Last week, Hype Hippos came out of nowhere like a meteorite and was able to gather enough fomo and hype in four days to sell out its entire 10,000 at 0,08 ETH collection in an hour, despite severe technical difficulties. Although the collection is performing very poorly on the secondary market, the team behind the project managed to sell yet another 1,257 batch of female hippos at 0.02 ETH each.

No hype, no value: every NFT investor knows that even the best project won’t generate value if it doesn’t manage to gather enough hype and fomo before its mint. On the contrary, we see more and more projects without tangible added value selling out in a matter of minutes following a heavy marketing campaign.

On the other hand, a successful mint is no guarantee that a collection will have any meaningful value on the secondary market, as shown in the Hype Hippos case, whose items change hands at 0.01 floor price, or 8 times less than their initial mint price!

Hype Hippos came literally out of nowhere, the first messages on their Discord server being dated August 24, 2021, or just 5 days before minting! The team obviously allocated a lot of resources for marketing, using all the tricks they could.

On August 25, 2021, they published a press release on Yahoo Finance entitled Highly Anticipated NFT Drop of Hype Hippos Announces Their Launch Date Sooner Than Most Were Expecting, which they shared everywhere on their official platforms without explicitly saying that they wrote the article themselves.

But more importantly perhaps, unlike other projects, the team behind Hype Hippos made an extensive use of Instagram, and managed to have several influencers and big accounts in the NFT community promote their upcoming collection. On August 28, they were featured on Mark Cuban’s backed Instagram account nft, and on August 29 Amanda Cerny, an Instagram celebrity with around 25 million subscribers also published a story on them.

During all this extremely short period, Hype Hippos seemed to be everywhere, from rarity.tools to Twitter and Instagram.

Needless to say that on mint day (August 29 at 3 PM EST) their discord server, which had around 15k members with at least 3 to 5k real online members, was literally on fire. It was obvious that the team managed to attract first-timers, as the main chat was submerged by newbie technical questions on how to buy Ether and how to use Metamask to mint.

Many also suspected that the team itself was behind a high number of accounts and encouraged the hype while suppressing negative comments by literally flooding the chat with emojis and short bullish messages. At some point, a dozen of account just texted hundreds of “HYPPPPE” every second, while doubtful or suspicious members were promptly banned.

The mint itself was a disaster, as apparently some dev unlocked the contract half an hour before the actual mint (it was never clarified whether it was intentional) and people started minting en masse while the crowd was waiting an official announcement from the team, which never went. Despite this red flag, the whole collection sold out in an hour or so, bringing 800 ETH cash to the Hype Hippos team.

On the secondary market, Hype Hippos did not perform well, to say the least. While the collection managed to stay at an average price of 0.09 ETH for a couple of days, it quickly dipped to a 0.03 ETH average price a week after the initial sale, and its floor is currently sitting at 0.01 ETH.

This did however not stop the developing team to launch yet another collection of 5,000 Hippos on September 6 for minting, this time only females, at 0.02 ETH. While it obviously did not perform as well as the first mint, the team still managed to sell 1,262 out of them in around 12 hours, already cashing in 25 ETH.