Author: Cookie

Since the middle of last year, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have gradually departed from the "classical value standards". The elements used to judge the value of traditional PFP (Profile Picture) NFTs, such as image content, community, and the traditional brand-building narrative, have basically failed. This trend reached its peak at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, with projects like Kaito surging to over 10+ ETH, several Cosmos ecosystem projects on Stargaze skyrocketing, and the highly controversial MegaETH.

Many players call this type of "FT (Fungible Token) in NFT clothing" as "equity-type NFTs", the most direct manifestation of which is that these NFTs mostly come from projects that are about to issue tokens, using NFTs as a starting point to preheat the ecosystem, build a community, or directly sell token quotas.

So when I found that the NFTs on Hyperliquid had a bit of momentum, and even had a bit of a "classical flavor", I was a bit surprised...

Savage Growth Without an NFT Trading Market

The most anticipated Hyperliquid NFT trading market should be Drip.Trade (@drip__trade), which will go live on February 27th. Although the product has not yet been launched, the platform token $JPEG was issued a few days ago. At its peak, its market capitalization approached $20 million, and is currently around $7.5 million.

The airdrop recipients are the two hottest NFT projects on Hyperliquid currently, Wealthy Hypio Babies and K-16 a.k.a KARU, both of which are on the Base network and have not yet been bridged to HyperEVM.

So how can the projects already on HyperEVM be traded? Now it is on the Net Protocol, a tool made by OpenSea protocol engineer aspyn, which has already supported the trading of some native Hyperliquid NFTs.

This savage growth situation makes me feel a bit like I'm back in the early 2023 Glyphs era, doing over-the-counter trading with an Excel order book...

In addition, minting NFTs on Hyperliquid is also cumbersome, similar to the early Ordinals. To briefly describe the whole process, you first need to deposit USDC to the Arbitrum network:

After the deposit is confirmed, purchase $HYPE in the HYPE/USDC trading pair:

After the purchase is successful, go back to the Portfolio page, click on the position's Transfer to EVM to transfer the $HYPE to HyperEVM.

With $HYPE on HyperEVM, you can then use $HYPE to mint new projects.

Which NFT Projects Are Currently in the Top Tier?

First of course is Wealthy Hypio Babies (@HypioHL), whose current floor price is around 0.9 ETH, down slightly from its ATH of 1+ ETH. However, the market is currently in a downturn, so the correction is understandable.

Looking at the floor price trend, you'll find that while Hypio's overall trend is steadily upward, it also went through a period of about 1 month of dormancy, before launching a second wave of growth to hit new highs in the middle of this month.

Hypio's community is indeed the best among the current Hyperliquid NFT projects, which is reflected in the price and trading volume. In addition, holding Hypio has also yielded a lot of airdrops, including the $JPEG from the upcoming Hyperliquid NFT trading market Drip.Trade, the native meme $BUDDY on Hyperliquid, and $SENT from Hyperliquid's AI Agent platform Sentiment. On the way are also $Neko from Hyperliquid's DeFAI Swarm and $SPR from Hyperliquid's short-term options platform Supurr (formerly Buffer Finance).

The second project under Hypio is K-16 a.k.a KARU (@karu__16), whose value logic is similar to Hypio.

However, KARU's price trend has not been as smooth as Hypio's. After quickly breaking through 0.1 ETH at the start, it plummeted sharply within a week, and then climbed back up from the bottom to hit new highs, so it can be said to have withstood the test.

The last one is TinyHyperCats (@tinyhypercats), the first native NFT project on HyperEVM, which currently has a floor price of 17$HYPE as it needs to be traded on the aforementioned Net Protocol.

Which New Projects Are Worth Watching?

Hypers (@HypersOnHL)

This project was already mentioned in the NFT new project introduction article at the end of last year, and the hype was already high back then. It will finally be launched, with minting to be opened on Drip.Trade on February 27th. The total supply is 8888, and the minting price is 2 - 2.5 $HYPE.

PiP (@PiPonHL)

Although the fan base is not very large, the actual response is larger than the fan base. There is no more information available at the moment, they are just constantly updating the content.

Catbal (@CatCabal_hl)

The situation is similar to PiP, but they will have closer connections with other projects in the ecosystem, such as also receiving $BUDDY airdrops.

Rekt Gang (@rekt_gang)

This project has collaborated with Hyperliquid in the community aspect a few years ago, such as raffles and opening Spaces, and they are also running a Hyperliquid validator node. But their mission is to be a community focused on exploring multi-chain ecosystems, which means they already have some NFT assets on other chains, which is something to note.

Conclusion

The small rally in Hyperliquid NFTs is mainly due to the entry of foreign NFT players. As for why foreign NFT players would choose to come to this chain for speculation, I think it may be because the trend of $HYPE has evoked their fond memories of the good returns they were able to get as diamond hands in the past NFT market, with Wealthy Hypio Babies, K-16 a.k.a KARU, and TinyHyperCats being no exception. The recent small rally of meme coins on AVAX also has a similar flavor.

If the small image frenzy on Hyperliquid continues, there will inevitably be more new projects "coming like a spring breeze overnight", but the overall market uncertainty is currently very high, so when minting new projects, it is still necessary to carefully evaluate the depth of the community and cooperation relationships, and cherish the $HYPE in hand.