Cats Rule the World! | Why Do Mimic Shhans NFTs Go Viral?

22 July 12:07

[TL;DR]

🔷 Mimic Shhans is a playful "black cat" wearing various clothes. Each Mimic Shhans has a unique set of clothes, expressions and accessories.

🔷 Mimic Shhans is a PFP NFT (Profile Pics NFT) project based on Ethereum. The author is shhans.eth.

🔷 Mimic Shhans is a decentralized project. Since July 2022, it has started to go viral in Chinese communities.

🔷 Opportunities and challenges for the further development of Mimic Shhans: remarkable model innovation, and concentrate chips rely on social networking.

What is Mimic Shhans？

Mimic Shhans is a PFP NFT project based on the Ethereum blockchain, with a limit volume of 10,000. The project is a playful and cool black cat image, wearing various styles of clothing headdress, imitating the image we are familiar with. Each Mimic Shhans has its own distinctive clothing, expression and accessory with high recognition.

Mimic Shhans uses the CC0 license. Here we take an opportunity to explain what CC0 is.

Creative Commons license is a public copyright license protocol that allows the distribution of works protected by copyright. The creator can use the license to grant others the right to share, use, or even create derivative works.

In other words, anyone (who does not need to buy NFT) can use it for personal or commercial purposes. The initial minting of Mimic Shhans is free and can be purchased on OpenSea, but the gas fee required for the corresponding sub_script_ion is borne by the buyer.

Project Background

shhans.eth, author of Mimic Shhans, whose real name is Seung Hun Han, abbreviated as SHHAN, is a post-70s uncle from Seoul, South Korea. He lives a quiet life of working during the day and painting at night.

SHHAN lived with a Russian blue cat named Niki for 9 years. Because of his love for Niki, SHHAN hoped that it could survive on the network forever in some form, so he began to draw cats and published them on Instagram in 2017. At first, SHHAN was not good at painting, so he only used simple lines. In 2020, the author began to try and paint black cats, which was also the birth of the prototype of Mimic Shhans. The author has a relatively great vision for the project and hopes to spread Mimic Shhans to the world.

It is worth mentioning that the dissemination of this project is very unique, that is, unlike many other NFT projects, SHHAN did not build a very centralized project operator or publish a detailed roadmap about the project, but led it open to the community.

In other words, Mimic Shhans did not have a centralized and recognized "project team" from the beginning. When you change the Mimic Shhans's Avatar, help Mimic Shhans to publicize, and construct a narrative for the Mimic Shhans, you are actually doing what the "project team" does to some extent.

Before Mimic Shhans went viral on June 25, 2022, Mimic Shhans had listed on OpenSea for more than two months, but the sales volume was not very ideal at that time.

By coincidence, Mimic Shhans was discovered by a Taiwanese collector and was posted on Twitter. Then it was discovered by his Chinese friends, and gradually became popular and spread in the NFT space.

Development History

In April 2022, Mimic Shhans had been listed on Opensea, but it wasn’t in the spotlight at the beginning. At that time, it only took a small amount of gas fee to subscribe to MS NFT to mint a unique Mimic Shhans for free. Because Mimic Shhans has its own celebrity attributes and beautiful design, many people have participated in minting Mimic Shhans, adopted it as an avatar, promoted it, which made Mimi Shhans gradually gain popularity and spread in the NFT space.

The first success of Mimic Shhans occurred around June 25th, 2022. Its highest floor price reached 0.09 ETH, but then its trading volume fell to a certain extent.

According to many insiders, due to the low attention and low acquisition cost of Mimic Shhans in the early stage, the chips were concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, who gathered together to communicate with each other and made the first wave of publicity and marketing for Mimic Shhans; However, due to the contradictions and differences within some communities, some holders finally chose to sell Mimic Shhans and leave the market, which not only brought the centralized dissemination of the project to an end, but also shrank the confidence of the community to a certain extent, resulting in the decrease of the project trading volume in the next period of time.

However, it is hard to say that this was bad news for Mimic Shhans - since then, the dissemination of the project has gradually changed from centralization to decentralization. The basic value of the project has not changed, and most people who had adopted Mimic Shhans avatars have not changed their avatars. The social activities carried out by these people in the next two weeks also imperceptibly made more people aware of the existence of the NFT project "Mimic Shhans", which constantly accumulated potential energy for the project.

On July 7, 2022, with a series of crazy dissemination events in the decentralized communities, the floor price of the project soared from 0.09 ETH to 0.18 ETH within a few hours, and its 24h trading volume once approached goblintown, a trending NFT project.

It is essentially a release of accumulated energy, a sublimation phenomenon naturally caused by transforming decentralization.

Why Do Mimic Shhans Go Viral?

1. Cohesive and compact high-quality community organizations: communities are unorganized but co-occurring. The artists’ unremitting efforts to update status in #Discord DC has stabilized the confidence of community holders.

2. Excellent topic track: cats have a wide audience, and Mimic Shhans also has its natural celebrity. In the beginning, the project was totally free, and the gas fee was extremely low, which was equivalent to the cost of buying a cup of coffee at that time. People were willing to try to pay for their favorite Mimic Shhans.

3. The vacancy of the concept of blue chip NFT: the cat has always been one of mankind's favorite pets, especially with a bit of independence and noble loveliness, which has spawned countless literary and artistic works. However, among the famous blue chip NFT projects before Mimic Shhans, not only is no NFT project related to the concept of "cat", but most NFTs are not suitable for social avatars in terms of aesthetics, that is to say, there is a gap in the relevant market.

