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QR Codes & Ribeyes

Feb 15, 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.)

Gm all.

It’s a crisp Tuesday morning in the metaverse, Coinbase rocked everyone's world with a bouncing QR code (and broke their website), and we’re knee deep in what seems to be an asian NFT renaissance.

Big shoutout to TheChild this week for another epic Web3 Career section at the bottom of the newsletter. If you’re looking to break into crypto/nfts full time, there’s really no better place to look.

This Weeks Sponsor: The MetaMarket

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Macro Update

A bit disappointed with the lack of NFT discussion at the Super Bowl (probably not as disappointed as the countless BAYC holders who thought the entire halftime show would be dedicated to them), but definitely expected more. While it was cool to see crypto finally go mainstream, we were hoping for a little bit more in-game jpeg content. But we’ll live.

We have a thesis we’ve been thinking through and meaning to discuss once it fully took shape in our minds, and now that it has, we’ll walk you through it here and then we can all watch as it likely plays out over the next 2-3 weeks…

The NFT market seems to be in a bit of flux, and who can blame it – we got hot a bit too quickly, confidence in projects drastically drove up mint price above .5 ETH, and in hindsight, selling out wasn’t necessarily a clear signal for sustainable success. The blue chips have been holding up quite well with Doodles above 13 ETH and Azuki hitting 12 ETH. Again, as we reach points of over saturation, more projects go to 0, and more money flows to the top. Simple.

Cool pets is up 25% over the past week and BAYC is still floating around a 100 ETH floor. So for all the “doom and gloom” we see on twitter, things aren’t so bad. Again many are just getting involved in “derivative” or generally low-effort projects.

Anyways, let’s jump back to what we believe is worth keeping an eye on, as it will likely act as a driving force over the next few weeks for the space as a whole (albeit ETH rugs under 2k or moons above 4k by end of the month)…

There’s been a lot of “hyped” projects recently. We’ve had successes like Karafuru and disasters like Squiggles uncovered as essentially a rug. Then there are those like HYPEBEARS and HAPE PRIME that are down over 60% from their ATH post-reveal. So where do we go next?

Our thesis boils down to our belief that the success of a very small handful of hyped projects will determine whether we see a continued bull run throughout the broader NFT space or not. We compiled a list below of what we believe to be the projects whose shoulders the weight of the market rests on (there is probably another 1-2 we’re not thinking of but should be sufficient enough for this explanation).

The sheer number of followers and the fact that it’s practically impossible to get into their discords is astounding, and many of these projects have become known for how much of a grind it is to get on the “Whitelist”. For many, they require you to be active 24/7 in discord, buy physical items, promote the projects, etc. If you do manage to grab a WL spot, good for you – these are all going to pump massively post-mint. We already see Tasty Bones going for 1.7ETH at the time of writing (from a .069 mint).

All of the eyeballs in the space are on these projects. While we most likely will not get involved in any of these projects (Wonderpals/Tasty Bones probably would be the most enticing to us) we think that their success is paramount toward the health of the market.

Oddly enough we haven’t seen many people talking about this. A lot of the NFT community (especially on twitter) seemingly wants to see the projects fail (out of jealousy most likely). Yes, while many have ambiguous road maps, it’s going to be terrible for the macro NFT market if the majority of these hit a big ATH 1-2 weeks post-mint, and then drop 50% to never recover (like the Mekaverses of the world).

Tl;dr we think the success of these projects will be a good indicator of where we go next. If Invisible Friends holds up well and executes, our assumption is that more new projects will begin to put in months of effort upfront, as opposed to these derivatives which are spinning up a website and Fiverr artist in 2 weeks (like Jacked Apes). Also worth noting that all of these projects are minting in the next 2 weeks and will likely cause some gas spikes as well. In the end, having just 1 or 2 of these projects emerge as a blue chip will be extremely bullish toward the continued growth of the space.

Still hidden gems to be uncovered:

The title of this newsletter is Mint Calendar, so it would make sense for us to discuss new mints 😂. That being said, this week we actually don’t have any new mints which haven’t already been covered here in previous weeks. As always, rather than grind for a whitelist spot or ape into an over-hyped project, we think hidden gems and *lesser-hyped* projects are probably a better ETH bet. Again, we are not looking for quick flips but instead projects we think can grow sustainably. Reminder – in order to achieve this, you *will* have to stomach lots of volatility.

With the lack of new mints to mention this week we’ll be trying something new. Since we get a lot of people ask how *we* (Wilson and Paul) play the NFT space personally, we’ll cover some new/recent mints and how we’re playing each of these.

Again, nothing is financial advice, do your own research. We are playing around with highly speculative jpegs where we believe 99% will go to 0 and most will never have any utility.

Sprite Club

Team has stuck by the original mint price of .07 which they set in the midst of the bear market and haven’t changed a thing. They could probably mint for .3 now and still sell out but they have integrity. We’re max minting these and will be sweeping the floor immediately post-mint. While there’s certainly a risk that many may believe we’re over-shilling Sprite Club, we have the same confidence and gut feeling we had with the Creepz. NFA of course, but if you didn’t make the SpriteList we’d suggest monitoring the floor closely, as somebody flipping for a 2x will give you a buying opp at ~.15 ETH. This should go much higher.

