The last few months have seen WAX furthering its reputation as the king of NFTs.
Every primary sale that launched on WAX so far sold out immediately, most of which contained more than 100,000 NFTs each. Combined, a total of more than 750,000 NFTs. Plus, secondary market sales continue to surge and will soon hit $2 million in total sales among the top four WAX-powered secondary markets.
In that context, it is no surprise that WAX and Topps are once again teaming up to deliver a second series of Garbage Pail Kids collectibles. In a tweet on the 28th September Topps Digital made the announcement and the anticipation is starting to build.
How to get involved
To purchase the card packs, users will need to open a WAX account and be able to make a purchase using a credit card. Sales begin at 12 ET on Wednesday 30th September.
Given that previous sales have all sold out very quickly we would advise those interested to keep a very close eye on the Simple Market website and be ready to make a move once the collectibles go live.
King of the NFTs
What’s interesting about WAX’s momentum isn’t the initial success of the releases. Instead, what’s been more significant is how the entire marketplace ecosystem on WAX is evolving. To put the success story into perspective it is worth looking at the highlights of 2020 thus far and then to look at the importance of secondary markets.
May 2020 – Topps Garbage Pail Kids (GPK) Series 1
The cult-favorite trading card brand was the first official NFT sale on WAX and sold out in just over one day. 12,000 GPK Card Packs containing 110,000 cards were purchased by collectors in just 28 hours.
July 2020 – Topps “GPK Goes Exotic” Series
The second series featured artwork reminiscent of 2020’s favorite documentary, and the entire series of 20,000 digital trading card packs containing 240,000 total NFTs (worth $204,800) sold out in just over 1 hour.
July 2020 – William Shatner Series
One of the world’s most iconic and beloved actors, William Shatner, released a series of trading cards on WAX featuring never-before-seen pictures from his personal life and career. The series of 10,000 packs containing 135,000 NFTs sold out in just NINE minutes!
August 2020 – Blockchain Heroes Series
This series of 12,500 card packs, containing 125,000 cards, featured the likenesses of famous crypto and blockchain personalities and sold out immediately. The entirely-original artwork was created by the team behind The Bad Crypto Podcast and has become a collector favorite.
August 2020 – Kogs
Inspired by the 90’s global phenomenon POGs, KOGs, or Keys to Other Games is a series of collectible NFTs that can be used across a number of different games. Their primary sale sold out 11,785 packs containing more than 150,000 NFTs in just three hours.
August 2020 – Topps GPK Crash Gordon ‘Surprise’ Series
Topps released a surprise series of 5,000 Crash Gordon card packs during their Topps DigiCon broadcast which sold out instantly. This limited series contained only 25,000 total cards, making it the rarest GPK series on WAX so far.
Looking at this timeline of achievements two things become clear. WAX is sticking to a formula that is definitely working for them right now. Secondly, It is no surprise that WAX is becoming known as the King of NFTs.
Secondary market growth
As we reported back in July When we tracked the launch of the original Garbage Pail Kids release, the flow from purchase to trading was simple.
The only place to buy the card packs was (and remains) the Topps GPK dapp, but users can’t trade their cards and packs within that dapp. Effectively it’s just a storefront.
Instead, users started trading on the Simple Market dapp, which is an open marketplace for trading any NFT on WAX. A couple of days post-launch, this was joined by GPK Market, the official marketplace designed for trading GPK cards and unopened packs and as time went on more secondary markets emerged.
After all these successful primary sales on the GPK market they continue to trade on WAX forever, potentially generating lifetime revenue for the NFT’s creators. Arguably, this is one of the major benefits of NFTs.
Total sales volume on the top WAX marketplaces has surpassed $1.8 million Since May 2020. Collectables.io is leading with AtomicHub close behind.
NFTs are finally getting noticed
It feels like everyone is excited about NFTs. There is NFT farming and the MEME token, insurance mining, and COVER, there are game items, shards, art, and more.
Now Christie’s will be joining the party, as it will be auctioning off an NFT. The emergence of well known traditional players in the space may draw the attention of the more conservative art collectors.
Rarible and its RARI token have seen a lot of hype. The platform distributes its governance token to those who use the platform, which has created an additional incentive for wash trading and creating low-quality art. The community voted to introduce market fees, and perhaps that will calm things down to some degree.
So far this month, Rarible.com has accounted for 81% of the $7M volume generated by marketplaces on Ethereum.
It will be interesting to see if the excitement around RARI and crypto art pushes WAX and the marketplace platforms to issue their own governance tokens.
As always we will continue to monitor and report on developments as they unfold.
