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“I recently walked into the local bodega at night around 8pm and accidentally said “good morning” - friend of ours from CT. Safe to say things are moving the right direction.
GM all. As we approach the end of the year, there is A LOT going on. No need to feel overwhelmed though, we’ve got your back. So strap right in and get comfortable, because this week we’re about to take a whole lot of info and make it so digestible you’ll finish reading and ask yourself “Did MC just chew up my food for me bird-style?”
This week we’re mixing things up a bit with the new mints we’re covering. Typically we do a deep dive on our own time, but this week we actually connected with the creators behind these projects in order to give you more of an insider's look into how the sausage is made. Anyways, too much content and too little time so let’s jump right in.
Macro Update:
From Ken Griffin achieving the ultimate revenge by snagging the constitution right out from under the hoards of online apes, to furries leading the right click save charge, to major crypto volatility, to a completely polarized CT over whether the bear market is over or if this is just a dead cat bounce, this has been an action packed week in crypto land. ETH briefly dipped under $4K USD for the first time in a little while, and the standard thesis of “ETH go down, NFT go up” played out as expected.
Generally speaking this is the most we’ve seen twitter polarized over NFTs in a while. Seems like half of the influencers are all rah rah NFTs are back in full force while the other half are telling you to use this bounce to liquidate your jpegs. While we think there is a good argument for both sides, these are arguments rooted in complexity and should be picked apart. When a large number of projects go to 0 (or even negative if you consider that the price of gas exceeds the actual value of the NFT), the money flows to the top. A good place to start is the recent round 2 of BAYC.
The photo above has been circulating amongst the “probably nothing” crowd all week. While BAYC never really entered a bear market, the floor has crawled a whopping 40-50% over the last 2 weeks - comfortably floating around 50 ETH +/- 3 ETH or so (update: took a decent hit this morning around 44 ETH). Interestingly enough, it seems like the Bored Apes have been the PFP of choice for celebs entering the space, over punks. While we don’t think BAYC will ever flip punks, the personality, community, and staying power of BAYC PFPs seem to be attracting a lot of big players, who are most likely going to be long term diamond handers. It’s not like Steph Curry or Post Malone ever have to sell their bored ape to pay the bills, even if changing their twitter PFP. Separately but related, it’s good to see that MAYC has held its own as well.
Around a month ago we mentioned MAYC was probably a solid risk reward bet under a 4 ETH floor for time being. The floor is now floating from 6-7 ETH with some notable sales recently, including the one above which went for 21 ETH (or $88K USD). With BAYC pricing many out, newcomers with a lot of cash may jump in here. BAYC and MAYC rising is good for the general health of NFTs. The Bored Apes are recognizable to many outside the space at this point and every new high profile sale leads to more and more eyes to NFTs.
Worth noting that ETH is rapidly moving off exchanges (another h/t to BTB for pointing this out). The linked article mentioned that 9 billion worth of ETH moved off exchanges from 11/14-11/16. As ETH took a hit under $4200, we believe that smart money was just accumulating. Also while this is a sign that whales may be accumulating, it may explain the NFT bounce too.
On the flip side, there is still a lot of potential carnage on the horizon. The whole “sell now while there’s liquidity even if you’re down” crowd does have some great points. A lot of solid projects (not blue chip) have bounced but are still sitting in the ~15-30% range off their ATH, which is where many bought in. While we tend to be bullish on NFTs, especially long term, it’s tough to not see the point that bears are making. So many of these 10K PFP projects with no roadmap are still sitting at $1,000 USD and we think that probably can’t last forever. We’re not going to name names here but if you feel stressed over a project you’re holding, we do think now is a good time to take your loss and increase liquidity.
There's still a significant number of projects that haven’t recovered much from the bounce, and to be frank, we think these are a lost cause at this point (this is what happens when supply greatly outpaces demand). These are projects that have fallen 50%+ from their mint price AND have extremely low trading volume. Of course, we’ll be wrong for some and a handful will recover, but generally speaking most of these should go to zero. If you’re looking to pick up something low that you truly think is undervalued, it’s important to check the volume to make sure you’re aping into a project with liquidity.
FUD aside, blue chips and soon-to-be blue chips are where you want to place your bets. Unfortunately, we only had a short period of time to shout this message to the heavens as many of the high quality projects have already recovered and even hit an ATH. To reiterate here, as many projects die out the money will flow to the top.
Two projects we’ve expressed our positivity on are Doodles and Toadz. And yes this pixelated image below sold this week for 12 ETH (or ~$50K USD).
