Ghxsts rockets to NFT stardom by focusing on community

I think I heard about Ghxsts a little over a week ago, I had missed the boat on the drop but I joined the Discord to see what all the buzz was about. Since then, I've seen both the community and the project grow like crazy and give birth to other complimentary collections that are taking on a life of their own.

Honestly, it's pretty amazing that currently on OpenSea, an offshoot of the Ghxsts project - PXIN GXNG now actually outranks it, and yes - both are in the top five.

The crazy thing about the NFT space and a project like Ghxsts is that projects can go from nothing to sold out in the blink of an eye. In this case, Ghxsts started their Twitter account this month (May of 2021) and already they've become one of the top NFT projects on OpenSea.

So what makes this project so special? Let's dive in.

First we'll start with the general concept - 100 ghosts are trapped in the blockchain, and as you might imagine, they're looking for a home 🏡  All of the Ghxsts are hand drawn and each has unique properties, some known, some unknown. The whole concept of unknown properties is pretty interesting and I personally haven't seen it used in any other NFT project.

There project hit the scene with a lot of cool little details that I think made it an instant hit, one that's hard to ignore is the concept of combining the DNA of two Ghxsts which gives you an Immxrtal.

It's this kind of creativity that started to really get some buzz going in the community. Investors started sharing their Immxrtals and the project was soon all over Twitter.

On May 13th the project inched ahead of SuperRare on OpenSea. At this point I don't think the creators or investors had any idea it was about to leap ahead of just about every major NFT project.

But what's really special here is the community. Spend a minute on Twitter or on the Ghxsts Discord and you'll see something really special has formed, and people around the world noticed.

Suddenly, Ghxsts started selling on the secondard market for real money, the floor shot up and sales like the one below were made on a project that was less than two weeks old...

With all 100 Ghxsts accounted for, i.e. saved and now in new homes, you would think the buck would stop there, but honestly, what happened next has been absolutely mesmerizing. The creators moved into creating a new piece to commemorate the gas wars that took place during the Ghxst launch...and those sold out ten minutes.

With the success of their first meme, the project promised to create more in the future, and that they did, the next one being of a yellow salt shaker in an ode to the SXLT GXNG. I missed the Ghxst drop, missed buying in at a good price, and missed the Ghxst wars meme so I made sure to snag a SXLT GXNG before that sold and, and sell out it did. Here's my little pride and joy:

But I missed it, as did many other investors that didn't see the trajectory of this project early enough. The reality is - the creator(s) of Ghxst could write the playbook on how to launch a successful NFT and a lot of it centers around truly exceptional community building.

Right now I feel like the guy showing up to an exotic car show on roller blades, but at least I have a little skin in the game to hang with the crew. There are a lot more intricacies I could cover on all the nuanced things that Ghxsts did right but I'll probably save that for a follow-up post.

For now, it's safe to say that Ghxsts found the magic formula, and it wasn't about spending a fortune on marketing, instead it was about making something really special and doubling down on making the community really shine. Congrats to Gong Yang for putting this amazing project together and to the investors around the world who know they are a part of something really special.