The alpha:
- Reddit collectible avatars (which are definitely not NFTs) are back. After mocking his pitch last week, the social media platform dropped the Super Bowl LVII x Reddit Collectible Avatar picked up yesterday at collaboration with the NFL.
- NFTs are free and, like previous Reddit releases, provide owners with unique benefits on the platform. Users can choose from four types of NFTs to mint: an Eagles, Chiefs, The Champs, or LVII Super Fans collectible. Redditors are limited to coining one per account. So far, more than 651,800 of the avatars have been minted.
- Currently, the collection has a minimum price of 0.0002 ETH in Open seahaving generated 3 ETH in trading volume.
Dive deeper:
Reddit made headlines in 2022 with the release of its first NFT collections. Dubbed Collectible Avatars, CryptoSnoos NFTs were based on the social media platform’s mascot, Snoo, and were designed by both independent artists and Reddit creators. The avatars allowed users certain benefits of the platform, including unique profile animations, and gave holders something of a CC0 license to use the avatars as they saw fit.
NFTs seemingly came out of nowhere and quickly blew up the NFT space, generating over $12.5 million. in sales volume and acting as one of the largest Web3 onboarding events in blockchain history. Helping Reddit achieve this was their strategy of completely avoiding the use of the term NFT in any press they published, instead choosing to call the tokens digital collectibles. This playbook was not only a huge success, but also spawned some of the best comedy Web3 space has never seen.
Whats Next
This new collection comes during a precarious time for the NFT and crypto space. Reddit’s rise came before the calamitous fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, an event that caused widespread sentiment towards the already precarious world of cryptocurrency to turn outright hostile. Regardless, it’s no surprise that Reddit is moving forward with its NFT experimentation, given how successful it was in fall 2022.
Reddit could be taking a small page out of Candy Digital’s playbook by partnering with the NFL to try to bring its collectibles within the reach of league fans. Candy Digital is another platform that has been quite successful in partnering with Major League Baseball and MLB Players Inc. to help them implement their Web3 initiatives, possibly in part because they, too, have avoided calling NFTs by their technical name.