Hashmasks — The Art of Trading or the Trading of Art.

Pat Doyle
4 min readFeb 8, 2021

The NFT (non-fungible token) world has been receiving a lot of attention lately. Mark Cuban has even been tweeting about it. This past week a project called Hashmasks received a lot of interest from the Ethereum and NFT community. “Hashmasks is a living digital art collectible created by over 70 artists globally. It is a collection of 16,384 unique digital portraits.” They raised over 10,000 ETH during the initial sale of the portraits following the NFT sale schedule below.

Hashmask NFT Sale Schedule

Here’s how it works.

Each Hashmask a wallet owns will accumulate 3,660 Name Change Tokens (NCT) per year (~10 per day). If you participate in the initial contribution period, you receive an additional 3,660 NCTs per Hashmask purchased. To change the name of an NFT, you need to send 1,830 NCTs (about ½ years of NFT emission) to the Hashmask contract and burn them.

So, let’s take a look at what our NFT Whales are doing on-chain.

NFT Whales vs. Snails

Looking at wallets that purchased more than 20 Hashmasks (our whales) — we see only 3.6% (or 113) wallets purchased more than 20. Pictured below on the left. However, those 113 addresses control almost HALF of all the NFT’s. The remaining NFT’s are controlled by 3,058 different wallets.

Whale — are wallets that purchased more than 20 Hashmask during the initial sale.
Whale wallet (purchasing more than 20 Hashmask) control 45% of all hashmasks.

Which wallet had the best ROI on “Yield” Farming NCT?

Let’s look at which of these wallets actually were profitable. It is important to understand that this profit analysis is strictly looking at the immediate payoff from a wallet’s ETH contributions to the value of the NCT they received.

We want to compare the dollar amount each wallet spent on NFT’s compared to the dollar amount they received in Name Change Tokens (NCT) . Remember the NFT distribution model above, early contributors paid less ETH per NFT. If you were an early participant (first tranche) in Hashmask then you are already profitable in the Name Change Token that was received. Looking at the break out of Whales vs. Snails wallets, we see that more Snails wallets are profitable than Whales.

# of profitable Snail wallets vs. Whale Wallets

However, when we look at which category took the most total profit it was the Whales who made the most total dollars. Whales potentially made ~$175,000 while snails were at ~$145,000.

Total Dollars by category. Snails vs Whales

It is likely that many of the investors in this project are looking to profit off the rarity and uniqueness of their digital art. Many of these Hashmasks are selling on secondary markets like OpenSea.

Who did it best?

The single most profitable wallet in returns on their NCT was….

🥁🥁🥁Drumroll🥁🥁🥁

👏👏👏 0x4bbb41f61fffc1bbe65a2aa192c65281e16ea758 👏👏👏

This wallet bought 200 NFT’s at an average price of 0.1 ETH (~$160 each at the time of sale). For each NFT they purchased they received 3,660 NCT’s. 3,600 * $0.08 * 200 = $57,600. This wallet spent ~$32,000 in ETH for 200 Hashmasks. Profiting $25,000 and still having all the upside value of having 200 NFT’s. Every wallet that participated in the first wave of the sale was profitable but only a few wallets were able to get in for a large size.

Looking past the “yield farming” opportunity, we can start to analyze the secondary market of NFT’s being sold on Opensea. We can explore this wallet’s transactions on-chain to see if they have recouped their initial 20 ETH by selling Hashmasks on the secondary market.

On-chain data shows us that this wallet has sold 16 Hashmasks for a total of 52.35 ETH ($83,000). Bring their ROI to $108,000. This does not include the remaining NFT’s that have not yet been sold. Not a bad day.

Hashmask Sold on Open Sea by 0x4bbb41f61fffc1bbe65a2aa192c65281e16ea758

Written by Pat Doyle

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Pat Doyle

Building actionable blockchain analytics. Co-Founder @ Genesis Volatility