(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.)
Happy New Year everyone. What a wild ride 2021 has been and it’s looking like 2022 is going to be 10x crazier. There is so much to cover so strap in for an extensive write up. As mentioned last week, our next newsletter will drop on Monday January 10th and from there we’ll be back to our normal scheduled programming.
To our readers: We’re immensely grateful for all of you and the engagement we continue to see. We started MC only 4 months ago and are blown away by the support and love we continue to receive. What started as a random experiment blossomed into a full fledged community of early adopters – this is just the beginning of what we hope we can offer with big things planned for 2022.
Kicking things off with another cute cartoon from the Golden Pups team!
Some special shout outs:
BowTied Bull and the Jungle. Can’t thank the Bull and the fellow bowties enough (if you didn’t know this letter is written in part by BowTiedSalamander). A few RTs within the first week of inception and we gained roughly 1000 followers. We’re aware a ton of the jungle follows us and we’ll continue to support the community and members as best as we can.
TheChild. Huge shoutout to our favorite weekly contributor. This guy is an absolute beast and is constantly hitting all of you readers with top-level jobs in the Crypto/Web 3.0 space. We’ll be looking to ramp this career section up next year in a major way.
All of our community in the Mint Calendar Discord. Blown away by not only the alpha generated in here but the constant feedback we receive. You guys are truly the best.
A lot of really exciting stuff to cover in this week’s newsletter. As this will be a longer write up, we’ll give you a quick overview in case one section is more important to you than another.
Macro Update
New Mints in 2022
Biggest Losses
Biggest Wins
Other projects we remain interested in
2022 outlook and future projects
Crypto Jobs
Macro Update
Greatest wealth transfer in the history of humankind is about to take place in 2022 – you better not be sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else get hilariously wealthy.
Things are getting crazier by the day as the simulation has been turned up a notch. We hope all of you internet picture enthusiasts received some free money from the $SOS airdrop last weekend (and actually sold). What a time to be alive. Even Elleven, one of the most famous nightclubs in Miami (and the USA) acquired a Bored Ape. Interesting to see corporations/institutions buy our NFT bags, and strategically really wise from our perspective, being that it’s a small cost with the potential to achieve an outsized impact by organically leveraging the power of a pre-existing community.
One interesting thing we’ve noticed anecdotally is that people are becoming truly numb to 6-figure jpeg purchases. Remember when that alien Punk was purchased for over 1 million USD and the whole traditional finance world flipped upside down? Now it seems like every other day there’s a high 6/7 figure jpeg purchase. Even at a floor above 55 ETH/$200k+ BAYC is still seeing over 20 sales per day (with plenty of other projects doing high volume as well). The next thing you know people will be debating buying a car/house/boat/etc. versus a literal jpeg. Wild stuff.
New Mints
Cold Blooded Creepz (yes, really this project again)
Will keep this short and sweet since we’ve been covering Creepz for quite some time, but when the Creepz hits a 1 ETH floor within the next few weeks, we will not have regretted sounding the alarms so much. We’ll be putting our money where our mouth is here as well, max minting as many as we can from the White List.
If you’ve been following us for the last 2 months we’ve been emphasizing that we believe this is a blue chip in the making. We’ve done a bunch of in-depth write ups here, having initially put this project on your radar 7+ weeks ago (link). To make a long story short, the team has executed on every aspect of the project they have said they would, while continuing to go above and beyond. Joe and Dom (the founders) seemingly are doing AMAs every day, are always active in the discord – these guys simply do not sleep.
A lot of you have gotten a WL spot for being part of our Discord community. WL mint is today and we know many of you will be joining us for the ride. As always, DYOR.
Sprite Club
Ended up in a mutual server with one of the creators of Sprite Club, piqued our interest, and connected with the team as a result. Was instantly impressed by the caliber of the team, which encouraged us to dive deeper.
They’re very under-the-radar, focusing primarily on organic growth which we like. We were especially intrigued by the minting process, a “choose your own adventure” minting, where 1 of 7,777 Sprites is selected for you based on the answers you give to a short series of questions surrounding your personality (think Harry Potter house selection with the magic hat).
