The Hundreds, a 20-year-old streetwear brand, entered Web3 last year, and its loyal clients promptly dropped over $100 million on non-fungible items (NFTs). In order to protect the economic interests of creators, it canceled the OpenSea drop for this year. This means that Bobby “The Hundreds” Kim will be recognized as a 2022 CoinDesk Most Influential.
In 2003, Bobby “Bobby Hundreds” Kim and Ben “Ben Hundreds” Shenassafar launched The Hundreds. At the time, NikeTalk was the preeminent sneaker message board, and online communities flocked to chat rooms to debate the newest Air Jordan releases and product designs and connect with like-minded designers. This may sound familiar to you. It served as the forerunner to contemporary cryptographic Discords.
When the streetwear company made its first entrance into Web3 in 2021 with the introduction of the Adam Bomb Squad Ethereum non-fungible token (NFT) collection, it exhibited the enduring power of customer loyalty and community. The 25,000 different NFTs in the collection were all sold out in less than forty minutes. Data from CryptoSlam shows that its entire sales so far have generated secondary trades of over $73 million and a value of 22,000 ether (ETH), or over $25 million.
The Hundreds spent a lot of time and money expanding its Web3 presence using this success as a base.
On Twitter this summer, a video of an NFT demonstration was trending. At the start of the yearly NFT.NYC conference, showed an “angry” mob marching through SoHo in New York City with posters reading “God hates NFTs,” “Crypto is a sin,” and “Vitalik is the antichrist.” The first crypto winter snowflakes started to fall just then.
Longtime followers of The Hundreds knew it was guerilla marketing as usual, but some people on social media mistook it for a demonstration against NFTs. The OG once more showed Web3 how conventional marketing is carried out.
In November, Bobby Hundreds stopped offering the NFT drop on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace by trade volume, in protest at the platform’s policy on creator royalties.
A secondary-sale royalty, frequently between 5% and 10% of the price of the resold item, is imposed on the work of many NFT producers. Since August, NFT marketplaces X2Y2, Magic Eden, and LooksRare have lost market share as a result of no longer requiring users to pay royalties or support creators. OpenSea has adopted a reasonable approach in this ongoing argument.
Kim stated on Twitter that giving up author income “undermines the fundamental purpose of Web3/NFTs.”
He has been one of the most vocal Web3 programmers against OpenSea. Instead, in November, The Hundreds debuted its latest NFT line, Badam Bomb Squad, on its own website.
Kim claims that the long-standing cultural evolution of streetwear may teach NFTs a lot. The cultural foundation and creative appreciation of streetwear took 10 years to develop, but NFTs took the exact reverse path: their investment worth predominated the narrative before newcomers realized their cultural potential.
What is more essential for creating the cultural base of non-profit organizations than marketing strategies? the founders. Kim claims that “the artists are always in command” and hence opposes 0% royalties.
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