Toadz are back in a 4-6 ETH floor range. These seemed to be one of the more obvious dip buys on the lower end of 4 ETH and definitely below. 50% holder rate, crazy high volume, and everywhere you go you can’t seem to avoid them. We just don’t see a world where Toadz don’t hit their ATH floor again (obviously, not investment advice).
One more project that we touted as a “future blue chip” at the 1 ETH floor was Doodles, which minted back in October. Sitting above a 2.5 ETH floor now (even jumping above a 4 ETH floor at one point this week), this project has been strictly “up and to the right”. w project can jump a few X in price when there is a real team.
We’re going to end this macro update by reiterating a point we made 2 weeks ago. There’s a lot of negativity on the timeline (Seriously? before Coinbase launches their platform?) and while some is warranted, sometimes it makes more sense to block out the noise and just focus on the big picture.
“The metaverse is now. Thought about this the other day. We’re already spending more time in front of a screen (TV/Phone/Computer) then we are IRL. At the end of a long day, most people move from their work computer to go watch Netflix. Even working out has been moved in front of a screen (Mirror, Peloton, youtube classes). While we may not be sitting around in a circle with our VR headsets (yet) the majority of our time is spent in the digital world, without us realizing. The metaverse is here and most people have been too immersed to stop, look around, and recognize what’s really happening.”
We’re early, anon. Very, very early.
This Weeks Sponsor: Holly Sonders NFT
Mint Details: November 23rd at 11am EST
This week’s sponsor is the official Holly Sonders NFT drop. Pro golfer turned model Holly Sonders is dropping a 10,000 piece collection full of exclusive pics that have never been released before. While this is certainly a bit unconventional in comparison to most of the jpeg collections we typically cover, it's still noteworthy. NFTs continue to disrupt a variety of industries / business models and this is a prime example of that.
With the popularization of Only Fans as a means for models to “own” their audience, it would only make sense that the natural evolution would be toward true independent ownership, coupled with a realignment of incentives so that fans can be owners too.
This drop is not solely about flipping a jpeg for profit, it’s more a representation of the paradigm shift taking place, where fans are now becoming owners. That being said, this is still likely an opportunity to earn meaningful returns as Holly promotes this project to her 650,000 instagram followers who will likely pay handsomely for a lot of the perks being offered on the roadmap (golf with Holly, meet and greet over Zoom, etc).
Modeling aside, Holly is a seasoned golfer (hence the “golf with Holly” reward on her roadmap) and a savvy business person herself. So, while we have no clue what the future holds here, we do know that Holly and her team are well equipped to build an engaged community. This should sell out relatively quickly, but as always, DYOR.
Cold Blooded Creepz - Follow Up Analysis
Supply for Drop 1: 6666 | Mint Price: TBD
We covered Creepz last week because we see them as a new mint that is criminally under the radar. As mentioned, we reached out to the founders and learned a bit more about their origins and the origins of the art itself.
Our favorite way to describe the Creepz is a “breath of fresh air” and think that if the team plays their cards correctly, this can be a real long term winner. Looks like a target mint date sometime in mid December.
Before jumping in, you should definitely DYOR and see for yourself what we see – 1. check out their website, and 2. join their Discord (the community just hit 1k members and is more active than half of the discords we are in with over 5k members).
We think Creepz can end up in the same realm as Doodles and really take off in a similar fashion, as long as they execute on their roadmap. A few high-level thoughts below:
The artwork is really good. Doesn’t seem to be another copy pasta PFP or some punk knock off. This made sense when we learned that there is an actual artist behind the project, Psychrome. He has most notably headed up all artwork and branding for sneakercon.com. There’s 13 separate traits for the lizards vs the market average of 5. Not sure how relevant that is, but it gives us the same feeling when we first saw Wanderers - “wow, these guys actually put in the effort.” When speaking to the creators about the artwork, they said that it was “inspired by Psychromes past in hypebeast and hip-hop culture, full of fashion references such as Christina DYOR, Gecko (Gucci) and many more easter eggs. As a project we have been laser focused on weaving in extremely deep references into the traits from conspiracies, pop culture, tv, celebrities and internet culture.”
Founders are fully doxed (Joe and Dom). We listened to Dom do twitter spaces with the Wicked Bone Club and were impressed with what he heard. These guys are also willing to do 15 min zoom calls with members in the discord if you have questions about the project. From our discussions, we learned the following:
Joe started his career founding and scaling an award-winning brand of music-driven dining venues all across the UK with Jamal Edwards. Dom started his career on the founding team of an events and experiences company that has gone on to be valued at over a billion dollars and has now worked with artists like Kanye West, Drake and Justin Bieber. Both then went on to build other startups, some wins some losses, before they decided that NFTs and more importantly Web3 is too important an opportunity to overlook. And off the back of a decade-long friendship, Creepz was born.
We’re excited to see how this one goes and once we find out the exact mint date, we will most likely do a deeper dive into the tokenomics of this project if they continue on the right direction.
As always Christian DYOR.
House of Warlords
Supply for Drop: 8888 | Mint Price: .069
Pre Sale for Whitelist 11/27 | Public Sale 12/4
Interesting project that we came across. Hopped in discord and was seamless to connect with one of the founders - @Xalted.
Our thoughts:
HOWL without a doubt has unique art that clearly isn’t a copy and paste PFP. What really caught our eye though was the utility. Once a month there’s the Seppuku event (essentially a sacrifice) which will lead the project to be deflationary. Econ 101, supply decreases with consistent demand, prices go up. Here’s *our* understanding of the general tokenomics:
If you have 2 Warlords, you can burn 1 but transfer the traits you want to keep to your unburned warlord. For example, if you love the helmet on the one you're burning but not the rest, you can choose to move it to your existing warlord.
Holders can receive $SOUL(soul) tokens, which can only be earned through the burning mechanism once a month or by staking the NFT. Tokens can be used to purchase traits to put on warlords, change the name, or buy 1/1 artwork - all from the $OUL shop.
Because this is crypto, the project has it’s Degen side where there is a 50% chance you also will get a purely new warlord out of this, most likely making it rarer.
Project has a similar vibe to Hashmasks and is really leaning on the customization and utility aspect. The team is working with Ryan Zurrer (buyer of a $29m beeple piece) and his team at Dialectic, one of the world’s largest crypto funds.
One of the main downsides we noticed here is that the discord has 9k members, which does seem a bit fishy for a project with 2k twitter followers. When we tried to verify, we noticed there were only around ~1300 verified members for a group with 9k members?
*EDIT: Update on the above* - The team reached out to us regarding this. “We want to point out that the reason why the verified count is so low is because we only implemented that channel about a week ago, hence the low count".” - We think this is a fair explanation.
We’re not discord or bot experts but worth keeping an eye on. That being said, the general chat is active and the main team responds to individual requests often while also hosting several AMAs.
In sum, there is a lot going on here. Another one with some huge promises and associated execution risk. We’ve seen these types of projects come and go, but the ones that can execute gain powerful staying power. Team has pretty powerful backers and their willingness to speak with us and answer our questions makes us more than happy to put this on your radar. The whitelist is still open for 11/27 and if you mint 4 you get the 5th for free. DYOR.
Axolittles <> Chubbiverse
Really cool concept we’ve seen starting to take shape. Back in September we had touted the idea of blue chip projects adopting side-kick projects (ie Penguins and Chubbicorns / Punks and Toadz). While plenty of notable Penguin and Chubbicorn holders were fans of Axolittles publicly, it’s cool to see an official partnership from two strong community-driven projects.
Not too much info here but essentially they will be rolling out unique NFTs available to both holders of Axolittles and the Chubbiverse. As long as you hold one of any of the following NFT collections you will be eligible for an NFT (details to be announced) from this partnership. Interesting concept we’ll keep an eye on, don’t be surprised if you see more similar things happening in space.
Closing Thoughts:
Seems like week by week as more projects die, more grifters get exposed for… well, grifting. Week by week, the less 10K copy and paste PFP projects emerge, the more confident we get in NFTs long term. This is a natural cleansing and a positive step for the space overall.
If you have a high end/expensive NFT, the buyer is most likely going to be another rich crypto person. While we see adoption picking up, boomers and traditional art/finance people aren’t the ones scooping up your jpegs (yet). What was once a key driver of value in the art world may not apply here as a new culture emerges – Memes/Community > Art.
Noticing some larger NFT related accounts or NFT tracking products have been posting less and less and others have gone dark. More for us :)
It’s a full time job keeping up with how fast this space moves. As we approach the new year we will most likely start looking into projects on other chains as well (AVAX, Solana, Tezos, etc.).
Finally - quick note on Wolf Game: super interesting concept here and definitely recommend checking it out if you have time. Got on our radar a bit too late for analysis this week but will potentially take a closer look after we see how this plays out a bit more.
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.