Projects Building in the Bear Market: Chimpers

As the bear market continues, it’s important to illuminate the projects that continue to build and provide value to their holders. Today’s spotlight will be on Chimpers.

Chimpers minted in May 2022, and currently hold a 1.79 ETH floor while surpassing 13k ETH in volume. Below we’ll dive deep into what the Chimpers team has already provided to holders and some upcoming catalysts for potential growth in the Chimpersverse.

Article Outline

• The Chimpers’ Ecosystem Explained

• Analysis

  • Strategic Direction

  • Project Runway

  • Projet performance

• Closing Remarks

The Chimpers Ecosystem Explained

1/ The Team

Timpers is one of the founders and the project artist. Timpers originally was a graphic designer, using Photoshop to create designs for social media. He then created a YouTube channel comprised of Photoshop tutorials that amassed over 40,000 subscribers. While studying at University, he fell in love with pixel art, further developing the style into what we see from him today.

In February 2021, Timpers entered the NFT rabbit hole selling his first 1/1 on Foundation. Since then, he has worked with RTFKT, Kolectiv, Interleave and had art featured in the BAYC X Rolling stone magazine. He also worked as an artist on the Nouns DAO project. Timpers twin brother, Insight, is also on the team as a community manager and writer, helping build the lore behind The Bored Ape Chronicles (TBAC).

2/ Ecosystem Beginnings

The Chimpers Ecosystem is a lot more complex than meets the eye.

It all began with the Boring Ape Chronicles (TBAC), a community-driven collection made up of six interconnected episodes showcasing Timpers art with Insight’s storytelling. These were small, 100-piece collections that collectively told the TBAC story.

Holders of episodes 1-6 received an E-Book NFT, A Diamond Fleece NFT, as well as the TBAC Animated Production, “The Quest for the Diamond Fleece.” This NFT is a 1-minute and 15-second animated clip bringing the Chimpers lore to life.

Diamond Fleece holders had the option to burn their Diamond Fleece for a 1/1 Genesis Chimper and a Diamond Dust NFT, the latter’s utility is yet to be revealed. To this date, 98 Diamond Fleeces have been burned leaving two Genesis Chimpers yet to be revealed. 15 Diamond Fleeces were reserved for the team, resulting in weekly auctions for the Genesis Chimpers revealed by the burn mechanism. The first auction concluded with a 30 ETH sale to noted whale Mondoir.

This all set the stage for the Generative Chimpers mint. This collection consists of 5,555 Generative Chimpers that were minted for .07 ETH in May 2022. Holders of these ecosystem assets were heavily rewarded with allowlist spots for this mint, which continues the pattern of rewarding holders by the team. The mint was highly successful, and the project has remained very relevant since mint, eight months ago. They have done many different things to keep their community engaged, and incentivize them to hold their assets.

3/ Post Generative Mint

Since mint, the Chimpers team has continued to build, and create different experiences for their community. The first of which happened shortly after minting through the creation of their Art Foundation which was created to support and invest in art and artists within the Chimpers community. This was done through a series of art competitions.

Chimpers held several other contests for their community with ETH prizes, as well as other physical events like their sticker contest in NYC. There have also been three arcade games released for holders to play.

Insight continued to build the lore of the Chimpers universe with 10 stories about the Chubbie Chimpers, and shortly after the Dojo was launched. The Chimpers Dojo is where Chimpers are staked and partake in training, battling, and adventuring. The training was the first activity to be active in the Dojo. While training, Chimpers gain XP which contributes towards earning Dojo Bandanas. Currently, 92.76% of Chimpers are staked in the Dojo.

Chimpers continued delivering by adding integration to WorldWide Webb as well as Battling in the Dojo.

Each Chimper can partake in one battle per day. Winners receive 4 XP and losers lose 1 XP. Battles are automated every day and can be viewed in the Dojo. The rest of the battling mechanics can be found here. The battling leaderboard was released shortly after showcasing the most successful Chimpers.

Then in November, Chimpers announced a long-term collaboration with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Paramount. This is the most exciting development in the Chimpersverse as they will be collaborating with a massive, legacy IP brand. Speculating on how the partnership could work, I could see an animated series, a comic, or more curated content coming as TBAC is an interactive comic in its own right with an Animated Production as well. Chimpers then ended the year strong auctioning off eight Chimpers at Sotheby’s including three legendary Chimps. Chimpers then ended 2022 by announcing a collaboration with Oncyber to provide holders with galleries to showcase their NFT collections.

Analysis

Strategic Direction

Chimpers is one of the most successful storytelling NFT projects in the space. They have curated a die-hard community by continuing to reward holders of their assets while executing their plan. It’s interesting to note, the Chimpers’ team refuses to publish a roadmap, which is unusual for a project like this. But this has been very effective as the strategy maintains a layer of mystery, feeds holder curiosity, and drives speculation as to what comes next.

