Pixel Bulls Assemble
Pixel Bulls Assemble
MBIC, You Bought A Jpeg
(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. Appreciate the patience on this one-day delay as we took a much needed vacation. Glad we returned when we did because there is a ton to cover – ETH and NFTs are ripping, blue chips seem unstoppable, and seemingly, many hyped projects are struggling to mint out. We’re back to that fast pace feel of January where if you miss a few days of drama, it feels like you’re a year behind.
Before we jump in, some quick notes:
Another stellar job on the career section below from TheChild. As we know a lot of you are looking to move to Web 3.0 full time, we have some hot job opportunities at the bottom of this newsletter that you won’t want to miss.
MC will have several major announcements throughout April, so keep your eyes peeled and remain on high alert.
The MC community has been flourishing since inception. If interested, we’d love to have you.
This week is very dense, no time to waste so let’s jump right into it!
Credit to our new in-house Meme Meister, TokyoSunbather:
Macro Update:
The money continues to flow to the top and blue chips are outperforming again. This week we saw a bunch of sweeps on Azuki where it hit an ATH above 18 ETH, MAYC at 24 ETH, and Doodles/Clone X both back above 14 ETH. As BAYC leads the way, it looks like the Ape coin liquidity trickled a lot of money back into the nft market. As usual, PFPs continue to drive us forward.
As we’ve shouted to the heavens for the last 2 weeks, we’re certainly not in a bear market right now. However, many new projects have still been doing poorly. If you’ve been reading MC for a while, you’re probably not surprised that the overhyped projects continue to underperform post-reveal. Because of this seeming underperformance, it makes sense to still see some NFT influencers saying we’re in a bear. As mentioned last week, if everyone is looking for quick flips on these WL only projects, this won’t turn out well, leading many of these traders to believe we’re in a bear.
This is *somewhat* healthy. It’s good to see that absolute garbage projects can barely sell out 20% of the total supply. On the other hand, it’s getting harder and harder to determine what is or isn’t garbage. Another hyped up 10k collection Chum Chums which looked great on the surface, fell to a similar fate as Happy Homies. To recap our thoughts last week, these were projects with a large twitter following, private discord, and great collabs. However, many of the buyers that these projects attracted were looking for “quick flips”. Because of everyone watching mint so closely, both didn’t sell out, and the floor prices are being brutalized for it.
However, Small Bros takes the cake this week for being the biggest loser in the overhyped category. The floor went from .25 to .064 (below mint price) at time of writing. With a whopping 140k twitter followers, you’d expect something like this to be in high demand. We’ve been stressing for the past 2 months that the prime entry for these over-hyped projects is pre-reveal on secondary. That being said, *most of the time* the big money in NFTs is made from buying a project before it generates hype, not after it already has 50k+ followers. Almost every one of these projects has not hit its ATH during the pre-reveal stage.
A new thesis that we’re starting to form but is not yet fully solidified, is that if a project starts booming post-reveal (we’d believe due to great art), this is most likely a better longer-term investment. We’re not personally involved but a project like Muri which has gone up considerably since the reveal, is a prime example.
As silly as it may seem, good PFP art seems to be the main driver behind the success of most projects, even more than a good roadmap (at the moment). Fresh Fools has had the absolute comeback of the century, up 4x+ from mint price and 8x from the bottom after its disastrous mint. This is the first time we’ve seen a project make these gains after A) not selling out and B) deciding to burn the supply. There’s a lot of different factors involved here (art, apparent asian influencers, simply being pumped) and we’re not going to act like we know the true reason behind this success. Whether this is a one-off case or not, hopefully this acts as a bit of hopium for the future.
Finally, there is one looming, potentially fatal concern for NFTs. With ETH ripping the last few days and gas starting to rise again, we’re getting close to the upper range where NFTs start underperforming ETH. We’re not experts on how crypto trades but the combination of ETH above that ~3700 range mixed with high gas is not good for our jpegs. Transparently, we are completely uncertain of what happens next but if you think ETH is looking to break above 4k in the next few weeks then it may be time for you to start selling some of your jpegs, especially ones you plan to hold short-term.
