A Bored Ape Whale Just Spent Nearly $1 Million on DeGods NFTs

DeGods has dominated the Solana NFT space, racking up more trading volume in SOL than any other project. It now plans to move over to Ethereum, and the project appears to have already caught the eye of at least one big investor in the space.

A pseudonymous NFT trader known as “Pokeee” spent nearly $1 million to sweep 69 DeGods NFTs on Monday. Pokeee made the buy through the Magic Eden marketplace, using its tool that lets buyers “sweep the floor” or buy up a desired amount of NFTs from a project. Traders sometimes purchase numerous lowest-priced NFTs in a project as a bet on the future success of the collection, rather than individually selecting more valuable assets.

Pokeee previously promised to do so if his tweet from January 13 received 1,000 likes on Twitter. He wrote that he would buy 69 of the NFTs “in support of” the project’s impending move to Ethereum, and the tweet ultimately racked up nearly 3,000 likes. Three days later, the approximately $900,000 purchase was completed.

Magic Eden previously only allowed up to 50 NFTs to be purchased at a time through its bulk buying feature. But when prompted by the prospective buyer, who claimed that the proposed change was “of ultimate inconvenience” late on Sunday, the marketplace upgraded the functionality and enabled the larger mass purchase.

Pokeee (on Twitter) claims to be the same owner behind the Pokeee.eth Ethereum wallet, which holds three valuable Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs as well as the titular Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name and other NFT collectibles.

In a text interview that Magic Eden posted today via the marketplace’s website, Pokeee claimed that he runs a private crypto fund, and said that he made this sizable DeGods play due to the project’s planned move to Ethereum.

“My purpose of this investment is actually to have them bridged to ETH,” he said. “Due to on-chain risks, I wasn’t able to deploy larger portions of my portfolio into Solana. I was having fun in Solana on smaller NFTs and mints back then.”

DeGods has racked up some $135 million worth of trading volume to date, per data from CryptoSlam. While it’s beaten in total USD trading value by projects like Solana Monkey Business and Degenerate Ape Academy that were popular when SOL was much more valuable, DeGods tops all projects on a SOL basis with 3.7 million SOL worth of trading to date.

The project launched in late 2021 but rose significantly in value and prominence last year, as developer DeLabs—led by the pseudonymous Frank, who recently revealed his real name as Rohun Vora—debuted a reward token, rolled out new artwork, purchased the rights to a BIG3 basketball league team, and launched a follow-up project called y00ts.

In late December, DeLabs announced that DeGods will be bridged to Ethereum’s mainnet while y00ts will bridge over to Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain. The studio plans to complete both moves by the end of this quarter, and disclosed that it received a $3 million grant from Polygon Labs to move y00ts to the Polygon chain.