Follow The Flows
Follow The Flows
Blue Chips, My Favorite Chips (not doritos)
(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 fam. Another action packed week in the books. We had a nice overall market bounce and your favorite CT influencer is no longer crying bear market it seems (what a surprise). March may end up being another up-month for NFTs, albeit a bumpy one. Depending on the projects you’re in, you either had an absolutely amazing week, or barely made it out alive. We remain cozy despite the few hiccups this week but look forward to discussing the good/bad/ugly in depth below. Two notes:
We have a hot job section at the bottom of this newsletter, thanks to TheChild.
Next week’s newsletter will be released on Tuesday, then back to our regularly scheduled programming thereafter.
Anyway, let’s dive in.
MC Pass
Wow! Blown away by all the love and support. We sold out in under 36 hours in what many said was a bear market (it wasn’t). Nonetheless, the community has been thriving and we’re super excited to keep building and see where this goes. If interested in joining the token-gated discord, a link to the community and passes are below:
Macro Update
Gm. Extremely exciting week as NFTs continue to capture a larger share of the mainstream consciousness. Highly recommend checking out this video if you haven’t – some of the most iconic future media property giants are being built right in front of our eyes. As BAYC holders drastically increase liquidity through the drop of the APE coin, this seems to be flooding the market, and many quality projects are doing extremely well. At the same time, some new mints, even some considered *higher-quality* projects, are struggling to sell out. Will do a deeper dive into this phenomenon below in ‘Market Musings’.
Along with this, PFPs still continue to drive the market forward and our good friend ThinkingHotels just dropped a fantastic thread on why this will likely continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. To best summarize the thread, if/when Instagram integrates NFTs into the app, this should further drive a massive PFP bull market.
We mentioned the other week that we’ve been seeing more and more friends change their Instagram profile pictures to an NFT (as well as LinkedIn surprisingly). Not a hot take at this point, but if you’ve been following this newsletter for sometime, we mention that a huge value driver for high-end NFTs is the ability to flex. Since they are essentially veblen goods, the higher they rise in value, the more likely they are to further increase in value (Punks/Bayc). Here’s a great quote from ThinkingHotels below:
“While it may be uncomfortable to acknowledge, many people use Instagram to “flex” on others. Instagram is a tool for people to share the best aspects of their lives with their peers. Users wish to signal to others that they are living meaningful lives.“
We strongly agree. Showing off your Doodle or Cool Cat is like showing off your Rolex, and what better platform to do so than Instagram, which is essentially your life “highlight reel”.
Yuga Labs
Have to dive a bit deeper on all the recent strategic moves Yuga Labs has been making, both with its acquisition of CryptoPunks and with its core community (BAYC). If you think OpenSea isn’t tossing and turning in their sleep right now you’re sorely mistaken. With Yuga owning a significant chunk of overall NFT volume (lol), it’s only natural that every major NFT marketplace will start thinking through how to incentivize Yuga to stay on their platform, to inevitably prevent them from starting a competing marketplace.
NFT marketplace aside, Yuga looks equally poised to conquer the P2E gaming space. If they can solidify their place as the preeminent “metaverse” gaming experience and position themselves as not just a game but a platform for other NFT projects to integrate, then it’s not only OpenSea who should be terrified – Zark Muckerberg should be sweating profusely.
Yuga Labs is building one the largest, most forward-thinking tech companies on the planet, full stop. Do not fade the apes.
Market Musings:
As we spent the last week digging through twitter and discord, we noticed an interesting phenomenon taking shape throughout the NFT space. Recently, a lot of the hyped NFT projects have all been running the same model. Not very active on twitter, follow an extremely small number of people, have a private discord server, WL-only, and all of these projects seemingly have the same art style.
Seriously, find practically any NFT project with a cute cartoon PFP, impossible to get a WL spot, and 30k+ followers. Boki for example looks just like Droplets which looks just like Chill Bear Club. And despite this egregious overlap, everyone still wants a piece.
We’re not going to sit here and rip on the art. If you talk to us in discord, you know we’re huge fans of cute cartoon avatars (isn’t everyone). But here’s the core thesis we’re getting at…
Everyone has been saying this is a flippers market recently. You get a WL for a hot project and quickly flip it for a 3-4x before the art reveal. But if everyone is utilizing the same strategy, how is anyone going to win? The answer is, they won’t.
So, we think you should be doing the opposite and fading these flippers who clearly aren’t nailing it, and revisit a time-tested, more expensive, but more consistent strategy – follow the flows to the top.
We’ve been watching this play out over the last week – everything is starting to connect more and make sense. The majority of the market has deployed the strategy above (quick pre-reveal flips), which while working at times, does not nearly have the hit rate it had last month. These flippers are the ones who have been calling for a “bear” market. In times like these, we’ve seen money flow to the top – a rush into blue chips. Doodles/Clone X/Azuki are all back to that 12-15 ETH floor range. BAYC is doing BAYC things. Projects we’ve covered like Catblox have done +2X off the bottom, and other solid projects like Coolmans have been in a steady up trend.
Practically every “over-hyped” February project mentioned in this newsletter (Invisible Friends, WonderPals, Tasty Bones, etc) is down 50%+ from its pre-reveal price. But, since every one of these projects are still up 3-4x+ from mint price, the consensus that the flippers drew was to get as many WL spots as possible and flip pre-reveal.
So, what’s next? Many of these hyped projects will probably do well short-term, but this trend is breaking as value plays continue to rule the day. As you should expect, we’ll be monitoring this trend closely to see how it evolves over the coming weeks.
New Mint: Smilies
Date: TBA
Price: .045 ETH
Supply: 5420
We came across this project from a community member recommendation. Team is doxxed and the project seems a bit under the radar with ~8k followers on twitter and ~4700 in discord. While we are certainly overdone with cartoon PFPs, they are seemingly still the path with least resistance (for now).
While we can argue the art is too similar to Weather Report and Dented Feels, it’s important to note that Weather Report was one of the most hyped projects before the artist debacle and Dented Feels hit a .4 ETH floor. This “smiley” style art has had a lot of past success and gives us the sense that projects like these simply catch on (at least temporarily).
Another thing that’s nice about this project is that the creators were much smarter about total supply. With a lot of 10k collections struggling to sell out, Smilies has a 5420 supply and only a .045 mint price. Let’s not forget ETH is still in a good range for NFTs to flourish.
We’re not going to act like this is a revolutionary project that’s going to change the game (it may very well be a degen bet). But what do we like besides the art and basics? Well, considering so many projects run private discords, WL-only mints, and hyping exclusivity with seemingly nothing worth being deemed exclusive,
Smilies does not do this (a breath of fresh air). While they still offer WL spots, it’s not a real grind and they’re generous about giving them away. If you’re trying to scratch that degen mint itch, then for .045 ETH, Smilies is at the lower end of the risk spectrum if you’re looking to mint a fresh PFP.
🚨Minting This Week🚨: Sprite Club
Date: March 26th, 2pm EST
Mint: .07 ETH
Supply: 7777
Most of you know how excited we are about this project and many readers are already on the WL and/or plan to scoop up on secondary. We’ve seen some recent FUD around Sprites, due to the fact that it isn’t “super hyped” and ~only has 30k followers on twitter… HA HA HA.
Wonder what this reminds us of 🤔… When Creepz minted during the bear market, they had under 10k followers on twitter and minted out in under 1 hour with a WL-only mint. Why is that? Because Creepz grew slowly and organically over a long period of time. Sprites has been doing the same – the growth has been consistent and purely organic since December.
When you have true organic growth, you create a community of people genuinely interested in a project, coming back to the discord everyday, joining twitter spaces, and spreading the good vibes. Many of the “hyped projects” recently launched a month after sprites, and minted a month before. While they managed to gain 2x the followers, these projects seem rushed, and in turn haven’t done as well. We’ve seen this story play out before and we *still* strongly believe that Sprites will perform well on the secondary.
Final note here – two bullish catalysts we want to mention. The first is that Sprites isn’t a 10k collection, it’s ~25% smaller than most other projects dropping right now with exponentially more organic demand. Secondarily, the Sprite you mint / rarity received, is based upon an adventure quiz you’ll take pre-mint. Since we were beta-testers, we can confidently say that we think community members will be a bit more emotionally attached to their Sprite, which we expect to result in low total listings. Again, we’re confident this will be a winner, but please, as always, DYOR.
Blankos Block Party
Finally, a play-to-earn game that’s actually a game 😂. This is what immediately struck us after stumbling across Blankos Block Party. We also briefly played the beta version of the game and were pleased with both the ease of use and overall quality.
As we dug even deeper, we were not disappointed with what we discovered. Based on the artwork, it looks like they’re building traditional-feeling collectibles using the characters within the game. They also seem to be backed by a very large game publisher (Mythical Games) which should certainly help with establishing authority in the space. What struck us most was the “leaked” image from the Yuga Labs video with a Blankos character off to the side. Later we saw a tweet from Blanko’s CEO confirming some form of collaboration between Blankos and the BAYC owners. Not too much is known of the extent of this collaboration, but needless to say it’s quite an exciting catalyst for the growth of this project.
Note that we did ape in and before you ape as well, you should DYOR, scroll their twitter, and play the game itself.
Fresh Fools & Happy Homies
While Fresh Fools has made a surprising comeback after slashing total supply and readjusting their roadmap, the initial mint for both Fresh Fools and Happy Homies is a testament to how tough this space is. Teams need to execute perfectly or they are slandered. Things were looking very good for Fresh Fools earlier in the week. Public mint looked like it was ready to sell out fairly quickly, but an issue with the minting process left a lot of people hanging and frustrated.
The Fools then had the same issue after rescheduling the mint for 24 hours later, and at this point, let’s just say the crowd wasn’t thrilled 😅. While this was a train wreck, the space is truly unforgiving, and any small mistake, especially something like a delayed mint, can derail an entire project.
Unfortunately, mistakes happen and we won’t bat 100% (although like we said, look out for the Fools to make a comeback). While we think both teams have the ability to build and execute, this will most likely not be enough (at least for Happy Homies) as the project will always be “tainted”.
To dive deeper on Happy Homies specifically, the fact that they’re currently sitting at around 25% of the supply minted is a massive surprise to us, and inspired a lot of our market musings above. While we did mention upfront that we were scratching our degen-itch last week with this play, we thought of these as similar to Dippies and Loser Club, which have done well. With the discord always active, people seemingly excited to mint, large twitter following, fully doxxed team, and truly some of the best collabs in the space, how could this happen?
We don’t think the lack of success (so far) is due to the team or art. A lot to nit-pick here but one key issue that may come about in a market full of “flippers” is that it seems like every whitelisted participant was watching the mint volume extremely closely (too closely if you’re trying to build a community of holders). The second the mint lost momentum, flippers started doing calculations on whether it made sense to mint or not (and we’d argue they are making a financially sound decision by doing so). Momentum is practically everything while a project is minting and when the perceived expectation is that something should mint out quickly, and after 24 hours it’s only 20% of the way there, people get FUD. The second the floor price dips below mint price during an active mint, especially when it’s not even close to being finished, it makes no sense for people to mint if they’re looking for a quick flip.
So what’s next? The team clearly wants to keep building and has strong advisors and big supporters in the space. It’s tough for us to gauge where this goes in the future. If you remember when we covered Paradise Trippies during the bear market, this was a seemingly hyped project that only minted around 20%. After around 2 weeks it slowly and steadily finished, although the floor price never recovered.
We’d be lying if we said we aren’t bummed about this call and it’s tough to be super positive about the future for Happy Homies. The art still has not been entirely revealed (as of writing) so this should be a growth catalyst, but they will definitely need a whale to come in and sweep as well. If the art is truly something special, then the community should jump right back on this. At the end of the day, we are rooting for this team/community. The discord surprisingly has very little FUD for what you’d expect and the team seems to be dead set on building something special. Keep them on your radar and proceed with caution.
Conclusion:
Note – we wrote the majority of this newsletter yesterday and this conclusion was written this morning.
We are bullish in the near-term, plain and simple. Seedphrase just swept the Creepz floor with 50 ETH, every major blue chip is riding high, and there are multiple exciting new mints on the horizon which MC Pass holders will have exclusive WL access to (Sprite Club and one soon-to-be-announced mystery drop).
Losses will be had (if we never made a bad pick you should be concerned we might be robots 😂) but as long as we can keep the losses to a minimum, learn from our mistakes, and ensure that our winners greatly outweigh our losers, then WAGMI, anon.
Love,
Wilson & Paul
Web3 Careers:
Hey job hunters! Last week on our Discord AMA (get yourself a MC Pass to join in future discussions!!) we had some great questions about jobs and ballpark salaries for specific roles. Not every post has a salary listed, but some do, so we’re going to start including that when we can with salaries in USD unless otherwise noted.
We’re seeing a ton of demand for project management roles this week. If you have project management or strong organizational skills – check these out. Project management is seriously one of those careers where you don’t need tech experience. If you are skilled at coordinating and organizing across teams, stakeholders, and customers this is for you.
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 hello@mintcalendar.com.
Community/Safety
Twitter and Instagram Social Media Manager (Metaverse 7, Remote)
Fraud Specialist, Crypto/NFT (DraftKings, Multiple US Locations)
Flow Community Manager (Rarible, Remote)
Marketing:
Senior NFT Marketing Specialist/Manager (Eyekandy, Remote, 70k-125K)
Crypto Gaming/NFT Content Writer (Gamestarter, Remote/Vilnius)
Product/Miscellaneous:
Lead Product Designer (Ripple, Remote North America)
Account Executive – NFT (Crypto.com, Remote Hong Kong)
Internship, Product (Nansen, Remote)
Project Manager (Nike Virtual Studios, NYC/LA)
Metaverse Producer/Product Manager (Boom.tv, Remote San Francisco, 150k-200k)
Software Development:
Lead Solidity Developer (Cool Cats, Remote, 150-250k)