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At the height of the NFT craze, NZ-based Fluf World’s digital rabbits were selling for the equivalent of $32,500 each. Now they go for approximately $3900 on average.
The fall equated to an average value loss of just over $28,500 per rabbit since January 2022 – a trend which has played out across the highly speculative NFT market.
Sale volumes were markedly down as well, going from 362 sales per week in January 2022 to 52 in early April, roughly an 85% fall, according to Opensea.io, the largest marketplace were non-fungible tokens are bought and sold.
Despite the falls, the creators of Fluf World, Non-Fungible Labs, said the rabbits remained part of a larger plan, and an academic studying the market said Flufs had some of the qualities that could help the project survive the likely culling to come.
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In their current form, Flufs are little more than digital 3D bunnies that sway on-screen, and their value largely comes from the fact that each is a one-off, the ownership of which can be verified.
Some Flufs have hats, some have eye patches, some are smoking, and each has its own short backstories. There are 10,000 of them, and in the past they have attracted a partnership with US rapper Snoop Dogg.
The value of Fluf World Burrows – the NFT homes where Flufs can live – has fared worse than the rabbits themselves, plummeting in value from 4.25 ethereum at the end of January last year to 0.19 ethereum at the end of March.
In dollars, that is the equivalent of the price of a burrow falling from over $1800 to $551 today.
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Aaron McDonald, who co-founded Non-Fungible Labs, said in a statement he remained steadfast that Flufs had a future in the next iteration of the internet..
“While the overall price of assets across many sectors of the market are down from historical highs, we continue to build this foundation and remain committed to our long term vision to reshape the internet,” McDonald wrote.
McDonald is the CEO of Futureverse, which is the company aiming to create a new digital realm where, it is planned, Flufs will mature.
The recently-created Futureverse Corporation is a combination of 11 different local and international technology and media companies, which McDonald said was one of the largest metaverse communities in the world.
The metaverse, which is often equated to the Facebook-driven initiative to bring more of people’s work and social lives online, is a vague blanket term for the next stage of the internet.
McDonald saw it as a space that will be created by collaboration between many entities, but he did not say how Flufs would factor into it.
Whether they would develop into playable characters or avatars, for example, or remain inanimate pieces of digital art, remained unclear.
Associate professor of commercial law Alex Sims is currently conducting research into NFTs, and said whether any given NFT was likely to recover its value depended on two main factors: did the creators have a future plan to expand, and was the artwork likely to come back into fashion.
She was not surprised NFTs had been through a boom-bust cycle, because excitement often blossoming when a new concept or technology came out.
She equated the explosion to the dot-com bubble, and said the amount of money that initially poured into NFTs was likely exacerbated by the amount of money washing around when interest rates were at historic lows.
Just like companies during the dot-com bubble, a lot of NFTs would never recover any value and disappear, but Sims believed some would withstand the test of time.
Sims was acquainted with the team behind Flufs, and said it had expertise in digital design and blockchain, which was encouraging.
“The aim of Fluf World is to build that metaverse and more things around it to give value to it, and that may or may not work.
“It’s different from some NFT projects, which were effectively a whole 10,000 JPEGs sold, and there was nothing really there.”
“I always say – only invest if you like it personally, or you see value in the community around it.”
“It’s like with any piece of art, if you bought for only speculative reasons, you’d almost always get your fingers burnt.”
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