Are Ya Winning Son?
(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 kings and queens of the realm. Outside of new SBF DMs, unsealed court filings and memes, it’s been a fairly quiet week. Given that most NFT enjoyoooooors have the attention span of goldfish (myself included), sentiment seems to be a bit better this week versus last. Some may view the whirlwind pace of NFTs as a negative, but I think it’s great that despite the recent market turmoil, folks start to look forward rather quickly and turn whatever the Armageddon du jour was into quality memes.
My guy Excel Baller summed it up nicely earlier this morning.
If you recall, we ran our Cacio e Pepe giveaway for the premiere of Mint Avalanche. Make sure you check your burner emails in case you won. As a reminder, owning a Pepe gives you access to the Mint Media discord, where we share alpha, network, and overall has been a great home base for those sticking around in the bear market.
Shameless plug aside, let’s get to it.
Market Update
Source: @21shares
Another abysmal week for AVAX, but completely unsurprising given FTX’s implosion, the fallout, and likely many participants getting rekt. The last two days were under $10k in volume - even worse than the dog days of summer that we all remember.
Project performance seems to fall across the spectrum. Some projects have done pretty well, some projects continue to tank. At this point, if you’re retaining any sort of value week-over-week, that’s significantly outperforming most other JPEGs. Happy Ducks failed to mint out last week which I attribute entirely to cosmically bad market timing given the demand we’ve seen for mints over the last 6 weeks.
On over-performers, APAs has been ranging between 4-5 AVAX for the last few weeks while Chad Doge is actually up week-over-week given the tidbits of alpha surrounding Chad Doge Supers (covered below in Upcoming Projects). Outside of knowing that they have a tight-knit community and bonafide OG status, I am completely unplugged from the APA ecosystem and will need to do more due diligence over the weekend to see what they have planned.
Meanwhile, the Peon ecosystem has been sorely underperforming from a FP perspective - Peons sit at 4.4 AVAX while Beeg Rock is all the way down to ~80 AVAX from 150 just a few weeks ago (I bought the top). This is probably a combination of two things: macro / capitulation and the minting of Plague Game later today. I’ve heard some people say that they think Joe Studios is spreading themselves a bit thin between Smolverse, Peons and Plague Game and that may be reflected here. Despite DevilK ignoring my barrage of DMs saying “wen”, I think he’s an incredibly talented producer alongside the rest of the Joe Studios team, so I’m interested to see how they juggle these projects going forward.
Upcoming Projects
While Nox Beyond is sitting 20% below mint price at ~2 AVAX, it looks like they’re coming out with a Chad Doge collab called Black Swan, which looks highly memeable. You’ll need both a Nox Beyond and a Chad Doge to be whitelisted.
We need more fun and engaging projects like these when we’re all down in the dumps - at the absolute worst, they become a great source of memes and a nice tax write-off (😅). At best, I move to Abu Dhabi and you never hear from me again. We’ll likely shake out somewhere in the middle on this one.
Chad Doge Supers
The next evolution of Chad Doge has arrived - now I finally know why Stupifff has been raiding every tweet and discord server with “_” for the last month.
Despite the fact that the hidden challenger Chad Doge Super looks like a gymcel cat, I like the expansion of the ecosystem and feels more in line with how I imagine your typical Chad. Like all projects that spin out subsequent projects, my main question is how they will prevent this from being dilutive to Chad Doge holders - perhaps a burn mechanic? Total speculation on my end but intriguing nonetheless.
What the fellas have all been waiting for - Plague Game is minting TODAY at 12pm ET. I’m not going to butcher the explanation for you, so check out the comprehensive substack explaining how the game works here.
Bottom line - the top 10 doctors who remain uninfected either through sheer RNG luck or potion spamming will each receive 2100 AVAX, a pretty nice haul for participating in a bear market.
I’m not a game theory expert, but it’s been fascinating to hear people discuss strategies on how they’re going to approach the game. I can’t drop ALL the alpha, but I’ve heard the following being discussed as viable strategies:
Hoard potions to contribute towards inevitable supply shock as the uninfected doctors dwindle later in the game
Form collectives / DAOs to pool money together and compete with the whales
Be a whale and have a boatload of money to ape on potions and uninfected doctors
Despite the inevitable fact that I will lose, I haven’t decided how I’m going to play this one yet. Do I play to win, or just to bring others down with me? Really waffling between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil this morning. In any case, this will be incredibly cool to watch play out whether you’re a participant or a spectator.
Conclusion
As I mentioned last week, it’s paramount to keep a level head in times like these but also some really good buying opportunities have presented themselves. Just don’t get rekt and keep your fake internet money off centralized exchanges.
Also, I think next week I’m going to start creating an AVAX shitposter tier list. Stay tuned on that.
Arrivederci,
Chuck