If you’ve read any of my past articles on the NFT space you know the biggest thing I look for when researching and investing in a new project is COMMUNITY. Having a strong community achieves several things. It gives you a core following that is less likely to flip and more likely to evangelize. When I look at projects I’ve invested in that have skyrocketed and the ones I’ve invested in that have failed, I think the biggest difference between them is the amount of evangelists. At the end of the day these NFT’s are tokens on a blockchain with metadata that points to some picture of a zoo animal. The difference between the projects that succeed like BAYC and those that fail is there are a hell of a lot more evangelists talking about the token that has metadata that points to an ape in a funny hat with a cigarette than the tokens that don’t. After researching for the past few days, watching the discords and social feeds, and consuming as much content as I can, I’m convinced Llamaverse is building one of the strongest communities in the NFT space. And they’re doing this in a very novel way, by providing actual value. Let’s talk about how they’re accomplishing this and how you can use this information to research your next NFT investment.

When I invest in a project the first thing I ask myself is “how do I make my investment back?” This value can be obtained several ways. Maybe you’re holding a Bored Ape and you get air dropped a serum worth $4,000,000. Maybe you hold a Cool Cat that generates you a $MILK token every day. This value generating continuously reduces your cost basis. This is why Warren Buffett famously only invests in stocks with dividends. The continuous dividends reduce your cost basis, slowly taking the risk out of your investment. In a space where the next rug pull is right around the corner, reducing risk is the most critical activity you can do. After studying the project and putting in a ton of due diligence I have determined Llamaverse gives me multiple ways to reduce my cost basis. The different value propositions they have started executing on I find wholly unique in the NFT space. It’s because of this value I believe they’ve organically built one of the strongest communities I’ve been a part of. Let’s dive into some of the things they have planned, talk about the opportunities for cost basis reduction, some fundamentals about the NFT’s themselves and other factors that I believe led to a large army of evangelists for this project.

The Llamaverse started months before a mint. Back in August of 2021 NFTLlama started an alpha Discord out of the love of the space. This is the point that the strong organic community started forming.

No hype, no advertising, just organically forming a community around providing value. From here they started growing, adding staff and mods, as well as slowly adding more people to the community. After months of this healthy organic growth, NFTLlama launched his first project- Llamaverse. This Llamaverse token acts as a key to the community, as well as access to a long road of partnerships, tools, tokens, and additional alpha. The roadmap being worked on by the team is massive. Within the next several days holders will be able to start reaping several benefits. Rugburn, a sweet tool with many benefits will allow free access to Llamaverse holders. Many other tool partnerships will launch shortly thereafter. A slick dashboard where you will be able to stake your llamas will launch. $SPIT coin will start generating. And these are all on the short term roadmap, within days and weeks.

The dashboard and $SPIT coin is really interesting. By generating $SPIT (I find it hard not to laugh every time I type that) you can use that token in the dashboard marketplace. This marketplace will have a tremendous amount of opportunities to acquire value. Whitelists, other NFT’s, raffles for ETH, there will be numerous ways to reduce your cost basis. This is just added benefit to a continually growing community that will only mint new project evangelists.

Now let’s talk about the community engagement. This is another thing I look for when researching projects. It’s critical for long term success of a project. Llamaverse simply has some of the best community engagement I’ve seen seen. It’s very rare to see these many project evangelists this early in a project. Type Llamaverse into Twitter and you’ll see countless Tweets about how strong the community is. Head into the Discord and you’ll see channels that are active at all hours of the day. Look at the voice chat channels and it’s always filled with users.

This is actually one of the small factors I find incredibly revealing about the strength of a community. It’s one thing to lurk in a text chat. It’s another thing to have an active community chatting in the voice chat. Every time I go into the Discord the voice chat is full. It’s safe to say if someone is active in a voice chat, they are probably an evangelist. If community is the strongest factor in the success of an NFT project, it’s hard to look at Llamaverse and not think they’ve absolutely nailed this critical factor.

When you examine short lived projects that have taken off then crashed their communities were typically all built the same way. Through hype and engagement farming they build a paper thin community that is there just to flip. Then when the price gets high enough everyone dumps and the project dies. Llamaverse took a different path. It’s been completely built organically through providing value. This isn’t just anecdotal, let’s look at some numbers. Another fundamental measurement I use to measure community strength is unique holder %. Llamaverse is currently sitting at 4k items with 3.2k holders. That’s an absolutely absurd 80% unique holder percentage. For comparison sake, Bored Ape Yacht Club currently stands at 63%, CryptoPunks 34%, Azuki 54%, Cool Cats 52% and CloneX 43%. Llamaverse blows them away. The more unique holders there are holding just a single NFT, the more likely they’ll be diamond hands and won’t flip. This is also reflected in the listings. Currently there are only 110 listings out of 4000. That’s 2%. Even Bored Ape Yacht Club, a community with the most notorious diamond hands ever, is at almost 11%. Llamaverse staking hasn’t even begun yet. When staking starts this listing count will undoubtedly drop even further. Looking at NFT fundamentals, this is as strong of a project as you can possibly get.

As I’ve mentioned many times before though, no project is without risk. The project is pre reveal and still early. The founders have started executing on the roadmap, but there’s still a lot of execution that still needs to be done. Execution is notoriously very rare in the NFT space. Until functionality launches, you can’t 100% count on it fully panning out. This is one factor to keep in mind before investing. Another risk is tokenomics. Anytime token generation is a feature of an NFT project, it’s important to make sure you’re confident in the tokenomics. Poor tokenomics can crush a project. This will be a delicate economic balance the founders will need to balance. You can find information on their tokenomics here.

Lastly I want to leave you with a little bit of due diligence. NFTLlama has produced a ton of well organized content describing this multi faceted project. I’d recommend checking out the whitepaper, explanation of Llamaboosts, and FAQ. I’d also recommend checking out the website and Discord to do further research.

As I’ve said many times before, community is by far the most important factor I look for when I’m researching a project. Llamaverse has built their community organically through providing tons of value. This blueprint is something I hope more NFT projects use from here on out. Instead of hype and engagement farming, we should focus on value and community building. This article’s purpose is not to convince you to spend your ETH, it’s to show you there are different ways to launch a project, and hopefully some of this information will help you when you’re researching your next project.

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