Another week, another huge NFT collection hits the Internet. A project called The Saudis is a collection of 5,555 NFT pieces that sold out in hours.
With all the news of crypto winter and NFTs being a bubble, you would be forgiven for thinking that the NFT market has cooled off. However, practically every week sees the release of a new and impressive NFT collection that sells out in record time.
The Saudis are one such project.
What Are the Saudis?
The Saudis are a collection of 5,555 NFT pieces that were free to mint on July 9. The artwork for the collection is a derivative of the ever-popular CryptoPunks collectibles.
At the moment, the floor price for Saudis is around 0.75 ETH (around $1,150 at the time of this writing). Last week, the floor price peaked at 1.3 ETH (nearly $2,000). So far, the Saudis collection has totalled 8,300 ETH (about $12.8 million) since it was minted.
The Saudis had the biggest opening weekend out of any NFT collection on OpenSea since the popular market launched. What’s responsible for this momentum? The huge Twitter following the creators managed to amass.
If you followed any NFT news on Twitter last week, you probably saw one of the many Saudia Arabia-themed meme videos circulating on the Twitterverse.
What’s the Controversy All About?
Nowadays, you can’t have a successful NFT launch without some controversy. After all, controversy sells, right? The Saudis are no different. The biggest story concerned an automated bot that lowered the floor price of the collection.
The launch also had its fair share of influencer drama. Fingers were pointed in the direction of a few influential social media personalities who were able to make a good profit off their early knowledge of the mint.
Of course, these situations are nothing new in the world of NFTs. In fact, they’re practically par for the course at this point.
Wait, NFTs Are Still Selling?
Ok, the answer here is pretty obvious, yes. Despite the recent crypto crash, certain NFTs are still selling like hotcakes. The Saudis collection is just the latest in a string of impressive NFT sales.
The pseudonymous team behind the Saudis has had several successful free-to-mint performance-art-driven projects in 2022. Most notably, they launched the Goblintown collection, which made more than $7 million in sales volume at its first weekend.
That particular project kept its moment by leveraging influencer marketing campaigns, strange Twitter Spaces, and NFT-themed, ghoulish parties. Projects like these show that, despite how the mainstream media may feel about them, there’s still a lot of interest in NFTs.
What’s Next for NFTs
Project sales have cooled down quite a bit since the weekend. However, the short pandemonium is a welcoming sign that, despite market conditions, NFTs are still an active and integral part of the crypto space.
The Saudis collection are the first really popular collection since ETH crashed 50% in June. And if things continue as they are, we could see more of these over-the-top launches soon.
