Weekly Alpha Update – #4
Weekly Alpha Update – #4
Autist Autumn is Upon Us
(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 old frens, new frens, and anons. Welcome to the Mint Calendar Weekly Alpha Update, where we share alpha on the hottest NFT projects minting each week, give our thoughts on the Macro NFT environment, and discuss undervalued projects. We started Mint Calendar with one simple mission: make frens, help frens, sling jpegs, and reduce noise in the NFT space. If you don't know what any of that means, don't worry – you found us which means you're GMI. In fact, WAGMI.
Donations🤝:
In order to keep this free and do more monthly giveaways, we're going to be opening up a wallet for donations. Anything helps and we appreciate the love.
Donation Wallet Address: 0x3ecc93a317f4e9672678ed571f34e1a0393ac97a
ImmaDegen Giveaway🦎:
Our ImmaDegen Giveaway is still up and running until October 1st. To follow up on last week – the floor is a bit higher having just reached .3 ETH (~4x mint). Reason for this is likely their WynLambo drop (LINK). See WynLambo drop details below:
Drop 9/23 – time:TBA
9999 WL's. A minimum 6666, and a maximum 7332 WL's avail to mint at .09 ETH.
3X VOID holders can claim their WL's from 9/23-10/1. 50+ WL's will be airdropped to random VOID holders after minting ends.
Anyway, if you’re interested in a FREE .23ETH NFT ($1000 USD+) from a growing project with real potential and real plans - feel free to follow the directions below:
To enter the giveaway:
Like and RT this Tweet.
Play the free game and score above 1500 for a chance to win this ImmaDegen NFT (see below).
The winner will be announced on October 1st via email & twitter
Macro Update📈:
A gross opening to crypto markets today, the cream continues to rise to the top, and major pfp projects are starting to get tiny cute sidekicks – lets get into it.
Every day it seems there’s another professional athlete tweeting for help selecting the right first NFT purchase. While this is a time to remind you that we’re early, it’s also a time to note the importance of celebrity adoption. The reason the creator economy is so massive is because the general public tends to follow whatever their favorite celebrities do/say. Keep that in mind when looking into a project (always good to see what ‘famous’ people are involved).
One trend we want to dive a bit deeper on in this week’s macro update is the adoption of cute sidekicks for larger blue chip projects. We first took notice when Crypto Toadz blew up as a result of casual conversation in the Crypto Punks discord. More recently, we’ve noticed the overwhelming adoption of Axolittles (discussed at length later in this update) by the Pudgy Penguins community. We have a feeling that this will become far more common in the coming weeks/months/years. It’s an exceptional growth hack for a new project to latch onto a thriving pre-existing community. Keep your eyes peeled for new projects with small followings that seem like natural fits for other larger blue chip projects and you might have just secured yourself some exceptional alpha.
New Mints:
There’s been a significant slowdown in new mints. Probably because pfp projects are becoming oversaturated and it’s been tough to find any non pfp projects that are truly interesting or community-driven (Wanderers is still our favorite example of one of these projects with floor price steadily rising – shoutout to Packy for the recent pump). With that being said we’ll cover 2 of the more interesting projects we found below because at the end of the day it’s still our job to make you aware of what's going on. We’ll keep these short and sweet.
If you’re reading this and not following us on twitter (ngmi) then you should because we’ll be using that as an outlet to post any other new upcoming drops not covered here. Finally, it is important to reiterate that anyone is able to mint a WynLambo even if you don’t own a Void. May be some pretty crazy gas here but if you’re looking to mint something high quality this week that’s still the best option in our opinion.
Woodies NFT:
9/19, 9a PDT, Mint Passports public sale begins! .08ETH plus gas.
