The Involution "War" of the Whitelist: Players Have Mastered Various Skills to Buy an NFT

Original Author: 0x21

Original Title: 《To Buy an NFT, I Learned English and How to Draw

At the beginning of the new year, the NFT market once again welcomed an unprecedented boom. By mid-January, the trading volume on the OpenSea market reached a historic high. According to data from Dune Analytics, as of January 17, OpenSea's monthly transaction volume reached $3.4 billion, with over 1 million users.

Compared to previous peaks, current NFT projects have made qualitative leaps, and project teams have become increasingly mature and professional. Well-produced projects naturally attract the attention of collectors, and with the rise in popularity, most projects perform well in the secondary market.

However, the extremely high transaction fees during public sales and the expensive prices in the secondary market have made whitelists the only way out for ordinary players.

Taking the recently launched projects Azuki and X Rabbits Club (Cold Rabbit) as examples, Azuki sold out completely within 3 minutes at a Dutch auction price of 1 ETH, while collectors with whitelists could directly participate in the presale at a price of 0.5 ETH. Currently, Azuki's price in the secondary market is about 2.5 ETH, meaning that users who obtained whitelists can easily earn 2 ETH.

X Rabbits Club (Cold Rabbit) is even more so, with a presale price of 0.0502 ETH, allowing each presale qualification to mint two NFTs. By the end of the presale, the floor price of X Rabbits Club had reached around 1.5 ETH, enabling whitelist holders to earn over 3 ETH. Throughout the process, the risk for whitelist holders is very low, mostly obtained through community contributions such as artistic creation and active chatting.

Some community members jokingly remarked, "NFTs have greatly improved personal self-cultivation, not only improving English scores but also learning music and drawing, and most importantly, understanding how to treat others politely."

This may seem like a joke, but it actually reveals how competitive whitelists have become.

Bronze Level: Tug of War

As the main way for project teams to attract collectors, whitelists allow community members to participate actively in promotional activities through PoW (Proof of Work) to earn whitelist rewards. Initially, whitelists were designed to encourage early supporters and members with special contributions. As the community grew, project teams began to increase the difficulty of obtaining whitelists.

Taking the 0N1 Force launch as an example, in mid-July 2021, 0N1 Force was one of the most promising projects of the month, with over 10,000 members flooding into the Discord community. As more members joined before the community sale, the team promptly announced the whitelist rules, granting whitelists to players based on their rankings using Discord's built-in Rank bot.

This straightforward approach made obtaining whitelists a "grind." The success of 0N1 Force led many NFT projects to imitate it, but it also provided opportunities for "scientists." Various "off-topic" Discord bots began to flood the community, making it difficult for ordinary players to cope. Consequently, many projects started to explore new methods of distributing whitelists to seek fairness.

At the end of August last year, the NFT market experienced a peak of the previous wave of heat, with many projects achieving qualitative leaps in gameplay and overall quality. MekaVerse can be considered one of the leaders, with 200,000 community members joining within half a month. Players accustomed to chatting to level up and earn whitelists suddenly clogged every channel in the community.

To ensure fairness while avoiding Gas Wars, MekaVerse adopted a method of registering wallet addresses for a lottery. It was thought that this would reduce competition among players, but in reality, many players began to "grind" the number of wallet addresses, registering multiple wallets to increase their chances of winning.

By the time of the final sale in early October, a total of 170,000 wallet addresses participated in the lottery, and MekaVerse's official website received 4.6 million visits in one day. Faced with an unprecedentedly large community, MekaVerse's wallet address lottery method could only strive to ensure fairness, and this method has been emulated by many current project teams.

Gold Level: From "Mixing" to "Licking"

If the previously mentioned "chat leveling" and "address lottery" methods are objective mechanisms set by project teams, then the next phase can be described as project teams unilaterally forcing players to "fight among themselves."

To eliminate the interference of bots in chat leveling and to avoid players who only "lottery" without contributing, a series of NFT projects led by HAPEBEASTGANG began to focus on creative and active manual selection. This seemingly fair method has actually taken the "competition" to the extreme.

