With the NFT boom that began in July 2021, countless NFTs successively set record-breaking prices. As a result, one popular NFT series after another ascended to greatness, becoming the blue-chip NFTs that many project owners admire.

Throughout this process, there were undeniably popular projects that managed to maintain their momentum. However, there were also noteworthy instances of severe market crashes and dissolutions. The frenzied escalation that occurred during this time was perhaps tinged with the hues of an economic bubble.

With the arrival of the bear market in 2022, the rosy lenses of many projects were punctured. Among them was Cool Cats, an established NFT project that, after gaining a certain level of fame and becoming a much-anticipated blue-chip NFT project, swiftly fell from grace. By the end of 2022, Cool Cats’ market value had evaporated by 92%.

To understand what transpired during this process, it is essential first to familiarize oneself with the basic information about Cool Cats.

What are Cool Cats?

Cool Cats is a collection of 9,999 standardized, randomly generated Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), akin to Profile Picture Projects like CryptoPunks. Each Cool Cats NFT is composed of various unique features. In total, over 300,000 possible combinations exist, including unique bodies, faces, facial hair, hats, glasses, clothing, and other elements.

（Image source:coindesk.com）

However, as pointed out by the creator of Cool Cats — illustrator Colin Egan, while all the cats are cool, some cats are cooler than others.

This pertains to the specific NFT characteristics of the Cool Cats project. Roughly half of the Cool Cats NFTs have a basic ‘coolness’ level, indicating that there are slight variations in their value.

Cool Cats bearing special attributes such as wild, elegant, exotic, and the like, obviously have higher values. Among these, there are 66 super rare Cool Cats, with values reaching tens of thousands of dollars each.

Although the rarity ranking of Cool Cats’ NFTs might seem like an emulation and tribute to veterans like CryptoPunks or even CryptoSkulls, members of the Cool Cats community believe every cat is cool.

With its distinctive NFT designs, Cool Cats saw a price surge to 0.66 ETH within less than eight days of launch. It even caught the attention of boxing legend Mike Tyson, who adopted it as his Twitter avatar.

Another event that sparked considerable attention for Cool Cats was the project team’s decision to give back 20% of the sales proceeds to the community in various ways. The team held numerous contests and lottery events within the community, making Cool Cats a central topic in the NFT conversation at the time.

For a while, Cool Cats rapidly climbed to the third spot on the OpenSea leaderboard in terms of popularity and sales volume, trailing only behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks.

The enthusiastic reception of Cool Cats since its inception can be attributed to the creative thoughtfulness and dedication of the project team during the NFT creation phase.

The Genesis of Cool Cats

The Cool Cats NFT was composed of a quartet of seasoned NFT enthusiasts. Tom Williamson, a blockchain and smart contract specialist, was joined by Rob Mehew, an internet developer and manager. The creative reigns were held by Evan Luza, the Creative Director. However, the integral touch of style to the NFT was lent by the illustrator, Colin Egan, fondly referred to as Catoonist by fans.

In expressing his creative journey behind Cool Cats, Egan once disclosed:

“I’ve spent a lifetime sketching cartoon characters, but it wasn’t until high school that I started illustrating cats. I was christened the man who draws cats. That period marked the beginning of transforming these sketches into tangible pieces of art. Prior to that, they were merely doodles to me.”

Every single Cool Cat originated from a blue cat character that Egan created back in high school. This fact has been introduced in the official Medium column of the project. After years of meticulous refinement, he mastered the perfect line weight, ear height, and whisker length for the blue cat. The end product was a universally appreciated representation of coolness and cuteness.

With the flame of creative passion burning bright, this self-proclaimed band of nerds, filled with enthusiasm for crypto-art and creativity, officially launched the Cool Cats NFT on July 1, 2021.

Market Performance and Reasons Behind Cool Cats

After experiencing a highlight moment in the early market following its release, Cool Cats began a series of popularity surges. As a hot PFP NFT project then, Cool Cats followed the release of BAYC, both leading the market development.

Each Cool Cats NFT was initially priced at 0.06ETH, approximately $150 at the time. Cool Cats initially sold 300 NFTs. Subsequently, the team lowered the price to 0.02ETH per NFT, which sold out completely within eight hours.

In the subsequent days, Cool Cats started to explode in the NFT industry frenzy, with prices quickly soaring to 0.66ETH.

（Image source:nftgo.io）

During this period, Cool Cats collaborated with Time Magazine to release a limited edition NFT series, designed after the four founders of Cool Cats, with one for each, totaling 100 different NFT personas. These 400 NFTs served as rewards in the community’s creative competition, with the top eight creators each receiving an NFT. The remaining 392 NFTs were randomly distributed to the 392 participating users, and Time Magazine’s president, Keith Grossman, expressed his appreciation for Cool Cats on Twitter.