New Projects On Our Radar:
Fuzzy Felons
Supply: 3,333
Mint Price: .1 ETH
Fuzzy Felons definitely looks solid. Former Dreamworks artist, fair mint price, low supply, and 1 spot per WL, we think this should be a winner post-mint. While we’re not a fan of the “walking” style art like Invisible Friends has (bad for PFPs), we think the art is impressive enough to outweigh this concern. There’s a solid following and hype, but nothing too crazy or overblown. Discord is super active and public as well, and the project looks to have grown fairly organically. Team is doxxed and transparent, frequently answering questions in discord.
Roadmap is a bit ambiguous but essentially they want to create a Web 3.0 animation studio by June. While this isn’t easy, having somebody coming from Dreamworks makes us think this is possible. As mentioned above, we also think the mint price is very fair, with most sub 5k supply projects minting between .2 – .25.
The tokenomics of the projects coins, $FUZZ and $BRIBES, are explained on the website and seem quite unique to this project if you’re interested in familiarizing yourself with the mechanisms. We didn’t have the chance to chat with the team, so we won’t go too deep, but from our understanding, holders will be able to win a pot of royalties from secondary sales as well as NFTs by accumulating $FUZZ and $BRIBES. Your Fuzzy Felon NFT will not need to be staked to accumulate, it will do this automatically. We’ll be minting ourselves and raffling off 30 WL spots to MC Pass holders.
Crayzillas
Really loving the core idea behind this project – minters have the ability to customize their own NFT.
“The community has no input. During minting, the NFT you receive is a static JPEG randomly picked from a pile. Oftentimes, it’s one that you don’t like, nor one that represents you.” - Crayzillas
Think this is a great point, and one of the reasons we think Creepz has done well the last 2 weeks is due to the similar experience they created with Interdimensionals. For Crayzillas, during the minting process you will be able to mint separate crayons and 1 coloring page. We think this is something that will definitely catch on, and the artwork is exactly what the NFT space typically loves.
There’s no real roadmap here but we can see this generating a lot of noise, where many want to buy/sell/trade crayons with one another to customize their ideal personal crayzilla. For example, if somebody wants blue no matter what, they’ll pay up for it. Same goes for the coloring page. Not sure how this will do long term, but think this concept will be copied by many other projects down the road.
AvaxScape (Guest Post)
Mint date: 4/7
Mint price: 3 AVAX
Supply: 3333
Mint Calendar: This is our first ever project we’re doing a write up on that is not on ETH. While we strongly believe most NFTs (especially PFPs) will be primarily ETH, there has recently been a lot of positive and deserved hype around P2E games on AVAX such as DeFi Kingdoms and Crabada. Many community members have expressed interest in us covering projects on other chains so we figured a guest post from community members BowTiedQuoll and SaasWiz would be interesting for readers. While we’re transparently a bit ignorant of the inner-workings of AVAX, we 100% endorse the founder of this project.
BowTiedQuoll/SaasWiz: A play-to-earn browser-based MMORPG built on the Avalanche network, the Gameplay of AvaxScape is heavily influenced by Old School Runescape (hence the name).
Avaxscape will feature 3,333 unique NFT heroes used to earn the in-game currency $MMO. Heroes are bucketed into three classes of Wizards, Archers, and Warriors split evenly and then there are four separate tiers for rarity. The hero that you mint will become the character you play as in the game.
Like Runescape, you can slay mobs for profit as well as duel against other players. A unique concept here is that players will be able to bet tokens or NFTs on the outcome of the pvp duel via smart contract.
While there will be some WL spots for giveaways and partnerships, the majority of the mint will be public mint to avoid the ethos around being a WL grind project. An evolving aspect of the game is that partner projects can actually add their NFT as an in-game character (this includes projects on ETH). So, essentially, you can have your cartoon lizard avatar dueling it out in the metaverse for $MMO.
Mint proceeds will be allocated to fund development, liquidity pools, and staking pools which will be available on Trader Joe. Avaxscape will go live shortly after mint and play-to-earn for $MMO will be begin.
Feel free to reach out to BowTiedQuoll and/or SaasWiz with any questions.
Concluding Note: ETH is still king, there’s no denying that. However, Avalanche’s ecosystem offers low fees and speedy transactions to give our team the perfect environment to build a nostalgic GameFi app for our community.
