For those unaware of the Avax Whales project, you’re missing out on a real Avalanche NFT OG gem.
**UPDATE** 10th Jan 2022, below is our original article. There seems to have been a stall in the development of this project. Native marketplace issues, a general lack of communication from the team, combined with an inability to sell on secondary marketplaces with a verified contract. We have hope that the team can turn this around and release the next stage of the project.
A relatively small project by today’s NFT standards, the project was released nonetheless to great enthusiasm and Twitter fanfare during early September 2021.
Consisting of 3,333 individually generated and creatively pixelated whales, each piece is unique with its own special traits that when combined, contribute directly to the rarity score. The project sold out in a mere 6 hours. Each piece had a mint cost of 1.5 AVAX.
As Whale owners ourselves, there is almost no feeling quite like admiring your collection on the marketplace and realising that you own not one, but two Whales with orange Donald Trump-esque hairstyles, floating on an American Flag background and smoking a pipe. However, the holy grail for any aspiring Avax Whale Collector is owning a “Nega”.
Hunting and owning “Nega” Whales, the uber-rare mutated versions of their cousins, becomes an almost daily or even hourly activity for avid collectors. Whilst these special Whales possess the usual traits and qualities present in other Whales, they also have a distinct difference that places them above the rest, that difference being the Negative trait. Instead of the aforementioned Donald Trump-esque orange hairstyle, a “Nega” whale will have a rather attractive blue tinge.
There is speculation about whether “Nega’s” were an unintended consequence or a masterstroke from the initial design team and it is unclear how many are actually out in the wild, they do appear occasionally in the secondary market and are usually priced somewhere around 100 AVAX. Regardless of how they came to be, there is one thing that all Whale collectors can agree on: they must be hunted, owned and rarely sold. The community Discord group even has a special zone simply titled “No Nega Therapy“ created solely for members that have not had the distinct pleasure of owning one of these rare beasts.
We encourage anyone with a passion for NFTs in the Avalanche space to take a look at this project, the secondary Marketplace on the official website is currently the only way you can become a Whale owner and it certainly displays some impressive figures for the project so far.
Currently, the marketplace has a Post-Mint Total Volume of 1918 AVAX (approximately $249,000 today), Total Sales of 809 pieces and a Highest Sale Figure of 35 AVAX (approximately $4550). Truly impressive figures and a sign of confidence in the project and its future.
Come make some Whale noises on Twitter
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