Important note before we begin:
In the new year, we’ll be moving from Substack to Beehiive to improve the newsletter writing and reading experience. Be sure to check your spam next week just in case.
You will be able to find us at www.mintmedia.beehiiv.com/.
(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 everyone. I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season and enjoying some much needed time off. While the entire USA is freezing over, I have been tax loss harvesting my worthless jpegs. My hidden folder was quite disgusting. On the other hand, my bags are fully packed for 2023 – this will be a unique newsletter. I’ll give a quick peek into my bags and the bags of the Mint Media team going into 2023. Next week, I’ll follow up with a “year in review”, highlighting my best and worst plays of 2022.
While the markets have been slow, I’m excited for 2023. 2023 is not going to be an easy year, but it *feels* like the worst is behind us sentiment wise. I mean this in the sense that NFTs are slowly but surely becoming more mainstream and bringing users real utility, not just purely vaporware. Yes, most of your bags are zeros but on the bright side, something new and amazing will emerge this year. Anyways, I’ll do my best to keep this short and sweet and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the holiday season and amazing new year! It’s been months since I said this but if you’re out here grinding every single day and haven’t left yet, then WAGMI .
Market Update
ETH is entering its 7th week in the $1,100 - $1,300 range. Combine this relative stability with Blur airdrop farming and we’ve had a pretty solid December when it comes to volume and prices. Definitely a better December than most expected, including myself, as December has been the opposite of dead.
Blur + OpenSea trading volume increased this week with Blur volume jumping 15% week-over-week. It’s tough to tell how notable this is due to wash trading and airdrop farming but we’re well off the volume lows. To be fair, I am completely in the dark when it comes to how the mechanics of the Blur airdrop work so I can’t give the best opinion on how this will affect the market. Overall, I expect the airdrop to be underwhelming and would be surprised if we all received a significant amount of USD denominated tokens.
If this is the case, we may not get the massive liquidity injection and pump we’ve all been waiting for in January. With that said, it can go either way and I’m sitting mostly on the sidelines with my high-conviction bets watching the madness play out. Since so few users are left and the same projects are simply trading hands, the market has become smarter and there’s much less garbage minting and trending.
Overall, I’m excited to see what 2023 brings. I’m looking forward to bringing my learnings from 2022 into the new year to build generational jpeg wealth for the future.
Blue Chips
The above chart is from Axu.eth (follow him if you already don’t). While this is probably super controversial (as all of these are since we're emotionally attached to our bags), I think it’s the best one I’ve seen so far. Mainly, I feel that S to A- are mostly spot on except that MAYC should be “A” and 80% of B is deservingly there as well. Obviously, these are just opinions from random internet people.
Moving on, a solid week for some projects, rough week for others. Some surprising, some… not really. As always, the floor is on blur and this is from Monday Morning EST.
Yuga Labs dropped a teaser trailer and brought in volume for the Monkey ecosystem. As a self-proclaimed Otherside skeptic, I thought the video looked amazing, I won’t lie. I was also impressed with the article they dropped as well. BAYC and MAYC are up ~10% week-over-week and Otherdeeds had a nice “video-hype” pump as well.
Azuki is up slightly and has maintained its 10.5-11.5 ETH stablecoin status. Unsurprisingly, Azuki grails continue to sell at exorbitant prices.
Moonbirds are ~7.2 ETH but look like they want to drop below 7 ETH. Any small pump here usually retraces quickly. Doodles are flat again at 6.7 ETH (6.6 last week) and I think this is pretty solid considering there is a ton of FUD around Doodles and more specifically the fact that the team has essentially gone radio silent. Clones are also still unable to shake off their FUD from the MNLTH shoe drop and hit a low of 5.5 ETH, but are technically flat week-over-week at 5.8 ETH. All in all, out of these 4 projects, Azuki looks great, and the rest… not so much.
Cool Cats are down slightly from 2.7 ETH to 2.5 week-over-week as of writing this, but this isn’t surprising as we saw a 140+ ETH sweep last week which was the primary driver behind the pump. That being said, they’re holding steady above a 2 ETH floor which has been an important range for them. If I was a betting man, I’d say the Cats have more upside than downside at this point.
Penguins, Penguins, Penguins. It was always the Pengs. Pengs hit an ATH as I write this. At 5.15 ETH they’re getting scarily close to flipping Clone X. As I’ve mentioned since ~August, the *real* catalyst is flipping a project in the Azuki/Doodles/Moonbirds/Clone category. That alone in my opinion will be a massive FOMO driver for the price to rip higher. Overall, the momentum behind Penguins hasn’t stopped. However, this pump has been steady since early August and is as healthy as it can look on a chart. I think Luca and team will be making huge waves in 2023, and I don’t believe this is a controversial opinion anymore. Penguins are turning out to be this bear market’s ChainLink.
And to nobody’s surprise, we’re now 2 full months of Punks being in the 62-67 ETH range.
Mint Media Team Portfolio Update:
First of all, as stated in the disclaimer at the top, nothing below is any sort of financial advice. NFTs are arguably the riskiest and most speculative assets (if you want to call them that) one can invest (gamble) in. We are extremely passionate about this space and believe the technology is revolutionary. That doesn’t necessarily correlate with us being good or bad at speculating on various NFT asset values. Always do your own research and make decisions of any kind based on your own research – we’re literally random internet cartoons.
We got a ton of requests in the discord to see what our core team holdings look like. Mint Media has a larger team but for the sake of this portfolio update, we’ll strictly be focusing on the 3 of us (Wilson/Chuck/Paul) who run the day-to-day. This is going to be a ton of fun!
First before diving into our current portfolio – let’s all cringe a little and look at the Mint Media team portfolio from Dec 13th 2021.
Yikes! While I love to pat myself on the back for screaming into the void about Pudgy Penguins for over a year now, the rest of this portfolio is practically 0. HashMasks was a major loss. Wanderers were a great flip but have gone to 0 now if you held on to them. The rest could be chalked up to tax loss harvesting. Chubbifrens are the same price as mint. And Parallel… LOL. Let’s just say we’ve come a long way since we first started discussing into NFTs in this newsletter. The best part about this all – one win like Penguins can outweigh all of your losses massively, which is one of the things that makes the jpeg space so enticing.
Looking ahead, this is what Mint Media’s core team is holding going into 2023:
Deeper Dive
As the author and self-proclaimed Penguin enjoooooyer, I have a lot of opinions on various projects. The breakdown above is is the aggregate of 3 members who share differing opinions. Below I will do my best to share the high-level thoughts of our team, with the reasoning behind why each project is being held heading into 2023. As a reminder, everything below is very biased as we are talking about our bags. Feel free to read our rationalizations or simply move on. Note: we treat all individual assets (including rares) as *floors* to make this more digestible.
Pudgy Penguins Ecosystem
We’ve been Penguin fans since day one. Which makes sense since the entire ecosystem makes up 50% of the value in our collective portfolio. This alos makes sense since the Pengs have been UpOnly lately. It’s clearly a blue chip and top #5 NFT brand without question. Without overdoing it, here’s a short thread from TheChild on why he's always been a huge Penguin bull. This is from early December before we saw any substantial price pump (he’s very smart). We think this is a great summary.
Y00ts
Objectively one of most-enjoyed PFP art in the space. Seriously there is no denying that y00ts look amazing. The main bull case here is that Frank is clearly one of the greatest leaders we’ve seen in this space, and we are betting on him to be successful. With Solana dropping as low as it has, we think these were/are undervalued at time(s) of purchase in USD. Unsure how to feel about the move to Polygon, but will wait for the dust to settle before buying/selling more.
Other
Includes various projects such as Yaypegs, Chubbiverse, Lascaux, and various other projects that are mostly *shiny objects* where we look to sell the pump. For the most part, this is the “hold for sub-1 week” portion of our portfolio so it changes frequently. There’s also a ton of other projects in here that are down 95% that might as well be sent to the graveyard for some tax loss harvesting.
Creepz and My Pet Hooligan
Looping these together because both projects have similar objectives and a massive overlap of holders. MPH has a 50+ person team and a live demo of their game. Creepz has a cult-like community and some of the best founders in the space. Both projects have rumors of announcing *massive* funding rounds in the new year which on its own can be a catalyst. At one point in 2022, Creepz was by far our largest holding, and was easily the biggest win we’ve had all year (was up 100x+ at one point). Like many involved, we de-risked X amount on the way up. Finally, these projects both seem under the radar, which is quite remarkable considering everything they have done. Ultimately both of these projects are in price ranges where we feel like we *still* want to accumulate more.
Avax NFTs
I’m sure if you read Mint Avalanche then you know who holds the majority here (hint hint, Chuck). This was larger back in October/November but prices have really taken a nose dive in the last month. Essentially, this is a bet that the Avax ecosystem is undervalued and it’s one of the only places where we still feel truly *early*. With an extremely easy entry (~$10) and no fees, it’s a great way to onboard new users to the NFT space.
Cool Cats
Overall, the core team has very mixed feelings on this including some very bullish and very bearish takes. Despite the recent downtrend, it’s only fair to give a bull case for holding. Cool Cats have brought in fresh leadership with a grand vision and the capacity to execute. There is still a strong core community and Cool Cats will always be looked at as an OG project, especially in 3-5+ years. It may not outpace other blue chips but is still undervalued compared to the other high-end projects.
Final Thoughts
2022 has been a year of massive ups and downs, emotional swings, and a wild learning experience. We started off 2022 in full NFT mania and ended the year so deep in goblin town that sometimes I forget what the good times were like. All in all, we’re still here, still alive, and still *having fun*. Keep your head up and keep learning. Can’t wait to see what the new year brings and I’m sending my best wishes to all those reading this, especially if you made it this far.
Have a great new year! See you next week.