Touch Grass – Stay Liquid
(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 everyone. Things certainly look bleak as we barrel down this seemingly never-ending spiral, heading towards capitulation. BAYC is down 90% from the ATH and just like that, there aren’t anymore $100K floor-price PFPs. In the last 2 weeks it seems like half of the space is already gone and everything is officially declared dead. Literally zero.
As people who enjoyed the camaraderie of the bull market, we’ll certainly miss those times. But as builders and alpha seekers, we couldn’t be more excited as this is sort of what we’ve been waiting for – an asymmetric opportunity to double down on our conviction while “blood fills the streets”. Crypto isn’t going anywhere.
That said, tough times are certainly ahead and we hope this serves as a sobering reminder that we’re engaging with the riskiest assets on the face of the earth. The name of the game is surviving to see another day, and this market is taking no prisoners. With that, let’s do our best to have a great week and stay safe out here.
As always, quick shout out to @TokyoSunbather for the newsletter thumbnail this week. He doesn’t miss.
Rebrand: As we continue to expand and launch various new verticals, our ‘business’ will be rebranded to Mint Media and the “Mint Calendar” newsletter will be rebranded to Mint Weekly. This will be the final week of Mint Calendar before we transition our brand, logo, and twitter to represent this update.
We will also be publishing Mint Weekly next week on Wednesday June 22nd, but will return to our regularly scheduled Tuesday morning programming thereafter.
We will continue to refer to our community as “MC” and there will be no changes to the discord or MC pass for now.
Need A Job? Bear markets are the best time to build and if you’re looking to get your feet wet in Web 3.0 when everyone panics and leaves, please check out our new job board: Mint Jobs!
Macro Update
If it somehow hasn’t been obvious, we are currently in a bear market. ETH is in free fall and NFTs are in “down-only”. It’s a complete blood bath out there. We’re at the point where free mints aren’t even minting out. Doodles / Azuki / Clone X are all under 10 ETH and MAYC is under 15 ETH.
This image above is from Monday and practically everything is down another 10-20% from here. Wild. According to Dune, OpenSea volume is down to under 20 million USD per day, which is under ~20% of the daily average in 2022. Market participants are panic selling their jpegs left and right.
So Now What
What do you do in moments like this? First of all, the time to be most bullish is not at the top. That time is now. Most of the best products in this cycle were built during the 2017/2018 bear market, and most of the individuals who generated inconceivable wealth were buying up coins while the majority of the market panicked and cried. That’s just the way it goes.
From what we’ve seen in previous cycles, it’s new products and projects that eventually take you out of the bear market. ‘DeFi Summer’ in 2021 helped lead us out of the last bear into this cycle. We *believe* NFT innovation may help lead the way out of this one, *eventually*. Specifically, we think that music NFTs and gaming NFTs may be that very catalyst in the future.
While we continue to dive deep on the intersections of music and NFTs via Angelo’s weekly Mint Music newsletter section, we have yet to dive deep on blockchain gaming, though we are equally as bullish. To get a bit more granular, one of the major pieces of technological adoption which we expect blockchain gaming to popularize, is the ‘omnichain’ concept, where users aren’t limited to a single blockchain. Additionally, we’ve seen gaming ponzis in the p2e space boom over the last year, but we expect them to (thankfully) die out and make room for real interactive and engaging gaming projects that prioritize fun and make earning a feature, not the game itself.
Bring In The Corporations
When you have companies like American Express launching a crypto credit card and Mastercard integrating it's payment network for NFTs it’s tough to say that we’re at the end of the road. So yes, while your favorite NFT influencer has gone dark and twitter feels a bit more lonely these days, big legacy companies like Fidelity and Goldman are beefing up their presence within “Web 3.0”.
It’s important to take note of when in a cycle big corporations jump into an emerging market (like crypto). If they’re jumping in at the top, chances are they’re cash grabbing. If they’re jumping in at the bottom, then chances are their perspective is much longer-term and their conviction runs deeper.
While corporates jumping into the same is ‘lame’ and ‘less fun’ on the surface, it’s a necessary next step toward a more stable, reliable, user-friendly crypto market.
Bear Market Blues
There is a fantastic blog post by famous investor Fred Wilson about the bear market in 2018 titled What Bear Markets Look Like – very relevant today:
“What we have yet to see in crypto land is when they kick you when you are down. And that is certainly coming. Regulators came after the Internet sector in a big way post the bubble and that seems likely to happen in the crypto sector too. And most everyone in big companies wrote the Internet sector off, canceling their Internet efforts as a fool’s errand. That seems likely to happen in crypto too. And many talented people left the sector. That seems likely to happen in crypto as well.
But those who stayed were rewarded, although it took a long time for that to happen. We didn’t see meaningful paydays in the Internet sector until the 2007-2008 period and the big paydays didn’t start coming until 2010 and beyond.”
This goes back to our earlier point on survival being paramount. As we saw in the early days of the internet, a lot of talented people left, and we clearly see that now within the blockchain space. CT is as quiet as ever, your late cycle friends most likely dumped their bags, and your co-workers are dunking on you for spending 3 grand on that digital image of a penguin.
That being said, over and over again, we’ve seen that people who stay, innovate, and persevere through the tough times are rewarded handsomely.
Macro Wrap Up
If you’re still holding on to that heavy bag of jpegs, we’re not going to sugar coat it, that’s tough and may not get better for a while, if ever. The brands that survive and make it to the other side will thrive, but this will be ~1% of what’s currently on the market. If you’re a true believer in the community and team, we’ve seen diamond hands pay off in the past.
Being patient pays, and if you made a killing this cycle, there are certainly some amazing *relative* bargains on the market. As always, the money flows to the top, so if you’re looking to buy a dip, better off scooping up a blue chip project vs a bunch of mid caps, which have taken a beating.
