The Grift That Keeps On Grifting

MC vs Overhyped Projects

Feb 28, 2022

(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.)

This newsletter is not and has no plans to ever be political. That being said, our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who is experiencing the horrors of war. In times like these, it’s important to take a step back and feel grateful for what we have.

Gm. One of the more eventful weeks in NFT land. Some of the most hyped projects of the year minted and overall OpenSea volume seems relatively healthy, which is especially positive after the recent phishing attacks.

A couple quick notes:

We’re still running our referral program to win awesome ETH/NFT prizes. Click here to join.
If you are looking for a job in the Web3 space, please check out this week's postings at the bottom. As always, huge thank you to TheChild.

The MC Pass

We have some VERY exciting news. We are officially launching our own long awaited NFT project. We’re not going to shill our own bag in this newsletter so if you are interested please read our Lite Paper here. If after reading our Lite Paper you are interested, please fill out this survey. This will be a “white list” only mint. If you have any questions please email us at hello@mintcalendar.com.

With all of this out of the way, let’s jump right in. Shout out to BowTiedTurtle for the meme.

Macro Update

With all of the craziness in the world right now, it’s tough to predict where things will go next and macro sentiment seems to change on a day-to-day basis. On a positive note, high-end project floors are recovering nicely from last week. Obviously, the elephant in the room is Invisible Friends.

Invisible Friends has been the most hyped (or overhyped) project of 2022. The floor hit a whopping 13 ETH pre-reveal, which we think is absolutely absurd. There’s a lot to unpack here. We’ll start with the pre-reveal vs. post reveal phenomenon happening right now.

Before all of this over-saturation and over-hype, if you minted a project and sold it pre-reveal, you basically benefitted from a near 100% win rate over the last month (besides 3Landers and potentially Karafuru). Out of all of the *Mega-Hyped* projects we mentioned 2 weeks ago, practically every single one of them has been cut in half by 50% since revealed. We will see if Wonderpals can break this streak. We think this is generally bearish for the NFT space and will be monitoring to see if other less-hyped projects can hold their ground post-reveal.

Projects are getting bid up 10x+ mint price only for most holders to be disappointed by the artwork. While we were priced out of what we thought was a fair price to buy Wonderpals pre-reveal, we genuinely hope that the price over this next week goes up post-reveal, as this helps validate buying higher end “art” in the NFT space. Besides 3Landers, we haven’t seen this happen much in 2022 since Creepz, which was 2x floor within 48 hours of art reveal).

But back to Invisible Friends. This project will likely not hit a 13 ETH floor ever again (down to 6.5 ETH now). We’ve been seeing on twitter that many buyers are extremely disappointed by the art (ourselves included). The point we’re looking to get at here is the same that we’ve been trying to preach since the founding days of this newsletter. Please do not buy into these over-hyped projects. This is not where the alpha is. Does bidding $25,000 USD for something where you have no idea what it looks like really sound like a good idea?

If you are able to get a WL spot to mint, different story. But, practically every single project with 50k+ twitter followers pre-mint has lost you money if you bought in pre-reveal. Certainly, this is not healthy for the overall space. The tweet below from PuffYatty is a simplified explanation of how we feel.

While we can shout this to the heavens, the grift never ends. On the bright side, we can confidently say that we are still in a bull market considering the derivatives and copy projects are back in full force. Look at Visible Apes or Invisible MFers for example (please do not waste your time with these). While these are all scams and cash grabs, the prevalence of them and their ability to gain traction shows how hot the current state of the market is. These types of projects wouldn’t sell out 10% in a bear.

Finally if you didn’t already see, the above image is the $3.1 million Mutant Ape that was revealed this week – pretty cool… But is this really $3.1 Million USD cool?

The Possessed

Frankly we’ve been blown away by the teasers we’ve seen so far from The Possessed NFT. Seriously, check out their Instagram and media real on Twitter.

When this first came across our radar they had about 2k followers on twitter and within a few weeks the project has managed to gain almost 20k followers. Doing this with little to no promotion as well. We’d assume this is due to the absolutely insane art. We recommend checking out this article which explains how they built the smooth flow of their Blessed to Possessed state in the gif. These are highly technical leaders and we’re pretty confident this will be one of the bigger projects of H1 – highly recommend keeping this on your radar.

In a market where many projects get overhyped quickly, we think the Possessed will ultimately become one of these mega-hyped projects. However, from what we’ve *seen* watching them grow organically, this looks like it could be a breath of fresh air.

