Just when we thought the NFT world was out of surprises, we saw another free mint collection make record sales on the secondary market and hit a trading volume of nearly 2000 ETH. This happened in less than a week.
IreneDAO, led by Irene Zhao, a popular social media influencer and model, has become the hot topic of NFT space. People who minted on the first day could flip for as high as 8.8 ETH. At one point, the floor price reached 5 ETH. We saw some of the biggest influencers like Logan Paul ape in at peak prices and buy 20 of Irene NFTs.
I know it is hard to wrap your head around how this happened. In this article, let us break it down and understand whether this is a start of a new trend in NFTs.
Who is Irene Zhao
Irene is a social media influencer with a massive following of 500k followers across Twitter and Instagram. She first started as a commodity broker in Singapore. After working for more than four years, she decided to quit in 2021 and pursue her passion in the cryptocurrency space. She joined the Konomi Network and worked for two years. In Jan 2022, she left the CMO role and co-founded a web 3 social media platform called SO-COL.
As Irene had a strong social presence, she partnered with more than a hundred corporate partners for advertising and promotional campaigns. Some brands include Huawei, Casio, Grab, Carlsberg, and Shopee. With IreneDAO, she plans to help social media creators grow using SO-COL and guide them in leveraging NFTs for memberships within the community.
How IreneDAO Broke NFT Twitter
IreneDAO was launched by giving the community free claims on NFT tribe passes. They launched a total of 1107 NFTs. There is no art. There is no special roadmap planned. There was no value attached to these NFTs when launched on 14th Jan. But the NFT community saw something. Irene’s fans saw something of value, which promoted the project into the limelight and caught everyone’s attention in the NFT community.
In a matter of hours, we saw a tweetstorm from big Twitter accounts and followers of Irene. As the NFTs were memes, it became easier to go viral. And people resonated with them because of the funny text overlays. Some popular ones like “WAGMI” and “gm” are also included in many NFTs.
Even the CEO of Galaxy Digital, Mike Novogratz, showed support of IreneDAO, saying, “I love the hustle. This young woman has created her own brand in a year. And NFTs allowed her to pull her community together”. Few other influencers on Twitter talking about Irene NFTs are Grabiele Haines ( check out the song he made) and Crypto Cobain. Irene also offered the well-known venture capitalist Zhu Su, an NFT, to join the DAO.
What are the Future Plans for Irene DAO
We saw many new use-cases in the NFT space over the past year. But we are yet to see a fully-operational NFT DAO that is solely for creators. With IreneDAO, we can expect more creators to use the NFT platform and leverage their communities. Irene plans to use her start-up, SO-COL, to improve the creator economy and help people make the most out of NFTs and web 3.
According to the recent proposal in IreneDAO, they plan to collaborate with Ghozali, an Indonesian student who recently rose to fame with this NFT collection. Currently, Irene has no proper roadmap for the DAO. But she hopes to onboard more fans and drive more attention. A token launch is a possibility, she says, upon approval of DAO members.
Can we expect more of this?
I am confident that we will see more such DAOs in the near future as more influencers like Irene discover the power of the NFT community. In most cases, people, usually male, buy such NFTs at high prices to get attention from female creators. So it is very much likely that more creators will enter this space with similar intentions and create NFT communities.
On a macro level, we may see celebrities and musicians launch NFTs with a DAO fan club. This allows them to directly interact with fans and promote their other brands as well. The opportunity is massive. And any creator can get the support Irene got, but they need to create something that resonates with the NFT community. The surprising part of all this is that Irene never created any NFTs. A random person online put in the work to create memes and smart contracts to claim these NFTs. So such fan clubs will continue to make noise. The only question is- will they sustain?
Born and brought up in India, Karthikeya Gutta is a crypto journalist and freelance contributor for ItsBlockchain. He covers various aspects of the industry with in-depth analysis and research. His passion towards blockchain and crypto ecosystem is mainly because he believes it can really change the world and help millions of people.
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