#207: The Rarest Starbucks NFT

PLUS: 🧳 More details about the LV launch

Starbucks Odyssey’s airdrop whoopsie

A couple weeks ago, I received this e-mail from Starbucks Odyssey:

Nice! Another stamp NFT from Starbucks, and I already qualified as I’ve been actively completing journeys and purchased one of the Limited-Edition Stamps a couple months ago.

Why did Starbucks do this? I would assume the team wants to:

• Understand engagement and reception for artist collaborations with Stamps

• Measure community progress based on different incentives. Can an airdrop encourage less active members to complete specific actions? The IRL analog is Starbucks Rewards incentives (eg received an e-mail today: “make 3 purchases, earn 45 bonus stars”)

• Understand the impact of secondary market sales if owning a specific Stamp is a requirement

With the snapshot taken at the deadline, I received this e-mail yesterday. Airdrop received, woohoo!

Interesting that 2,352 Odyssey members qualified for the airdrop.

We don’t know the full funnel and conversion rates for this type of engagement, but this is a good example of how on-chain (holding Stamps) and off-chain (purchasing Stamps, completing journeys) behavior can be combined to understand user behavior, engagement, and insights more effectively.

As community members received the Airdrop e-mails in their inbox, they noticed something was wrong.

Clicking on ‘See Your Stamp’ led to a listing page for the Stamp at $1 a pop.

As the Discord went through mild chaos, the team quickly shut down the listing and deprecated the collection. Meanwhile, Nifty Gateway called back the NFTs that were distributed.

Wait, you can call back NFTs?!

In the case of Odyssey Stamps, yes you can. Nifty Gateway, Odyssey’s platform partner, has an Omnibus wallet that functions as a custodial option to move NFTs around (buy, sell, transfer, etc.)

4 hours after the initial botched airdrop, the team relaunched the collection and properly airdropped the Stamp to the 2,354 members.

Not sure why the thumbnail is broken 🤷‍♂️

All’s well that ends well. But there is one minor wrinkle or two.

The rarest Starbucks NFTs?

As I mentioned earlier, the Odyssey Stamps live on Nifty Gateway’s marketplace and are held by their Omnibus wallet. However, you can choose to withdraw your NFTs from Nifty Gateway to a non-custodial wallet, one that you truly own.

While the mild-mannered chaos ensued, two stamps escaped the reach of the Omnibus wallet, #45 and #134.

Why did these two individuals quickly self-custody their Stamps?

Maybe it’s part of their standard process to self-custody everything, maybe because they want to sell for more profit outside of Nifty Gateway, or maybe because they had an inkling that the Omnibus wallet would reverse the transactions. Who knows.

However, I would argue that these two NFTs may eventually become one of the rarest Starbucks NFTs, even if the company releases 1 of 1’s in the future.

Why?

Too many mistakes are bad. However, mistakes from reputable brands and products can make them even more rare.

I’m not a collectible card expert by any means, but a comparable example of this is with Pokemon Cards. For example, in 2021 a Blastoise card that was misprinted on the back of a Magic The Gathering card sold for $216,000. 🤯

Only 3 of these have been printed.

There are many other examples of error cards that have become highly sought after over the years.

On Starbucks’ side, they could update the metadata to emphasize that the deprecated collection and 2 self-custodied NFTs are worthless, maybe something like this.

If this were to happen, it might actually make the NFT even more ‘rare’.

To be clear, there’s no functional utility for the deprecated collection. But that’s the point of collecting for collecting’s sake. There’s beauty and rarity in the error, and sometimes there’s a story that comes with it.

The reality of brands and NFTs

It’s unrealistic to expect large companies and brands to embrace crypto and web3 in its truest form (fully immutable, permissionless, etc.). With this example, we see that Starbucks utilized Nifty Gateway’s Omnibus wallet capabilities to rescind the first Airdrop and rerun a duplicate collection just a few hours later.

I believe that this is ok and want to give a shoutout to the Odyssey team for the quick fix. These are digital collectibles after all, not corporate income statements.

On the other hand, the immutability of the mistake is real in the sense that these mistakes will live on the blockchain forever, at least to some degree. Whether or not people care to know what happened is up to the community.

More details about Louis Vuitton’s NFT collection

Registration for Louis Vuitton’s Treasure Trunk collection are now open. Some additional observations on top of my thoughts in the last piece:

• LV is bringing on VIA Guides: It seems like these guides will be ambassadors for the brand’s web3 efforts. I first caught this from Farokh, CEO of Rug Radio and popular web3 personality (350k Twitter followers). I imagine these Guides will act as representatives of the brand sorta like how it happens IRL with luxury brands. Another ambassador is Betty, CEO and Founder of Deadfellaz.

• The first digital collectible will be revealed at the next LV Men’s show by Pharrell on June 20. Pharrell is no stranger to web3, as he is also the Chief Brand Officer for Doodles. We’ll quickly see how LV incorporates the physical and web3 together.

• Joining the wait list is quick and simple: Connect your wallet, provide your e-mail, and verify that the wallet is yours.

In the meantime, I need to find $42,000 between my couch cushions. Wish me luck…

See you next week!