It seemed that they had it figured all out. Great marketing and hype, thousands of active member on their discord server eager to mint… And yet despite a sell-out, things went completely south for the alcabones collection, reminding everyone in the field that technology still matters.
alcabones is a NFT collection featuring skeletal mobsters from six different criminal families. The collection has all the expected attributes of the genre: rarity properties spread between various traits, etc.
The team behind the project did a pretty good job from a marketing viewpoint and managed to generate quite a good level of hype around the project. When mint was officially launched on August 29th at 0.066 ETH, the server discord was on fire, and the stars seemed in alignment for a great sell-out and a successful trade volume on the secondary market.
And then hundreds of buyers started flooding the team’s discord and Twitter accounts with thousands of similar angry messages: it appeared that the dev messed up the smart contract and forgot to put a gas limit, causing metamask to suggest extremely high fees, sometimes in the hundreds of ETH!
As a result, the collection did sell out, but only to a few hundreds of unique owners, which caused extreme anger among the alcabones community.
As if it was not enough, a few hours later the team published an official announcement where they admitted that they had to postpone the reveal for a few days after a security hole was found in their smart contract.
On September 4th, a new announcement from the team came out, in which they said that the would have to deploy a new smart contract, and that all alcabones owners would have to exchange their tokens to the “updated and more secure version” by connecting their metamask wallet on https://recall.alcabones.io/ and paying transaction fees…
To make matters worse, the original collection, while still unrevealed, was available on OpenSea and saw a lot of trading action during all this time, with some cards changing hands at an astonishingly high price of up to 6 ETH! As of September 8th, the total sales volume for the ortiginal collection was no less than 5.45k ETH.
So what now? Despite generating a lot of confusion and anger among its crowd, the token exchange seems well on the way, with 8.5K items and 3.4 owners according to the OpenSea page of the new collection. At 0.1 ETH, floor price is however much lower than a week before for the original collection, but still almost double its mint price.
The moral of the story: hype is not enough and you better make sure you have capable devs and a solid smart contract or you’re in for a hell of a ride.
Links:
Official collection on OpenSea