Nearly a year in the making, Proof Collective is finally ready to unveil the next development phase expanding upon the once-celebrated Moonbirds NFT brand.

The release of a 20,000-piece collection called Mythics begins today, the company announced. The latest iteration of the Moonbirds brand will kick off with the release of 100 new NFTs and will continue with an additional 100 each day for at least 200 days, Proof said in a statement.

Proof, which is run by co-founder and CEO Kevin Rose and backed by top crypto venture capitalist a16z, first released its Moonbirds PFP non-fungible token collection in April 2022. During its first month the collection generated nearly $485 million in sales with each NFT fetching an average price of over $30,000, according to CryptoSlam!.

Like the rest of the NFT market, interest in Moonbirds has fallen significantly since then with sales volumes just shy of $1.2 million in June, also according to CryptoSlam!. Average sales prices for Moonbirds have declined by nearly ten times from what they once were. Last month a Moonbirds NFT sold for an average of about $3,850, according to CryptoSlam!.

Elite NFT brands keep building

Like other top-shelf collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki and Doodles, Proof is hoping to stir community engagement and sales with efforts to enrich the underlying intellectual property with added brand lore. Proof is also aiming to prolong interest in the new collection with a unique release plan, or “slow roll out,” of the new NFTs.

“We’re really trying to give our community a new experience that links together the Proof ecosystem and expands the storytelling that started with Moonbirds,” Rose said in a statement.

Unlike Oddities, another Moonbird iteration released a month after the original collection debuted, Mythics represents a “truer follow-up” to Moonbirds, according to a person familiar with the matter. Proof first mentioned the eventual release of Mythics in August of last year.

Twitter post from Moonbirds community

“We took a deep dive into the lore of this world we’ve been building," Justin Mezzell, Proof Collective's co-founder and chief product officer said. "It was important to us that we create an engaging, entertaining experience."

source:theblock