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What Are The Okay Bears?

NFT investors are once again open-mouthed to the latest success: Okay Bears. The Solana NFT collection breaks all records in no time. In just 24 hours, it has more trading volume from NFT collections like Gary Vaynerchuck’s. This is the first time that an NFT collection on Solana has been so successful. And that success is not entirely coincidental. Discover everything about Okay Bears in this blog and why it could just become the competitor of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

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What is Okay Bears NFT Collection?

We are all familiar with the wildly popular Bored Ape Yacht Club which trades for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But with the increasing popularity of Solana NFTs, it couldn’t be long before a similar NFT collection was developed here as well.

Okay Bears is an NFT collection on the Solana (SOL) network of 10,000 unique bears each with distinct and rare traits. The collection was launched on April 26, 2022, and immediately got off to a flying start and was an unprecedented success. The goal is to build a rock-solid community that will transcend the internet into the real physical world. We are increasingly seeing NFTs bridge the gap to the physical world. The VeeFriends NFTs a digital access pass for VeeCon, Gary’s conference.

Owning one of these Okay Bears will give you access to exclusive merchandise, NFT drops, live events, and major global collaborations in the future. In this way, they want to build a worldwide Web3 brand.

#WAGBO

Twitter and social media are overflowing with abbreviations related to the world of crypto. One of the best known is perhaps WAGMI, which stands for: “We Are Gonna Make It”. Okay Bears’ NFT collection is building their community so purposefully that they’ve even launched a new acronym: #WAGBO. This means something like: “We Are Gonna Be Okay.”

Solana NFTs

We are seeing more and more interest in the world of NFTs and that is certainly not unjustified. The largest NFT marketplace at the time of writing is still OpenSea, where millions of NFTs are traded daily based on Ethereum. But whoever says Ethereum also immediately says sky-high gas fees. That’s why NFT platforms like Magic Eden, the largest NFT marketplace for Solana, are growing. Since April 2022, OpenSea now also supports Solana NFTs, meaning they get a lot more exposure.

The Launch

Long before the launch of Okay Bears, the hunt was on for these funky bears. With a whitelist of 7500 and only 2500 public mints, the chance of a bear was of course very small. Before the launch, Twitter almost exploded because of course everyone wanted to get a whitelist. This resulted in great hype and exposure on social media. And with success!

Were you one of the lucky ones and were you on the whitelist? Then you could mint an Okay Bear for only 1.5 SOL. At the time of launch converted to only $150. Quick mints in the public sale paid 2.5 SOL, about $250. And in retrospect, this turned out to be a real bargain. Not only did these Okay Bear sell out in just 7 minutes, but secondary sales skyrocketed.

According to OpenSea’s statistics, Okay Bears’ NFT collection has set a new record. Okay Bears saw the largest trading volume in the first 24 hours after launch, at a staggering $18.4 million. This beats Gary Vaynerchuk’s VeeFriends 2.0 with a trading volume of $13.1 million. This is the first time that a Solana NFT collection has such a large trading volume in just 24 hours, surpassing several Ethereum NFT collections.

Okay-Bears-Collection-OpenSea
Okay Bears stats on OpenSea

Blueprint – Roadmap

The makers deliberately do not use the word ‘Roadmap’. This is not your average project with a roadmap, but a revolution. It’s a blueprint, a manual on how to build a community that aims to be at the heart of Web 3.0 brand development.

Park

Where a Bored Ape gives you access to The Swamp, and an Okay Bear gives you access to the park, among other things. The place to be to relax and chill with others. The makers here emphasize the duality and contradictions in the world, but that in a world of winners and losers, heroes and villains, this park is the place where it’s okay to be ‘okay’. An extraordinary brand designed and built for normal people.

 “A place to fit in. A space to stand out’ 

Bear Market

No declining market or panic sellers, but an ecosystem of Web3, Web 2, and physical sales channels for everyone with an Okay Bear-NFT. They want to partner with big brands to bring many benefits to their community. And they’re doing it on a large scale: they’re working on an integration with none other than Shopify that will give Okay Bears holders access to a dedicated eCommerce platform for all their exclusive purchases. In addition, they also want to show their presence at real-life events. They will open pop-up stores worldwide, as well as at crypto events. Everything for more brand awareness to build their community.

Workshop

Not a one-hit-wonder, but a sustainable investment; Okay Bears wants to keep growing and they want to do this through collaborations to increase their community. This is through advertising as well as through large-scale marketing campaigns such as billboards, subways, and advertising videos. Who knows, you might soon see an Okay Bear appear on Time Square, it just might be possible. It looks like the team will spare no effort!

Gallery

A gallery is the central place to show your art to the world. Not only do the original Okay Bears get their place here, but everyone can contribute to Okay Bears fan art. How? By simply letting your creativity run wild. Every fan, whether you’re part of the community or not, can go wild. Anyone can visit this art on the Okay Bears official website. And isn’t this digital gallery enough? Discover your opportunities in the physical world. Okay Bears is going to hold worldwide pop-up exhibitions where you can present your digital art to the whole world.  

