World of Women Galaxy Ethereum NFT Drop Generates $79M in a Day

Ethereum NFT collection World of Women has been on an upward swing since the start of the year, surging in price as celebrities buy in and the project charts Hollywood ambitions. On Saturday, the project launched a secondary NFT collection called World of Women Galaxy—and quickly blew through the available supply.

According to the team behind the project, World of Women Galaxy generated some $79 million worth of sales within the first 24 hours of availability. That includes $34 million worth of primary sales from the initial mint, as well as $45 million in secondary market trading per data from CryptoSlam.

Since the Saturday launch, secondary trading has now topped $60 million in total. As a result, World of Women Galaxy has done more trading volume in the last two days than other notable NFT profile picture (PFP) projects have done over the last week, including Azuki ($49.5M), the Bored Ape Yacht Club ($45M), and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club ($42.3M).

An NFT is unique token that functions as a kind of blockchain-based digital receipt—a way to prove ownership over digital items, such as PFP artwork. While the original World of Women collection contained 10,000 different profile pictures, each with a randomized assortment of traits, World of Women Galaxy spans 22,222 images.

Original holders can claim one Galaxy NFT for each World of Women NFT they own, while another 2,222 Galaxy NFTs were offered at a lower price to “certain individuals and communities” that are working to broaden access to the NFT market.

The remaining 10,000 Galaxy NFTs were put up for sale on Saturday using a Dutch auction format, in which they begin at 3 ETH (approximately $9,300) and gradually drop in price until the supply is sold out. It’s an approach similar to that of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the subsequent Mutant Ape NFTs.

Yuga Labs granted a free Mutant Ape to each original Bored Ape holder, via a Mutant Serum NFT that “mutated” the original Ape image to create a new NFT, and then sold another 10,000 new NFTs to the public via a Dutch auction. Similarly, the free Galaxy NFTs for existing holders look like remixed versions of their original, respective profile pictures.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club and World of Women share something else: representation by Guy Oseary, the veteran music industry executive who also manages artists like Madonna and U2. Oseary’s deal with Yuga Labs was announced last October, with the World of Women announcement following in January.

World of Women then announced that actress Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production studio will develop TV shows and films based on the NFT project, while Jazwares has secured the toy production license for the project. To date, the original World of Women NFT project has generated about $200 million worth of secondary trading volume, per CryptoSlam.

A share of primary and secondary royalties from World of Women Galaxy will go to benefit the recently-revealed WoW Foundation, which pursues opportunities for women in the burgeoning Web3 and metaverse spaces. The makers of the metaverse game The Sandbox pledged $25 million in grant funds to the WoW Foundation over the next five years.

The best of Decrypt straight to your inbox.

Get the top stories curated daily, weekly roundups & deep dives straight to your inbox.