It might sound like a dumb sci-fi movie that went straight to VHS in 1989 but I can assure you it’s neither dumb, nor is it sci-fi.
Way back in the day, in the ancient times of July 1st 2021, the NFT project Cool Cats launched on Ethereum. The hype was there from the start. Everyone rejoiced under the umbrella #welikethecats. Everyone but me. I didn’t “ape in”. I was a noob in the space and was clearly clueless. You have to be willing to be a fool to become the master, I guess.
Eight days later the living legend Iron Mike Tyson changed his profile pic on Twitter to a Cool Cat and since then the floor price of this blue armada of felines have gone up from $60 to around $26,000 per cat, and that’s after retracing 40% from their highs. The total volume of Cool Cats bought and sold is a whopping 50,000 ETH - a cool $192 million. Cool Cats are the newest and bluest blue chip NFT on the block and they seem to be here to stay. Sotheby’s is in the community already and so on and so forth. The cats recently released their updated roadmap, it looks pretty ambitious and was well received by the community.
And that’s just the backstory. Now onto the really interesting one.
While the Metaverse sang the Cool Cats’ praise, a new NFT project was stealthily launched. The Mutant Cats were being mutated and minted on Ethereum. I went deep into the dusty archives, like a digital Indiana Jones, and found the very first announcement in the Mutant Cats discord dated back to October 4th 2021 (I am old enough to remember the beginning of October). The Mutant Cats is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) which offered 9,999 “mutated Cool Cats” to the world.
As you can see from the announcement the plan was already set. Half of the proceeds from the Mutant Cats would go to acquire Cool Cats to be put into the DAO’s treasury, subsequently raising the value of the Mutant Cats. Plans were also in place to release a utility token called $FISH (fkn geniuses) that the members of the DAO (holders of Mutant Cats) could earn by staking their Mutant Cats.
How could this fail? It didn’t. In the era that followed after the launch the team behind it delivered on every promise they made. All the Mutant Cats are sold, they have kept buying Cool Cats and the price has soared. The DAO’s treasury should have collected about 1250 ETH since launch through the sales of the Mutant Cats and the commission on resales. That’s a purring 4,75 million US dollars in revenue in just 15 days.
A few days ago Mutant Cats bought a Cryptopunk for the DAO (Cryptopunks - the hailed OG project in the space, minted around the time of Caesar Augustus of Rome) and yesterday they had the audacity to cop a Fidenza. The holy grail of digital art that only has 1000 pieces. Created by the great Tyler Hobbs in the early days of mankind’s latest endeavor called NFTs. Snoop Dogg owns one too.
So what does all this mean?
Well. A lot of things. My main takeaway is that this points out the future. Mutant Cats have effectively become an extremely successful “Layer 2” on top of the whole NFT space. It democratizes bluechip NFT projects and gives people who don’t have millions of dollars to spend on jpgs the opportunity to have exposure to the most coveted projects in the space, and to join the extended community of these projects.
Democratization is one of the absolute cornerstones of the Blockchain technology and movement. The Mutant Cats DAO have in a very creative way managed to manifest that vision of democratization with a very soft and lovely touch.
The Mutant Cats project is both art and a financial derivatives instrument. It’s both a community and a mutual fund. It’s both cleverly tactical and deeply visionary.
There are some Layer 2 chains that have successfully launched on Ethereum’s Mainnet on the infrastructural side. They are predicted to change everything. Mutant Cats brings a different kind of “Layer 2” to the NFT space. And is now successfully launched on Ethereum Mainnet.
I’m happy to say that I actually have exposure to this trailblazing future-revealing project. And maybe more importantly, that it has also inspired a little bit of development in the stealthy startup I’m a co-founder of (more news on that later).
Mutant Cats are here, and they have already changed the world. If you go to their discord and check out their announcement channel you can clearly see that this is just the start. Their own Mutant Gorillas are coming, and the Bored Apes Yacht Club will probably never be the same again.
Neither will the world.