What Makes an NFT Project Successful?

There are a lot of NFTs on Solana.

I was curious about how many, and tried to find an authoritative source, but everything was out of date or un-cited. So I wrote a script to find out exactly how many NFTs there are on Solana.

And then I ran it. For 3.5 hours.

Over two hundred and sixty seven million NFTs on Solana. And, given the nature of web3, this number is almost certainly already out of date.

So! There are (probably, by now) over 300 million NFTs on Solana. So what?

Defining Success

Poll a dozen people and you'll get a dozen answers about what makes an NFT project successful:

• Floor Price
• Volume
• Utility
• Community
• The Founder
• Marketing
• Ponzinomics
• etc.

After crunching the numbers, I think measuring "success" is actually quite simple: do you know about the project?

Let's do an experiment: How many Solana NFT projects can you name? A few dozen?

There are three orders of magnitude more projects than that. I think the "blue chip" NFT projects are the ones that live rent-free in your brain; the 99.9% of NFT projects you don't know about are the unsuccessful ones (and that number doesn't even include the famous rug pulls and scams).

Yes, floor price is important. Utility is important. Community is vitally important, as in many cases it's responsible for both the utility AND the floor price. All of these, and all of the reasons above, contribute to the degree to which a project is successful. But with so many NFTs on the blockchain, I believe the real measure of success is: you remember it. You know it.

Remaining Relevant

Just because you remember an NFT project doesn't mean that project is still relevant.

There are multiple strategies for how projects can remain relevant, and in the next post, we'll talk about what the Pesky Penguins is doing in order to remain both relevant to holders and relevant to Solana. Stay tuned!