Topps launched their digital Garbage Pail Series 1 and Series 2 sets this year on the WAX blockchain. Both sets sold out in record time and for record amounts, but this article is not about highlighting how quickly the packs sold for USD dollars. Instead, this article is a visual display and light analysis of secondary market sales for both major releases from the first Series 1 release through the 17th of October. It is not meant to be a full overview of the market or a fair comparison between even the two releases. I hope that by presenting this data it can open up a discussion between users of WAX and the developers on how to support the secondary economy of GPK and WAX.
How It Was Compiled
The data has been scraped from various sources and what is presented here is what I felt was accurate enough to display and ponder on. Keep in mind that using an API to pull the data from the blockchain itself would be more accurate and would provide a higher level of detail than what you will be shown.
The full datasets can be found at the end of this article allowing anyone to draw their own conclusions and to interact with the data and create their own visuals. I removed anything that did not scrape well or that did not work well in tableau, but did not alter any of the data shown. For example, finding the SUM price of all transactions for Series 1 was not possible, so some charts are missing the price when I display the data. Additionally, there was no easy way to parse the correct date information for sales so some charts had to be displayed according to transaction ID, from earliest to latest. This was a learning experience for me in how to compile this type of blockchain data from secondary sources without relying on the blockchain itself to provide the data.
Regardless of the incomplete nature of scraping the data from these sources, I believe it tells a story of a growing ecosystem, currently bottlenecked by a limited number of users compared to the abundant amount of releases WAX has seen this year. While WAX as a whole has maintained decent transaction volume, GPK on WAX is struggling to maintain interest. But, that could all turn around if Topps is able to improve the functionality of their website and product before users have moved on for good. Let’s take a quick look at some of the data.
Pack Sales
A byproduct of Topps choosing to release their product on a standard known as Simple Assets versus a newer standard known as Atomic Assets is the limited number of resources that exist for gathering information on secondary market sales of Packs. The relatively few data points for pack sales prevent any serious conclusions from being drawn.
The difficulty in having packs as a token versus an NFT, as cards for all WAX releases are, is felt by the players as well. Limited visibility for the packs to users of WAX who spend an increasing amount of time on the Atomic Assets platform is simply bad for business.
Having said all that, here are the few pack sales I could scrape from Collectables.io. They are displayed from earliest transaction on the left to latest on the right.
Series 1 – Standard Packs
Series 1 – Mega Packs
Series 2 – Standard Packs
Series 2 – Mega Packs
Series 2 – Ultimate Packs
Average Price of Number 1 Mints
While Series 1(OS1) had a normal sale and a somewhat decent distribution of Mint #1s (it still went to only a few number of users), OS2 was a disaster and one individual obtained many of the Mint #1s. Nuff said.
Series 1
Series 2
Whales
WAX is very small. These charts show who has the most purchases by volume. You can see how in OS1 there were more users overall and how in OS2 less whales contribute towards a largest percentage of the sales.
Series 1
Series 2
Average Price Per Mint Number
When you look at how much people are willing to pay for lower mint numbers, there is an obvious correlation between mint # and price. This drops off steadily after the first few mint numbers, but it is easy to see that users value lower mint numbers overall.
Series 1
Series 2
Account Interactions
The following packed bubble charts look at how many times buyers and sellers interacted with each other. Totally not COVID safe. In other words, the larger the bubble, the more the same two individuals have sold or purchased from each other.
The distribution here shows that although there are a few users who seem to interact a lot, many sales are between people who don’t often interact at all. This could be because of a low amount of sales overall, or because most sales are organic. Series 2 does have a much tighter distribution and many more sales between the same buyer and seller. Iiiinteresting.
Series 1
Series 2
Top Ten Sales
I figured I would pause a minute here to highlight the top ten sales per launch in WAX for no other reason than to put something positive in the middle here. So um, 80k WAX is A LOT..OS2 has some catching up to do.
Series 1
Series 2
Volume Per Category
Here we see a breakdown of which categories of cards are commanding the most volume percentage of total sales. The price category did not pull well here, so I can only show it as a percentage of the total. Neat, huh?
Series 1
Series 2
Buyers over Time
Here we can somewhat show how the trend for buyers has gone down over time..by showing it increase as we go back in time **WAVY LINES ON SCREEN** The reverse of what we would expect to see for a new product. Work to do, there is.
Series 1
Series 2
Average Card Prices Over Time
These charts are like the charts above in that they go earliest to latest. I did not find much value in this data besides seeing that the low total volume of sales skews the average and makes it hard to see any trends, which is true of all the data shown here. I included it because otherwise people would ask how the sales are trending..
Series 1
Series 2
Conclusion
A lot can be learned by looking at this early blockchain release data. At the same time, with such a limited amount of data points, we can easily be swayed by any interpretations we try to make after the math has already been run. Doing this experiment has shown me that even just scraping some data on a blockchain release can give you decent insight into how well that product is performing. As a collector, fan, and enthusiast, I look at this data and go huh..I sure hope they crank up the marketing.
Data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dZrnKzNU3u__pmuFlAfjFNHYWcZe08Sysc3yjr4UX-0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s9xVWoXuru4IkmxAoUzxlUmxOHaBxbG10FG5ZVd9dws/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PkvkU2XXWqQDK9sgO0nPCMgSHlTQOtOv8p27KedvwRU/edit?usp=sharing