Team is fully doxxed from London and to bolster their intentional transparency, they’ll be hosting weekly twitter spaces, discussing overall project development and answering questions from the community. We think the art is unique, we’re pleased to see several members of the team are full time in the crypto space now, and their discord is closed and invites are dropped sporadically via twitter so be on the lookout.
As always, please do your own research, but we do think we might have a winner here and will do an in-depth analysis of the project in the next newsletter.
Big Wins/Losses
Our job is to vet projects we find interesting and post both the bullish and bearish takes here for you in this newsletter. It is up to you to make the decision to pull the trigger and mint. That being said, if you’ve followed along with every pick we’ve suggested, you would have achieved around a ~60% overall hit rate on profitable mints (not too shabby!).
We define a win as a project that is significantly above mint 1 week after, or where the floor has at least 2x’d since we mentioned it. Our worst calls, losses, we define as projects that almost nobody profited from during the mint, or a project where the floor has fallen 50% since we mentioned worth looking into.
Anyways, we aren’t perfect so here’s a list of our worst calls posted in this newsletter. From rugs to overcommitments to just projects not working out, we can’t win them all.
Biggest Losses:
We have drastically improved and become more cautiously selective over time, with most of our worst calls being in our first month of writing this newsletter. However, many of you discovered these projects and lost some ETH because of it. Time to own our worst calls of 2021.
The Sevens - funny enough, the floor is at .07 which was the original mint price. However, if you remember, this project was an absolute disaster, with people paying 2 ETH to mint. We’d say 90%+ people here lost money. Was extremely overhyped and oversubscribed.
The Project Urs - Simply little demand for this project. No real flaws with the team, the project never caught steam. Sits ~70% below mint price and has little volume.
BlankFace - Rugpull and project floor non-existent. Giving ourselves credit here, we were always cautious of this and mentioned how we believed they had discord bots to increase members. However, we know a few of you minted this and it happens to be one of the 0s that you can’t always avoid.
The Richies - Never loved this one and did’t mint but this was an actual rug. The team literally sold out roughly 10-15% of the mint and then deleted all social media and stopped responding.
Pixel Beasts - Ah, the emergency alpha report. Our first ever sponsor and we definitely got ahead of ourselves here. Don’t worry, we minted a bunch and lost it all. This was a tough one since a lot of our community got involved. From a high-level, project had a lot going for it, from the virtual world utility and Yohei being a solid leader. And fwiw, the community is still extremely active. However, the mint was a shitshow with gas fees rising above 1 ETH and somebody exposing the contract, causing various people to mint early with low gas. While this isn’t a rug and there is still a discord community and working virtual world built out where your PB grants you access, the demand for pixel copy pasta pfp projects is practically 0 at this point. In theory a great idea for community, demand just is not there.
Biggest Winners
As mentioned in the portfolio update, with NFTs, your winners should drastically outpace your losses to ensure profitability. Here’s a highlight of our best calls.
CryptoDads - Our best pound for pound mint play of the year. Minted a bunch and sold just under the 2 ETH floor (these did hit around 2.2 ETH at one point). Depending on the gas you paid for the Dads, you had the chance to sell for anywhere from a 5-20x. Yes, we know it’s taken a hit and sits around .2 ETH right now but as we mentioned, profit taking is important and this one held strong for a while.
Woodies - Underrated call we had here. The project sits at .08 ETH right now, right around the mint price. However, if you were a Woodie's enjoooooyer post-mint, these sat around a .3-.7 floor for ~3 weeks. At minimum you had a few weeks to lock in a 3x and most likely even more.
Doodles - We know the minting situation was complicated here, but the lowest price you ever had to claim doodles was at 1 ETH. We mentioned the first week post-mint that this was the next blue chip. We covered it for a few weeks and mentioned if you’re looking to dip your toes in a safer bet, that Dooddles was the project to go with. If you listened to us, congrats, you're mostly likely at a 4x now, and this will likely go much higher. Same advice as always, if you need the ETH take your gains and if not, we feel that there is a better chance this hits a 10 ETH floor than going to 0, so take that for what it is.
