(Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)
Gm everyone. It’s officially been 3 full months of writing Mint Calendar and we’re super grateful for all of the support and how quick we’ve grown. Thank you to everyone who subs – we’re looking forward to continuing to bring you valuable and relevant content for years to come. As we experiment and grow, we want to remain engaging and gear our writing towards you, the readers so always feel free to share feedback on what you want to hear more of over email or through twitter DM. Some updates below:
Quick Important Announcements:
We’ll be launching our own discord. Come hangout with us in the Block Party Discord. While it’s pretty barebones at the moment, we’ll continue to build the community around what the members are looking for. Feel free to reach out to us on twitter if you would like to get more involved, write a guest post, or be a mod. Side note here, with creating a discord server comes obvious scammers. We will never reach out to you via dm, only within our own discord server. Looking forward to chatting with you all.
We’d like to announce an official partnership (our first ever partnership) with the Cold Blooded Creepz, who we’ll be co-hosting our first ever twitter spaces with, likely on Wednesday 12/8 around ~6pm ET. If you’ve read this newsletter over the last few weeks, you’ll know that this is one of the few upcoming projects we’re actually excited about and figured a public AMA with the founders could be a great way to learn more, increase transparency, and keep everyone active. While it's tough to stick your neck out publicly like we are currently, we feel really good about the Creepz and decided to double down on supporting actual quality as opposed to covering a large handful of “maybes”, especially as the overall markets experience the volatility that they currently are.
Finally, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback around the crypto career section from last week’s newsletter (h/t TheChild). So, the collaboration will continue again this week. Feel free to share feedback around which careers standout the most so we know to try sourcing more similar roles.
With that all out of the way, let’s dive in.
Macro Update:
Volatile week for crypto, with a flash crash of 15-20% on Saturday evening. As we approach the end of the year we don’t expect conditions to get any clearer. While ETH trending down is generally good for NFTs, we think that this extreme volatility isn’t, as NFTs are a risk-on asset in the space and volatility will generally scare people off in the immediate term.
On the other hand, the buying opportunities remain. NFTs aren’t being discussed anymore and it seems that everyone moved on to the next big thing (right now it’s the 80,000,000% APY ponzis on AVAX).
We remain level headed and bullish. As the no-coiners and right-click-savers come out and preach that the end is near, we smile, nod, and keep our long term perspective intact. Plus, if you’ve been following us since day 1, you are most likely up quite big on your cute internet pictures.
Blue chips we’ve discussed are still having record sales and high quality projects are constantly spitting out multiple 5 ETH plus sales a day. Current thesis remains: buy the dip on high quality projects if you can handle the volatility, double down on quality new mints (don’t spray and pray).
We think the biggest news right now is probably the closing spread between Punks and BAYC. Punks have seen a few 65 ETH sales, which is drastically lower than their 100 ETH floor 4-5 weeks ago. On the other hand, the Bored Apes look as resilient as ever, hitting an ATH 52 ETH floor as of writing this.
While everyone loves to talk about the flippening of ETH/BTC, it’s always been seen as “cringe” to talk about Apes flipping Punks. We don’t really know where we stand on this, but it’s simply fascinating to watch play out. As we’ve mentioned already, it seems that every A list celebrity or athlete who enters the NFT space wants an Ape over a punk, so take that for what it is. This also drives home what we’ve stated before, which is that money flows to the top – Bored Apes seem to be the #1 beneficiary of this right now. Punks/Apes aside, there are some great deals out there and some diamonds in the rough with newer projects if you where to look and remain diligent (Hint #69 … Doodles).
The Struggle of New Mints
It’s no secret that the once high probability lottery ticket of blindly minting new projects and flipping them shortly after is long gone. While many mints have underperformed since the official mint day, it’s only fairly recently we’ve seen projects struggling to actually sell out. Selling out within 24-48 is probably the most notable indicator for the future success of a project at this time. Correct us if we’re wrong, but we don’t believe there has been a single highly successful project launched over the past 2 years that didn’t sell out within the first couple of days.
With NFT FUD at an all time high, it’s crucial to keep an open mind because high risk/ high reward opportunities will present themself. In this case, we’ll do some quick coverage on 2 extremely high profile projects that minted last week with opposite results.
Paradise Trippies
One of our followers put this on our radar and we never had time for a deep analysis. Fortunately, this may have worked to our advantage since this project hasn’t turned out the way we would have originally expected (LINK).
Paradise trippies is a true testament to how tough the NFT market is right now. This project was as high profile as it got. 30k followers on twitter, 20k discord, a bunch of BAYC holders w 10s of thousands of followers shilling, reputable people on CT minting, and the founders are the domain name slinging Booth Brothers. Not only was the team’s track record stellar, the art is super unique and not at all a copy pasta project.
A few days post-mint, the floor is now significantly below the mint price and the project is just over 50% sold out. Side note: House of Warlords which we covered the other week, another high profile and thoughtful project is struggling as well to sell out.
So what went wrong here? Tough to put a finger on it but our best guess is that hype, founders, and track record doesn’t always mean success. Instead, in this type of market people who mint have to want to be part of the community. Many who are minting projects these days know it could take a few months to reap the rewards of their purchases financially, so if the project doesn’t come with a fun discord, funny memes, etc. then it’s probably not a no-brainer buy for most. While other projects like Pudgy Penguins and Chubbicorns have been hit hard, they’ve held up way better than most, simply because both these communities consistently churn memes and fun content. The volume is still high for illiquid jpegs here and people are still willing to pay $5k USD+ to be part of these communities in a “bear market”.
