(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 frens. We’re back after another wild week in crypto land. Hope you’re all still standing, because there’s a lot more volatility to come as we enter the final month of Q4. The timeline has been pretty bearish the last few days, although as of last night, things have turned on a dime. As always, we’re here to act as the bipartisan voice of reason. It’s true, certain areas in the crypto realm, especially large corners of the NFT market, frankly look like absolute garbage. Like really just a dumpster fire with no path to recovery. However, the money printer is going brr, adoption is at an all time high, ETH continues to fall off exchanges at a consistent pace, and your screen time most likely hit an all time high this week.
Some exciting news!
We’re always looking for more ways to provide value to the community. It has been said on twitter numerous times already, but to reiterate, the days of putting $100 into a an L1 or popular L2 and 100X’ing within 12 months are mostly behind us. As such, the best ways to capture alpha in the crypto/nft world moving forward isn’t trading as much as it is building. With that in mind, Mint Calendar is experimenting with adding a section of content that’s focused entirely on Web3 jobs.
We’ve partnered with TheChild1996 to roll out this experiment (you should be following this legend) – he’ll be combing through job boards, tweets, and discords to find the best new jobs each week. If you’re working at a company in search of a new hire in the crypto or nft space and want to share the job listing to reach more candidates, tweet us @MintCalendar or send an email to officialmintcalendar@gmail.com and we’ll post it if we think it’s a great opportunity for our community!
Lastly, due to rapid growth, we’re going to be dropping our own discord server in the next week.
We’ll be using discord as an opportunity to more directly answer questions from the community, connect with frens, host polls to gauge what you’d like us to cover more or less of, and so much more – be on the lookout!
With that all said, let’s jump right in.
Macro Update
It seems like we have officially exited the “mania” phase and the level of difficulty has been turned up a few notches. It feels like years ago (although it was only a few months ago) when we were all happy, frolicking around during Jpeg summer flipping our mint for a 5x overnight and complaining about $50 gas fees. Those were the days.
“Easy mode” is no more, and negativity / cope has reached an all time high. With all the recent bear porn and the fear tracker at a 3 month high, we can’t ignore the current state of affairs. Even the charts below sing the same tune, with the volume of NFTs sold trending downward, with what appears to be a “dead cat bounce” in November.
Now, we can go ahead and “sound smart” like all bears do and fear monger, since it is the easy thing to do right now, but we’ve got a long time horizon, and over the long haul, NFTs will win and bears will eat their words. Side note: it’s important to generally take the overall sentiment of the crypto space with a grain of salt, as things can go from hyper bearish to bullish on a whim.
Let’s take a step back and look at how far we’ve come over the last 6 months or so.
Looking at the chart above tracking transaction volume from Opensea (LINK), while the number of transactions are lower than the last 2 months, we’re still significantly higher than we were back in March, and 100x from where we were at the start of 2021 where volume was barely existent. When you zoom out, you tend to notice these things but unfortunately most are so stuck in the moment at times and forget that it’s been under a year since most people (even many early adopters like the ones reading this newsletter) knew what Opensea was – many had never even heard of an NFT. Imagine what this chart is going to look like a year from today. We haven’t even had many institutions raising NFT funds enter the space yet, this is a whole other rabbit hole to go down eventually.
You can’t build a long term future with short term thinking. Expect more volatility with your jpegs as we approach the end of the year. As we’ve reiterated over and over again, the money flows to the top.
With ETH sitting above 4k as of writing, it may make sense to get some liquidity from projects sitting significantly below the original mint price that you believe won’t ever recover. We can’t cover everything but as a made up example: Project minted for .1 ETH 2 months ago, is at a floor of .04, discord is dead, and volume is around 1-2 sales a day. This is a huge red flag and you should get out of there before this goes negative (gas is more expensive to sell than the NFT costs). Even if it’s a .03 ETH with gas, 3-4 of these can add up to ~$500 in ETH which you can put to work to recover, especially if things turn bullish again in Q1/Q2 for NFTS (Coinbase / Institutions / ETH 2.0 Scaling).
On the other hand, there’s still projects out there that *we believe* are significantly undervalued, such as chubbiverse frens, covered previously. While the floor has been cut in half since mint, volume is still high, whales are still involved, and the team is creating, collaborating, and generally moving forward every day. There’s plenty of these out there and we’ll do our best to help uncover them.
Oh, and Future also decided to scoop up another MC approved project (Doodles). Wonder if he reads our newsletter?
Jpegs aside, we’re so incredibly bullish about the future of media as it relates to NFTs. We are living through an enormous paradigm shift in the way artists monetize their work, and visual art is just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the most exciting use cases to keep an eye on is how music artists leverage NFTs to monetize their work. Spotify has had artists bent over a barrel for quite some time now, where you can essentially rent a song for fractions of a penny.
It’s only right that artists regain their pricing power and NFTs will be the vehicle to facilitate this transformation. Companies like Royal (founded by NFT enthusiast and artist 3LAU) are disruptors worth watching, as they enable artists to sell stakes in their music to their fans, turning fans into evangelists and aligning incentives for everyone involved. Meek Mill is one of many artists taking notice of this trend with the recent planned release of his mixtape via NFT. We bet that web3-native record labels will crop up with a focus on empowering artists and not robbing them – the future is bright so keep your eyes peeled.
