Three years of silence later, Nakamigos has proved something most people thought was impossible.
Most NFT projects from 2021 to 2023 followed the same formula. Mint the project, join the Discord, buy into the community, and hope the founders could keep enough hype alive to hold attention. Floors moved on tweets, partnerships, roadmap promises, and whatever announcement came next. Most people weren’t really holding the art, they were holding confidence in the people behind it.
HiFo Labs never really operated like that.
They launched Nakamigos in 2023, gave Sartoshi pass holders free mint priority before opening the public Dutch auction, then mostly disappeared. One X account. No Discord. No roadmap. No founders constantly doing podcasts, spaces, or AMAs. They drop things occasionally, then go quiet again.
Three years later, the floor still sits around 0.13 to 0.14 ETH. That might not sound huge until you compare it to almost everything else from that era. Most 2023 NFT projects are either dead or barely hanging on. Nakamigos has done over 52,000 ETH in total volume and are the most traded NFT collection by unique transactions of all time.
We wanted to understand how that was possible, so we spoke to Anon (@anonchain), one of the most recognizable voices in the Nakamigos and broader NFT space, as well as one of the project’s largest holders. He coined the phrase “Nakamigos coded” and, alongside Coops (@Nicoops), helped organize the meetups that became the social backbone of the project.
At this point, he’s fully bought into what Nakamigos represents. If it all turns out to be meaningless, he says he’ll probably stop believing in NFTs entirely.
What pulled Anon into Nakamigos wasn’t just the art. The 24x24 pixel characters, the CryptoPunks sizing, the mix of hip-hop, sports, and internet culture references. It was the fact nobody was trying to convince him to stay.
HiFo Labs wasn’t grinding spaces, forcing collabs, or dangling roadmap promises to prop the floor up. Nakamigos just existed on its own terms, and people either connected with it or they didn’t.
We ask Anon why that matters. “The floor isn’t being held up by announcements,” he says. “It reflects what holders genuinely think the art is worth.” That matters more than most people realize.
None of the largest Nakamigos holders are tied to HiFo Labs. Compare that to projects like CryptoPunks or Meebits, where founders still hold major portions of supply. Nakamigos doesn’t have that cushion. The biggest holders are simply people who believed enough to go all in.
When there’s no founder leading the culture, someone usually fills the gap.
For Nakamigos, that became Anon and Coops. Neither are officially involved. No admin roles, no team allocation, no paychecks. They just started organizing Node meetups together and slowly became the people newer holders looked to for what Nakamigos actually represented.
Coops shows up to Node events. Anon leads his voice in the NFT space. Together they built the social layer the project never formally created.
When we ask what keeps people around he mentions, “You're here because you genuinely believe in the ethos, in the origins of the story of Satoshi and Bitcoin. You want to preserve that and pay homage to it and to be able to tell that story to future generations through the art.”
A lot of NFT communities feel performative. Everyone trying to convince each other the project still matters so the floor doesn’t die. Nakamigos feels different. Smaller and quieter, but the people still here actually care.
When founders stay silent, communities naturally start building their own narratives. But Anon doesn’t believe the silence around Nakamigos is accidental. He thinks it’s intentional.
“I believe there are likely NDAs being taken extremely seriously, likely due to the partners that may be aligning or in the mix,” he tells us.
The community still points back to Beeple acknowledging Nakamigos early, before seemingly disappearing from the conversation entirely. No follow ups, no retweets, no public involvement afterwards.
Anon has spent years tracking what he sees as repeated Nintendo references across Beeple’s everydays from that same period, including one titled “Long Game” featuring a giant Nintendo controller. Beeple also referred to Nakamigos as “V0 Punks,” comparing it to CryptoPunks before they became what they are today. Whether that means something or he’s simply trolling is still debated constantly inside the community.
Then there’s HiFo’s old “Not Larva. Not Yuga. Nakamigos.” post. Most people interpreted it as a denial. Anon sees it more as misdirection, believing people connected to both Larva Labs and Yuga could still be involved in some capacity behind the scenes.
When we ask whether that drifts too far into conspiracy territory, he points to something more concrete.
“Redbeard has mentioned on multiple interviews now that a Nakamigos cabal exists and NDAs are real. That’s not even really a conspiracy at this point.”
To Anon, the bigger picture is HiFo quietly building long term infrastructure instead of chasing attention cycles. Full commercial rights from day one. Worldwide gaming rights tied to CLOAKS.
The community stuck and the art still resonates, but there’s also a lingering feeling throughout Nakamigos that something bigger might still be sitting behind the curtain.
The silence would feel like abandonment if HiFo wasn’t shipping. But they have been, consistently, for three years.
March 2023: Nakamigos launches with free mint priority for Sartoshi pass holders and full commercial rights.
September 2023: CLOAKS drops. Another 20,000 characters with worldwide gaming rights. Originally planned as a 0.05 ETH mint before backlash pushed it free for holders.
January 2024: Crypto Trading Cards. 837 cards released exactly 31 years after Hal Finney’s “Crypto trading cards” email to the Cypherpunk mailing list.
Later in 2024 came the Hal Finney Bobbleheads, continuing HiFo’s obsession with cypherpunk history and early Bitcoin culture.
December 2024: Fukuhedrons launches on Bitcoin through Ordinals.
2025: CLOAKS games being a fully playable Fortnite island, The Legend of Himaji.
January 2026: Cypherpunk Files. Nearly 10,000 lore NFTs minted out the same day.
Six expansions turned into seven. Mostly free or priority access for holders. None of it heavily marketed beforehand. HiFo would simply appear, release something new, then disappear again.
What HiFo created by refusing to constantly perform is something stranger than a normal NFT community. With no founder to rally around, the mystery itself became part of the culture. No roadmap to follow, so holders built their own theories. No Discord to live inside, so the real believers organized themselves through Node meetups, X spaces, and endless conspiracy threads.
“Nakamigos coded” started as a joke. Now it’s shorthand between holders for the feeling that they’re part of something the rest of the space still doesn’t fully understand.
When you remove the founder from the equation, the community either dies or hardens. Nakamigos hardened.
The people still here aren’t here because someone convinced them to stay. They stayed because they convinced themselves.
Near the end of our conversation, Anon says something that reframes the whole story.
“If I was so certain of something and it was proven that I was just wrong, that it was not that special, and even worse that we were lied to or taken advantage of or abandoned, I don't want to do this anymore. I would just stop believing in anything this intensely moving forward.”
- Anon
For him, Nakamigos became the test case.
Can NFT communities survive without founders farming engagement every day? Does conviction matter more than hype? Can the art alone be enough?
Three years in, the floor still sits around 0.13 to 0.14 ETH while most 2023 projects built entirely around founder personality are dead or barely alive.
The people still in Nakamigos are there because they want to be, not because someone convinced them to stay.
HiFo refused to play the same game everyone else did. What came out of it wasn’t chaos. It was a community that genuinely cares about the art, people like Anon and Coops who stepped up naturally, and a floor built more on conviction than manufactured hype.
Will this approach work forever?
Does Beeple actually know the alpha?
For now, everyone is still waiting to find out.
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