Catblox

Progressively been getting more bullish on this over the last week for 2 reasons. The first is that the art teasers they’ve been releasing have been pretty incredible. Community seems to be responding strongly as well. The next is that the AMAs and team have been impressive and the discord is highly active in a non-spammy way. Won’t dive much more in depth since our original thesis has not changed much. Don’t love the .18 mint price here but to be fair the team knows they will sell out easily and it does give them a war chest to execute on their ambitious roadmap. We expect some paper-hands immediately post mint since, .18 is steep for a new mint but think this should be a pretty quick 3x from mint price if everything goes according to plan. Long term potential here as well but will take a lot of monitoring of the team executing.

Fury Bandits

Glad to see the bandits are starting to gain some real traction here. We plan on minting these around the 1st of March. Extremely ambitious roadmap here but think it’s a solid risk/reward proposition. While many projects have had a lot of success with P2E (play-to-earn) recently, it’s essentially become a meme and a way to garner hype more than anything else. The bandits are spinning this into P2W (play-to-win). Essentially, owning a bandit will act as a key, giving you access to flash games on their website where high scores can win NFT prizes. We think this concept alone is a reason to take a look at this, considering you actually have to use the NFT in order to gain access to the games. Since this isn’t just a staking mechanism, we can see this creating a tighter community due to the skill-based nature of the games. We’ll be co-hosting a twitter spaces with them tonight to dig a bit deeper into and hopefully get our many questions answered. Feel free to tune in!

Edenhorde

Love this one and many of you received WL for this project and discovered it from us. Unfortunately we did not get a WL spot but we both ape’d in at around a .5 ETH floor. Hopefully this ages well. We've covered why we love this one the last 3 weeks. Also, for some reason we forgot to mention that the art was created by Emmy award-winning artist behind the show Adventure Time 👀.

Ali and His Friends

We mentioned this 3+ weeks ago when their twitter had under 2k followers. Well it's over 100k now. What we do like is that they’re doing a random raffle for a WL (no grinding necessary), although don’t expect to get on it. Ali & His Friends has over 3 million followers on Weibo and was recently touted by 9x9x9 on twitter. We think this could potentially be a quick moonshot similar to what happened to PhantaBear and/or also become one of the premiere Chinese NFTs. Pre-sale begins today but we’ll be looking to potentially clean a few up off the floor for under .3 ETH if possible.

Creepz

Quick update since we didn’t cover last week and have seen a lot of FUD on the timeline recently. We’re happy with how things are progressing on the roadmap. While the price of the in-game token has collapsed (as predicted) the P2E game is running smoothly. At the same time, a lot of FOMO buyers are quite upset about how things are playing out. Let’s take a quick moment to take a step back and realize it’s been ~7 weeks since the launch of Creepz and since then:

Price is up 30x+ from the mint
Team is giving away a +1 ETH floor NFT every single day for the last week and next 2 weeks
Team has been averaging 2 AMAs per week, answering even some of the most unreasonable questions
Team is constantly iterating based on feedback from community

There’s a long way to go here and will surely be plenty more volatility on the road to Valhalla. On twitter spaces last week we publicly called the bottom being the 2 ETH floor. We still believe this holds tight +/- .2 ETH, barring some sort of NFT macro event. While the floor is below its ATH, the fundamentals of the project have never looked better.

Conclusion

Well folks, that should do it for this week. We appreciate your patience as we released this a day late due to the Super Bowl. We expect to bring some new exciting projects to you all next week and this will be released during our normal programming (Monday morning). Have a wonderful week all!

Wilson & Paul

Web3 Careers:

We have some awesome jobs for you this week including a couple community submissions at NiftyKit and MetaVox labs! If either of those roles stand out to you, feel free to ping us and we can make some connections. I’d regret it if I didn’t call out the Opensea social media support role. We all know they need help in that department so please apply!

As promised, the jobs list this week focuses on roles that most Web3-ers are qualified for. In that same line of thinking I’m going to keep flagging internships for high school grads or college students looking for work. A quick note on internships – I’ve seen too many crypto intern job ads saying “our role is unpaid but our interns have gone on to work at Coinbase.” That might sound great upfront, but we’ve got higher standards – you deserve to be paid for your time from day one so we will only flag paid roles here.

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 (NiftyKit)

Polygon Community Manager (Rarible, Remote)

Social Media Support Manager (Opensea, Remote, NYC, or San Francisco)

Marketing:

YouTube and TikTok Script Writer (Watcher Guru)

Strategy/Miscellaneous:

NFT Drop Manager (NiftyKit)

Cultural Research Intern – Web3/Metaverse (Codec, Remote London)

Research Analyst – NFT Market (Masterworks.io, NYC)

Sales and Trading Rotational Summer Analyst (Genesis, NYC)

Software Development/Data Engineering:

Head of Engineering/Technical Co-Founder (MetaVox Labs, Remote)

Senior iOS/React Native Engineer (Phantom, Remote San Francisco)

Mint Media

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