NFT Puberty
(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. Another relatively quiet week in the NFT market on a project level, but definitely not a quiet week in New York. Turns out, most of you degens actually did take some profit and blew it all partying in NYC. Jokes aside, while not in attendance, we’ve heard amazing feedback from folks about the caliber of people entering this industry looking to build and network. The future is bright, but not before we wade through a sea of pain. Overall, trading pictures of cartoons in this market, especially with global headwinds, is becoming less of a viable option to make a living (who would have thought!). That being said, we’re here to break down some big stories, share a few thoughts, and dive deep into a few new upcoming projects. Let’s have another great week everyone!
Housekeeping
Mint Jobs: We’re launching the baddest web3 job board on the internet. Visit mintjobs.xyz if you’re looking to mint your next career opportunity, or if you’re hiring, contact hello@mintcalendar.com to get your job listing posted!
Featured Partner: Diamond Hands Hotel
This week’s featured partner is Diamond Hands Hotel – a company that works with brands to help them launch their own NFT projects. They reached out to us to help spotlight their newest tool for builders called Verify, which is a free API that allows NFT projects to implement on-site verification for holders for any collection on ETH, Polygon, or Sol.
Some of the many ways you can use Verify:
- Build a platform that requires NFTs for access
- Launch an album, podcast, alpha channel, or any exclusive digital content for holders
- Give holders various rewards based on traits or rarity
If you might be in need of Verify for your next project, email us at hello@mintcalendar.com and we’ll make the introduction :)
NFTs In The News
As we transition away from simply highlighting degen PFPs and aim to become the go-to educational destination for all things NFTs, we’ll be covering some of the most interesting stories throughout the industry as they arise.
Uniswap acquires Genie - Many of us have used either gem.xyz or genie to sweep floors of our favorite collection. Recently OpenSea acquired Gem and now we see Uniswap (the decentralized exchange) entering the space with its acquisition of Genie. As the market continues to stagnate, and valuation multiples contract, we expect M&A activity to persist.
eBay acquires NFT marketplace knownorigin – Interesting acquisition by eBay. Transparently, we have never heard of knwonorigin and according to the sentiment on twitter, it seems that most natives in this space haven’t as well. Nonetheless, we see the theme of Web 2.0 companies acquiring their way into Web 3.0 rather than build from scratch.
Crypto exchange Bitget plans to double workforce to 1,000 over next six months - “As we continue to endure the crypto winter, it will be a perfect opportunity for us to attract talent in the market and strengthen our foundation, prioritize growth and be prepared to welcome the next round of crypto adoption when the market regains strength” - Managing Director Gracy Chen. Prices certainly are not a reflection of the growth this industry is seeing.
Shopify allows merchants to add utility NFTs – “...Customers can now connect their crypto wallets to stores on the platform to validate they own specific NFTs. This activation will then give them access to things pre-sales for drops, experiences in real life and exclusive content or merchandise. The company calls this 'tokengated' commerce.
Yuga labs files lawsuit - This seems to be the big one this week. Yuga labs sued artist Ryder Ripps and several associates, accusing them of producing and selling “copycat NFTs”.
A16Z funds Cryptotoys to build NFTs for kids - Surprised this hasn’t happened sooner as at practically every restaurant you see kids staring at their iPads the entire time. The funding will give Cryptotoys parent company OnChainStudios some capital to build out their vision including, yes, NFT gameplay. The younger generation are digital natives and there may be a large market for the younger degens out there. Not to mention that kids love physical toys, and the digital/physical ownership idea is already popular as you can see here.
Market Update
This is a gross chart from Nansen. ETH volume has fallen off a cliff and is the lowest it’s been since Nov 2021. What’s even grosser is that ETH was $4K USD in November. At around ~$1200 USD, we’re at a low on the year. While volume has plateaued the last month, this was the first sizable drop since the week of May 23rd.
On the other hand, active OS users are still at nearly double from November 2021 and 10x+ since June 2021. Transaction volume is still fairly high, which makes sense with the free mint meta still thriving (which we’ll touch on below). With how bad things have *felt* over the last month, it’s helpful to zoom out and look at how far we’ve come. 1 year ago today we bet many readers had not yet bought their first NFT.
The final noteworthy chart of the week is the Blue Chip 10, showing an aggressive bounce off the recent lows. While blue chips are certainly getting crushed in USD terms, they float around 35-50% below their ETH ATH compared to most of the market which is down 90%+ at this point. As the bear market continues to chop people up, Blue Chips are currently breaking the downtrend. This most likely is *not* a leading indicator of good things to come (unfortunately), but instead is the big players consolidating their holdings. Nonetheless, this is good news and we hope this steady slow grind upward continues.
Another important note is that Blue Chips, despite their high price, still have the best liquidity (which is king in an illiquid market like NFTs). That being said, funny enough, this week in particular, we found liquidity in some hopeless places.
Moving on, practically 50% of the projects on the OS top 24 hour volume are all free/degen mints with a floor of .01-.05, the typical spike in vol and max out around 150-200 ETH before dying out. At times there were more “new” projects than blue chips in the top 10 vol this week which is a rare occurrence.
