Last week on Thursday, one of the most anticipated NFT releases on the WAX blockchain took place. As part of their partnership with Capcom, WAX released the Street Fighter digital collectible series.
I was on the fence about whether or not I was going to participate with this release. There are a lot of people who were on the fence actually.
The key issue was the manner in which Capcom decided to distribute the cards.
In the past, projects like this on typically have a limited number of card packs for sale. Once they are gone, they are gone. Sometimes they impose limits on how many packs an individual user can purchase, others they do not.
In this case with Street Fighter, they implemented a 24 hour unlimited sale of the packs. From noon EST on Thursday to noon EST on Friday, you could purchase as many packs as you wanted. At noon on Friday all pack sales stopped and no further packs for series 1 will ever be minted. At that time on Friday, you were then able to open your packs and start crafting your cards.
Wait, craft your cards?
That's right, the packs in this project don't give you actual cards like some projects in the past have. Instead, each pack gives you building pieces so you can craft your cards and then level them up.
I believe this is similar to the NBA Top Shot project over on ETH, though I could be wrong. It appears that pretty much every project right now is trying to eclipse the success of that one.
So as I said, I was on the fence about participating as were a lot of other people. With it being an unlimited 24 hour sale, there was a huge chance that the market could become overly saturated with packs and build cards.
I decided to purchase one ultimate pack and seven standard packs to start out. That was the equivalent of about $125 USD. As things continued to progress through the day on Thursday and into the morning on Friday, the pack sales were not slowing down. Capcom had topped over 1.5 Million dollars in sales by Friday morning, so I decided to purchase a couple more. I picked up another five standard packs for $50.
As you can see from my images, they ended up selling 27,022 standard packs and 35,388 ultimate packs. That equals just over 2 million dollars in total sales.
So far, I have only opened two of my standard packs. My plan is to wait for the prices per pack to go up on the secondary market as people continue to burn their build cards and need more to level up their cards.
I did sell a Vega build card on the market for about $5 USD before the prices started to even out at around $2 per build card (according to Atomic Hub).
Standard packs are already selling for about $20 on the secondary market right now which would be a 2x return on investment if I sold any of mine. Likewise, ultimate packs are listed for about 2x over the original price.
Personally, I am going to hold out and try for a 3x or 4x return.
There is speculation that there may be a game associated with the cards in the future. Why else would they have the level up metric if not. If that is the case, it could drive the price of unopened packs up even further.
If packs were to get to 3x, I would probably sell enough so that I could at least recover my initial investment and then wait to see if they go up higher from that point.
The release was not without its issues. This has been the case for most of the projects that have taken place on the WAX blockchain. I don't feel it is a limitation of WAX as much as it is unpreparedness for the demand on the part of the partner who is selling their IP (intellectual property).
At noon on Thursday many people were met with a storefront that would not allow them to add items to their cart of complete their transactions. Luckily, they were able to fix most of the issues within a half hour and clearly it didn't impact their sales too much.
I have seen other projects where they needed to push the launch back by hours, days, and even weeks because they weren't fully prepared.
Stuff like that needs to be fixed. It is a bad look for WAX (even though the issue isn't necessarily with WAX) and it is not helping to bring people onto the chain.
Friday at noon there was another small hiccup when pack opening and crafting started. This one was handled in about 15 minutes, but still...
Despite the growing pains, I am really excited about what is happening on WAX. The token has seen a steady increase from $.03 to just over $.09 (now back down to $.08) during this bull run. Personally, I think the token should easily be valued at over $1 if not closer to $10 given the expanding NFT market and the potential from strategic partnerships WAX has made.
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