Last Christmas I had a few extra dollars, or at least was under the impression I did, so late one night after a few beers I decided to do some digital hunting to see what might be out there in NFT land. Now, I'm no big spender, so OpenSea is off the menu for me. But I do dabble a bit in the WAX network, knowing enough about it from gaming and discord forums to feel pretty comfortable there. What I didn't expect was to see a K-mart Bluelight Special show up out of the blue.

A Bit of Background

Different NFT cards, especially in sets and groups have different levels of rarity. There are commons which get generated by the thouands are worth a fraction of a penny. Then there are uncommons and rares; a bit harder to get, worth a bit more in terms of reach as much as a few dollars, but you can get them all with a bit of savings and patience. However, once you start getting up to the epic level, things start getting a bit pricey. It's quite common to spend anywhere from $20 to $50 on an epic. Finally, the mythic and legendary level of an NFT series are extremely rare, supposedly have a lot of high demand, and require some serious risk and cash up front to get.

Good Beer and Computers are Dangerous

So, when I'm running along digitally, playing with filters and seeing what's out there that cold, holiday night, what do I find and just about spit my beer all over my laptop? None other than the #1 card in the CryptoMonkey series going for less than half the normal going rate. What?!? This is a joke right? A bit of detail here: this particular card has an extremely low issue of only 19 copies. CryptoMonkeys has a huge, popular Banano-theme following, and these cards don't typically get offered to the main audience. They are either scored in drops, packs or special work, as in being one of the artists. No surprise, the secondary market typically demands a hefty price for any legendaries, and definitely for the first card in the series.

Now, I'm definitely opening a 4th beer at this point, checking my wallet to see what I have, and then scrambling to move some Litecoin to an exchange to turn it into Wax and get it into my cloud account. This whole frustrating process and related confirmations literally takes more than 45 minutes. By this point I'm convinced the card is gone, but lo, it's still there at the ungodly low price of 50% under suggested market price. Finally, my Wax shows up, and snap. For the space of 1.whatever seconds, I'm holding my breath. And I got it. The card is mine.

Now, for some of you, this is why people shouldn't drink and look at NFTs alone at night. I dropped some $470+ on this one purchase. But there's a lot going on here. First, the market for any early issue legendary CryptoMonkey card simply doesn't hit this low. Even the later issue CryptoMonkey legendaries are well over $300 a piece. But when I looked at this history on this particular card, it had never really dipped below $500 except back in late 2020.

So there is obviously a lot of upside potential on this asset.

Sell, Sell, Sell...Well Maybe Not

More importantly, though, scoring the #1 card for the CryptoMonkey series and particularly the first NFT artwork by the series' artists Soggy and Rah was a treasure find at the price I was fortunate enough to land. Currently, the same card with a different mint is well over twice as much in price. On the other hand, it may very well be that I bought the card at its real market value as no other sales on the same have happened since.

Will I be able to flip it and make big moola? The market definitely isn't in the mood to let another one go for as cheap as mine card sold for. And if mine does sell, it will probably take another person just as drunk on a holiday night as I was with money to spend. However, I'm not in a hurry to sell it. Having the #1 legendary CryptoMonkey is like holding onto a bit of history that only 18 other people have as well. That's pretty cool, especially with the digital world changing so fast these days. Eventually, the card will end up with someone else in time, but for now, it's my own special beer story I can show friends.