this one is the most obvious W, and the entry price is offensively low.
The supply, out of all the collections I’ve shared in Carrot Lane, is also the smallest. So you’ve got this interesting dynamic: Huge potential demand, very low supply, and all of these cards are essentially the players’ digital rookie cards.
One word of caution: they’re unlicensed. But in the blog linked here, I explain why that has minimal impact on supply and demand.
The art, in my subjective opinion, is probably the best across all historical projects.
They all look eerily similar to the players’ actual faces. Which might sound trivial, but I’ve seen my fair share of botch-job portraits.
At a $300 entry, these are basically theft.
(Mark my words—come back to me in 12 months.)
Final Thoughts.
This isn’t a conclusive list of projects I share, but it’s an excellent starting point.
It should be glaringly apparent that my risk-adjusted strategy here is simple: Follow where the constant flow of demand is heading.
And that demand usually shows up in historically significant projects that, over time, get constant eyeballs on them.
That attention?
It leads to a steady stream of buying flows.
As I mentioned at the top of this piece, the expressive nature of the artwork makes it very hard for people to sell.
Right now, we’re seeing that financial conditions are improving, and the dollar is nosediving like a kamikaze pilot. That gives countries with dollar-denominated debt the green light to start printing more casholla.
And when cash goes full supernova, asset prices detonate into the moneyverse.
The NFT projects that really do well will increase by the highest % out of almost any other asset you could put your money into.
It won’t even be close.
The entire global financial system will eventually be tokenised on blockchains. Outside of Bitcoin, most institutional money will flow into Ethereum, which will act as the decentralised app store of the internet.
What that’ll do for the historical projects is turn them into fossils that carry the entire digital asset space.
So if you think you’re already thinking big with NFTs…
You’re still playing in the kiddie pool.
Go bigger.
If today's piece provided you with any value, please share it with a friend or family member. It’s how Carrot Lane grows, and your support means the world.
Hi Jayden, I have a long-term question. Do you believe Curio Cards will still hold strong cultural and financial value by 2030 and later, or are they more of a hype that’s best to sell during the next bull run? I’m considering a set-and-forget approach with some cheaper pieces, but I won’t be around to trade actively until 2030. (prison time due to local anti-weed smoking laws...) Would love your honest thoughts.