What Are Nakamigos NFTs?

You might notice that whenever NFTs are going through a bearish period, a new project will suddenly appear and start pumping like crazy. It happened last year with Goblintown, then again with Renga, and over the past couple of weeks, all eyes have been on a new collection called Nakamigos.

What Are Nakamigos?

Take a look at the collection, and it’s refreshingly simple. There are 20,000 pixel art PFPs, looking slightly to the side, and with a wide variety of traits. As is usual with NFTs, the rarer the trait, the more valuable the PFP.

The style is reminiscent of CryptoPunks, and this is, overall, a straight down-the-line PFP collection, with no pretensions. The supply is unusually large (10,000 or fewer is more common), although actually, that original 20,000 has been reduced slightly, something we’ll come to later.

There is also an accompanying collection of 24 Honorary Nakamigos, which were sent out to well-known figures in the NFT art space, including people such as Snowfro, Steve Aoki, and Punk6529.

How Nakamigos Started

Back in November 2021, a PFP collection called MFers was launched. Visually, it was, basically, some stickmen sitting at computers, but it memed its way to popularity, and was seen as representative of NFT culture. The creator, named Sartoshi, subsequently stepped away from the project, and on his way out, minted an open-edition farewell NFT called End of Sartoshi.

Then, at the beginning of 2023, Sartoshi returned, the End of Sartoshi NFT became the EOS pass, and one of its benefits was that, on March 23rd, it allowed holders to mint for free from a mysterious new PFP collection called Nakamigos, with any remaining items going to a public mint.

Rumors and Hype

In the week after minting, Nakamigos didn’t do much, trading for around 0.04 ETH, and sometimes lower.

However, the Sartoshi connection meant that it had a head start over other projects, interest began to build, and the floor price started edging up. At the same time, rumors began to fly as to who had created the project.

West Coast Labs (who worked previously with MFers and Doodles, among others) were involved in the mint, but suggestions were now circulating around Twitter that Nakamigos was, somehow, secretly attached to either Yuga Labs (the creators of BAYC) or–an idea that gained more traction–Larva Labs (the creators of CryptoPunks).

What is actually known for sure, because it’s right there on their website, is that Nakamigos was produced by an unknown outfit called HiFo Labs, which is described in a Nakamigos post as,

“The anonymous entity behind Nakamigos with years of experience in NFT projects.”

The same post states that Sartoshi is not a part of HiFo, and also that the artist behind Nakamigos is,

“An ‘OG’ crypto artist with many years of experience in digital art. The artist is anonymous but may choose to reveal their identity at some point.”

When it came down to it though, separating truth from rumor didn’t matter to the market–in fact, the sense of swirling mystery acted as a draw–and the floor price surged to a high around 0.85 ETH, before correcting back down to around 0.3 ETH, after which prices climbed again, dipped, recovered again, and are currently sitting at around 0.65 ETH.

Beeple, 10KTF and Gremplin

The ups and downs in price have been fed into by some other significant influences, not least of which is Beeple’s attention landing on the project. Beeple is one the biggest names in the NFT art world, best known for a piece called Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which sold at auction back in 2021 for over $69 million.

Whether he’s creating art or tweeting, Beeple has a large audience, and so when he started posting new artwork featuring Nakamigos, and put out a tweet urging degens to send Nakamigos up to a 1 ETH floor, it had a significant effect, helping to pump the price and adding legitimacy to the project (although a 1 ETH floor still has yet to happen).

In addition, the well-respected 10KTF project tweeted an image featuring a Nakamigo, suggesting that the new collection will become part of the 10KTF ecosystem.

And from there, the digital artist Gremplin, who is famous for performing design duties on CrypToadz and Moonbirds Oddities, also got in on the party, dropping a 69 piece edition called An Eye for a Fry, which required buyers to burn a Nakamigo in order to mint one of the new artworks (meaning the Nakamigos supply has been very slightly depleted).

What Happens Next?

The question now is, where is Nakamigos heading? On the positive side, the project has made some exemplary NFT-world connections, including Sartoshi, Beeple, 10KTF and, in a roundabout way, Gremplin.

The artwork hits the right buttons, and the collection has classic NFT simplicity on its side: these are pixelated PFPs that appear to be valued mainly for their collectability, but along also, of course, with the possibility that number go up.

On the other hand, we’ve seen similar stories before. As mentioned, Goblintown flew high on hyped-up community vibes, inaccurate rumors of a Yuga Labs connection, and even attention from Beeple. That collection hit a floor price over 7 ETH, but from there it slowly bled back down its current 0.4 ETH price tag.

What’s more, at (almost) 20,000 items, Nakamigos has a conspicuously large supply, and the collection has low distribution, with only 29% unique holders. Right now, Nakamigos could go either way, and so sentiment has, understandably, become more cautious than it was a week or two ago.

That said, we should also keep in mind that the identity of the artist who created Nakamigos, along with details about HiFo Labs, are still not known, and there’s at least a possibility that, if revealed, this information could generate further excitement.