The NFT project Doodles which was all the rage in 2022 was launched in the fourth quarter of 2021. Several months of development have witnessed Doodles’s transformation into one of the most influential and popular existing NFT projects.

The unique line-drawing character series presents a colorful art style. The data shows that Doodles have swept across the globe. In terms of popularity and sales, Doodles topped the list of the best PFP collection projects. They even set a record of a 1544% increase in trading volume on the Opensea platform within 24 hours, which is really impressive.

Launch of Doodle MAP

Over a year after the release of Doodles NFT, the project, like most blue-chip NFT projects, began to build application spaces and scenarios that are consistent with its own brand features.

After the initial announcement on February 28, the typical NFT project Doodles launched Doodle MAP — the project’s new plan. As Doodles claimed in the announcement, Doodle MAP is planned for better creation and circulation, and it may go beyond people’s understanding of its original project route.

However, since it is just newly-released news, most of the comments on the Doodle Map on the Internet are predictions.

Doodles Records: Volume 1 is expected to be released at some point later, according to Pharrell, Doodles’ chief brand officer. In addition, as part of the Doodles’ Ethereum roadmap, Doodles also intends to launch “Doodles Records” and “The Stoodio.” We can only guess its content to be an artistic or creative studio.

About Doodles NFT

We might as well review the relevant content about Doodles NFT, so as to better analyze and predict the Doodle Map.

Doodles is a collection of 10,000 generative NFTs created by Evan Keast, Scott Martin, and Jordan Castro.

Before Doodles emerged, Keast and Castro had already laid a solid foundation in the NFT community, as they helped launch a legendary NFT project called CryptoKitties in 2017. Meanwhile, it has been about a year since Martin minted his work and developed his creative brand within the NFT space.

With a unique visual art aesthetic, the founding team of Doodles consists of a few veteran players with rich experience in NFT projects. Many users thought Doodles was similar to CryptoKittiws when they first saw it. This is because of the fact that the two maintain a consistent art style.

Doodles is an original art created by Martin. He has designed hundreds of unique visual features for the series. However, ultimately, Doodles, following in the footsteps of its predecessors like CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and Cool Cats, randomly mixed and matched these individual traits and created a complete collection of Doodles.

The Doodles ecosystem contains humans, cats, pickles, apes, flames, skeletons, aliens, and other characters. Similar to nearly all generative avatar collections, Doodles NFTs come in varying degrees of rarity, which is determined by their nature. Though the Doodles team has never officially released information about which traits are the rarest, avatars like skeletons, cats, aliens, apes, and mascots consistently offer the highest resale prices.

Doodles was officially launched on October 17, 2021, and the initial product was priced at 0.123 ETH per NFT, which was thought high at that time. Before the Doodles came into being, the mint price of most PFP projects was generally lower than 0.1ETH. However, the founding team of Doodles decided to adopt this high price to accumulate funds for the initial fund pool of the community.

Doodles tried ways that no PFP project seems to have taken before in the promotion of the project. A month before the project went live, the Doodles team shut down the project’s Discord channel when its members had just passed 1,000. Therefore, it prevents more members from joining the community and creates an artificial hunger marketing effect for the project.

People held different opinions on this decision at the time because only a small number of users were whitelisted. Whereas, as the mint date of Doodles NFT drew closer, the project’s followers kept growing, and the move to close Discord began to be seen by the outside world as an innovative way to reward supporters of early NFT projects.

The community served as a key support in the NFT sale process, which had also become the main factor for the following steady rise in the price of Doodles. Besides, the project team always focused on the community when releasing the progress according to the roadmap, which is also presented in the information released by Doodle Map.

Market performance of Doodles NFT

Of the 10,000 Doodles NFTs, 504 were minted and reserved for the founders. The rest are minted and sold to whitelisted users in primary sales. Many Doodles have been resold and purchased on secondary markets such as Opensea and Nifty Gateway. The rarest Doodle was purchased by NFT collector Pranksy at a price of 296.69ETH, which at the time was worth over $1.1 million.

As of now, Doodles NFT’s total trading volume on the Opensea platform has reached 270,586 ETH. In the past more than a year, it has topped Opensea’s daily trading rankings several times.

The reopening of the Doodles Discord community after the NFT was minted plays a crucial role in this process. It can be said that it promoted the increase in Doodles’ price in the secondary market.

In essence, Doodles is an open, community-driven ecosystem. With its community-based nature, it is similar to a DAO. Holders of Doodles can vote on different topics such as approved derivatives or future features and events.

In the meantime, the creation of Doodlebank also set up an exclusive fund bank for the community, forming this ecosystem together with the community. Holders of Doodles can vote to determine the use of funds. The 20 ETH from the initial sale serves as the fund for the bank, and half of the creator’s proceeds from the secondary sale also go directly to this bank.

With initial marketing and operations, the Doodles project successfully allowed its holders to get a sense of exclusivity. Meanwhile, it expanded the influence of the project and invited newcomers to join the ecosystem, finally forming a vibrant community to underpin the progress of the whole project.

