The whales may have won the day with Stoner Cats, but I still love them just as much

Before I dive into this post I want to make sure you know my angle on this topic. I love the NFT world, and I think that the way it’s panning out is actually going to be really good for all of us, big and small. While I’m frustrated when gas prices spike and minting moves out-of-reach for most, I also think it creates momentum for projects and provides opportunities for non-whales like me

Today I was pretty excited about a new project called Stoner Cats. I was excited about this project because it’s pretty darn different from any other project out there. The funds from the launch are going towards funding a cartoon, staring the NFTs themselves, which as you guessed it, are mostly stoner cats.

I’m not crazy about the theme as I’m not a big pot or pot culture guy, but I am excited about the people behind the project – Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Chris Rock, and even Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. Here’s the whole team behind the cartoon:

I’m a big fan of all six of these people with Chris Rock probably being my favorite out of the group, I was lucky enough to see him live once and he’s one of the funniest people on the planet, period. Hollywood has worked on the same model when it comes to funding TV shows and movies for a long time and this project represents the first foray into using NFTs to fund A-list-backed TV shows, and I think that’s pretty special.

Well, apparently I wasn’t alone because major whales in the NFT space came out in droves and won the day, and lots of Stoner Cat NFTs with it. One of the most prolific influencers in the NFT space, Pranksy minted 500 cats, at 0.35ETH each that’s 175ETH or $403,025 not including gas. Pranksy first shared his enthusiasm for the project a week ago in this tweet:

I agree with Pranksy, with the team behind this I think a really meaningful TV show could emerge, and with a completely different funding source and model for engaging fans. But now let’s talk about the elephant in the room , gas .

NFT superstars like Pranksy paid a small fortune in gas fees, but given that he was already dropping $400k on the project, this was a small price to pay. Like most popular projects, the whales who are minting hundreds of NFTs pump up gas prices and as was the case today, win the day. What this means for most normal NFT investors like me is that we just couldn’t participate in the mint. I tried to mint today but the gas fees I would need to pay to mint one Stoner Cat was more than the cat itself. Since I wasn’t ready to throw $400,000 or even $40,000 at this project, I, like many other was shut out

That being said, I’m okay with this. Some people took to Twitter to vent their anger, but for me, I know I’m not a big player in the NFT world, and with popular projects like these, and given the current way Ethereum works, I just assume I won’t be able to participate, and I’m okay with that. I’ll buy in the aftermarket and carefully pick the NFTs I invest in using Rarity.tools to get something that I both like the ascetics, and also has good collector value based on the rarity of the traits.

I don’t think there’s one way to win in the NFT world, and just like the investment world where we all can’t run our own hedge funds, we can all find ways to make good investments and generate a meaningful ROI, heck, hopefully a ridiculously good ROI

While I do think we’ll look back on these gas wars and remember the somewhat unfair early days of NFTs, I think we all have a choice to make. We can either get angry and pout on Twitter, venting our anger and saying that we’ll never invest in a project like these..or we can know that at this point in time, it’s the world we live in and we have to do our best to maximize our investment potential based what we can do to participate.

In short – I still like the Stoner Cats just as much as I did yesterday. I think what Ashton and team are doing will probably become a viable new model for funding new, innovative TV shows and movies, and I’m studying rarity traits tonight and earmarking some cats I want to try to snag over the next few days.

The gas wars aren’t going away anytime soon so if you’re not a whale you have to decide, do you still want to play the game? For me, this is a blast, I’m loving it, and I’m in!