We were fortunate enough to chat with the founders, Tom and Joe, to learn more. They’re fully doxxed, building slowly/organically, not rushing to mint, and are just genuinely good guys looking to build something great. As we’d say, they’re doing everything the right way. Obviously a lot of this is high-level stuff, but we get the same vibe from them as successful project founders we’ve spoken to in the past.

Going along with this, minting a Possessed NFT will grant you 3 NFTs:

1 Jpeg of the Blessed state
1 Jpeg of the Possessed state
1 fully animated GIF between the two states

As more details come out, we’ll do a long-form write up and analysis of the nitty-gritty, especially our thoughts on how 3 NFTs per mint may affect floor price on the market. For now, we’re excited to learn more. In a space where there are certainly a lot of issues, seeing the rise of projects like this remind us that organic growth combined with creativity will always prevail.

Some good and bad news: We expect this project to be a bit tougher to get a white list spot due to the demand. Fortunately, we have some good news. The first, is that it’s still on the earlier side since project inception, so hopefully by getting this on your radar now you can follow along. 2nd, is that the team was kind enough to allocate some white list spots to the MC community, some of which will be given away in the coming weeks to MC Pass holders.

Some Musings

There aren’t many new mints on our radar minting over the next few days. Below are a few topics that have been on our mind lately.

Look out for quick growth on twitter:

Following up on the hyped projects concept. Many projects are growing insanely quickly and this is something to look out for. We noticed Garbage Friends pop up on our twitter timeline.

The account was created ~10 days ago, has 72k followers, and extreme engagement on their tweets. Now, to be fair, we have a handful of mutuals and there are a lot of high profile players. Still, ask yourself, does this add up? This has more followers than some pretty established projects. What’s the reason for this? According to the internet it’s the same artist as Invisible friends, Markus Magnusson.

We’ve been riffing a lot on these projects recently and yes, we think Markus is extremely talented. The point here is that we expect to see the same thing that happened to Invisible Friends, happen again (can see it so clearly): project gains 200k followers up to mint, hits an extremely high floor pre-reveal, and then it gets dumped after. Everyone who minted (most likely a lot of insiders) make out like bandits.

Maybe we’re being a bit too harsh right now but this just seems to be too common recently. Can’t stop thinking about this thread from Feb 2nd.

Minting from WL spots still reigns supreme in the bull market:

We had a few WL spots for Turtle Town and since they only cost .025 it was worth the degen bet. At a floor of .08, you were quickly able to flip .075 worth of these for ~.22 ETH after gas. While not a huge paper gain, there is no complaining when making money, especially when it took basically 90 minutes to do so and these can really add up over time. While we’re spending the majority of our time looking for longer-term and/or huge winners, this strategy remains undefeated in the bull market.

[The following is max-degen] If you’re able to get a WL spot for a *WL-mostly project* with a discord/twitter large enough where the project can sell out quickly (under a few hours), you’re almost guaranteed to make gains on your mint. As mentioned, this is only because we are still in a bull market. We balance all of this optimism with a healthy dose of skepticism – we’re still a bit concerned we’re near the top of the overheated stage since projects like Yukimi were barely able to sell out 5% due to a last minute price decrease. Again, this is all opinion based.

Pixelmon:

Not much to explain here. We aren’t the slightest bit surprised by this. Most readers are probably familiar but the Pixelmon team (another massively overhyped scheme) promised to build an immersive world and your NFT would be the access key. Oh, and did we mention this world would be so sophisticated and special that mint would cost 3 ETH.

Again, not surprised by the grift here. We balance how hilarious this whole debacle is with how bad we feel for all those who lost ~10K USD minting this piece of garbage. An absolute shame to see, but again, is anyone really surprised by this?

Weather Report Fiasco:

Quick read for those not familiar. Our quote aged well - “However, there is still no roadmap at all and it seems like some empty promises have been made. One interesting aspect of this project which we’re not personally fans of, is if you buy a Weather Report hat, you can win a white list spot. We just never loved the idea of “grinding” in a discord to win a WL spot.” Anyways, not here to grill on WR – there’s a really paradigm taking shape here with the floor for Weather Report at .11 and the floor for DentedFeels at ~.3.

What’s happening here is that the community decided to follow the artist vs. the WR team. While the art for both projects is extremely similar (ie: Dentin did the art for both projects), this aligns with what we mentioned last week regarding our bullish thesis on projects led by artists. Without their main artist (and a lot of awful PR) it seems that Weather Report doesn’t have much of an appeal to the crowd. And clearly, their art is enjoyable since Dented Feels is 3x the floor and 2x in volume.