Studio

Whoever says studio immediately thinks of music. And yes. How an NFT collection can contribute to music? A strong community where everything is possible and everything is allowed and where chilling is central its accompanied by jam sessions. In the future, the community will also broadcast these albums and jam sessions via the streaming platform Spotify. Just chill beats and good vibes!

Boutique

The most exclusive merchandise can of course be found in this boutique. Buy your collectibles, your prints and especially your ‘swag’ here. Anyone with an Okay Bear could claim his welcome pack immediately after mint, a real-life pack with numerous gadgets. Conceptual and unique prints are only available for Okay Bears. Do you still want to go wild in this boutique but you don’t have an Okay Bear? Fortunately, you can also shop here, albeit only for the less rare items. This way they get more brand awareness.

Platform

Real leaders and experts are born here. The platform brings together tech lovers and blockchain enthusiasts in keynotes, conferences, and meet-ups. This is not only for Okay Bear holders but also for NFT partnerships. These are other NFT collections that will help build Okay Bears’ success. These events will take place both online and in real life.

Integration of Web3 in the physical world

The virtual world of Web3 is a revolutionary development. For the first time, we as an investor can own something digitally. A virtual item, a digital image, that is exclusively yours. While much of this NFT collection is purely a form of digital art, we increasingly see a symbiosis between these non-fungible tokens and the physical world. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was one of the first to offer numerous benefits in the physical world thanks to these NFTs.

These Okay Bears also have a very clear vision of where they want to go beyond just showing off their digital art. They are building a solid community where the new technology of NFTs is part of this revolution. As they say themselves: they build a community, a real brand that is central to the development of Web3 and that bridges the gap with the physical world.

The new Bored Ape Yacht Club?

With a minting price of 1.5 SOL and a floor price of 108 Solana a few days later, we can of course dream aloud about the further price development of Okay Bears. Making the comparison is difficult because we are now a year later and more and more investors have found their way into the world of NFTs.

If we look at the chart above, we see that growth has been fairly steady. The minting price of Okay Bears increased from 1.5 Solana to a whopping 108 Solana, just 4 days after launch. This is an increase of x72. When we look at the same growth with the BAYC, we see that the team took almost 4 months to do this. Despite the fact that a lot has changed in one year, we can ask ourselves whether Okay Bears will ever overtake the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Team

The entire team consists of 12 talents, each with its own specialism. We limit ourselves to the 4 team members below:

Kais Co-founder: Kais is a multi-talent in both graphic design and branding. With his experience and strategic approach, he helped to develop major brands including Unicef, Unilever, and Greenpeace.  Twitter
Suby Co-Founder:An engineer by training, but developing and growing Web3 communities is now central to Suby. He has previously worked for a strategic design firm that retains the design and development of leading NFT projects. Twitter
Rio Digital Artist: No Okay Bears without slick graphics. Rio has plenty of experience, especially in the gaming field. He has worked on Legends of Runeterra, Clash Royale, and even films such as Cinderella. /
Teeq Web developer: With a background in industrial design, UX design is central. He has worked on numerous design and creative projects and web development for both startups and government agencies.  Twitter

Social media

It is clear that the makers of Okay Bears are successfully building a strong community. Even before the launch of these 10,000 Okay Bears, more than 100,000 members were active in their Discord. Knowing that there were only 2,500 public mints there, you can imagine that the hunt for these bears was truly unprecedented. It is therefore not entirely surprising that the entire collection was completely sold out a few minutes after launch.

Discord 101,300 members
Twitter 120,000 followers
Instagram 6500 followers

The above numbers are at the time of writing

Conclusion

It is very difficult to estimate in advance whether an NFT collection will be successful or not. A roadmap is always promising, but the question is whether the team can live up to these expectations. We could cautiously say that the launch of Okay Bears looked quite good. Why? They want to build a real community and even before launch, the project has a Discord of 100,000+ members. And a richly filled whitelist of 7,500 that the community had to share, like, and retweet, naturally caused a tsunami of content on Twitter. And the remaining places for the public mint? Only 2,500 seats for a community of over 100,000 members? That was a battle of the titans.

In addition, we see that more and more NFT investors are finding their way to platforms other than OpenSea in order to avoid the sky-high gas fees. This tendency, in combination with a strong team, good skills, and an admirable ‘blueprint’ makes Okay Bears a true one-of-a-kind Solana NFT collection. Will it ever compete with Bored Ape Yacht Club prices? Time will tell!

Josephine Tsang

Josephine Tsang

Software Engineer, Blockchain enthusiast, Bitcoin miner, gamer and anime fan. Love to share knowledge on the web (on my own blog, for immla, on twitter or reddit). Always on the look for the coolest and newest Web3 updates. Hope you guys enjoy my writing!

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