Of all the new blockchain projects hitting the crypto market this year, five NFT projects stand out as the most anticipated ones to look out for as a new investment in 2022.
The NFT trend took the market by storm in 2021 as mainstream attention and investment poured into the nascent non-fungible token (NFT) sector, making many investors happy and some even millionaires if they got into the right projects.
This year the NFT trend is still on the up and opportunities are everywhere for savvy investors looking to hit the jackpot in 2022. In this article we bring you five of the most anticipated NFT projects this year, in no particular order.
Bored Apes
It is fitting to start with Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a project that has managed to capture the imagination of the NFT community and inspire hundreds of clones. Meme coins of the recent past proved that it’s always a good idea to start with something ‘memeable’ and Bored Apes, on the surface, falls into that category.
BAYC is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs – unique digital collectibles stored as ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and hosted on IPFS. But far from just looking cool or cute like other meme coins, Bored Apes give their owners tangible benefits that add real value to having them in your wallet.
They double as a Yacht Club membership card and grant access to members-only benefits. Each Bored Ape NFT is unique and programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits including expression, headwear, clothing, and more. The first apes cost 0.08 ETH each and currently have a floor price of 147 ETH on OpenSea! With more than 500,000 ETH in volume traded, Bores Apes is just a monster!
Needless to say, the unprecedented success of Bored Apes – which are still consistently selling for between $350k to $420k apiece – means investors are now furiously searching for the next big NFT moonshot.
G.O.A.T Elves
Following a similar model to Bored Apes is G.O.A.T Elves, a Solana-based NFT project minting 9,999 NFTs. At a price of 0.69 SOL to mint, G.O.A.T Elves will be hoping to emulate the success of their simian predecessors.
G.O.A.T Elves launched on April 24th, courtesy of a five-person team, and ensures the correct distribution of more than 200 beautiful rare traits and a more granular rarity compared to other projects, with their main focus on quality.
There were no whitelists or presales, giving everyone the same chance to mint their elves via the G.O.A.T Elves website. These NFTs can be listed on all major Solana NFT marketplaces. Any G.O.A.T Elves sold below mint price on any secondary marketplace will be bought back by the team, ensuring that mint price is the lowest possible price.
In terms of NFT utility, all G.O.A.T. Elves holders will receive an airdrop for their upcoming 3D metaverse project called The G.O.A.T.VERSE. This will be a play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game in which G.O.A.T Elves will have special in-game abilities, gaining advantages based on the items they wear and carry. G.O.A.T Club members will also have access to early investment in The G.O.A.T.VERSE, where proof of NFT ownership is required to join.
As an NFT project in the early stages on Solana, there is big upside potential for G.O.A.T Elves if the team can deliver on its promise to strategically grow the community and spread awareness through global events, partnerships, and giveaways to generate more publicity and increased demand for G.O.A.T. Elves.
Ugly Frens
Taking a more original turn, the next project that could become a smash hit in 2022 is Ugly Frens. This does not look like your average NFT project. Still very new with a 10,000-strong Twitter account that only launched in March this year, the team has been teasing what the project is about with a fun and unique take on the “oddball meme” genre.
A character called ‘Jaja’ appears to be discovering itself – its body parts, its facial expressions, its likes and dislikes – via cute and strange tweets that reveal the tone of Ugly Frens a little bit more each day. An intriguing marketing approach pushes a narrative that you have to be ugly to be ‘frens’ in this community. It’s a little sad, a little silly, but it’s fun, and it might just be a sleeper hit in the making.
To date there has been a campaign push to grow their Discord community, with 20 free Ugly Frens NFT mints already given away. Don’t take your eye off this one!
AkiraGal
Another hot project that is still relatively new in the NFT space is AkiraGal – a community-driven NFT collection of 6,666 exquisite and deadly agents fated to help you write history in a dystopian world known as The City, which is a Web3 platform by day and “city of dangerous secrets” by night.
AkiraGal is a deflationary collection of virtual NFT ‘galfrens’ that can be staked to earn the $AKA utility token. Lovingly designed in the Japanese anime style and loosely based on the classic 1988 film, AkiraGals are high-quality NFT art modeled after mythological goddesses, empresses, queens, warrior princesses, and cyber assassins created by a secret society. Both beautiful and deadly, a quick scroll through the AkiraGal Twitter feed shows off some intricate early NFT designs that the community will have a chance to get their hands on soon.
Bright and bold colors signify the AkiraGal NFT collection so far, with the female agents in this metaverse equipped with deadly weaponry that adorn their outstanding and provocative outfits. From gatling guns to samurai swords, these NFTs are sure to pack a mean punch in addition to their outer beauty.
A special burning mechanism will remove NFTs from the total supply in exchange for $AKA, thus giving increased value to the entire AkiraGal ecosystem. There will also be a hard cap on $AKA with halving periods. Each halving reduces $AKA staking rewards by half to curb token inflation.
DeGods
Finally, one of the top NFT projects on Solana is the irreverent DeGods, a death-themed deflationary collection of degenerates, punks, and misfits. DeGods brand themselves as gods of the metaverse and masters of their own universe, and are not messing around with niceties.
DeGods is building an ecosystem for buying, selling, and minting blue-chip NFTs. By staking DeGods NFTs to earn $DUST tokens, DeGods can then be converted into DeadGods using $DUST while keeping the same NFT attributes. The ultimate purpose is for DeadGods art to sell at auction houses, and they currently have an average price of 372 SOL on Magic Eden.
In addition to earning passive income as DeadGods NFTs continue to earn $DUST, there is also DeLabs – an accelerator and launchpad for NFT projects with a strict policy of only accepting and onboarding the top Solana projects. DeLabs collects a percentage of each mint, and every project will have a percentage of its supply mintable with $DUST.
This means the DeGods community will be able to mint high-quality Solana NFTs with $DUST, adding another valuable use case for the token to maintain its value. The team is also working on getting $DUST integrated as an accepted currency with top-tier Solana NFT marketplaces, popular P2E games, and top metaverse projects.
And rounding off the power of DeGods NFTs is its ‘decentralized monarchy’ – on-chain elections for a group of elite ‘DeMonarchs’ who have shared power over DAO funds and get compensated by a percentage of the DAO royalties, as long as they do their jobs and don’t get voted out by the community.