Just eight days after its release, Cool Cats received strong support from Mike Tyson. He changed his Twitter profile picture to a Cool Cats avatar, which significantly fueled the project’s community’s excitement. Cool Cats subsequently attracted a host of celebrities, and three months after its launch, the average price of Cool Cats had reached nearly 26ETH, becoming one of the most attention-grabbing NFT series.

（Image source:pinterest.com）

However, while Cool Cats had a robust development momentum on the surface and successively issued a second generation of NFTs, games, and Milk tokens, all of this proved to be fleeting.

On one hand, with the premise of operating the project based on the community, the Cool Cats team failed to keep up with the rapid development of the community. As early as January 2022, the founders of Cool Cats hired Chris Hassett as CEO, a business director with rich experience in the crypto field since 2015. At that time, the market sentiment for NFTs was generally optimistic, with OpenSea’s monthly trading volume breaking historical records, but Chris Hassett left the project just three months later.

（Image source:nftpricefloor.com）

By April 2022, the head moderator of the Cool Cats community, Chris Peralta, also left the project. Although the project’s popularity was still decent, Cool Cats seemed to have suddenly lost momentum.

On the other hand, Cool Cats gradually lost the confidence of speculative users. Amid high expectations, the game Cooltopia was launched in mid-April for Cool Cats NFT holders, and Cool Cats holders could complete tasks in the game to earn Milk governance tokens. At the same time, Cool Cats could earn passive income in Milk by holding NFTs.

（Image source:luckytrader.com）

However, having the game as an application scenario could not satisfy the speculative users’ needs, and many long-term NFT holders felt that the game could not meet their investment return expectations for Cool Cats.

The Cool Cats team had predicted this eventuality, believing that once buyers realized that NFT holders could not profit in the short term through the NFT itself or the game, any further promotion of the project’s elements might strike a blow to users’ confidence in the project and cause a sell-off.

The result was exactly as the project team speculated. Since the launch of Cooltopia, the floor price of Cool Cats has further declined, once dropping to around 2ETH.

By the end of 2022, clear market data indicated that the market capitalization of Cool Cats had fallen to $35.4 million, a value evaporation of 92.04% from its peak.

Although the collapse of Terra at that time intensified a more severe market downturn, causing a comprehensive fluctuation in NFT prices, and many popular NFT projects were heavily hit at the time, few projects experienced such a severe price collapse as Cool Cats.

The situation, while not unrelated to the slump in the NFT market, had much to do with Cool Cats’ excessive reliance on hype marketing in the early stages of development. Plus, with the community as the fundamental basis for the Cool Cats project, users attracted by the hype naturally valued short-term investment returns more, and Cool Cats chose the relatively dull GameFi direction to broaden the project’s application scenarios.

In the inability to satisfy the existing users’ short-term return expectations, the urgency to expand the project’s marginal upper limit exposed the risk resistance problem of the Cool Cats project thoroughly when the market entered a bear phase. This was one of the significant reasons for its fall from grace.

Cool Cats Community

The success of a project relies heavily on the construction and operation of its community culture, especially for NFT projects. Like other PFP NFT projects, Cool Cats began building an application ecosystem within the Metaverse framework once it gained popularity through community establishment in its early stages.

To attract more users to join, Cooltopia, the game, was launched at a time when the project was highly popular, regardless of its subsequent development. The launch of Cooltopia became the tangible product and convergence core of the entire Cool Cats ecosystem at that time.

Subsequently, the project’s official Twitter, Discord, Cool Shop, and trading market, among other communities, began operating around Cooltopia. Cool Cats attempted to transform the project itself into a gamified NFT community, thereby connecting all Cool Cats NFT holders.

The goal of the Cool Cats team is to create an online experiential community where users can participate in various experiences such as games, tokens, activities, and investments simply by holding NFTs.

Therefore, on January 28, 2022, Cool Cats officially launched Cool Pets, and the long-awaited Cooltopia Metaverse game began, accompanied by a new NFT series called Cool Pets.

All Cool Cats holders received an airdrop of Cool Pets based on their holdings, while another 10,000 Cool Pets were directly sold to provide more opportunities for players to enter the Cooltopia ecosystem.

At the time, the vision presented by Cool Cats was indeed very enticing to users. In the period following the launch of Cooltopia, the project’s visibility and popularity experienced some growth, and the secondary market performance was once promising. However, these achievements failed to conceal the project’s inherent weaknesses, and the subsequent industry downturn had a severe impact on Cool Cats.

Cool Cats and Cool Pets

However, it is well known that Cool Cats has performed exceptionally well in the market. Setting that aside, there are indeed commendable aspects in the design of their second NFT series—Cool Pets.