9/24 9a PDT UltraDAO passes can claim a Woodie
9/25 9a PDT pre-sale passes can claim a Woodie
9/26 public passes can claim a Woodie
Interesting project with some cute and funny art here. Not the largest twitter or discord but they do seem to be doing something different. Created by UltraDao, Woodies is attempting to create a story-driven project. With 10k woodies, they are also looking to do a series of challenges, mini-games, and puzzles that will earn you the right to name your own woodie and elevate them to a character that will be involved in the future content of the story that the team is creating. This will also make you eligible for other special rewards. If you read our previous updates then you know we’re bullish on projects that incorporate puzzles.
Whether they can execute or not, their roadmap is pretty insane (goes out to 2023) with several notable objectives. 1) 10% of the proceeds from the mint will be donated to Trees.org. 2) Woodies owners will have access to mint their own 3D avatar that can be used in the Woodies VR metaverse. 3) Looks like they want to develop “lore” and have community members build the story with them (a generally positive signal). 4) Also they’ll be airdropping comics.
One thing that really stood out to us was Woodies Weekends: “A series of international events for Woodies holders in beautiful destinations around the world. Skiing, hiking, bouldering, fishing, boating, and more!” Now talk is cheap and I wouldn't say we are so confident that this will be executed the way they make it sound. However, this idea of an NFT being a key to an exclusive real world club is something that we will start seeing a lot more of in the future. The projects that execute on this correctly will absolutely take off. Best of luck if you’re looking to get involved here!
ArbiOtters
Mint: Tuesday 9/21 @ 12pm EST
Wasn’t going to cover these at first but saw somebody tweet about this and laughed internally because of how ridiculous the nft space has become. With readers asking us to hear more about “unknown” projects rather than strictly covering blue chips, we figured we’ll do a quick rundown on these. Plus, they fall in line with one of our investing theses: if funny and cute, buy.
Pretty standard stuff here. 10,000 unique images. Important to note that this is one of the first projects on Arbitrum. These aren’t on Opensea right now and you have to be connected to the Arbitrum network to mint. There is very little info on this project and not much of a roadmap here. Potential risk/reward play comes from it being one of the first Arbitrum projects which will have much lower gas fees. Good luck to all!
Honorable Mentions:
Axolittles: What the heck is going on here
Overview:
One of the elephants in the room to address this week is Axolittles. A lot going on here with a ton of similarities to the rise of penguins. Hilarious and friendly community with some pretty solid meme games. They are cute animated fish based off of an axolotl (yes a real animal we had to look this up also) and as the community likes to say, they are the cutest amphibians. “Each Axolittle is animated and comes with a 48-frame GIF that loops perfectly so you could stare at it for hours!”. We spent an embarrassing number of hours researching this one, looking at the volume charts, and time in the discord this week, so let’s jump right in.
Timeline:
AxoLittle’s launched 2 weeks ago and remained pretty flat and down 50% from the start.
On 9/15 Volume started picking up out of pretty much nowhere with 1k ETH traded and trending on Opensea.
New joiners and memes started appearing all over twitter. Similar to penguins in this sense, Axolittles community takes advantage of the fun/cuteness and proceeds to comment their own pictures on twitter threads. Discord is great about keeping community involved and spreading awareness.
As this project gained momentum, plenty of notable sales over 5 ETH started taking place.
The floor hit a 4x in basically an hour and over 1500 sales occurred in a 2 hour period.
Follower count on twitter hit a 3x in under one week.
Volume has slowed down since but the floor is pretty steady from the .15 floor for now with 4.4k holders out of 10k.
Our thoughts:
At the end of the day, Axolittle’s gained momentum because they are fun and cute. If you scour the discord, it seems like it’s a lot of newcomers’ first NFT. They simply like the Axolittles. Reminds us of the *earlier* days of the penguin discord. NFTs are fun, that’s plain and simple. Axolittles represent that. While this can all be mania (and potential manipulation to a degree) the memes caught on, volume hasn’t gone away (although down from peak mania), and the discord is super active 24 hours of the day. If one thesis has worked well over the last wave of this NFT rise it is that “if it is cute, buy”. Penguins, Chubbicorns, and now Axolittles. While we did join the Axolittle party, we have no recommendation here. What we do love is that the discord is genuinely fun and the community is hilarious on twitter. If interested come say what’s up to us in the discord.
