Jpegs and Joepegs
(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 and welcome back to Mint Weekly. We hope you are all enjoying your summer and getting in some much needed grass touching time. For the first time in a while we haven’t seen the market in free fall and things have remained relatively flat since our last article. With summer in full swing, not much “big news” as volume remains depressed across the board. While for the most part we continue to remain on the sidelines, the industry continues to make progress as a whole. Along with this, we’re starting to see the early stages of a boom within AVAX NFTs and will discuss why we think this will be the new near-term “meta”. With that, let’s dive right in. Have a great week folks!
Housekeeping
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NFTs In The News
Despite crypto ban, China’s tech talent rides the global web3 wave
NFT Startup Magic Eden Valuation Surges Tenfold to $1.6 Billion
Facebook launches NFT feature for select group of US creators
Ethereum Name Service domain bought for $315,000 in second-biggest ever sale
Another crypto lender Vauld pauses withdrawals as market crash takes its toll
Macro Update
The twitter timeline is full of FUD as the crypto contagion surrounding 3AC continues to leak into other areas of the market. This week, we saw Voyager suspend withdrawals as well as rumors circulating regarding FTX buying out BlockFi. Safe to say things in the broader crypto sphere are not looking too hot at the moment and your favorite CT influencer has either left or continues to post doom and gloom.
A Ghost Town
If we head over to NFT twitter, it’s basically just a ghost town at this point. Even the influencer white list giveaways are scarce right now. It feels like we’re in the early to middle-ish consolidation stage of the bear market. Similar to other cycles, things remained choppy with low volume for around 8 months to 1 year. Basically max pain.
We have no clue how long things will float around here for, but as always, it pays to be patient in this type of market. Patience, perseverance, and survival are the names of the game right now.
ETH Performance
Looking at ETH, this was the first week in a while where the price has remained stable in a tight range ($1000-$1200 USD). This stability is what allowed us to avoid another “down-only” week in NFTs. As we always say, steady ETH prices are great for our jpegs. That being said, a lot of macro news regarding CPI and the Fed will be coming out in the very near future which should usher in. more volatility with it.
NFT Performance
Diving deeper on NFT performance, overall volume in ETH terms ticked up slightly (it’s just nice to see that we didn’t lose more ground). Interestingly enough, earlier last week, for the first time in what feels like forever, OpenSea had its first week where no project hit over 1000 ETH in volume.
Blue chips continue to remain flat week-over-week, especially compared to the rest of the market which saw floors steadily decrease. It’s almost as if we’re running out of sellers at this point since the carnage has been devastating. We also saw Moonbirds pump 50% to a 30 ETH floor at one point during the week due to FOMO on some rumors.
OG collections like Art Blocks and Autoglyphs are back in the spotlight on the OS activity page, which are projects that helped originally kick off the NFT craze back in early 2021. Looks like a lot of the “OG NFT Whales” are looking to put their ETH to work in this area of the market, seemingly expecting these collections to take on ‘fine art’ status over time.
Free mints continue to dominate this current hype cycle, despite the slowdown. There’s always at least one free mint within the top 10 volume on OS at any given point during the week.
As a market, we’ve basically evolved into two categories which remain to show promise as most 10K PFP collections have died or have practically no volume (many mid-caps slowly drifting into this category). The first is top-tier blue chips, the second is projects which can be considered the next “shiny object”. The second is a bit more interesting and fun. This category or the new “shiny objects” as we like to say continue to run off of purely the hype cycle. These assets, which are driving a lot of the volume today, continue to prove that many of our jpegs are simply momentum assets exchanging hands multiple times a day, only ending up with the greatest fool at the end.
There’s certainly a lot of cash to be made in this part of the market, and it really comes down to who is the “earliest”. We’ll do a quick overview of the new stuff this week below.
Recent Mints
Last week we covered 4 new mints and how their results could tell us a bit more about the current state of the market. Below we’ll follow up on these and express our views on the macro due to the results.
The Possessed has gone surprisingly well and hit 2k ETH volume on the first day post mint which was the most we’ve seen in a while. The floor is currently 2X+ the WL price floating in the .5 ETH area and even hit .8 around an hour post mint. The public sale sold out in minutes and volume here remains strong. Overall we’d say this has been a success, and there is *still* demand for hyped projects. If this had flopped we’d basically turn off our computer for the month, go outside, and touch grass. That being said, by no means are we blown away by the results here. Rather, pleasantly surprised.