Projects we like (aka think will survive):

To clarify, these are a few projects we haven’t covered much of and aren’t the obvious blue-chips we like. A few notable projects that a lot of our community members are apart of:

Coolman’s Universe. The art seems to be universally loved in the space, with over 55% unique ownership, and if you look at the last 3 months, it’s basically only gone up, but never really experienced a “pump”. A lot of Whales in other communities are high on the project and it has that sleek whimsical vibe that reminds us of a combination of Doodles and Cool Cats. While “it’s a great community” has become a meme, everyone we’ve spoken to who is part of Coolman’s is certainly proud to own it and represent it. Think this is a project that has legs.

Mfers is a bet on Crypto Twitter (CT) and meme culture. Mfers minted back in November and took roughly 75-90 days to gain any traction price wise, and now these can be seen all over. A couple of things we noticed is that in it’s pump to a ~6 ETH floor, it still has remained pretty healthy above 2.5 ETH. BTB had a great note that a lot of projects seem to get stuck between a 2.5 and 4ETH floor range, unable to break above, with the winners ultimately reaching a 10 ETH floor, which seems to be “blue chip” status (sentiment wise). Mfers had a few days above 5 ETH which helped it gain a lot more attention. We wouldn’t bet right now that Mfers is a 10 eth floor project, but we also don’t think it’s going anywhere. As the money flows to the top and plenty of projects go to 0, we’d be surprised not to see Mfers come out on the other side.

Tubby Cats. Seems to be a lot of people seething over the success of these, calling it the next “penguins”. There’s no real “analysis” here (or in general these are literal jpegs) but like Mfers, it’s a bet on meme culture and CT. Everyone knows memes get better when the number starts to go down. We wouldn’t say Tubby Cats time in the limelight will be over anytime soon.

End of the hot streak:

We knew this would end and definitely jinxed ourselves with our *humble* bragging last week. While 2022 has been an insane year for us, you can’t win them all. AliNFT execution was terrible and the art was underrated, don’t think this will ever recover. Along with this, the The Earlies Society mint didn’t go as expected (surprisingly the floor has held up). For now, these will enter the illiquid section of our portfolio.

As mentioned last week, it’s important to keep your losses small in the NFT space. Since the gains can be tremendous (10x within hours) you’re able to be extremely profitable with even a sub 50% hit rate. No reason to harp on the losers when 1 winner can make up for it tenfold.

Conclusion and the state of Mint Calendar:

It’s officially been just over 6 months since we came up with the idea for Mint Calendar and we’re blown away by the incredible journey thus far. The rapid growth, positive community, and genuine friendships we’ve cultivated have not only exceeded our wildest expectations, but has opened our eyes to how crypto/Web3 is the future. While it will be a bumpy ride, we could not be more bullish on the space.

As mentioned before, we are operating on a very long-term perspective and have no plans of stopping. When the shillers, grifters, scammers, and people looking for get-rich-quick schemes leave the space during the next NFT winter (which will happen eventually, although we’re not fortunate tellers), Mint Calendar will still be standing. While we cannot control the macro environment of the world, we can promise you that we will always do our best to figure out a way to provide value, however that may be. To all of our readers who have been here since day 1 and to everyone reading this for the first time, we are happy to have you on board and look forward to adapting to this ever evolving space over the next 6 months.

Thank you all and we hope everyone reading is able to have a low-stress week.

Wilson & Paul

Web3 Careers:

GM! We’ve curated another great mix of positions for folks looking to break into NFTs and Web3 this week. Per usual, we’re focusing on jobs that require little crypto experience to get started and have tried to include a different mix of globally located positions. Please tell us if you’d like us to look for roles in specific countries/locations!

Additionally, as Web3 native companies are maturing we are seeing a ton of senior and executive level hiring. We haven’t been flagging these roles as much due to their need for serious experience, but let us know if that’s of interest to 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:

Community Manager (Stageverse, Remote US)

NFT Community Manager (IWS, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines)

Community Manager APAC/EMEA (Malicis, Singapore)

Marketing:

Marketing Manager (StoryDAO, Remote US)

Strategy/Miscellaneous:

Growth Product Manager (Zapper, Remote Montreal)

Product Designer (Decentral Games, Remote US)

Product Counsel, Nifty Gateway (Gemini, Remote US)

Interns (Ethernity, Remote North or South America)

Software Development: