(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 all. The simulation seems to be getting crazier and crazier week by week. Similar to the previous week, equities are getting no love and ETH remains in choppy waters. On the bright side for those reading this, we’re reaching max cope from the no-jpeggers. This is quite evident from the haters coming out after Justin Bieber bought a Bored Ape and the BAYC floor breaking through the 100 ETH floor with ease. Seems like multiple times per day over the last week we’ve gotten breaking news stories regarding NFTs and celebrity adoption – we were even chilling with King Bach in our discord earlier in the week. With all of the noise in the space, it may feel a bit overwhelming, which is why we’re here.
BTW, be sure to check out this weeks career section at the bottom! Some great opportunities this week if you’re looking to dive head first into the crypto/nft space.
Let’s jump right in.
This newsletter is sponsored by the Umbria Narni Bridge.
Umbria is our preferred bridge partner. We’re huge fans of the Umbria Narni Bridge, and have been users for months now. This isn’t some “shitcoin” we recommend you buy, this is a simple bridge that we’ve used and find to be the most efficient in the space, and at the same time seemingly unknown. As ambitious projects drop new features on L2s, such as Wanderers dropping Planet Pass on the polygon network, Umbria network is a fast and cheap cross-chain bridging asset that you’ll need to use in order to move your ETH to a new network. The Narni bridge can bridge from ETH to Polygon, BSC, and Avax. Right now, transferring 1 ETH to the Matic network would cost under ~$10 USD and take ~7 minutes – absolutely wild.
We know a lot of our readers are already familiar with the Umbria Narni Bridge, but wanted to make more people aware since our job still is “uncovering hidden gems”. Even on a recent AMA Creepz mentioned how in the future they’ll want to move to polygon to avoid gas fees. Anyways, we’re here to help, so feel free to reach out to us with any questions.
Macro Update
Another good week for cartoon avatars and it feels like forever since we were trapped in the freezing cold “NFT winter” back in November.
They say mass adoption of anything takes a long time, and then suddenly happens all at once. It’s one of those sayings, like most else, that you have to actually experience to understand. We can say without a shadow of a doubt that if you’ve been subscribed to MC since day 1, you’ve lived it alongside us. As all of our non-jpegger friends finally start dipping their toes in the space, we’re already months ahead, know what to look for, know what to avoid, etc. It’s easy to gloat, but the best path forward is to be as welcoming as possible – truly the more the merrier.
Looking at the macro picture, the Eth 2-3K range has been a breeding ground for NFTs to explode. This brings to mind an interesting note that we’ve heard from BTB, which is that people tend to value NFTs in USD. This correlation has been extremely prevalent the last month or so and as ETH prices go down, the NFT price goes up (in ETH terms). These circumstances make for a truly positive-sum market, where noobs can get in at seemingly lower prices during mint, and ETH bulls can increase their ETH stake on the secondary markets.
Separately but importantly, please stop asking us about derivative projects 😂. We have not been, and will never recommend buying a derivative. Any project that looks to replicate a blue-chip, such as Coodles & Caked Apes is not going to be successful long term. These derivative projects play on your emotions to make you feel like you’re involved in the next big thing, and we’re not surprised when they’re down 90% from ATH. Again, as overall NFT supply increases and the market continues to become oversaturated, the money will flow out of these types of projects and to the top.
Project Analysis
With so much going on right now, we’re not going to do a deep dive into a single project this week. We’re going to express our thoughts on a variety of projects that we’ve been involved in or have been eyeing over the last weeks/months. For old readers, you may recognize many of these names that have been on our radar, for new enjoyers, we hope you find some of the projects below interesting.
Getting closer to mint as this ‘Spritelist’ only project starts to fill up with demand. We’ve been public with our support for Sprites over the last month and think this will be a big winner (see last 3-4 articles). After 2 months, Sprites organic growth, 0 paid marketing, and exclusive/locked discord has paid off to create what is now a flourishing, friendly, inclusive, and active community. They took a big risk by relying on pure skill and it seems to have completely paid off 10-fold. Also at the end of the day, most NFTs are modern digital art pieces, and the Sprites team is led by sensational artist Ofelia who is one of the most talented creators in the space, full stop. Think these are going to have mass appeal – if we were you, we’d keep our eyes peeled and turn on twitter notifications for Sprites, as there is still a chance to get into the discord and win a WL spot.
Still extremely curious about this one. Edenhorde has done a great job of building up “hype” and slowly rolling out teasers while withholding as much info as possible. From what we could find, there will be 8,800 NFTs visually split into 4 different tribes. We’re starting to see more of this (breaking down a given project into subsections) but think it’s generally healthy for 10K collections. Overall we like how this is still under-the-radar and trying to remain exclusive (no discord yet with mint in 2 weeks).
Covered the bandits last week. Another project with an ambitious roadmap but a large, skilled, fully doxed team. For clarity, by ambitious, we mean that the team wants to build out ‘Bandits Heist’, where holders can participate in skills-based competition in order to win various NFTs and ETH prizes. Again, a unique concept that we haven’t seen in the space before, with obvious inherent execution risk. Still remains relatively under-the-radar and we’ve been pretty impressed with the organic growth of this project so far. Worth watching this one, seems like it’s on the right path.
We liked Metroverse as a new mint and we also liked it around a .6 floor. Now at 1.2 ETH and with 90% of the supply staked in the game, Metroverse is clearly on a path to sustained success. Haven’t played the game and don’t know the mechanics but if you listened to this call you’re at least up 2x, and many are up 10x+. If anyone is involved in this project, we’d love for you to reach out and let us know your thoughts, as we’re eyeing as a next potential investment (sometimes we’re lazy and don’t take our own advice).
Side macro note: while projects like Metroverse and Creepz have been a large success, we’d be cautious of projects selling themselves around their staking mechanics – seems like this is the next “hook” every single project will use to over-promise and under-deliver. If you were early to NFTs, you’ll remember many projects promising many airdrops – this is the same book, different title.
Guessing 99% of the people reading this have seen Azuki everywhere. Azuki has been absolutely crushing it the last 2 weeks. We expect to see more asian influenced projects pop up in the space and for many to be successful as well. Azuki gives us the same vibes we got when Doodles came to market. A project that found almost immediate success with NFT twitter yelling “blue-chip” to the heavens. Definitely don’t disagree, and we won’t be surprised *when* Azuki is at a 15 eth floor.
Already has 50k followers on twitter including many notable whales and big players in the space. Unsure if these typical cute projects ever get old because they appeal to teenagers as well as 50 year old men. At first glance, you can see they’ve been collaborating with the highly successful project Deadfellaz. Ambiguous roadmap doesn’t provide much, but also led by the talented and well known artist Mina. We assume this is one of those projects that will be very tough to get a WL spot in. Can’t comment on the long term potential but these “cute” projects with massive followings are known to really generate some noise. Will most likely look into this further.
Been getting so many questions about this project. Extremely hyped project that should definitely be a winner immediately post-mint. However, still no roadmap at all and seems like some empty promises have been made. One interesting aspect of this project which we’re not personally fans of, is if you buy a Weather Report hat, you can win a white list spot. We just never loved the idea of “grinding” in a discord to win a WL spot. On the positive side, the art is dope and based on hype alone, Weather Report has essentially guaranteed itself as a short-term win at the minimum.
Warning: The below is extremely-biased and solely our opinion and not financial advice:
We didn’t want to cover Creepz for the 5th week in a row but since we’ve been extremely vocal about the project, we thought it was necessary to address the recent FUD. Creepz went from a .069 mint price to above a 9 ETH floor in around ~3 weeks. Now, at a roughly 4.5 ETH floor, people are acting like it’s the end of the world. The lizards haven’t even existed for 1 month and are up 60x + since. With 3 collections in the top 10, and 5 in the top 45, how could you be fearful.
In times like these, it’s important to take a step back and recognize that this is an extremely volatile space and we’re simply trading internet pictures for thousands of dollars. When you sense a wave of euphoria, it may be a good time to take some profits. If you cannot sleep because of how much you have invested, it may be a good time to take some profits. To be clear: we remain extremely bullish on Creepz. If you thought about entering at 7 ETH but felt it was expensive, you should be thrilled that floor sits around 4.5 ETH now, not scared. While there have been some “hiccups” the past week or so, the team has been fully transparent and has constantly delivered on their promises. No reason to think the team will not continue to execute.
Conclusion
That about does it for this week. There’s clearly a lot to be excited about – we’re back baby! Will end with an old tweet from Cypher that just resurfaced right around the same time Mint Calendar started. Makes you think. Almost nothing has changed besides the fact that there are now millions more pricing their digital assets in ETH.
Have a wonderful week everyone!
Wagmi,
Wilson & Paul
Web3 Careers:
GM job hunters! We’ve got lots of great roles for you this week! Several of these positions came from or were requested in our dedicated jobs channel in the Mint Calendar discord. If you’re hiring, looking for jobs, or have advice for folks in the job market, pop in to #job-talk and join the conversation or tweet/DM us @MintCalendar or @TheChild1996.
Community/Marketing:
Product Marketing Manager (0x, San Francisco/Remote)
Senior Marketing Insights & Data Analyst (Rarible, Remote US)
Community Manager (NFTGo, Remote US)
Strategy/Miscellaneous:
HR Business Partner (cLabs, Remote US)
NFT Compliance Associate (Kraken, Remote US)
Head of Partnerships (Immutable X, Australia)
Software Development/Data Engineering:
On-Chain Artist/Creative Dev (@adhdfounder on Twitter, Remote)
UX/UI Designer - NFTs, Crypto, Blockchain (Mintable, Singapore)
Software Developer Graduate (Wintermute, London/Singapore)
PSA: With all the positivity in the air, we wanted to come up with a way to reward you for sharing the MC alpha with your friends…
so we started a referral program! Click here to join.
Got into creepz because of you the newsletter so thank you! It seems like January has been all about manga style nfts. BTB is betting on Azuki and Capsule House. Would be great to see you guys cover that space more and hear your thoughts