Main point, spend some time in the discord before minting. If there’s no reason to keep you from hanging there you may not be in the right place.
The Flower Girls
New mints are struggling, but they are NOT dead. There will always be alpha for long-term and short term holders. Flower girls is a great example of that, selling out within 4 hours at a price of .05 ETH. This is the first time in a while we’ve noticed a 10k collection sell out quickly. Overall this is bullish, showing that there is still demand out there.
The floor is up 3x since mint and the volume is a whopping 460 ETH already ($1.6 million USD) at the time of writing. This is already extremely successful in our eyes since everyone who has minted can technically exit if they’d like at a 2x profit. We haven’t looked into this deeply and are unsure where this project goes from here, but it’s a certainly worth underscoring that there is still alpha in the space, even for a quick flip.
We think we’re still a few months away from mass minting coming back but this should align ideally with the release of Coinbase’s NFT platform (which as we’ve noted several times is going to be massive for new adoption).
Cold Blooded Creepz – Deep Dive
Rumored Mint Date: Week of December 13th
“Built in the crazy world of conspiracy theories, the Creepz’ central plot line is the reptile people conspiracy flipped on its head; Lizard people are cool and you want to be one. The creepz is run by the overlord, a millenia old mega-lizard who has summoned the lizard people to invade earth.”
We first mentioned the Creepz in our November 15th newsletter, and prefaced our coverage with a disclaimer that although they looked promising, they should be approached with caution (like any other early stage project).
Well, simply put, after watching them execute over the past few weeks, bringing on strategic advisors like Josh Ong and Von Doom, we’re bullish.
After meeting with the team and learning about their vision, there’s just a lot to like with these “defi collectibles”. Powered by a highly experienced artist who has worked with the likes of Nike and Hennessy, and whose using the art as a marketing tool by creating Creepz-style illustrations of popular “influencers”, including Gary V, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and Snoop Dogg.
Digging deeper on marketing, they also have plans to launch the Creepz into literal space 😂. They’re launching this in collaborating with the world’s leading space marketing company (didn’t even know this existed honestly), and it will apparently be achieved by launching a space grade balloon with a 4k filming rig and TV into space for footage of the Creepz in space.
We’ve always said to back teams who are expert world builders, which is another primary reason why we’re excited about this multi-drop, multi-character ecosystem, built as a play-to-earn game. The earn in play-to-earn being their $ILLUMINATI token, which can be earned when staking your Creep, and used to make purchases in future drops, as well as to grant access to a variety of unique benefits (both digital and IRL). The tokenomics coupled with the quality art are what makes this truly a defi collectible.
As always, DYOR. But seriously, hop in their discord and ask the creators of the project anything you want – they’re extremely transparent.
Web3 Careers:
We were pumped to hear the positive community reaction to our Web3 careers section and so we’re back with the best job opportunities we’ve found over the last week.
We’ve curated an awesome list including a Web3 Strategist role at Pardon with a required qualification of being a “Web3 degen.” There’s something for everyone including positions with the auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s, NFT marketplaces like Magic Eden, software developer roles with Play to Earn games and more! If you’re an artist, you’ll definitely want to check out the Seattle NFT Museum’s recent call for art.
Let us know if you’re hiring for incredible roles or if there are other types of opportunities you’d like to see in this section! Tweet/DM us @MintCalendar, @TheChild1996, or send an email to officialmintcalendar@gmail.com.
Community Building and Safety:
Customer Success Manager (Immutable X)
NFT Community Managers/Project Managers (Alchemy Labs)
Community Manager (Magic Eden)
Content Creation:
Associate Producer – (Nifty Gateway)
Call for Art – (Seattle NFT Museum)
Marketing:
Account Manager, NFT Sales – Client Accounting (Christie’s)
Coordinator, Metaverse - NFT (Sotheby’s)
Senior Associate, NFT Lifecycle Marketing (Nifty Gateway)
Strategy/Miscellaneous:
Web3 Strategist (Pardon)
NFT Business Operations and Strategy Analyst (StarStock)
Blockchain Ecosystem Advisor (Consensys)
Software Development:
Full Stack Engineer (Enjin)
Back End Developer (The Sandbox)
Sr. Blockchain Engineer for P2E NFT Games (Hat Swap City)
That’s all folks! Hope you all enjoyed this week's addition. Feel free to shoot us a DM on Twitter or email us with what you’d like to see more of! We’re super active on twitter so also feel free to tag us in anything interesting.
If you’re feeling friendly feel free to share this with anyone who you feel might otherwise fall into the NGMI category.
Most of all, have a wonderful week!
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Disclaimer about sponsorships: We’ve been getting A LOT of dms about sponsorships and upcoming drops. Many are NGMI but a few projects stood out and have teams that we’ve taken the time to speak with and are excited to share info on in the near future. If you're launching a new project and are looking to work with us on promotion and/or consultation on how to plan a successful drop, feel free to slide in the DMs in Twitter.
The best thing Cold Blooded Creepz could do is using sol instead of eth. Would be a standout project in the sol space (if they do marketing right), in the eth space its going to be tough for them.