Before we get to the headline, here is a rather bold prediction on how many Poets will be burned after 365 days from their reveal:
Yep, zero.
To take a step back, Lost Poets is the most recent project by Pak that sold out in 70 minutes, all 65,536 of them (including airdrops/bonuses) generating a +$70 million windfall. All Pak NFTs can be high-tier burned for $ASH, which is Pak’s cryptocurrency creation and the only way to mint $ASH is by burning NFTs.
$ASH per Pak NFT burned declines according to a bonding curve (each burned NFT yields incrementally fewer $ASH) and 1 means 1000 $ASH on the first burn. The x-axis is the number of burns. We may ignore the green low-tier curve.
So after ~7200 burns, there is a halving in that $ASH minted per Pak NFT burned drops to 500 from 1000 initially (Initial $ASH per NFT is weighted to 1).
Let’s extend this curve a bit (approximation, with the original bonding curve overlaid) to see the effect of more cumulative burns on $ASH minting:
You can see there is a halving of the amount of $ASH minted per high-tier NFT at successive 5 million $ASH supplies.
While this is an estimate, if all 65,536 Poet NFTs were burned you would get ~100-150 $ASH for the last Poet. At the current $ASH price of about $15, that is $1500 or 0.43 eth, well above the drop price of 0.32 eth.
Rest assured, this is an absolute, absolute worst-case bearish scenario and one should not just value NFTs based on how fungible they are. Pak stated during The Fungible value comes from ownership, scarcity, influence, hype, and fungibility.
Now here is why I believe ZERO Poets will be burned when high-tiered in a year (after reveal):
A lot can happen in 365 days
Pak will only high-tier collections that have floors well above the $ASH floor. Pak will not depress the $ASH market with new burnable supply
Recall that Pages are mint passes for Poets and they are 1:1. I expect more than 10-15% of Pages will NOT be converted to Poets so that automatically decreases the (latent) Poet count. Pages may have other utility during reveal as well (non-game utility; pure speculation here) so the percentage unconverted to Poets could go higher
A large % of claimed Poets will be named (uniquely) and since Lost Poets is a strategy game, these characters will hold in-game and sentimental value. You aren’t going to burn a Poet NFT that is named after your significant other or your cat. You also won’t be burning an in-game character you have spent weeks or months interacting with and possibly upgrading
That still leaves 10-20% of Poets possibly that might be burned which would yield at least 350-400 $ASH. Well, here is some context on numbers for a blockchain-based role-playing game that was launched by the founder of Yearn.finance on Sep. 5th
65k gaming characters, let along 10-20k, might just be too “few”:
In the short time since Lost Poets was launched on Mid-June Day (Sep 3), it has already climbed the leaderboards:
My sense is there will be even more interest and excitement when the “huge unrevealed part” surfaces for Lost Poets. Pak is saving the best for Believers.
You write that: “That still leaves 10-20% of Poets possibly that might be burned which would yield at least 350-400 $ASH.” Is that 300-400 ash per NFT burned or 300-400 Ash for the remaining 10-20% of all Poets?
If a page was burned today, does it generate ~700 ASH?