DeFi Market
The team behind Liquid Apes, a 10,000-piece NFT collection due to mint in October, has launched a free collection on OpenSea called NOT THE LIQUID APES. It's 10,000 NFTs, one per wallet, free apart from gas. Nine thousand of them are labelled, on the NFT itself, as worthless. The other thousand each carry a guaranteed place on the Liquid Apes whitelist. Nobody knows which one they've got until it's minted.
The public mint opened at 1pm UK time on 25 September and runs until 16 October. A few hours in, 224 of the 10,000 had been claimed.
Marketing inside the marketplace
The point is reach, and the team isn't hiding it. In an announcement to its community, the project described the plan as "infiltrating OpenSea", saying it isn't buying an advert on the marketplace but putting "10,000 adverts inside it". Every NFT carries links and QR codes back to LiquidApes.com and to the Liquid NFTs marketplace, so each mint, wallet and resale listing becomes a signpost.
The collection page leans into the joke. The 9,000 duds are, in its words, "JPEGs with no liquidity, no utility and no promises. Worthless." It's an unusual thing to put on a sales page, and that's rather the point: it sets a traditional NFT, with nothing behind it, next to the Liquid model, where half the mint price is locked behind each piece.
What the real Liquid Apes are
Liquid Apes is a separate collection of 10,000 hand-drawn apes priced at 0.08 ETH each. Both numbers are a deliberate echo of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which launched 10,000 apes at 0.08 ETH in April 2021. The difference is the Liquid part: according to LiquidApes.com, 50% of what a buyer pays is locked into the NFT as liquidity, creating a backed floor from day one. The collection is built on the Liquid NFTs system, explained in our guide to how Liquid NFTs works.
| NOT THE LIQUID APES | Liquid Apes | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | OpenSea, Ethereum | Ethereum, via Liquid NFTs |
| Supply | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| Price | Free, plus gas. One per wallet. | 0.08 ETH |
| Backing | None, by design | 50% of the price locked as liquidity |
| When | 25 September to 16 October | Late October, 7 to 10 days after the whitelist closes |
What winning actually gets you
Worth being clear on: a winning NFT doesn't give you a Liquid Ape. It gives you a guaranteed place on the whitelist, the right to mint one at 0.08 ETH when the collection goes live. To claim it, you hold the winning NFT and register your wallet at LiquidApes.com before 16 October. The team told DeFi Market Journal that Liquid Apes will mint on Ethereum, 7 to 10 days after the whitelist closes. The other route in is an application on LiquidApes.com, where the team says places aren't first come, first served and it will favour people who help spread the word.
So the real cost of playing is the gas fee for one mint, and the real prize is an option to buy. Whether that option is worth having depends on how the Liquid Apes mint goes.
Early minting
OpenSea's live mint feed shows the limit of one per wallet being tested in the usual way: in the first hours, a run of wallets named "drizzt68" to "drizzt78" minted within minutes of each other. A team-reserve stage before the public mint allocated eight to a wallet named TheRealDelli. The published odds, one in ten, are across the whole 10,000.
The bigger picture
Using the biggest traditional NFT marketplace to advertise an alternative to traditional NFTs is a cheeky move. It will get attention. Whether it converts OpenSea collectors into Liquid buyers will show up in October, when the whitelist is due to mint. We'll report the numbers.
Sources: the NOT THE LIQUID APES collection page on OpenSea, LiquidApes.com, and the project's announcement to its community.