Moonbirds Can’t Remember If It Gave Jimmy Fallon A Free NFT

After more repeated attempts to get an answer about Fallon’s NFT from Rose and the Moonbirds team, Rose finally responded two days later that he was too busy to answer whether or not Fallon was gifted a freebie, saying over email:

“I have an insane roster of advisors across a wide range of disciplines that receive moonbirds. Some paid for their Moonbirds, some work for them, and some are gifts for various help and advice they’ve contributed. I’m not going to get into the financial details of each Moonbird transfer, but know that just looking at the blockchain transfer is silly; it doesn’t show you the whole picture of the relationships we’ve established or why they are receiving them.”

The price of an NFT collection is very susceptible to hype: If other people see influential people in the NFT space buy into a collection, it makes it desirable, and the prices go up. A handful of celebrities have recently gotten into NFTs: Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, and other A-list actors, musicians, and athletes have bought into popular NFT collections like World of Women or Bored Ape Yacht Club. Moonpay, a crypto payment company, recently announced a funding round with a bunch of celebrity investors. These celebrities may enjoy the artwork or the fun of speculating and collecting, or perhaps they realize the uniquely lucrative potential: Merely attaching their own names as a buyer to an NFT will likely raise its value.

And indeed, that’s what happened with Jimmy Fallon’s Moonbird. On Wednesday morning before he tweeted, Moonbirds were selling for a range of around $55,000 to $60,000. By Friday morning, the average price had gone up to about $111,000, according to NFT trading platform OpenSea. A rare gold feathered owl sold yesterday for over $600,000.

“We know we’re on fire right now, in terms of hype,” said Rose in a Twitter Space on Thursday.