Munko and Yokee have both fallen below mint price and failed to mint out the entire collection. Whether it’s a world renowned artist or a hyped PFP project with a large following, the demand for new mints is at an all time low despite the cheap ETH. On the other hand, free mints had themselves a week. WZRDS hit .4 ETH 24 hours within its free mint and God Hates NFTees has ripped to 1.4 ETH after its free mint as well.
This is a wild phenomenon showing the true degen nature of momentum trading NFTs. At the current state of the market, participants rather pay up to join a free mint project with no roadmap that’s trending on moby.gg or OS rather than mint a project with a team that’s built out future plans. Quite the time we are living in. For now, it seems best to take a step back and avoid new mints for now (unless they’re free of course).
We found alpha in a hopeless place
Doom and gloom aside, the 24/7 crypto casino is always open. To nobody’s surprise, the degens are still alive to come and play. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Avalanche (AVAX) NFTs and are quite pleased with how smooth the entire process is (and fairly lucrative). We’ve been talking a lot about this with our discord community and have jokingly said we’re now AVAX maxis.
We *think* there may be a new mint meta coming to AVAX, due to small collection sizes, extremely cheap mints, and practically no fees. Also, Joepegs, the OpenSea equivalent for AVAX NFTs, is quite easy to use.
Let’s take a quick look at what happened over the last few days. Smol Joes, was a free mint on AVAX that now has a floor of ~850 AVAX in roughly a week at time of writing. While the volume is low, we’ve seen plenty of sales in the 350 AVAX zone. This is the equivalent of a free mint on ETH going to a 5 ETH floor in under a week (~5K USD). If you minted 2 Smol Joes, you could have walked away with ~10 ETH (600 AVAX) if you held on for the week. Basically what goblintown did.
Free mints on AVAX are even lower risk than ETH as well because of the minimal fees. This would be under $1 to mint compared to what can be $40-$50 USD in ETH for a free mint. The demand is clearly here. Owloper sold out in under 8 minutes last week. This 2222 collection was a 2 AVAX mint (~$32 USD) and the floor is up 3x since mint to 6 AVAX.
While this isn’t a major win in USD terms, it’s still a win in what has been an abysmal market. More importantly, the speed for minting out shows that the degens are still here to play.
On Joepegs, you can see that right now there are 4 mints coming up within the next week or so. We’re either extremely early to the next “meta” or wrong. Either way, we’ll probably plan on minting all of these collections since it’s low risk/medium reward. If these continue to be successful, we’ll get deeper in the coming week. Transparently, this is what we are most excited about market wise.
We also saw 2 free mints yesterday that both sold out in under 1 minute and have continued to pump. Satoverse, a 100 piece collection, is seeing good volume around 50 AVAX (~$900) and Smol Land has gone to a ~90 AVAX floor ($1500) in 1 hour. This is wild. As mentioned above, if you manage to look in the right places, the casino is clearly open right now.
We’re not fortune tellers, but we’d say we’re early on this end since there isn’t much chatter going on. However, we’ve seen these mini-cycles occur in NFT land for around 18 months now and this looks like the next one. As we’ve traded various “meta’s” before, the hype cycles around them tend to last around a month or so +/- 1-2 weeks.
Smol Joes minted 8 days ago and it looks like the attention is just getting started. If you’re looking to get involved, degen, or simply learn more NFTs on a new chain, this is looking like your best risk/reward in the market right now.
If you follow us on twitter, we'll RT some stuff solely to spread awareness, not as endorsements, since it is tough to keep up with everything going on. Here’s a quick video if you’re interested in learning more on how to bridge from ETH to AVAX. Again, we’ve been surprised how smooth the entire minting/buying/selling process has been on Joepegs and think that there is a very good chance the degens move here next.
Conclusion
If you made it this far, we’re glad to see you’re still alive. Innovation continues to happen left and right and there is nothing stopping the path to our digital future. Behind the scenes, money continues to pour into the hands of the next great entrepreneurs building in this space.
At this point. your co-worked probably stopped making fun of you for owning NFTs but rather completely forgot they exist.
Keep your head up, anon.
W & P