Galactic Punks: Skulls and Terrarian Sales & Scarcity
A look into the sales of Skulls and Terrarian GPs
Behold, one of the rarest species in the Galactic Punk collection - the Terrarian Royalty, denoted by its unique mix of orange and yellow face color.
The Galactic Punks collection is an NFT collection on Terra consisting of 10921 punks with 8 varying traits from hair to suits and even jewelry. Out of all 8 traits, the one that stands out the most for me is species.
There are generally 7 broad species namely lunatic, ape, alien, zombie, skull, and terrarian. Skulls and terrarian can be broken down further into skull, golden skull, terrarian mars/neptune and terrarian royalty, which represents the most scarce category in the GP universe and since they are the most scarce, I will be focusing on them in this analysis.
Number of GP by species
First, let’s look at the number of the GPs with those species traits.
Golden skull and Terrarian royalty are the rarest species with only about 50 each, representing 0.45% of the total GP, while skull and terrarian mars/neptune is at 3.35% and 10% respectively.
In total, there are 1570 GPs across these 4 groups, about 14% of total GP population.
If we were to rank them by increasing rarity, it would be:
Terrarian Mars/Neptune » Skull » Golden skull » Terrarian Royalty
This order would be important as we dive deeper.
Volume & Number of Sales of these rare GP species
We first examine the total GP sales volume on daily basis.
On the first day, sales volume was over 200k Luna. Volume quickly decreased the following days on the fourth day, daily volume was only at 22k, an 89% decrease from first day sales.
Let’s compare the graph above to the rare species sales graph below:
If we look at the first day sales alone, sales from these rare species make up almost 25% of total GP sales and about 30% for both day 2 and 3.
Within these groups, Terrarian Royalty takes the show with higher sale volumes than Terrarian Mars/Neptune despite being 20x more scarce.
Let’s supplement volume with number of sales transaction.
If we look at the number of sales, we clearly see that only a handful of royalty GPs are sold. Yet, the sales volume are comparable to that of Mars/Neptune - which means those sales price must have been really high!
Another thing we can see from both of the graphs above is that there were only sales for the Terrarian Royalty GPs on the first 3 days of GP trading. There are no Royalty sale transactions from day 4 onwards. There’s a couple of possible reasons for this.
One is that on the first 3 days, prices for the Royalty are way too low and people are buying and flipping them. By the time the buys and flips happen a few times, floor prices now become so high that it is above what is should be valued for.
Second hypothesis is that after day 3, people realized that the Royalty species is way too scarce to be sold and hence place exorbitant prices on them on RandomEarth deterring any low sales.
I think it could be a mixture of both scenarios. To verify the first, I’ll be looking into GP flipping in the next section.
GP flipping and average price
For my first hypothesis, I first would need to see the ratio of total GP sales by category to the number of unique GPs in that category.
To my surprise, the percentage of successful flips for both Terrarian & skulls is 48% which is the same for the GPs in the other categories as well!
Next, I would need to find out what is the average price of the GPs sold and compare them to the current listings on Randomearth.
In the graph below, we see that the average price of Royalty sold is at 2850 Luna.
Let’s compare this to the first 4 listings on Randomearth for the Royalties.
Apart from the first 2 listings, the other GP Royalties were upwards of 3900 Luna. This actually gives us additional 2 scenarios - 1, these first two listings are very underpriced and are a steal right now or 2, floor prices have risen so high that people are unwilling to pay for those prices and thus we see people resorting to a listing it at a considerably low price to get it sold.
Seeing how there are no serious bids and that listing has been up there for quite some time now, I am leaning towards the second scenario. If we look at the daily sales volume, there just isn’t much demand for GPs as there were on the first 3 days. People are just happy with holding their current GPs and don’t see the need to buy more.
From all the info in this section, I think both of my hypothesis in the previous section holds true.
A lot of rare GPs are bought and flipped in the first 3 days - so much that floor prices has risen to a point where it is way higher than its average price during the first 3 days. The high floor price combined with the lack of interest to buy more explains why GP Royalty has not seen any sale past 17 days.
Last but not least, a small section dedicated to the effect of scarcity on these rare GP prices:
Scarcity x Price
In this short section, I am interested to how much money are people willing to pay for scarcity.
Recall this information on scarcity ranking earlier:
Terrarian Mars/Neptune » Skull » Golden skull » Terrarian Royalty
To look at the effect of scarcity, I took its average price divided by how scarce a GP is (number of GP/total GP)*100%.
The regular Terrarian and skulls has ratios of 12 and 41 respectively. If we looked at their scarcity, they both are at 10% and 3.35% of the total GP population. We see a trend of price increase that is somewhat porportional to scarcity.
Skulls are 3 times more scarce and its average price is 3 times more than regular Terrarian - so the valuation for Skulls makes sense.
However, things start to get weird if we compare golden skull with royalty.
We know that there are 53 Golden skull GPs and 50 Royalty GPs. However, we see that people are willing to pay 3 times more for a Royalty GP compared to Golden skull even though their scarcity is the same.
What is it about Royalty that people are willing to pay much higher prices for? Granted, I am only looking at a single trait - but this difference in price is too high to ignore. Perhaps the blue/orange shade just looks nicer than a golden skull.
Perhaps.
That’s it folks! Here are some TLDR points:
Terrarians and skulls make up 14% of the GP population but almost 30% of the total sales volume in the first 3 days of trading
Terrarian Royalty contributed a large portion to that sales volume despite having few transactions
Royalty GPs recorded 0 sales in the past 17 days (at the time of writing) and we showed that that is because of the high number of buys and flips in the first few days that raised the floor price too high + a general decrease in GP buying interest
People are willing to pay 3 times the price for a Royalty GP despite having the same scarcity as a Golden Skull GP.
Link to graphs: https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/98-galactic-punks-free-square-sales-of-terrarians-and-skulls-TtC-va