Wackies
Supply: 2500
Mint price: .08 ETH
Wack! Holders: .02 ETH
By artist Camille Chiang, Wackies looks like quite the interesting project. Not sure where this goes but think it’s worth at least taking a look at since it’s still relatively under the radar. The discord is still quite small (~3000 members), but there seems to be a very high demand for everyone who has joined. The art is straight up awesome. This isn’t a typical PFP, more of a ‘fine art’ collection on the blockchain.
From the Wackies FAQ: “We want to remind our members that this is a FINE ART collectible, we are not here to pump and dump and have nervous break-downs, we are here to support each other, network, and learn.”
Something about this radical transparency and branding as solely art is quite refreshing.
A slight concern is that the original collection Wack! only has a floor price of around .5 ETH. With 207 items in total, it’s tough to imagine Wackies at a higher price. Essentially, this is a bet on the artist taking off, like we’ve seen with someone like XCOPY. The mint is broken up so that they’ll be 20% for Wack! Holders, ~30% for the public, and 50% for WL, which is a nice balance.
It still seems earlier enough in the project's lifecycle to get on the WL, and discord is very casual where you can still connect with Camille. While there aren’t many *pure art* projects in the space, if you’re interested in more of an artistic collectible, Wackies may be a stand out. We’ll most likely follow up with this in a few weeks, as it may have the potential to take off.
Sprite Club
Flawless mint process. We’re extremely proud to say we’ve had 100+ MC Pass holders on the White List for sprites and many of the top 20 holders are in our community discord. So where are we post-mint? Floor is up 2x+, only 7% of the total supply is listed for sale, and already at 55%+ unique ownership. Project will be revealed on Saturday April 2nd and the team has been releasing each Sprite class's lore each day up until mint.
Since many of the WL minters had minted 2 Sprites, and sold 1 for a 2x, it will be interesting to see how the project does over the next week and post-reveal. Since one of your sprites is based on your personality, we think people will be more emotionally attached, especially if they only hold one. The team’s first ‘lore’ reveal was great and it’s looking like they’ll be creating separate communities in their discord based on which Sprite class you belong to. We feel good about this one and are pumped to see the art.
Conclusion
Another week in the books and another exciting week ahead. A lot of hot projects dropping over the next couple of months and legacy media brands with major IP reserves are starting to dip their toes in the space while the getting is good, as they should (see teenage mutant ninja turtles as a prime example).
While the next few weeks look exciting, more importantly, we’ve got quite the exciting decade ahead of us. Projects will be born and projects will die, but if there’s one thing we’ve really come to terms with wholeheartedly, its that NFTs are the new foundation for any community-driven entity looking to go from 0 to 1 and thrive, with no need for grimy, yucky, good for nothing, outside institutional capital. We’re absolutely here for that and proud to be early adopters alongside all of you.
Until next time anon,
Wilson & Paul
Web3 Careers:
Hey job hunters! We have some sweet jobs for you this week including some sourced from conversations in the MC discord. Big shoutout to community members BowTiedFox and phonk for flagging high quality positions at Atlantis World and Coindesk.
Our biggest degen job call this week is the Web3 Founding Engineer role at Spaceminer. We see jobs like this often where a project hopes to bring on an experienced Software Dev early and offers equity and a yearly salary, but it’s all hinged on the project’s success. Opportunities like this are out there if you want them, but they’re riskier than most of the roles we flag here. Check it out if you’re really trying to make a degen career play!
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/Social Media
Social Media Manager (Yunit, Remote Worldwide)
Social Media Editor, Writer (Coindesk, Remote US)
Head of Community (Turnt Gaming, Remote US)
Marketing:
Marketing Insights Researcher – NFT (Coinbase, Remote)
Head of Marketing (METAWORK, Remote US, 150k-250k)
Product/Miscellaneous:
NFT Collections Manager (Highvibe Network, Remote)
NFT Partnerships Lead (Blockshain.com, Remote London, San Francisco, Miami)
Research Analyst, NFT Market (Masterworks.io, NYC)
Multiple Positions (Atlantis World, Remote)
Software Development:
Web3 Founding Engineer/CTO (Spaceminer NFTs, Remote Europe/UK, 120k-180k/5-10% equity)
Smart Contract Engineer, Solidity (prePO, Remote Singapore, up to 250k)