New Mints
Keeping this short and sweet for obvious reasons (too much uncertainty to express deep conviction in a specific project).
As mentioned last week, all eyes will be on LonleyPop which has their DA starting today at 10am EST. This will be a great barometer for the market and if it has trouble minting out we may be in for even more pain.
Possessed has officially announced their mint date of June 30th and they opened up their public raffle today. Hopefully by then, a bit more of the dust from this crash will have settled (though that seems unlikely at this pace). We’ve touched on Pssssd a lot and it remains one of the biggest mints of Q2, though unfortunately the timing is rough.
If either of these two projects fail during mint, then we anticipate there will be very few successful new PFP mints in Q3.
Our Strategy (Never Financial Advice)
As far as internet pictures go, we’ve remained on the sidelines this week, making 0 moves and dumping a few more bags which we didn’t feel comfortable holding. After weeks of staring at moby.gg charts and flipping free mints, goblins, and pictures of poo, the market has gone silent and the degens have no more money to play at the casino.
We’ll be monitoring closely for the next month but don’t expect much action. If things do manage to drift lower, projects like Doodles / Punks / MAYC / Clone X / Moonbirds will move up in priority on our shopping list.
We still plan on minting Possessed as of now (2 weeks out), although due to macro conditions, our giga-bullish take on the project is simply tough to stand by (at no fault of the founders). Hoping LonleyPop’s DA is quite successful and reinstates a base level of confidence in the space, even if temporary.
As a natural transition into Mint Music below, let’s circle back to what we touched on earlier, which is that “new things” should lead us out of this bear market. We have not yet seen free market dynamics applied to the emerging music NFT space, and we’re still confident that music/IP/royalties will play a major role in the maturation space. While there is no predicting exactly how or when this will start to take shape on a grander scale, we’ll be working with Angelo to dive deeper and deeper into the space during the quiet period.
Mint Music
Gm anons, Angelo here. Check price, bad price, close laptop - the theme of the weekend. If my grandfather were alive right now he’d let out a Geschrei of “Oy Vey!” Let’s share a brief moment of silence for all who got rekt - we all need to be supportive of each other in this tough time. Go outside, read a book, play with a puppy, make sure your family is ok. Now is the time to do a good deed - pay a street performer - break off a piece of your candy bar and give it to a crying kid. Do whatever you can do to get your mind off your portfolio.
The current Music NFT landscape is looking quite bleak, but as it goes, all NFT’s will be doooown in the dumps for the foreseeable future. Music NFT’s haven't had a great opportunity to take off just yet, or on the contrary, get rekt - the market just hasn’t allowed for it because it hasn’t taken it’s full shape yet.
The NFT market to date has been a traders market, where for the large majority of projects, nobody gives a shit about the artwork or the community. If you can buy a hyped up picture of a carrot with the potential to sell it for 5x, you’re 100% doing that – who wouldn’t? You have no real loyalty to the carrot creators or have any deep ties to carrots as a religious figurehead – your primary focus here is to make money.
The market has characteristically moved to where it sees value - trending from your run of the mill PFP’s to P2E, SOL NFT’s, Free Mints, etc. When one trend fizzles out, another begins to get milked until the next big thing comes around, rinse and repeat. Traders go where the money is, if an asset class (regarding music nfts as an asset class) hasn’t shown tradability - why would anyone gravitate toward it and make bets? This lack of exposure to the mainstream should actually be viewed as a good thing for music NFTs. As ETH tanks and the market is holding onto their britches for the ride on down to goblintown, music platforms and projects have the chance to mature, and more credible/popular creators have the opportunity to release content in web3. Bear markets are important for growth. If the PFP market had continued its unstable moonbound trajectory, investors might have treated music nfts like any other PFP - pouring in a shitload of volume - good for price - but unsustainable. The real intent of music NFT’s is to bring together creators and their actual fans, not for basement dwelling anon pump and dumps.
We’re looking to help artists take their first step into the space in a productive way, so if there are any artists you’d like to see release an album in cryptoland, we’d love to hear about it in discord.
That’s all for this week - Take care of yourself and take a listen to Turn up the Sunshine, collab between Diana Ross and Tame Impala - go get that vitamin D.
Sayonara,
Angelo
Conclusion
Going to keep the conclusion short and sweet this week to highlight what really matters.
Bear markets are for building and buying.
Look toward industries (like music and gaming) who fundamentally need blockchain tech to improve the user/creator experience. You want to buy into industries and products where the blockchain tech acts as a “pain killer”, not a “vitamin” (NFA).
As far as NFTs go, specifically regarding long term viability – utility and historical significance. Nothing else really matters.
If you came out of everything with more money than you came in with, be grateful, stay liquid, and deploy wisely.
If you took a haircut, try to reflect constructively on what could’ve been improved. Nobody is perfect and we can all benefit from thoughtful self reflection.
Take care of yourself.
Love,
W & P
Mint Jobs
GM! Lots of great jobs for you on our jobs board this week across all our regular hiring verticals. We did see a couple of unique Web3 Business Development roles within non-Web3 companies this week which is an encouraging reflection that despite market conditions traditional companies want to build in Web3. Check out the positions and let us know in discord if you apply!
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
Community Manager, Web3 (Playco, Remote Global)
Business Development
Sr. GTM Strategy BizDev Manager, Web3 Start Ups (Amazon, NYC)
Director of Web3 (Forbes, Remote)
Miscellaneous:
Illustrator (Pudgy Penguins, Remote)
Data Analyst (Consensys, Remote)
Web3 Economist (Mitre, McLean Virginia)
Web3 Reporter (Billboard, NYC)
Software Development:
Software Engineer, Data (OpenSea, Remote)