Check-Ins:
We think it’s important to keep you in the loop on the performance of projects that we’ve discussed in the past, so we added this ‘Check-In’ section to provide “micro-summaries” on recently discussed projects.
The CryptoDads: Hit a 2 ETH floor. Monster volume and great twitter presence. Fell to a ~1 ETH floor and currently sits there at the time of writing this. Still some whales involved and the project is hilarious. 2 options here. If you got in on the mint/early for CryptoDads at the peak you were essentially at a 10x, and now even after the pullback should be around a 5-7x. If you own more than 1 or were looking for a quick flip, now is your time to do this. We like the project long-term (multiple airdrops, playable characters in games, owning IP to your dad, list goes on and on) but this is only if you can stomach the volatility. Either way, this was a major success post mint. The rest is in your hands.
The Sevens: Covered last week. Drop was a disaster and you most likely paid over 1 eth to mint. Floor is now .45 ETH. Don’t really have an opinion here so let’s use logic. Everyone is bearish still (everyone is usually wrong) and it seems like all the bad news is baked in. Volume is insane on Opensea and was in the top 10 pretty much all this week with ~11k ETH traded. That is madness. Quick metric we like to use when evaluating projects is looking at the highest last sale. There’s roughly 40 sales over 5 ETH ($20K+ USD). Let’s repeat this again so it sticks. Big players are still spending $20,000+ to buy Jpegs after the whole drop disaster (bullish). The project has over 50% ownership. Art is still cool - people still buy things because they like them.
The Project Urs: Underwhelming to say the least with a .14 floor at the time of writing. Most likely a break-even with gas on this one. Volume is still high at 2k ETH but over the last 3-4 days has really dropped which is concerning. Discord is still very active but there’s only 3.8k/10k unique owners. Could be a sleeper and take off but don’t see much catalysts in the short term. If you’re a believer or like the art, worth holding. If not, good chance you’’ll break even and can use the ETH to move somewhere else when we re-enter the NFT mania phase.
CryptoPochi: Nothing about this worked out too well. A few Art Blocks whales got involved but this wasn’t nearly as bullish as we expected. Project didn’t even sell out and sits at a 1.8 ETH floor (if you owned a sea ham you minted at .5 ETH but public mint started at 8 ETH dropping to 2 ETH). 50% + ownership and massive players involved. Seems like most of the owners wallets have 200+ ETH. Will update if we see anything interesting.
Hashmasks: Been underwhelming but holding solid around 1 ETH floor. Volume still high and looking to do an airdrop soon. This is one of the most “long-term” plays you can make in our opinion. Won’t get killed in a bear market and won’t moon in mania. As many of you know, we hold and have no plans of selling for years. No real update here.
BlankFace: Extremely disappointing release so far. We think the art looks a little “cheap” here and rushed. Don’t love how they came out and very few sales over 1 ETH. Tough one that we were skeptical about but remained slightly bullish due to the community. Floor has taken a nosedive to .03 ETH as of writing this. Spent some time in discord and the community seems very bullish / remains generally engaged. Also was trending as a top 5 on Saturday. 4.6k owners out of 10k is also decent for a few days post-launch. Interested to see where this goes.
That's all folks. Thank you for subscribing and making it through the fourth edition of the Weekly Alpha Report. As we continue on this journey, we intend to revise the newsletter and tailor it to what you want/need, so feel free to slide into our DMs on Twitter with any feedback!
We'll be back in your inbox every Monday for the rest of time, but don't be surprised if you get an emergency alpha report in your inbox in the middle of the week – the NFT alpha never sleeps and neither do we.
Also be sure to tell your frens!
Until next time.
Are there any projects that incorporate puzzles currently (and not just mentioned in the roadmap)?