MAYC - Pretty simple. Should trade within ~20% of the BAYC floor. Was between a 3.5 and 4 ETH floor when we mentioned a prime buying opp, BAYC was around 48 ETH at the time. Now ~11 ETH floor. Low risk 3x here.
CoolCats - Yeah yeah yeah everyone knows this is a blue chip. “Cool Cats remains extremely undervalued at 4.8 ETH” way back in early September. Since then it has hit a floor of 12 ETH and sits at roughly 8 ETH now. No need to elaborate here, known blue chip and we remain extremely bullish.
Projects we’re holding that still have our interest in 2022:
Wanderers - A bit disappointed in the recent price action. Still a ways off from all time high. Volume is still here and the team is executing, it seems like there’s not as much demand as expected. Holding our rares tightly as we still remain bullish. If planet pass works out this can be a real game changer. Will update if anything changes.
Axolittles / Chubbiverse Frens - Sort of go hand in hand, especially with the recent partnership. A lot of big players are still holding and we think these collections will vibe extremely well with normies who enter the space. Holding on tightly, although feel much more confident in the success of the general Chubbiverse due to the extremely active community and fully functioning DAO.
Pudgy Penguins - Will leave this for last since we have a lot to say. Let’s be real, lil pudgies are eh and the pudgy presents turned out to be a dud. We get that they’re working to build out a full fishing game but this is essentially what every project is doing these days (custom p2e games), nothing special. Overall floor took a hit after the fishing rods were revealed. But, love them or hate them the penguins were mentioned in Ryan Selkis’s Crypto Thesis for 2022.There’s something to be said about a PFP that has stirred up more controversy than most other projects and still manages to drive major animosity from other communities (makes no sense as they’re literal cute penguin pictures). With a lot of roadblocks on the later half of Q4, what keeps the project together is that every single penguin pfp follows and supports one another. One of us sports a penguin pfp on twitter and it’s always funny when a basic tweet has 10+ likes from penguins. Funny enough, OpenDao or better known as your free $SOS - was founded by 9x9x9 (who we mentioned was the largest penguin holder in our whale overview last week). Having players like this on your team shouldn’t be taken lightly. Can’t teach that kind of community. In the end, most of the issues are publicly known and for pudgies to succeed going forward, leadership could benefit from a refresh in personnel in our opinion. Nonetheless, expect these to do well in 2022.
Web3 Careers:
It’s been a great year and as we enter 2022, we strongly believe a high probability way of “making it” will be finding work to help Web3 become the new normal for billions around the world. The opportunities we’ve seen this past year are just the beginning and we’re committed to bringing you the best of what’s to come!
We’ve continued to see a consistent industry focus on hiring community management, marketing, and software roles with an especially heavy emphasis on those software engineering and development positions this week. Some of these jobs are advertising in the mid five-figure range while others are well into the six-figures like the Quantitative Systems role below. As almost every NFT and Web3 project is truly a startup, it is worth thinking through the trade-offs of what tokens or equity you might be able to get from less developed projects and companies. We found one interesting Smart Contract Engineer role from an unnamed blockchain company that is offering a healthy six-figures and tokens from a project… Secret company? Secret token? Sounds like an adventure worth checking out…
FINALLY… if you do apply to any of the jobs we highlight each week, please let us know if you’re hired. Now that we’ve been doing this for a bit, we’d love to gauge the community impact and get an idea of if we’re connecting you to the right jobs. So 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:
Social Media & Community Manager(Fireblocks)
Community Manager (The Metropolis Project)
Strategy/Marketing/Miscellaneous:
Associate Curator (SuperRare Labs)
NFT Degen (Nexo)
Metaverse Product Manager (Clubrare)
Front-end/Graphic Design (Tightnet)
Marketing:
Marketing Lead (MetaSoccer)
Marketing Manager (Algomint)
Software Development:
Golang Backend Engineer (Consensys)
Front-end Engineer (blocknative)
Solidity/Web3 Developer (Quantitative Systems)
Full Stack Software Engineer – Digital (Topps)
Lead Smart Contract Software Engineer (Unnamed Top Tier Blockchain Company)
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.