Introduction

What are the Lil Nouns NFTs?

As is obvious from the name, Lil Nouns are basically a smaller, version of the Nouns NFTs they spun off from. “Nouns as kids” as it says on the Lil Nouns website. That is to say that they sport the same pixel art style and aesthetic as the Nouns.

In essence, these NFTs will be the funding source for the Lil Nouns DAO – an expansion DAO based on the Nouns DAO. Thus, the goal of the Lil Nouns DAO is to expose more people to Nouns.

One of the most unique things about these NFTs is how they become available. To explain, rather than dropping a full collection at once like most generative avatar collections, the Lil Nouns smart contracts generate and auction a new one every 15 minutes. Not to mention that this process will, in theory, continue indefinitely. Clearly, this is a riff on the Nouns, whose contracts produce and auction an NFT every 24 hours.

Aside from its fascinating launch mechanism, Lil Nouns have some other features that NFT purists will love. For example, the Lil Nouns NFT art is stored directly on-chain, as opposed to on IFPS. What’s more, the art falls under the CC0 license meaning that it is in the public domain.

And you don’t necessarily have to jump into an auction to enjoy the art! Indeed, thanks to the Lil Nouns “Playground” you can actually generate your very own Lil Nouns from its selection of traits. Naturally, these user-generated Lil Nouns are not official NFTs and are off-chain.

Of course, the most important element of the Lil Nouns NFTs is how they relate to the Lil Nouns DAO. As part of that, 100% of Lil Nouns auction proceeds immediately go to the Lil Nouns treasury. By the same token, each Lil Noun equals one vote in the Lil Noun DAO. As with most DAO tokens, votes are tied to the NFT and are non-transferable. Nevertheless, holders can delegate their vote to someone else if they wish.

Reference

Where NFT?

So how does one mint ? One can mint a lil noun NFT by going to the official website https://lilnouns.wtf/, connect wallet and bid for the upcoming NFT. The highest bidder in the 15 minute windows gets to claim the NFT and if he doesnt, then it goes to the next bidder.

Note: NFT distribution other than open auction Because 100% of Lil Noun auction proceeds are sent to Lil Nouns DAO, Lil Nounders have chosen to compensate themselves with Lil Nouns. Every 10th Lil Noun for the first 5 years of the project (Lil Noun ids #0, #10, #20, #30 and so on) will be automatically sent to the Lil Nounder's multisig to be vested and shared among the founding members of the project.

Lil Nounder distributions don't interfere with the cadence of 15 minute auctions. Lil Nouns are sent directly to the Lil Nounder's Multisig, and auctions continue on schedule with the next available Lil Noun ID.

Could not mint one ? want to buy one ?

Lil Nouns are available on opensea for secondary sales. Individuals can buy it on opensea.

Objective

In this article, we mainly analyse the secondary exchange of lil-nouns nft. Specificlly

• How many Lil Nouns have been sold on a secondary exchange within 24 hours of being minted?
• Are there any common traits among these Lil Nouns?
• Which Lil Noun’s have the biggest difference (positive or negative) between their mint price and secondary sale price?

Methodology

Identifying mints

When a mint transaction occurs, an NFT is minted to a NFT deployer contract which then transfers it to the minter. To identify the mints accurately, we use the ethereum.core.ez_nft_transfers table and filter using nft_from_address wherever it is NFT deployer (0xd5f279ff9eb21c6d40c8f345a66f2751c4eea1fb).

Identifying sales or transfers

We restrict our article only to sales that occur on chain using protocols like opensea. Hence, to identify such sales, we use the ethereum.core.ez_nft_sales table and filter using the contract address of lil noun (0x4b10701Bfd7BFEdc47d50562b76b436fbB5BdB3B).

Sale interval

To calculate the time difference between sold time and mint time, we use the date of minting from mint table(explained under Identifying mints) and sold time from transfers table (explained under Identifying sales).

Identifying traits

Traits of an NFT can be considered as the building blocks of an NFT which result in a unique combination for every lil Noun NFT. To identify the trait of each NFT, we use the ethereum.core.fact_event_logs. To effectively use it, we would need to convert the column data into decimal format from hexadecimal format using the (example - tokenflow_eth.hextoint(substr(data,259,64)) as glasses). To learn which number corresponds to trait, we use the Lil-Noun playground.

Calculating profits/loss from flipping.

To calculate the loss or profit an individual makes from flipping, that is minting and selling an NFT in quick succession to make a profit, we use the ethereum.core.ez_nft_sales table and ethereum.core.ez_eth_transfers table. We choose only the first transaction after minting as the question specifies.

Analysis of Secondary sales

Interval between mint and sell

We begin the analysis by looking at the interval difference between the mint date of a token and the sold date of a token ( We only consider opensea sales and dont consider sales off the market).

We notice that the majority of the sales happened with the initial 3 days. With 19% of the sales taking place within a day of minting. From the graph, it can be clearly seen that three quarters of the sale took place within a week of minting.

This shows that there are individuals who are attempting to make a quick buck by flipping the NFT. Now that we know that they are flipping, but how much are they flipping for and are they making a profit?

Number and sold and average price

We now look at the number of NFTs that were sold within different time intervals and their average selling price.

Well, this is surprising. The graph shows that for NFTs that were sold within a week of minting, the average selling price is rather low when compared to those that are sold after a long time ( 25 + days).

This could because of two reasons.

• NFTs sold later were actually the initially minted NFTs while those that were flipped within a week are the newer ones. While the initial users who sold/bought their NFT initially believed in the project and got/paid more, while the newer users are focused more flipping and making a quick profit.
• the lower number of NFT sold with more than 25+ days interval is masking the actual price while the huge number for < 25 days is being averaged out.

There are NFTs that are sold, but what are the most sold NFTs and what are the traits.

Trait distribution

We now look at the most common trait among the NFTs sold. We aim to identify the top 2 in each category. According to the Lil Nouns DAO, there are 5 traits.

• Head
• Glasses
• Body
• Background
• Accessory

The most common traits of sold NFTs are NFTs having a cool background, a noun with a yellow body having a bagpipe head and wearing a square frog green glasses while having a safety vest or torch as accessory.

The complete list is given below.

• accessory-flash
• accessory-safety-vest
• glasses-square-black
• glasses-square-frog-green
• head-factory-dark
• head-werewolf
• head-bagpipe
• head-glasses-big
• head-cookie
• head-rosebud
• head-cannedham
• background-cool
• background-warm
• body_orange_yellow
• body-yellow

An example lil-noun with all the desired traits. Feel free to create your own at lil nouns dao

It appears that the NFTs minted early on gave huge returns on secondary market while NFTs minted recently havent done so well

Conclusion

1. majority of the sales happened with the initial 3 days. With 19% of the sales taking place within a day of minting.
2. NFTs that were sold within a week of minting, the average selling price is rather low when compared to those that are sold after a long time
3. The most common traits of sold NFTs are NFTs having a cool background or a noun with a yellow body or having a bagpipe head or wearing a square frog green glasses while having a safety vest or torch as accessory.
4. It appears that the NFTs minted early on gave huge returns on secondary market while NFTs minted recently havent done so well

Price difference

We look at the difference between the sell price and the mint price. and also at the profits