Forget everything I said in my last post about near term pitfalls for Panini’s 2022 World Cup Prizm NFT drop. This morning, a $30,000 bounty was announced for the Lionel Messi Base Black Prizm 1/1 NFT in the Panini discord by one of the known whales. With roughly 12% of packs ripped as of this post (clocking in at just over 25,000 packs) and no word on a hit yet, I expect the $10 crack pack rip fest to continue, if not accelerate in the near term as word gets out across socials.

Comps

Ok so there’s a BIG number out there. $30k. How’s that line up with comps?… are there comps? (yes there are comps)

I need to point out the top Messi sale @ $26k contains a matching physical, as do ALL of the sales listed on pic 2 minus the Messi and Mbappe FR Foot French League 1 stickers. Those two are digital only sticker NFT’s. So, in essence, the best comp is $10K. Are we giving a premium to the World Cup Prizm 1/1? Reasonable, especially after watching Messi and Argentina run the table following their stunning loss to open the tourney against Saudi Arabia. It’s also worth noting the $10K sticker sale happened in February, with the market having been markedly softer across across the NFT space as the year dragged on. (That’s putting it nicely)

The Secondary Effect

There’s no way around it. As long as there’s a $30K bounty outstanding, people are going to rip like absolute nut jobs. And I get it, I really do. At the same time, this has the potential (likely imo) to cause some ripple effects in the secondary market, at least in the near term. TLDR version? People will floor everything that isn’t the 1/1 Messi in an effort to generate more funds to rip packs to chase the bounty.

Long-Term Value

The amount of ripping that I expect to occur here isn’t backed up by a similar amount of collectors on the platform as evidenced by some of the early prices we’re seeing on the market. The 1/10 Saka Gold Prizm selling for $35 and the 1/1 Lewandowski Black selling for $399 doesn’t give me a lot of hope for the long term value of the /25, /49, /75, /75, /99, /149, and /1399’s plus multiple inserts and potential challenge cards. Sure, if you want to sit back and snipe singles it makes it easy, but in the long run there’s a chance we end up with 500k ripped NFT’s and only a handful of actual collectors.

What’s the Flip Side?

Somehow Panini, a $30k silent bounty, and Lionel Messi winning the World Cup combine for the perfect storm to capture the hearts of the mainstream sports collectibles market and bring them across to digital. Hey, a guy can dream. – EPL out