4. Gorgeous spawned celebrity endorsement: many girls with their own fan bases CX on twitter. Mimic Shhans has now become one of the communities with the highest density of beauties, realizing “Her Economy”. Meanwhile, beauties can also attract more audiences to join the community, prompting many onlookers, even those who have never played with NFT before, to finally make up their minds to buy Mimic Shhans. In fact, the reason being is "maybe I can get acquainted with beauties if I adopt Mimic Shhans as an avatar". Although the reason sounds a little funny at first glance, it also reflects the purchase factor that Mimic Shhans NFT holders focus more on their social value rather than speculation purpose when buying.

5. KOL empowerment: blue whales with blue chip projects entered the market and we can determine that many people who bought Mimic Shhans were BAYC holders. The founder of Stepn project, Yawn Rong, also entered the market and changed his Twitter avatar. These top KOL celebrities’ endorsement also greatly promoted the spread of Mimic Shhans NFT.

Opportunities and Challenges

I. Adoption and Innovation of Consumption Mode

Presently, if you want to buy a cute puppet cat, you need to: follow the updates of the relevant social media platforms of the cat house early → join the pre-adoption group → queue up as a preparatory parent and get the pre-sale number → wait for 6-12 months → prepare 10000 to 40000 RMB for purchase → buy after the kittens are born → randomly select one of the kittens that are just born and almost identical → wait for 4 to 6 months: the kitten grows up in the cat house, vaccinated and sterilized → receive the kitten by air.
It is very similar to the current situation of the NFT market.

If you want to buy an NFT sold by your favorite artist, you need to: follow the Twitter page of the project team early and join Discord → as a preparatory buyer, make every effort to complete the task and get the white list → wait for the project team to release the official minting time → prepare a small amount of money as the minting fee→ if you want to participate in the public sale, you also need to prepare the gas war fee without capping → randomly select a box, all of the boxes look exactly the same → wait to open the box → officially receive your NFT (not necessarily what you like).

By comparison, if you want to adopt an NFT, you just need to: enter the market, choose your favorite NFT → click "buy now" → finish!

Compared with the speculation of quickly selling NFTs to make our money back after making every effort to get the white list, buying a collection for direct sale is more like a pure consumption behavior in a sense. It is not only a bit like giving rewards to a good-looking emoji collection at ordinary times, but also a bit like a pure art collection, and a bit like buying a ticket to the cat hobbyist community.
It makes NFT more commodity oriented than securities.

In fact, the form can screen out some speculators well at the beginning, and can even prevent people from being cheated, reducing the possibility of the project team running off with money.

After all, at the beginning of buying, consumers' willingness to invest was not so strong. The price stability of commodities must be much better than that of securities.

The data of Mimic Shhans also shows that many people don't care about rare attributes and investment attributes as much as we think. They buy more just because they like it, so there is a greater possibility that they will continue to buy and hold.

II.Concentrate Chips Rely on Social Networking with Acquaintances

As of July 18, the number of holding addresses of Mimic Shhans was 2.6k, which is not much compared with 6.4k of BAYC and 4.4k of goblintowns. Although there are no obvious large investors in the community after the selling event on June 25, a few people hold dozens of NFTs in the OG group of Mimic Shhans, and a few people also hold hundreds of NFTs. After all, the price of Mimic Shhans is really inexpensive and easier than those blue chip NFTs.

Presently, although the selling of a single large investor will not have a great impact on the development of Mimic Shhans, if some large investors carry out concentrated and large-scale selling for some reasons, resulting in a sharp drop in the floor price, which will lead to the project collapsing, it may have a very bad impact - the belief in decentralization that has been hard established among Chinese will collapse again, the infamous reputation of "no decentralized belief among Chinese" and even "no future for the Chinese community" will be substantiated.

Although the possibility is extremely remote, relevant stakeholders must also be aware of the existence of this risk; For large investors, when considering profit-making exits, we should also consider the potential impact at this level.

Secondly, Mimic Shhans' dissemination at this stage is too dependent on Twitter and social networking with acquaintances. Considering that the number of Web3 Chinese Twitter users is actually quite limited, how do we make the majority of Web3 users, who don't often follow Twitter hot spots, aware that the project may be a significant issue for community propagandists to think about next. Wechat, media, Youtube and Tiktok may be the next dissemination channel for the Chinese community.

In addition, if Mimic Shhans really wants to become a blue chip NFT, spreading it to the international community and enhancing its influence are also essential; The publicity methods at the relevant aspects will be mainly Twitter threads and Twitter space in English. Many community members are working hard to gain the achievements. We’re looking forward to further progress!

Conclusion

SHHAN, the founder of Mimic Shhans, once stated in a community AMA, "it is a grand social experiment. I hope it can become a brand that truly realizes community manufacturing and community benefits." Maybe Mimic Shhans are not possible to be known and liked by everyone.

However, the strong self-expression and self-identity formed by Mimic Shhans and the community consensus of jointly expanding and strengthening will affect the formation of more NFT consumption ecosystems in the future. In the Web3 world, showing a more interesting and personalized oneself will also become a great potential development trend of NFTs in the future.

Mimic Shhans, as a popular NFT which goes viral in many decentralized community of the Chinese world for the first time, will leave an indelible impression on everyone's own blockchain experience in this grand social experiment of decentralized dissemination, no matter how Mimic Shhans will develop in the future.

Author: Gate.io Observer: Byron B. Translator: Joy Z.
Disclaimer:
* This article represents only the views of the observers and does not constitute any investment suggestions.
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