NFTs. It’s Not About the Art.

LunarCrush
6 min readJun 1, 2022

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Social Intelligence for Crypto…and now NFTs.

NFTs were crypto’s first-iteration of the country club. This time however, anyone is welcome and the focus is not golf.

As anyone who historically understands what collecting art is will tell you, NFTs cannot possibly be about the art or the artist. How can something that is not tangible be worth any value? Why would anyone buy NFTs, have you seen them?

Except we are, and we are totally obsessed.

NFT was the most mentioned term across social media over the last two years behind only crypto, bitcoin, eth, btc, ethereum. It even outperformed dogecoin and doge, which as anyone in crypto knows is quite the feat.

Top mentioned terms over the previous 2-years across social media. Source: LunarCrush

Organizing online took a major leap forward with the advent of the non-fungible token. We now had a verifiable, immutable way to prove it was truly us online. Whether it be in a Discord server, game, or through a PFP on Twitter.

The NFT is simply a road sign guiding us down the path of a much more impactful and colorful journey. The rights and access a NFT gives you is the feature set, it is simply a key. A cooler and more versatile key than most people are used to, one they can show off or be traded anywhere and to anybody in the world, whether it be a Bored Ape, CryptoPunk, or Voyager. Albeit still only a key. Don’t fret though, this key unlocks the most powerful asset in the world…

Pure community.

Pure communities are exactly what you think they are:

Anything anyone wants them to be, at-scale, fully composable.

Want to organize a group of people to buy and securitize all of the laundromats in Seattle?

Launch a decentralized group to manage all minor league baseball players contracts and allow them to monetize their likeness?

Buyout mortgage backed securities of borrowers with FICOs 700+?

Get access to a local kitchen where the community comes together on Friday nights?

NFTs are the rights and access, DAOs are the governance. NFT collections, put simply, are the test stage of, “Will this idea work?” when launching something in this world of everything being organized online. All NFT collections will turn into a DAO of varying complexity, whether they officially organize or not.

At LunarCrush we coined the phrase in 2018, “Without a community, there is no crypto.”

Today understanding how community impacts NFTs is a natural progression for LunarCrush, our mission is to create transparency for communities. We believe the future looks a lot different for the world of NFTs and it’s not about selecting which specific NFT you want to buy, it’s understanding what each of these communities stands for, where their value lies, what assets do they possess, what is their mission, and who is involved.

We aim to enable these communities to showcase themselves and provide tooling to do so, while also creating transparency around whether these communities reflect their mission, similar to how we do this today for cryptocurrencies by distilling the signal from the noise that is social media.

In 2022, we get to say, “NFTs are pure community.”

Introducing Social Intelligence for NFTs

Starting today, collectors and creators can harness the power of social intelligence data to gain valuable insights into the state of the NFT market. You can now track social mentions, sentiment, trending news, and top influencers for your favorite NFT projects, all in one platform.

Experience the new NFT section now at LunarCrush.com/NFTs.

A new way to research

As NFTs are primarily driven by art, culture, and community, there are many important social and emotional variables that one must take into account when trying to determine the long-term value of a project.

Perhaps the most important of these variables is a project’s overall social presence. A strong community is one of the surest indicators of a valuable NFT collection.

The problem for many is that finding successful NFT communities before they take off can feel like waiting for a shooting star. Finding great communities does not have to be a guessing game.

At LunarCrush, our social collection and machine learning algorithms do the research for you by distilling the noise of social media into digestible insights helping you to zoom out and see how communities behave over time.

Identify top influencers, catch up on impactful news, and view popular NFTs in a collection all before deciding to make an investment.

A new way to build community.

As a creator, one of the most important parts of building a successful collection is making sure your message and your creations are promoted through word-of-mouth.

We have all watched iconic collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, and World Of Women show us the power of building a dedicated and vocal community.

The NFT section will give creators a new way to strategize for community growth and a fresh perspective on competitive market research.

As a creator, you’ll be able to analyze how established NFT collections have built and maintained social presence across time. You can then use those lessons to create an active and longstanding community of your own.

Unique Metrics

In addition to tracking real-time social and market activity for NFT collections, LunarCrush goes deeper, giving NFT metrics you can’t get anywhere else.

Each NFT collection gets a Galaxy Score™ which looks at how strong that collection is performing vs. itself over time. It looks at combined historical social and market activity to provide a 1–100 score where 100 would be the strongest possible score a collection could obtain.

Beyond looking at individual collections, LunarCrush looks at all tracked collections across the NFT market to determine which is performing the strongest at any given time. Through the LunarCrush NFT Rank™, you can learn how strong combined social and market activity is for a NFT collection is relative to all collections.

Best of all, every NFT metric is calculated in real-time and memorialized over time to understand historical performance.

In Summary

LunarCrush is looking forward to continuing to support these pure communities as they continue to grow and organize. We recognize the tooling needed to support them will need to adapt as fast, if not faster than the communities pop up. We are joining in building this future.

We will be supporting these communities seen as they are, the next generation of multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar organizations focused on building a better and more fair way of doing business, having fun, and finding happiness online and IRL.

Try out the new NFT section on LunarCrush.com/NFTs and follow us on Twitter for real-time social intelligence.

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