NFT logo displayed on a phone screen. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
It’s February 2022 and the podcast Why Not? has one of its stranger guests.
He sits on a grey sofa with a microphone hanging in front of his face. He wears a grey hoodie with the hood up and large black sunglasses. An orange bandana patterned with the Bitcoin logo covers his nose and mouth.
“I find that it allows me to be a lot more clear-headed as a leader of this community,” he says by way of explaining his desire to remain anonymous. At that point he went by — and still does go by — Frank.
But since his identity was revealed earlier this year, we now know that he is Rohun Vora.
Vora is the founder of DeGods, an NFT collection that has generated nearly $170 million in trading volume, according to the NFT analytics site CryptoSlam.
The Rebellious Guy In Class
If DeGods were a high school stereotype, they would be that super rebellious guy who sits in the back row in the class and aces all the tests, said Tiffany Huang.
Huang, head of marketing and content at NFT marketplace Magic Eden, has worked closely with the DeGods team and she holds two of its NFTs.
“They have developed a really cool reputation for themselves as this very mischievous, very daring and adventurous but also a very loud community that’s very unapologetic,” she said.
Originally launched on Solana in October 2021 to little fanfare, DeGods’ 10,000-strong collection of profile picture (PFP) NFTs cost just 3 SOL to mint.
With a then-anonymous creator who quickly established a reputation for being highly engaged with the DeGods community, interest in the collection soared with the implementation of its Paper Hand Bitch Tax, an additional 33.3% charge levied on anyone who sold a DeGods for lower than the floor price of the collection.
The streetwear-meets-deity design of the PFPs soon became a common feature of the Twitter profile pictures of those involved with the Solana blockchain, including the Solana co-founders and several members of the Magic Eden NFT marketplace team.
The DeGods project has since excelled at navigating new trends in NFTs. It was among the first to abandon royalties when it made the ultimately correct assessment that marketplaces were heading that way anyway (though DeGods later reinstated a 0.5% royalty fee).
But in the past few months it has attracted attention — and criticism — for its decision to migrate chains.
Experiments On Multi-Chains
Bitcoin and Ethereum logos. (Photo by S3studio/Getty Images)
The DeGods team announced in December 2022 that it would move the collection from Solana to Ethereum. Its sister collection, y00ts, moved to Polygon. Polygon gave the team a $3 million grant. The Ethereum Foundation didn’t disclose any payments made to DeGods, and the project is not listed among the grant notices published on its website.
The response was mixed, particularly from Solana fans. One of the most successful brands on the chain, the move represented a loss of around $200 million to the Solana ecosystem.
Three months before the jump to Ethereum, Solana Labs had invested in Dust Labs, a DeGods community project focused on building NFT tooling products (among the other investors was Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Ventures).
In addition to moving to Polygon and Ethereum, DeGods has also pursued its multi-chain agenda on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin NFTs are digital assets inscribed on satoshis, the smallest unit of a bitcoin, made possible after a Bitcoin network upgrade two years ago. These bitcoin NFTs have exploded in popularity in the past few weeks and months.
Despite some controversy surrounding bitcoin NFTs, they are currently the second most popular chain for NFTs after Ethereum, having grossed $167 million from April 22 to May 22, 2023, alone. And the numbers keep rising.
In mid-March, DeGods debuted its 535 bitcoin NFTs, which were recreations of the NFTs that were burned after failing to mint in its original Solana launch.
Snagging one wasn’t cheap. A total of 500 were up for sale on a first-come, first-served basis, costing a minimum of 0.444BTC (then $12,464). The remaining NFTs were auctioned for the community’s native token $DUST and earnings went to the token’s governance DAO, DustDAO.
A Very Vocal Community
That’s not to say everything DeGods has done has been a win. Its Paper Hands Bitch Tax that attracted it so much initial attention was ultimately abandoned as the mechanism was “flawed.”
Meanwhile, some of its attempts to push the boundaries of what’s possible with NFTs on a technical and community level have just as quickly incurred community anger as praise.
While there are 10,000 NFTs — though not all of the Solana-based ones have bridged to Ethereum yet — there are just under 2,000 unique holders of its Ethereum-based NFTs, according to OpenSea. And while its community can be very vocal in promoting the project, some fans don’t mince words with regards to criticism.
For example, DeGods released some limited edition hoodies in May 2023 that attracted mockery on Twitter, deemed to be laughably low quality. In response, the once-anonymous Vora offered a rather tongue-in-cheek apology, tweeting, “we’ll never be able to repair the damage caused by these DeGods hoodies, but we have to try.”
“So we started working on a hoodie design that is more appropriate for a blue-chip, luxury NFT community,” he continued, posting a picture of a Cryptopunk hoodie.
Unorthodox and radical, DeGods is now faced with the same challenge that is facing every blue-chip NFT collection: how to keep going and continue to develop. It has a current floor price of 9.29 ETH ($16,200). But it’s not clear where the road leads for DeGods.
After all, their current roadmap is literally a cartoon.