While this method can avoid bot chatting, not every player has the time and energy to remain active for long periods. On the other hand, the high threshold for artistic creation has caused many ordinary players to lose opportunities. As the saying goes, where there is demand, there is a market; some players began to shift their mindset, giving rise to businesses for代聊 (proxy chatting), 代邀请 (proxy inviting), and 代创作 (proxy creating).

According to Rhythm BlockBeats, the current price for代邀请 is around 6 yuan, while代聊天 varies between 600 to 1000 yuan depending on level restrictions, and代创作 prices also vary slightly based on type. Some economically capable players choose to hire others for代聊. Others opt to "grind" themselves, mechanically helping every new community member with their questions, creating works that evolved from simple sketches to sand art and then to 3D creations.

(From Voyagers: UnKnown Community's Sand Art)

Although this form serves as excellent publicity for project teams and creates an economic bond between paying players and the project, it has led to fierce competition among players, who go to great lengths to secure whitelists.

This brings us back to the community's jest at the beginning of the article: "NFTs have greatly improved personal self-cultivation, not only improving English scores but also learning music and drawing, and most importantly, understanding how to treat others politely." This method is also the one adopted by most current project teams for distributing whitelists.

The Ultimate Champion: Cultivation

Now, with the arrival of a new wave of heat, several high-profile projects, although not yet launched, have raised the difficulty of obtaining whitelists to a new height. In addition to代聊 and 代创作, selling whitelists has become the norm.

Invisible Friend quickly attracted attention due to its high-quality art, forming a community with tens of thousands of active members. In addition to the aforementioned methods, new conditions were added for obtaining whitelists: holding 3 to 4 SlimHood NFTs or MoodRoller NFTs can earn a whitelist for Invisible Friend.

To obtain a whitelist, players drove the floor price of the SlimHood NFT project, which was originally around 0.1, to over 1 ETH, raising the cost of the Invisible Friend whitelist to 3 ETH, with some even selling whitelists off-market for around 4 ETH.

WGMI Interfaces, which emerged around the same time, also performed well, but unlike others, WGMI Interfaces simply abandoned Discord and shifted its promotional efforts to Twitter. In contrast, obtaining a whitelist for WGMI Interfaces is more challenging; players must continuously update creative works and retweet tweets to qualify for a whitelist. According to Rhythm BlockBeats, the price for WGMI Interfaces' whitelist is around 3 ETH.

(WGMI Interfaces Fan Art)

When whitelists began to be sold, the entire process had already formed a small-scale industrial chain. However, this is not the extreme; the recently launched NFT projects Mutant Shiba Club and Starcatchers have adopted a closed community approach. Apart from players who entered the Discord community first, others wishing to join must participate in official Twitter activities and solve puzzles to gain entry, with each activity allowing a maximum of 100 to 200 people.

Ordinary players not only find it difficult to obtain whitelists but also lack the qualifications to enter the community. Some even sell already entered Discord accounts. The competition for whitelists has now escalated to competing for entry qualifications into the community, and those who have already entered the community have only just crossed the threshold for participating in whitelists; creativity and activity remain essential. To get noticed by project administrators, members have started to "show off."

(Fan Art from Starcatchers)

Faced with such intense competition, some choose to take a different approach, meticulously preparing their resume templates to present their rich experience and skills to project teams in hopes of becoming community administrators sooner.

(Job Application in the Community)

The "war" for whitelists is intensifying, originally designed to express gratitude to early supporters of NFTs. As the NFT market heats up, it has become a way to avoid Gas Wars. What now fills everyone's view has shifted from initial artistic creation to real money. Project teams must "compete" to gain popularity.

In the vast NFT market, hundreds of NFT projects are launched daily, but only a few can truly survive in this short history. NFTs start from the community and rely on community growth. Players have honed various skills for the sake of whitelists, but how many can truly retain players for project teams?