Hold your horses.
That's been the mentality of Party Horses NFT buyers over the past few weeks as they waited for the chance to get tickets to an exclusive party on the eve of the Kentucky Derby. And now, those bets are paying off.
On Sunday, Party Horses sent, via AirDrop, 400 tickets to a random selection of NFT holders for a Louisville event featuring performances by Diplo and DJ Irie. The event will be held from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Friday, May 6, in Downtown Louisville.
As I previously reported, Louisville-based Party Horses created a collection of generative non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with tangible, real-world benefits like bottles of bourbon and tickets to exclusive events, like the one mentioned above. Roughly 1,200 individuals bought the 3,300 NFTs, which sold for more than $1.3 million in a 48-hour window last month.
While the vast majority of those buyers were from the U.S., Party Horses had buyers from every continent except Antartica, said the company's COO Chris Wiedmar. About $200,000 worth of NFTs have since been sold or traded on the secondary markets.
"It's been a crazy two weeks — it feels like two years," Wiedmar said in an interview last week, noting that the company donated a lot of proceeds from the mint to Ukraine, and plans to make donations to local charities, too. "But it's been an awesome experience, from a team standpoint and a community standpoint. Just seeing where we've come from in a really short, three-month window to building a brand and a company with a lot of cool things we can spin off has been really fun."
Party Horses wasn't the first venture to create utility NFTs — adding value to the NFT outside of the digital artwork itself — but it's among the first to tackle ticketing for experiences that blend current events with the emerging world of web3. The idea came from Justin Delaney, a serial entrepreneur, and was backed by Louisville investor Brook Smith. You can read more about how the project came together here.
"There's really nothing that's been built in the space yet around ticketing and redemption so that's something that we've seen a lot of opportunity in," Wiedmar continued. "We laugh because two of the biggest NFT conferences are going on and they're still using old school ticketing systems, and you'd think you'd see NFT tickets, but no one has really figured it out yet. It's pretty cool that we've cracked the code while working on this project."
For its own party, Wiedmar said Party Horses held a randomly generated draw to determine which horses had tickets to the event. If the NFT holder doesn't want to go or can't make it, they can then sell the ticket separately from their horse on a secondary market.
As of Monday afternoon, tickets listed on OpenSea ranged in price from .145 Ethereum (ETH) roughly $500, to 2.148 ETH, which is upwards of $7,000. Prices on Party Horses themselves range between .114 ETH ($413) to 666 ETH ($2.33 million), for this satanic-looking fellow.
In tandem with preparing for the big event, Party Horses will also release rare bourbon through a partnership with Maker's Mark in the coming weeks. Wiedmar said the team will be going on a 15-city "redemption tour" to meet with the community it has created in person. It's already hosted a few in person events in Louisville, Cincinnati and New York, among others.
