The NFT mania continues with new projects coming each day, every one of them offering something seemingly new to the table. This time it’s The N Project – ‘randomly generated numbers stored on chain’ – as per the description itself.
Random Numbers on a Black Background
We’ve written a lot about non-fungible tokens and whether or not they’re currently in a state of a bubble. It’s a very nuanced topic because of the perception of NFTs – if the user buys an item for its subjective value to him, it’s hard to determine whether or not this is bubbly market behavior.
And there is a strong case to be made for NFTs – digital objects which are verifiably scarce, their genesis and overall cycle trackable on-chain, impossible to counterfeit, and so forth. However, when it comes to the value of some of the current top-selling NFTs, that’s a whole other story.
Of course, only time will tell if investors in Ether Rocks, Punks, Apes, or whatever the new daily hyped project is will be a good bet in the long run or just a quick effort to flip them for some profit.
But the fact is – we see new projects every single day, and the idea behind of them might be so abstract that it would be hard for the regular person to justify spending $6.5K on a single NFT.
The project in question is called “The N Project” and it has generated 8,888 NFTs, each containing 8 random numbers on a black background. Of course, this isn’t all to it. Each number has a random chance of being included in the sequence, and some numbers are more “rare” than others, with 0 being the scarcest.
So, Why Are People Paying Top Dollar For Numbers?
The entire collection is up for grabs on OpenSea, and according to the website, the floor price currently sits at above 2 ETH. Although, there are some NFTs that sell for about 1.75 ETH, which is around $6.5K at the time of this writing.
To unravel the mystery of why random numbers on a black background sell for this price, we take a closer look at a Twitter thread by Danial – a researcher at 0x.
First of all, this is what the probability of minting each number looks like:
Apparently, 0s are the hardest ones to get on the NFT, and, supposedly, getting one would push the valuation a lot. In any case, in the above thread, the researcher outlines why he puts a high value on the project.
He compares it to another very popular NFT project – Loot. There, instead of numbers, users generate random words or phrases, themed in a way the creators pitch, with the ultimate goal of creating digital roleplay environments, games, and so forth.
With The N Project – it’s pretty much the same, but the concept is stripped down to its very core – sheer numbers. As the project itself says – users can make the numbers into whatever they desire. So, Daniel points out that they can be used for DAOs, games, digital passports, and whatnot. Basically, they can be “an element of whatever you’re creating.”
Ultimately, the value of the project boils down to the community around it, seeing that its use cases are potentially unlimited.
And while all of the above might make sense to the technically savvy, it’s questionable if your regular Joe would understand a bit of it. To most people – these are just numbers on a black background, nothing more, nothing less. Of course, an argument could be made that every revolutionary idea is frowned upon by the masses in the beginning. But will these numbers turn into something more? Will we see use cases built around them? Only time will tell.
Are they indicative of a bubble? We’ve yet to see, and the way you look at it is absolutely subjective – that’s why it’s so hard to determine whether the NFT market, in general, is bubbly or not.
