Oil painter Cam Rackam watched in awe as his collection of 10,000 Wall Street bull NFTs swiftly sold out in October last year.
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In the first five minutes of launching the NFT collection targeted at the retail traders behind the GameStop mania, a thousand of the colorfully creative bulls riding rocket ships had already sold. By about eight minutes, half of the collection was purchased.
At 32 minutes, it was sold out.
"I was popping champagne, smoking a cigar in the house, and I freaked out, you know, I freaked out," Rackam said. "I went from being an artist for 20 years ... and then in one blink of an eye, all the planning and hard work massively paid off."
The four founders of the Wall Street Memes Instagram account -- which was inspired by the massively popular Wall Street Bets subreddit that's credited with launching the meme-stock phenomenon -- made about $2.5 million from the initial sale, and continue to get royalties from NFT collectors trading the bulls. The lowest price for one of the bulls is now about .2 ether, or roughly $638, according to OpenSea.
The NFTs, digital pieces of art stored on the ethereum blockchain, are a cartoonish take on the iconic Wall Street bull statue. They're supposed to represent optimism of the stock market. Or as retail traders love to say, "stocks only go up."
"We're just bulls," said Boris, a cofounder of the Wall Street Memes page, who asked for his identity to remain undisclosed. "We hate short sellers. We hate bears."
The NFT collection has become a way for traders to officially mint themselves as members of a community of retail investors. Rackam said bull holders have access to meetups and parties, and those who have multiple bulls will soon win a free NFT of a new collection of Wall Street interns.
But the makers wanted to go beyond NFTs and community building and add what Wall Street Bets traders love: risk.
A new gamification feature will allow bull holders to take a chance on making their NFT even more valuable -- or worthless. If the NFT holders purchase the feature, a random generator will either blow up their digital collectible or make it even more rare by adding new features to the bull.
"It's kind of like trading options in the stock market," Boris said. "Your option could go to zero or you could have a 100x option that you took a risk with. And that's what we're going to bring to the NFT world."
Rackam and Boris see their collection as an extension of the retail trading revolution that began in January 2021 when millions of investors banded together on Reddit to drive massive gains in highly shorted stocks like GameStop.
"It was a beautiful message showing that when people bond together, they can still have control over even something as big as the Wall Street market," Boris said. "The message behind this NFT collection kind of summarizes in a funny way, everything that happened in the past year."
Source: markets.businessinsider.com