We’re still seeing new mints struggle and even hyped free mints are struggling to get past 200 ETH volume on OS before hitting a quick zero. It really does feel like ancient history when discussing the days of minting a semi-hyped WL pfp project for a 3-4x+. While obviously not the best thing for nft enthusiasts like us, we are strong believers that the overall space has gotten a lot *smarter*.
Separately and funny enough, while it hasn’t been the “Solana Summer” we initially anticipated, new mints on sol are certainly outperforming new mints on ETH. Adding to this may be the fact that from a high level, you can see that the top 100 24-hour vol is now packed with Solana NFTs. While most of these are degen mints as well, it seems that vol can move quite quickly here with the low fees and quick transactions that Sol enables. Getting a WL spot for a hyped project such as CopeTown is technically a win, but these are much smaller wins due the fact that sol is hovering around ~$40.
In sum, we’re still not having too much fun in this market from a trading perspective. If you’re still holding bags, we hope you’re hiding out in blue chips as these have seen the *least* amount of pain. Free mints continue to flood the market but the success is becoming shorter and shorter lived. There’s no need to rush into anything this week, patience has continued to pay off quite well in this market and good long-term buying opportunities will continue to present themselves.
Deep Dives
Unless you’re a reader whose been living under a rock recently, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve strayed from covering specific projects as the bear market decimated price-action and made project-specific analysis hard to stand behind.
That being said, great projects will emerge from this bear market, and as ETH stabilizes there will be short-term opportunity to be had as well.
The day has finally come. It’s been quite some time since we spoke to the founders back in February and over the last 4 months the team has certainly generated a lot of noise. Initially when first covering, we watched Pssssd go from 2k to 100k in a few weeks off of what was true organic growth. They’re around 227K followers now and things have certainly stalled growth wise, but their loyal fans and discord momentum has sustained nicely.
Mint is still steep at .25 for WL and .3 for public (relative of course), and they really could not be launching at a worse possible time. Despite this, we’d say that Pssssd remains the strongest new mint on the market. Does this mean it’s going to do well – not necessarily. While we think they eventually find success, if a project like this manages to flop then there truly is no risk appetite for new mints at the moment. Anyways, we’re excited as this has been a long time coming – to be continued.
This has the makings to be an interesting mint, and it’s nice to see a hyped project with a low mint price. They have an extremely active discord but have managed to stay under the radar compared to Pssssd or a project like Memeland. With a WL sale mint price of .069 today at 9am EST, we’d expect this to sell out easily but not sure what happens next. More importantly, and similar to how we feel about Psssd, this will be a great way to take the temperature of new mints in general within this market. Best case scenario here (as we see it) is that we can see this catch on similar to how Boki did. ~20% allocated for public mint at .089 and gas war will depend on how private sale goes. Finally, keep in mind this is an 0xStudio drop which was in the hot seat the other week for their treatment of the Lonely Pop artist. DYOR.
**Degen** free mint but looks to really be picking up steam. Will probably ignore this if we don’t get on the WL but we’re happy to simply make you aware of these types of projects, especially in the off chance they end up becoming big winners. If you like getting involved with these, highly recommend moby.gg as our good friend Chuck Banister spoke in depth about a few weeks ago.
World renowned artist David Choe is dropping his own project, public sale begins tomorrow, June 29th, at 12pm PST, for .2 ETH. We touched on Munko in the past, it’s extremely rare that we’ve seen a 10K collection drop from an artist of David’s caliber. We’ll be watching this to see how traditional “art collectible” NFTs compare in this down market to PFP community based collections. Will something like this decouple and have a mind of its own? Most likely not, but if it does we’ll definitely have to touch on this further.
Mint Jobs
GM! A lot of you have asked questions like “what should my resume look like?” or “how do I sell my Web3 skills?” One of our community members who works as a freelance community manager, ZFreddy, has created an awesome website that shows how he answers some of these questions. Highly recommend you check it out for ideas in building your own resume or creative self-marketing tools!
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 @realmintmedia, @TheChild1996, or send an email to hello@mintcalendar.com.
Community/Social Media
Head of PR (Rarible, Remote Global)
Creative
Digital Designer (Art Blocks, Remote Global)
Art Director, Sports (Consensys, Remote US)
Miscellaneous:
Senior Blockchain Researcher (Ripple, London)
Lead Recruiter (Foundation, Remote Global)
Licensing Manager – Digital Games, NFT, Metaverse (MLBPA, NYC)
Legal
Lead Commercial Counsel, Web3 (Meta, Remote US)
Counsel (Opensea, Remote US)
Conclusion
We touched on crypto/nft gaming a bit last week as the *next big thing* and we’re starting to see emerging signs of meaningful traction.
It’s incredibly interesting to watch as we build our virtual future, while the virtual worlds which we already know and love slowly adopt the ownership infrastructure of tomorrow.
The old adage goes, the next big thing starts out looking like a toy. If that’s true, which it is, then we are in for one heck of a rollercoaster over the next several years.
Until next time, anon.
– W & P