The manner in which they have remained true to their ethos of lore, art, and storytelling is rather unique as is the way they scaled their collectors. Starting with small editions with the episode mints for TBAC, the Chimpers team gamified collecting in a manner similar to projects like RTFKT, BAYC, and Renga. The difference between the ways RTFKT, BAYC, Renga, and Chimpers scaled their ecosystem is that Chimpers utilized small collections to identify diamond hand collectors to reward, rather than having to cater to a large user base directly after mint. This gave Insight and Timpers the leeway to continue to develop their story and reward collectors throughout all the while continuing to raise funds for the project’s operations.

Project Runway

Analyzing a project’s runway is becoming increasingly more important as we traverse deeper into the depths of the bear market. Promising projects are unexpectedly failing due to inefficient cash flow management. As such it’s important to review the going concern of a project and assess the likelihood of whether the funds raised are reasonable to expect the team to deliver against its roadmap. We can see the project has raised a reasonable amount of funding through the various mints. 

Assuming all royalties were paid on secondary and all funds were retained in ETH, we can estimate a total initial treasury of $3m USD at the current spot conversion rate.

However this is unlikely, and the recent trend is that many holders will have paid lower royalties so a more prudent project treasury would be around the $0.8m USD mark. This assumes all funds remained in ETH, converted at the recent spot rate and no royalties were received from secondary. A reasonable war chest to keep them building through the bear, assuming the project funds are being managed effectively.

If royalties were paid at the full 5.5% then we can see that a large portion of the runway would have been obtained from secondary sales. This highlights the importance of honoring royalties for projects to continue to build.

As previously mentioned, Chimpers’ first mint was the TBAC Episode 1 which minted for 0.25 ETH. The subsequent 3 episodes were minted for 0.25 ETH as well, giving the team 100 ETH of initial runway to fund the project before royalties. There were 85 full set collectors of Episodes 1-4, who were all airdropped Episode 5 and 84 full set collectors holding Episodes 1-5, who were airdropped Episode 6. The remaining 15 Episode 5 and 16 Episode 6 NFTs were then sold to the public for 0.25 ETH bringing the funding raised by the project to a total of 107.75 ETH before royalties which they have set at 5.5% across all collections.

From there, 83 full-set collectors were airdropped the Diamond Fleece NFT of which 81 have been burned for Genesis Chimpers.

An interactive ‘Ebook’ and ‘Animated Production’ were the next assets to be minted in the ecosystem.

• Ebooks were airdropped to full set collectors, and 2,850 were open to the public, bringing in another 199.50 ETH to the team for runway.

• Full set holders then could mint the Animated Production NFT for 0.5 ETH which raised another 50 ETH bringing the total amount raised by the team from mints to 357.25 ETH.

Project Performance

TBAC price action has shown just how diamond-handed the Chimpers community is as there have been very few sales of the original Episode NFTs, driving the floors to insane heights, albeit with very little volume. Currently, Episode 1 is sitting at a 19.69 ETH floor, with its all-time high sale being 11.5 ETH. The remaining Episodes have similar price action, with lower floors, and the same low volume as very few holders are keen on selling as has been the case throughout this project’s lifespan.

After the Ebook was released, a missing page was identified by the community, as was the mention of Chimpers on the last page. Speculation ran rampant as to what this might mean, but it was later discovered all Ebook holders would be allowlisted for the Generative Chimpers mint. This generated an additional 389 ETH in funding for the team, bringing the total up to 746 ETH. Privately, the Chimpers team established a roadmap with 12-18 months of plans but remained focused on revealing those at their own pace.

One of the main reasons for Chimpers’ sustained success is due to the way they have built their community. Their method of minting smaller collections to a core audience is wildly different from the typical NFT PFP project.

Take BAYC for example; Yuga minted their 10k Bored Apes, then began providing large scale airdrops to holders in the form of 10k BAKC companions, and then 20k MAYC (10K airdropped and 10k in a Dutch Auction). Instead, Chimpers focused on their core collectors, and the small community that paid them 1 ETH for appreciating their art and lore by handsomely rewarding them all while expanding their ecosystem to more collectors along the way.

Full set holders were rewarded with subsequent drops, and ultimately eight (yes 8!) Chimplist spots for the generative mint. If full-set holders minted their complete allotment and sold the top floor of Chimpers (4.4 ETH) that would be roughly 34 ETH of profit after mint costs. Since the Generative mint, the Chimpers team has continued to build and create exciting experiences and opportunities for holders.

Closing Remarks

Throughout the lifespan of the Chimpers ecosystem, the Chimpers team has consistently made it a point to reward holders. I see no reason why that trend would stop after the advent of the Chimpers Generative project.

The Chimpers team established a great playbook for their ecosystem by curating a diehard group of collectors through smaller collections, incentivizing collecting, and expanding the ecosystem with their generative mint. The next challenge for them is building something valuable enough to reward over 2,500 holders in their ecosystem. It’s much easier doing so with smaller collections, and this will be quite challenging, however, this team has stuck to their ethos of art and lore since the Chimpers inception.

In closing, Chimpers have provided a lot of value to holders thus far and are still building new experiences and products for their community. Some upcoming catalysts include the launch of Series 2 TBAC, their collaboration with TMNT, Adventure mode in the Dojo going live, and the utility of the Diamond Dust NFT. With these future endeavors, the Chimpers community has a lot in store in 2023 and moving forward as one of the ‘OG’ storytelling NFTs.

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