Doodles boasts a very expressive art style and an excellent founding team. Though this project, which was created based on a solid community, can promote the plan to create a global entertainment brand, one thing cannot be ignored: Since 2022, the NFT market has not yet returned to the state of 2021 in terms of popularity and market value. Against the backdrop of the bear market, global NFT sales hit a record low in 2022, having lost over $4 billion. Doodles wasn’t immune either, with sales down more than $100 million in June alone.

Nevertheless, even if the market was in a downturn, Doodles still received multiple rounds of financing, and its valuation has also risen, reaching a peak of $700 million.

Doodle MAP and Community

Shortly after the Doodles sold out, its Discord channel reopened, bringing a new class of collectors and enthusiasts to the community. In the following months, various NFT enthusiasts and influencers joined the Doodles ecosystem one after another, which further consolidated the project’s status as the most popular PFP NFT community in the field.

While many PFP projects market themselves as community-focused projects, Doodles, at the very beginning, seems to have focused on strengthening their community. As stated on the Doodles’ official website, owning Doodles and voting on community proposals makes it more collaborative for the project to move along the established route.

Over the past year or so, the narrative logic of the Doodles project has become increasingly clear. This mainly contributes to the community’s voting system, which also includes the review and enforcement of anti-fraud and the culture of professional artists in the community.

After Doodles’ initial release, the price actually increased after the announcement of Space Doodles. The project team did not adopt the previous NFT project strategy but issued new and different NFT series to get more benefits for the ecology and the community. Instead, it released combinable derivative NFTs by bundling the Doodles NFT series.

Although projects such as Cool Pets, Bored Ape Kennel Club, and KingFrogs have launched more popular series to further expand the user base of the project, no project has made impressive success previously with Space Doodles’ methods of directly combining with the original 10,000 NFTs.

In short, the Doodles team did not launch an additional series of NFTs as a supplement to the ecosystem but implemented another mechanism that allows Doodles holders to exchange for new, spaceship-themed NFTs. These spaceship-themed NFTs are deployed in a different collection on the Ethereum blockchain as a way to differentiate it from others and Space Doodles can be displayed combined with Doodles.

Castro, the founder of Doodles, calls Space Doodles “a non-dilutive expansion of Doodles.”

Beyond that, the project team will also release its plan Doodles2 online in 2023. It collects more NFT series derived from the same IP in the ecosystem which will together form the entertainment platform planned by the project.

This is also one of the most interesting aspects of Doodles. The user community that abides by the principles of DAO governance is the cornerstone of the project’s existence and development. The follow-up ecological layout and the building of supporting infrastructure may be the intersection in Doodles where the blockchain meets the physical world.

It is because of the fact that Doodles is striving to become not just a simple PFP project, and the Doodle Map that was announced recently is one part that builds on that goal.

Less information is available now, but, undoubtedly, what the concept map released by Doodle Map signals to the outside world is that it will serve as the central intersection of the entire ecosystem. And this is exactly the wider application scenes that are developing based on the core ecological community foundation, arousing many project fans’ speculation.

Doodle MAP Application Prediction

With the effect made by various actions of the project, Many Doodles followers may have thought that this project has shifted from NFT projects to other aspects.

In its attempt to expand business in the entertainment field, Doodles has created two immersive offline experience activities.

In December 2021, the Doodles team partnered with The Heart Project for a major event during Art Basel Miami. They call it “Art Basel Miami,” allowing the NFT community to have a first glimpse of what Doodles can bring as an entertainment company.

The second event is called Doodles Genesis Factory and will launch with NFT.NYC in June 2022. The event further conveyed the desire for Doodles to be on display and set the stage for many upcoming Doodles initiative plans, including the reveal of Doodles’ first fundraiser, Doodles 2, the Doodles record, and so on.

While it remains to be seen how a Web3 company does all this with a PFP project, other blue-chip NFT projects such as BAYC Yacht Club and World of Women, both now run by entertainment executive Guy Oseary, have expressed similar opinions. And Doodles’ various initiatives seem to echo this view.

Although the distribution of the traditional entertainment industry includes both online and offline, the offline implementation of NFT projects is more about the output of trends and cultural elements extended from the brand.

From this point of view, the birth of Doodle Map is more to cater to the needs of more content creation in the ecosystem. After all, more entertainment presentation methods are necessarily derived from a richer coverage of content. Relying heavily on community development, Doodles provides more UGC content that is easy to circulate and disseminate and is even created by users themselves.

To achieve this goal, the construction of infrastructure within the ecology is essential, and the role that Doodle Map can play is self-evident.

Conclusion

Doodles is a new project, but what it has achieved is already impressive. The entire ecology is well positioned for long-term development in terms of the basic conditions, whether it is seen from the market value of NFT or the health of the community.

Although Doodles still has many shortcomings compared to established NFT projects such as BAYC, this dynamic collection of characters has undoubtedly won the hearts of countless NFT enthusiasts.

More importantly, Doodles has not shown any signs of slowing down its development pace. Even if the crypto price has fluctuated greatly since its inception, it has not prevented the project team from developing as planned.

The upcoming Doodle Map will offer more solid ecological content system support to the exploration of Doodles in the entertainment sector.