Author Tim Ferriss Tops NFT Sales Charts With 'Cockpunch'

"The Legend of Cockpunch,"—an Ethereum project co-created by popular author and podcast host Tim Ferriss—is today’s big NFT market winner, parlaying a sold-out mint into secondary market demand that has pushed the collection to the top of the sales charts.

"Cockpunch" is billed as an “emergent long fiction” project from Ferriss, the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” and other bestsellers, and it spans 5,555 images depicting anthropomorphized rooster characters, each with various traits and weapons. Each NFT was priced at 0.3 ETH (about $370) at the time of mint earlier today.

All told, the primary sale—which took place via Premint’s new minting platform—yielded just over $2 million, with all proceeds going to the author’s own Saisei Foundation. The foundation funds research into treatments related to psychedelics, life extension, mental health, and more.

Since the sale, secondary market prices have surged, with the NFTs listed at 1.4 ETH ($1,725) on leading marketplace OpenSea. And they’re selling, too: OpenSea’s market-wide chart shows about 2,700 ETH (over $3.3 million) worth of secondary sales thus far, topping established projects like CryptoPunks and Azuki over the last 24 hours.

The PFPs are billed as merely the start of Ferriss’ plans for the project. In a podcast interview with Kevin Rose, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Web3 startup Proof, Ferriss said that he has written an entire first season of a narrative podcast that will share the lore of the project’s fictional fantasy world.

Furthermore, NFT owners can use their characters to create derivative artwork and projects, thanks to a commercial rights grant. With other popular collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, holders have tapped their NFTs for things like virtual bands and supergroups, apparel, themed restaurants, drinks, and other products.

Ferriss released his first-ever NFT earlier this year as part of Grails, a promotion in which owners of Rose’s Proof Collective NFTs can mint one of several limited-edition artwork pieces without initially knowing the creators of each. Just 60 members minted the author’s NFT, titled “How to Start a War”—his first piece of published fiction.