GM frens,

It’s been an interesting week in the Web3 World.

Despite the recent reduction in the USD value of NFTs — the ETH value of bluechip NFTs has remained relatively stable in recent weeks.

For many NFT collectors, ourselves included, we have been using this opportunity to gain greater exposure to bluechip projects, and in today’s edition of The Ground Floor we will be breaking down one of our favorite NFT projects — PROOF.

The PROOF Collective Playbook

Breaking down the past, the present, and the potential future of the Proof Collective...

The most valuable currency in crypto is trust, and PROOF is a living example of this.

For Kevin Rose, Co-founder of the PROOF collective his journey to develop the personal brand that would allow him to launch one of the most successful NFT projects currently in existence started almost 2 decades prior in 2004.

Who is Kevin Rose?

Kevin Rose is an American entrepreneur who has founded multiple startups — some successful, others not so much, however, alongside his entrepreneurial endeavors Kevin Rose has been producing podcasts since as far back as 2003.

Throughout this time, Kevin has developed a reputation for having a great pulse on the latest innovations coming down the technology pipeline.

With this understanding, Kevin became a General Partner at Google Ventures in 2012 — Google's VC arm, and later in life (2017) he became a partner at True Ventures, a VC firm with $2.8 billion in assets under management.

From Thoughts To Tokens

Fast forward to March 2021 and Kevin was still working at True Ventures when he began a new podcast called the Proof Podcast where he & his guests would share their thoughts on a host of different topics related to the Web3 World.

32 episodes later with appearances from many of the biggest names in the Web3 World (Beeple, Gary V, Tyler Hobbs, Erick Snowfro, & many others) — the Proof podcast was quickly becoming one of the most popular podcasts covering Web3.

With this growing following of fans, Kevin sold 1,000 PROOF Collective tokens for 1 ETH ~ over $4,000 at the time on the 11th of December 2021 with the initial promise being a 3 year membership to a private discord of NFT collectors & artists.

Despite the low expectations Kevin sought to set, the floor price of PROOF Collective NFTs increased in value by more than 600% within 2 weeks.

Tangible Value For Token Holders

While many projects talk a big game about the value they provide to their token holders — PROOF is leading the way when it comes to providing their community with monetizable value in the form of valuable airdrops such as Grails & Moonbirds.

In late February, PROOF token holders received Grails, the first official project from PROOF whereby 20 digital artists submitted 20 pieces of digital artwork and PROOF Collective holders were able to mint one piece each — with a catch.

The artists weren’t revealed before the mint, however, to add an extra element of excitement to this airdrop PROOF did share that 4 of the 20 artists who had provided artwork were among the top 10 selling NFT artists of all time.

For the people who wanted to take profits, the average price of a Grails NFT on days 1-3 after their release was 4.68 ETH ~ $12,168 at the time.

Two months in and PROOF Collective token holders already had the opportunity to 4.68x their initial investment — without even having to sell their original PROOF collective passes.

More Value With Moonbirds

This was followed 7 weeks later with Moonbirds — a 10,000 PFP collection whereby each PROOF token holder was eligible to mint two Moonbirds free of charge.

The remaining 8,000 Moonbird were sold for 2.5 ETH each.

This drop allowed PROOF to raise 20,000 ETH ~ $60,820,000 USD at the time 🤯.

Less than 7 days later the floor price of this free mint for token holders was 33 ETH ~ $97,779 USD at the time — providing PROOF token holders with the opportunity to capture 66 ETH ~ $195,558 USD if they choose to sell this airdrop.

During this time, PROOF passes had also reached a 100 ETH floor price — offering each of the original holders who held for 18 weeks a very generous return to date. 💸

Could Projects Copy This?

Knowing the playbook, and being able to execute it are two very different things.

While many projects would do well to copy the PROOF playbook, without:

1) A large enough group of early adopters who believe in your project, which Kevin Rose already had access to through the Proof podcast.

2) The contacts to commission artwork from some of the top digital artists in the world which Kevin Rose also had through his network which has spent the better part of two decades building.

3) Last, but by no means least a trusted leader to lead such a community which is something no amount of money can buy – instead, the required investment here is the time it takes to build a track record such that people have reason(s) to believe you can build something valuable.

The Future Of PROOF?

PROOF will be hosting its own IRL conference later this year called PROOF of conference which so far sounds similar to the concept to Gary Vaynerchuk’s VeeCon where PROOF plans on sharing a much larger product roadmap update.

Additionally, PROOF recently filed a trademark for Moonbirds Ravens which many have hinted will be a mechanism to further expand the PROOF ecosystem through another PFP collection.

Outside of NFTs, PROOF has also been working on project highrise, a software product which next to nothing is currently known about. Many have speculated that it could be a community messaging tool to rival Discord, but no one knows for sure.

Looking Forward

It’s not entirely clear what PROOF will do in the coming years, however, there’s a growing group of people who trust that PROOF will continue to find new & unique ways to reward token holders.

Based on their track record since the project began, it’s easy to see why token holders remain so excited for the future of the PROOF collective.

3 Things You Need to Know

1) Reddit’s NFT-Based Avatar Marketplace

This has long been rumoured and it’s finally here. Reddit is going to be launching an NFT platform on Polygon — an Ethereum scaling platform.

It’s no surprise that the huge social site is foraying into NFTs.

Their founder Alexis Ohanian and his fund 776 have invested into various NFT projects, including Kevin Rose’s Proof where Alexis is an advisor.

They have also invested in Doodles, Sorare and many other NFT based projects.

2) WAGMI United X Adidas

WAGMI United, aka the internet’s team, are a brand who bought League 2 soccer club Crawley Town late last year, to the uproar of many English fans.

Their dream is to take Crawley to the Premier League, which would require 3 promotions up the English Soccer Pyramid.

WAGMI have come under some fire, but they’ve recently started to do some good things for the fans such as slashing ticket prices and signing some great talent…

…But, they’ve now partnered with Adidas (incredible for a team this small) to launch NFTs for 0.35 ETH which grant buyers access to 3 pieces of physical merch.

0.35 ETH seems a huge amount right now so it’ll be interesting to see how this goes.

3) FLOW Opens its Doors

FLOW, the blockchain built by Crypto Kitty & NBA Top Shot creators Dapper Labs, is now opening its doors so that anyone can build on it.

This is a step toward decentralizing the chain, but also testing just how popular it will be without investment or funding from Dapper.

FLOW can be attributed to being a lot of people’s first touch points in NFTs, with Top Shots creating such a surge of new collectors in the ecosystem.

Tweet Of The Week

An excellent thread on the importance of checking on-chain records:

Community Update

Is Art Blocks season among us?

Art Blocks has ranked number #4 in OpenSea volume in the last 7 days. 👀

The Floor discord community has created a thread called #ArtBlocks that lives under the Alpha channel. This tight knit sub-section of the Floor community has been watching recent mints and keeping an eye on the Art Blocks calendar daily.

The channel’s original aim has been to collect art and “vault” new mints or old but in recent times a lot of these “vaults” have turned into huge returns for community members. Although we can not be too sure how long the volume will keep up, the community is having a great time following along.

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Thanks for the read,

See you next time! — OB1 & Pet & Corwin

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or business advice to any person or entity.