Punks and Apes Update:
For the first time since August, the CryptoPunk floor spent a week below 90 ETH. On the other hand, this was the first time ever that BAYC spent a week above the 40 ETH floor. While there is some panic selling/profit taking in Punks, the apes have seen a wide inflow of money recently. Interesting side note: every week it seems like a new celebrity is “aping” into Bored Apes (Future and Steve Aoki being some of the more recent ones) while this doesn’t seem to happen as often as Punks. Anyways, Future does seem to be Married to the NFT game.
Unsure if this is due to community strength of apes but it does say something about general mass appeal. While Punks have grown in value for being the first ever NFT PFP project, BAYC has grown due to community and mass appeal (*love for the art*). Generally speaking, it really feels like people are placing their bets on what the world’s hottest collectibles of the future will be, and it seems that many firmly believe that the answer is digital. Not saying that Honus Wagner baseball cards will stop being highly valuable, but a new class of collectibles has arrived and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
Wolf Game Update
As promised last week, we said we’d look into the hype around Wolf Game. The floor has really held up this last week and the hype continues. Rather than spread ourselves thin, one of our awesome followers @mark_c_web_3, who got into wolf game at .04 ETH, is about to drop some knowledge on the project. You can check out his thread here for some more math and tokenomics info.
The Wolf Game (a quick take by @mark_c_web_3):
It's all the rage right now. Just three days after the release of the smart contract just over a week ago, The Wolf Game set fire to the NFT world. What brought this particular project to center stage?
First, it was arguably the first project to integrate "protocol-level risk" into a generative NFT series. Anonymice and CyberKongs had innovated by creating NFTs that interacted with native protocol tokens, but no one had yet introduced the wild-west of game theory into the equation.
And we all know the Wild West specializes in one thing: risk. Programmed into the smart contract was the ability for wolves to steal sheep. An NFT stealing another NFT? Who knew this was even possible? And finally, the project has found success due to its people-pleasing on-chain generative pixel art.
The project is great for a lot of reasons, but what are the downsides of The Wolf Game? Quite a few, actually. Just days into the game, minting of new wolves and sheep had to be paused because an exploit was discovered. Then, just a day or so later the project was completely halted so a full audit of the smart contract could be performed. This is bullish long-term, but frustrating and slightly unprofessional in the short term.
I am also personally not a fan of how much the project has already changed. On release, it appeared that all the game theory would be set in stone, but now The Shepard has introduced land, farmers, and even wool pouches. There's a lot to keep track of and my worry is that everything is getting too complicated and fragmented.
Overall, The Wolf Game is pioneering a new sector of NFT gaming that should be applauded. It's innovating at the cost of making mistakes along the way, but it appears for now the community has been forgiving, with the floor for sheep and wolves currently sitting at about 3.5ETH.
No New Mints This Week:
These will return next week. Didn’t want to blow our load on a handful of moonshot maybes when there are legitimate projects on our radar which deserve a thorough deep dive – especially now with it being more important than ever to select your new mints wisely (so much spam in the market).
As we look to get more active with the communities and creators of the projects that we cover here, be on the lookout for @MintCalendar hosting/participating in some Twitter spaces soon.
Web3 Careers:
As we noted earlier, we’re launching this section in collaboration with TheChild1996 to highlight some of the best job opportunities in NFTs and Web3 in general. Without further ado, we’ll let TheChild1996 take it away:
We want to start minting future leaders in the NFT and Web3 space by helping amazing companies, DAOs, NFT projects, creators, and members of the community connect to fill positions. This week, we’ve found a unique mix of opportunities across NFT-native companies like OpenSea, Rarible, and Nansen and NFT focused roles at companies like Reddit and DraftKings that are trying to dive into the space. We’ve also highlighted a couple of roles with NFT projects at Doodles and Art Blocks.
While we’ve seen tons of formally posted opportunities, we also know there is a lot of informal hiring going on through Discord and Twitter. We’ll continue to post formal NFT and Web3 related positions, but we’d love to flag informal hiring calls like we did this week with Sfermion’s call for specialists on Twitter.
Let us know if there are other types of jobs you’d like to see here, or if you have amazing positions available!
Community Building and Safety:
Trust and Safety Associate (OpenSea)
Discord Community Moderator (OpenSea)
Content Creation:
Art Director (Unstoppable Domains)
Graphic Designer (VaynerNFT)
Marketing:
Social Media Manager NFT (Coinbase)
Growth Hacker (Wonder)
Marketing Lead (Rarible DAO)
Strategy/Miscellaneous:
Project Manager (Doodles)
Internship, Alpha (Nansen)
Business Data Analyst - NFT Marketplace (DraftKings)
Art/Collectibles/DAO/Gaming Specialists (Sfermion)
Software Development:
Software Engineer (Art Blocks)
Staff Engineer (Gitcoin)
Frontend Developer, Product (Nansen)
Senior Android Engineer, NFT Platform (Reddit)
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!
--------------
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.