Solana NFTs Come 'Full Circle' as Okay Bears Knockoff Lands on Ethereum

By Andrew Hayward

Early in the growth of Solana’s NFT ecosystem, it was common to find obvious knockoffs of top Ethereum projects like CryptoPunks and Pudgy Penguins. Now, Okay Bears—the hottest recent Solana NFT project—has been effectively copied and pasted onto Ethereum in what some observers on Crypto Twitter have hailed as a “full circle” moment for Solana.

Not Okay Bears is an Ethereum-based NFT profile picture project that launched earlier today, with 10,000 cartoonish bear illustrations with a variety of randomized traits. If the imagery looks awfully familiar, that’s because it’s the same artwork from Okay Bears on Solana—just reversed so that the bears are facing left instead of right.

Call it a knockoff, a derivative, or a parody—but it’s also a success, so far. The 10,000 NFTs were all quickly minted this morning at 0.02 ETH (about $41) each aside from the first 1,000 of them, which were free to mint.

The as-yet-unrevealed creators donated about 20% of the Not Okay Bears mint funds (35.8 ETH, or $73,000) to the Mental Health Impact Index Fund via The Giving Block, according to a tweet from the crypto charity platform.

Now they’re selling on secondary marketplaces like OpenSea, where they’re trading in droves as the floor price—or price of the cheapest available NFT—is rising quickly. As of this writing, the Not Okay Bears start at nearly 0.1 ETH (about $200), or five times the original mint cost. OpenSea shows about $930,000 worth of secondary trading so far.

Granted, that’s still a fraction of how much an Okay Bears NFT costs on Solana: the cheapest available on leading Solana marketplace Magic Eden is listed for 243 SOL, or $13,400. An NFT acts like a deed of ownership to an item, and often represents things like digital artwork, profile pictures, and collectibles.

Okay Bears has yet to publicly comment on the launch of Not Okay Bears, let alone whether it plans to do anything about the project—such as, for example, issuing a DMCA takedown notice to marketplaces. That sort of move has been controversial when past projects have attempted it, such as the original creators of the CryptoPunks, Larva Labs.

Decrypt reached out to the creators of Okay Bears for comment, but did not immediately hear back. However, prominent members of the Solana community appear to be taking it in stride.

Notable NFT collector fxnction tweeted, “​​ETH dropping a Solana derivative is really a full circle event lmao.” Solana co-creator Anatoly Yakovenko quote-tweeted it and added, “Woot! We did it!”

Elsewhere on Twitter, fans of both Ethereum and Solana are trading barbs about the two chains and their respective qualities, often to hilarious effect. And the creators of Not Okay Bears kicked it off with the official project description on OpenSea, which reads, “Bears on the blockchain that actually works.”

Okay Bears launched in late April and has quickly become one of the most valuable NFT projects on Solana, not to mention one of the best-selling projects to date on the network. According to CryptoSlam, the project has generated nearly $95 million worth of trading volume to date.

Over the past 24 hours, it’s the best-selling project with nearly $5 million worth of secondary trading volume, according to CryptoSlam—higher than any Ethereum project, including heavy hitters like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks.

Solana NFT trading on the whole is also on the upswing, with CryptoSlam showing a 57% rise over the last 24 hours to $12.4 million, while Ethereum NFT trading is down 22% during the same span to $21 million.

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