Cool Pets is a complementary NFT series corresponding to Cool Cats and has practical associations. Perhaps inspired by the benefits of NFT series like Bored Ape Kennel Club, KingFrogs, Thingies, and others on their original projects, Cool Cats adopted a similar direction and approach with Cool Pets.

（Image source:nftnewstoday.com）

The Cool Pets series consists of 19,999 NFTs, with half of the supply allocated to existing Cool Cats holders, while the other half is reserved for sale to new users. All NFTs begin as an egg and gradually evolve into their final form. Users can cultivate their NFTs according to their preferences by providing appropriate food and items to the eggs and determining the appearance and elemental attributes of the final NFT.

Cultivation items come from chests in Cooltopia, which users can purchase from the marketplace using Milk or earn Milk by completing daily tasks with their Cool Cats. Cooltopia offers over 100 possible tasks, such as saving the forest, greeting frogs, detecting dangers, and making friends. Cool Cats holders can play these games daily to earn Milk for cultivating Cool Pets.

Regardless of the perspective, the construction of Cooltopia closely resembles traditional games in people’s perception. During the external promotion phase, Cool Cats focused on promoting the concept of its own ecosystem and gameplay mechanics, rather than emphasizing the economic cycle of the game itself.

Of course, this is not surprising, as at the time of Cooltopia’s launch, GameFi projects with successful economic cycle systems, represented by Axie, still dominated the landscape. Cool Cats itself did not introduce significant gameplay innovations and, in many aspects, showed signs of being influenced by others.

The most important aspect is that the early-stage users gathered through community marketing differ from the user base of pure GameFi projects. It is more appropriate to describe Cool Cats as a PFP NFT project that lost the support and trust of its user base when transitioning to the Metaverse field.

As Cool Cats move towards the Metaverse direction, similar to most competing projects, they have introduced a governance token for the ecosystem called Milk.

Governance Token MILK

Although the governance token Milk of Cool Cats may seem somewhat less prominent among its diverse ecosystem elements, here is a brief introduction to it.

Milk is the governance token within the Cool Cats ecosystem, and it is required for purchasing pet boxes, battle boxes, housing boxes, unlocking tasks, and maintaining the operations of the Cooltopia game.

The introduction of Milk sparked a slightly whimsical way of celebration, which became a new trend within the Cool Cats community—drinking milk to commemorate the occasion.

Typically, community members and project developers would share videos of themselves drinking milk, ranging from a small cup to a whole gallon, to celebrate the rise in NFT floor prices or the release of new content within the ecosystem. This has fostered an amusing cultural phenomenon within the Cool Cats community.

（Image source:twitter.com）

The Recent Development of Cool Cats

After a prolonged period of decline, Cool Cats has recently made an impressive comeback with a remarkable rebranding of the project.

As we enter 2023, with the gradual recovery and resurgence of the cryptocurrency market, the NFT sector has also witnessed renewed growth momentum. Taking advantage of this favorable climate, Cool Cats has unveiled a fresh brand strategy plan.

Based on the current outlook, Cool Cats’ new brand strategy focuses primarily on two aspects. Firstly, by expanding its roster of brand partnerships through compelling storytelling, the project aims to enlarge its audience base. Building upon this foundation, Cool Cats seeks to attract and retain users by offering an immersive gaming product called Cooltopia, designed to provide a complete sense of engagement.

Furthermore, Cool Cats has announced several collaborative partnerships. For instance, Cool Cats has partnered with Ledger to launch a brand education program called LedgerQuest, slated to debut in early February. Additionally, Cool Cats has partnered with Hologram to provide NFT holders with a holographic and 3D avatar experience of Cool Cats NFTs. Moreover, Cool Cats has joined forces with renowned department store brand Macy’s to introduce NFT-themed balloons.

It is evident that Cool Cats’ future brand strategy will revolve around rebranding and narrative construction. This approach aligns with the brand development path that only a few blue-chip NFT projects have successfully validated over the past two years since the NFT boom in 2021.

Moreover, Cool Cats’ foundational position in terms of product offering surpasses that of many NFT projects that primarily focus on brand construction. It is believed that its foray into the Metaverse sector will complement and propel the brand’s development in the subsequent stages, fostering the expansion of a broader Cool Cats ecosystem.

Conclusion

Overall, Cool Cats was a rare innovative attempt in the early days of NFT projects. Alongside other blue-chip NFT projects at that time, it provided a strong boost to the rapid growth and explosion of the crypto market.

Moreover, Cool Cats emphasized community building, actively involving community members in decision-making and voting, and maintaining good interaction with them, thereby creating a vibrant community.

However, like other blockchain projects, Cool Cats also suffered significant setbacks in the face of market fluctuations. Nevertheless, its project fundamentals remained intact, supporting the project through various challenges during the bear market.

As Cool Cats embarks on the process of reshaping its brand, it continues to be a high-quality NFT project, and its future is worth everyone’s attention.