Kevin Rose, the venture capitalist, podcaster, founder of Digg, sold out his Proof NFT project over the weekend. There were only 1,000 Proof passes available beginning at 12 noon EST on Saturday. Rose didn’t promise much for NFT holders other than three-year access to a new Discord community and early access to his podcasts.
However, that was under the advisement of his lawyers. He plans to do much more as he outlined in a recent podcast episode. These will likely include tools for NFT investors and real-world events. However, NFT buyers are taking that on faith that Rose will want to make the project exceptional. Given Rose’s reputation and clear enthusiasm for the project, it seems like a good bet.
Proof NFT Auction Format
- The NFT sale was structured as a Dutch Auction starting at 5 ETH and declining by 0.25 ETH about every 10 minutes. The floor price was supposed to be 0.5 ETH. This was a similar format that Gary Vaynerchuck’s VeeFriends NFT project followed with great success. It is a method that is designed around price discovery and maximizing total sales revenue.
- 167 of the 1,000 NFTs sold at 5 ETH and then sales tapered off significantly until it hint 1 ETH.
- Once the auction hit 1 ETH, all of the NFTs sold out in just a couple of minutes. In fact, if you didn’t have your order in within about minute you were going to get a transaction error in your mint.
- According to tracking data by Matt LaPrairie posted on Twitter, only 29 more NFTs sold between 4.75 ETH and 2.25 ETH. Then the action picked up with 47 going for 2 ETH, 25 for 1.75 ETH, 34 for 1.5 ETH, and 44 for 1.25 ETH.
- Then the mad rush as the 1 ETH price appeared with 654 tokens sold in just a couple of minutes.
- 1841.75 ETH was collected in the sale. LaPrairie used $4,000 as the USD conversion which is just below where ETH was trading during the auction. Using that figure, Rose raised $7,367,000 in less than two hours on Saturday. He has a lot of obligations ahead of him for the next three years to make that investment worthwhile but not a bad Saturday.
What it Means
- Rose hosts the popular Proof Podcast which focuses on art and NTs. He says that show nets around 200,000 monthly downloads. He also hosts Modern Finance, another podcast focused on crypto and decentralized finance. He is also a well known angel and venture capital investor with a strong track record of success and a well-known entrepreneur earlier in his career.
- This is not the first NFT project that is based around access to a specific NFT luminary but the limited membership and dutch auction along with Kevin’s contacts made it a high profile event. It is a model that you can expect others to follow.
- 45%, or $3.3 million of the $7.4 million raised came in the first few minutes when 167 people paid 5 ETH. That is more than $20,000 to join.
- 36% of the total or $2.6 million came from the last 654 NFT sales at 1 ETH or about $4,000 at the converstion rate during the auction.
- Expect this to be a closely watched project though information may not be widely available about its operation given the limited number of owners.
- It appears Rose could have easily netted another several million at the 1 ETH price if there were more tokens available for sale.
