Doodles has erupted in popularity since its launch in October last year. The NFT has now become one of the top non-fungible token collections on the market.
The ground-breaking NFT now features 10,000 pastel-colored, squiggly drawings. All of these drawings, living on the Ethereum blockchain. The cheapest of this collection trades for about $17,000 – equivalent to 15 ETH.
Julian Holguin, newly appointed CEO has some plans up his sleeves. The former president of Billboard has serious plans to push the current $500 million trading volume of NFTs.
Doodles NFT Intentions
“We want to create joyful experiences for people no matter what product we create, whether it’s a video game, a profile picture for Instagram, the music you listen to, [or] real-life attractions,” Holguin told Insider during an interview at the NFT.NYC conference Wednesday.
However, Holguin doesn’t just want cute photos. The CEO’s vision is to transform the company into a Web3 multimedia and entertainment brand. One that will be famous for featuring films, music and animations.
With this goal in mind the company has begun to take big steps. This week, they named musician Pharrell Williams as their chief brand officer.
“I’m a big fan of the brand. We’re going to build from the core community outward and bring Doodles to new heights.” Williams said.
On the same day, Doodles announced it had also raised its first funding round. The funding round was led by the venture capital firm, Seven Seven Six. This firm is helmed by the co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian.
In the 24 hours leading up to Thursday, which coincided with the event in New York, Doodles’ online sales volume surged over 1,000% to surpass $3.2 million, according to Cryptoslam data.
NFTs Despite The Economic Downturn
Despite having an amazing year in 2021, NFT sales have declined heavily. From its peak of almost $1 billion, NFTs have declined by 80% since January per nonfungible.com. Furthermore, it is not new that the size of the cryptocurrency market has fallen drastically. The market dropped by more than 50% to $1 trillion after being at $3 trillion sometime last year.
Bitcoin, the most widely traded cryptocurrency, is hovering around $20,000 currently, after hitting a record $69,000 in November. A slowing economy, coupled with rising interest rates and red-hot inflation has turned investors away from riskier assets.
However, Holguin still believes that the upcoming Doodles 2 collection will cost relatively less. This will lower the cost of entry and encourage NFT investments.
“The economy presents a macro challenge right now for everyone,” Holguin said. “But we’re really diversifying our business so we’re not completely tethered to the price of crypto. Plus Doodles 2 is going to be the most easily accessible project from a price perspective.“
In the event of a recession, Holguin said, the last thing people will get rid of will be something like a Netflix or Spotify account — and those kinds of platforms are exactly what Doodles aims to develop on the blockchain.
Hope For NFTs Future?
He said the current rout in the digital asset market was a sign of a “big maturation process” and echoed the belief of both the founder of NFT.NYC as well as the US CEO of The Sandbox: Stronger projects with supportive communities are going to be the ones that emerge stronger than before.
“Yeah, the economy is going through a down period right now, but this isn’t going to last forever,” Holguin said.