Degenerate Ape Academy - A New NFT project built on Solana
Superior Art. Fair Launch. Massive Hype.
Just by looking at the picture above, one can see how clean and sophisticated the Art looks.
With the NFT market in full effect and new projects launching daily, it’s hard to separate the good from the bad. Having been investing in NFTs since early this Jan, I’ve realised it’s not just the artwork that’s attractive and brings value to a project. It’s also as important to look at the project roadmap, website and vision.
What is the Degenerate Ape Academy?
The Degenerate Ape Academy is an NFT brand housed on the Solana blockchain. The academy consists of 10,000 degenerate ape NFTs. The Apes will be randomly generated from a selection of over 130 traits such as eyewear, headwear, clothing and more.
Drop Date: August 12th, 5pm PST
Mint Price: 6 $Sol
Website: https://degenape.academy
Twitter: @DegenApeAcademy
The Story
Taken from their website:
Deep in the heart of Dingus Forest echoes the sleepless crys of a troop of 10,000 apes. These aren’t just regular apes, however. These are degenerate apes.
Day in, day out they toil away on their spreadsheets, constantly baffled over how their signal reading is so consistently terrible.
So they hatched a plan.
A plan to build themselves an academy, one that would house all 10,000 degenerate apes. An academy where they can teach themselves the mysterious ways of the market, where their stable coin purchases finally turn them a profit, where they can learn how to buy at the highest highs and sell precisely at the lowest lows.
But perhaps more importantly, the academy was founded on the principles of friendship making, crayon eating and absolute, unregulated, deplorable, degenerate behaviour.
Welcome fellow apes, to the Degenerate Ape Academy.
“Lenis cerebellis foenicopterum et bonis amici”
The full website launches before the minting is live, the story already hints at additional membership-like benefits to NFT holders. It is clear that the team hope to build a strong community around the project and we can anticipate a road-map release after mint. It is exciting to learn that the benefits may incorporate DeFi as-well as more traditional NFT community privileges. This is very unique and highly ambitious.
There isn’t any team info on their website or twitter but from the community engagement and updates they provide on their Discord, they seem very friendly and have a clear vision for the project. Furthermore, it’s refreshing to see them launching on Solana instead of Ethereum. Ensuring no gas wars and transaction confirmation in seconds. A win-win for the community.
Appeal and Potential
Looking at examples of Mints below we can see the quality of the NFT. Whilst most NFTs use the standard formula of going either pixelated or 2D, these apes really stand out in 3D. The attention to detail on the accessories and and solid colour backgrounds really ensure the crispness of image and make them easy to look at. Personally, I would give them an 9/10 rating on looks.
The Degen Ape Academy twitter currently stands at 10.5k followers with over 4k discord members. They’ve partnered with Audius Project on a giveaway campaign and host regular giveaways on their twitter, I assume up until launch day. It’s clear from their following that there is mass appeal for the project with numbers likely to keep increasing until mint day. In terms of hype I would score the project an 8/10 rating.
Rarity of course, normally decided by numerous different elements; including colours, no. of accessories, types of accessories etc, but in the case of the Ape Academy it seems as though there will be an added layer on top. Where each ‘ape’ may have their own role/job within the ‘academy’ and where some roles may be rarer than others. This makes the project all-the-more exciting in my opinion and I cannot wait to see the full website release and the release of their ‘Apeintosh’ (Ape checker and rarity tool). Finally, it’s worth pointing out that NFT holders will have full intellectual rights of the ape they own. I would score the project a 6/10 in terms of future potential, this low only because we haven’t yet seen the full roadmap and website.
Finishing Thoughts
Time to address the elephant in the room - the project is based on the Solana blockchain instead of Ethereum. Of course we all know that the NFT ecosystem and sheer amount of projects currently on Ethereum overshadows that of Solana, with almost 3-5 new NFT releases a day. However, in my opinion launching on a newer blockchain is a positive for this project. Not only allowing for instant finality and negligible gas, thus looking out for the community but the sheer quality and appeal of the #DAA may actually put the Solana NFT ecosystem on the map, which currently only houses 3 projects. 2 out of those 3 being direct copies of CryptoPunks.
Solana is a premier blockchain project and is here to stay, so we may deliberate that ‘we are still early’ and the first few NFTs to launch on a blockchain which one day may be running entire institutions on it are for sure going to increase in value. Solana was in need of a top-tier NFT play and I think we have it. This project gives me Bored Ape vibes in terms of quality and project potential - the rest will of course be up to the community.
I for one will be ape’ing in when it releases, the question is, will you be joining?