CloneX Sales Recap & Timeline

5 min readDec 1, 2021

Wow! That was… messy. RTFKT’s website got massively attacked, Discord flooded, Sale Compromised by prices on OpenSea, Public Sale halted, Public Sale restarted..! I mean, what the… fck!? 😳 “Crypto drama” business as usual some would say.

👉 Wanna buy? Sale is over, head to CloneX Collection on OpenSea.
👉 Wanna know more? Read my previous article: “Clone X Drop: Everything You Need To Know”

Below are my notes, a summary of the situation and my expectations/hypothesis, as we went through the sales events 👇

Floor prices of eligible NFTs right BEFORE the Pre-Sale

Floor for Mintdisc1 was 4–6 ETH on Nov 25 & 26.
Floor for Mintdisc3 was 12–14 ETH on Nov 25 & 26.
There was a total of 1505 Mintdisc1 & Mintdisc3 airdropped.
There was ~20 Mintdisc1 & 3 Mintdisc3 traded on Nov 25 & 26.
Floor for eligible RTFKT NFTs (see above), allowing 3 CloneX mint, was 13–14.5 ETH on Nov 26.
Assumption1: this 4–6 ETH floor price represents the future price of a Clone X Vial (post mint, pre-reveal).

Floor prices of eligible NFTs right AFTER the Pre-Sale

Floor for eligible RTFKT NFTs such as Fewocious RTFKT dropped to 2.5 ETH on Nov 27–29. A 10 ETH price drop! o_O And it seems the same happened to the rest of the eligible collections.
Assumption2: this 10 ETH price drop represents the future price of 3 Clone X Vial (post mint, pre-reveal), bringing the floor price to 3.3 ETH per item.

RTFKT’s discord server members getting excited on Public Sale launch day

Floor prices of Mintvials right BEFORE the Public Sale

CloneX Mintvial floor price is 3.3–3.7 ETH (with 350+ Mintvials traded) on Nov 29, 10h before the Public Sale goes live.
99% of the 11'133 pre-sale Mintvials have been claimed (2.5h before public sale opens)
Assumption3: we saw a drop in price between Assumption1 and Assumption2; however, we saw that Assumption2 and current Mintvial floor price are matching. Public sale Dutch auction stars at 3 ETH. Conclusion: public sale might sell out very close to its 3 ETH starting price.
Assumption4: if the 8'367 NFTs available for the public sale have an average price of 2.8 ETH, the team will raise with that alone 102'823'736 USD!

Public Sale

The RTFKT website got totally overloaded + the Discord Chat got flooded with tons of messages
Less people than anticipated bought from the Dutch Auction at close to 3 ETH starting price
When reaching 2.7 ETH, people started seeing an opportunity: the auction might reach 2 ETH or less, so some people started to sell their Mint Vials just under the current auction price (2.6 or 2.5 ETH) in the hope of buying one when the auction is down to 2 ETH or less. So many did that, it created a crazy dynamic: no-one was buying from the auction anymore.
Discord got crazier and exploded with tons of messages. At this point no-one knew if these were from genuine community members or FUDers. Add to that the massive shitshow with the website under attack and people not being able to access it.
2h30min into the sale: the team STOPPED the public sale! They also blocked the discord chats announcing that the website got massively attacked, the discord was full of trolls and the sale almost stalled.
They then announced re-starting the public sale the next day

Public Sale, Round 2

The sale mechanics got announced in a twitter space 1h before the sale started
CloneX public sale restarted on Nov 30th at 7pm CET. This time with a fixed price of 2 ETH per item
The sale SOLD OUT in 37min!
Of course some people got bitter on how the whole story worked out. It is the nature of the space though, very experimental, and sometime that works in your favour, sometimes not. Nothing new under the sun.

Post Public Sale

RTFKT did an airdrop of 1'000 CloneX to those who minted on the website during the pre-sale and public sale.
On Dec 1, floor price is 2.7 ETH on OpenSea

I cannot help but to have mixed feelings about how this all went.

Cons: The Dutch Auction turned out to be a terrible idea given the sales mechanism, it would have worked if the market did not already have so many cheaper items in circulation. I’m also disappointed on the community management, there were so few moderators to handle the situation.
Pros: On the other hand, halting the dutch auction seemed to have work out. The 2nd round of public sale sold out very fast and the Dutch Auction is just a bad memory now. The price picked up on OpenSea coming to 2.7 ETH, close to what those who paid most in the Dutch Auction (3 ETH), meaning they are very unlikely to lose money should they need to liquidate early for whatever reason.

Finally, considering the massive amount of funds and the amazing track record of the team, I’m very optimistic on what’s to come. The utility coming with the CloneX does give everyone quite some excitement: amazing derivatives, accessories, metaverse access, IRL events access, you name it. The future is bright. ✨