Weekly Alpha Update – #8
Weekly Alpha Update – #8
Times, They Are A'Changin'
(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. I hope you are all feeling VERY GOOD this morning. We’re extremely pleased to say that the Mint Calendar community has been growing rapidly. We’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how high the quality of our following is, and the positive outreach we’ve been receiving has truly reaffirmed our mission to help reduce noise in this space and provide you with the hot takes you didn’t realize you needed. Being that the community has grown so much, we wanted to take a step back from speaking and start listening more. Whether you want to tweet at us, send us a DM, comment on the Substack post, or simply send an email to officialmintcalendar@gmail.com – we would love to hear some feedback on what you like, what you don’t, and what you’d like more of.
We're really pumped about this week's newsletter. In the spirit of experimentation, and to stay true to our mission of reducing noise, we aren’t going to cover any new mints today (mainly because there isn’t much that excites us this week) – instead we’ll be keeping things very high-level, covering the state of NFTs and the macro forces pushing us closer and closer toward true mainstream adoption.
Big Picture:
With ETH and crypto ripping upward as a whole, we do not think that spraying and praying on a variety of new mints is the best way to spend your money right now. Recently, the floor prices of a lot of hyped up mints have been dropping below their original mint prices. This doesn't mean they're going to remain below their floors forever (especially projects with great communities and teams), but the days of a sold out 10,000 piece nft drop for [insert adjective] [insert cartoon animal] are temporarily behind us. Our recommended strategy in times like these is to seek out paper handed noobs in blue chip projects that might be prone to panic selling. Their lack of long term vision is your opportunity.
Coinbase; Opening The Flood Gates:
Obviously most of you know about Coinbase creating its own NFT platform. This is the single largest catalyst for mainstream NFT adoption – full stop. This announcement will cover the predominance of the content in this newsletter and for good reason.
Let’s take a top-down view of the space to gauge exactly how impactful Coinbase is going to be. OpenSea, the largest, most-used NFT marketplace on the planet, is reported to have a total of 400,000 active wallets.This is nothing to overlook for a technology as nascent as nfts, but to put things into perspective, over two million people have already signed up for the coinbase NFT platform waitlist. Let that sink in. When a new NFT drops on OpenSea, it moons. When a coin is released on Coinbase, it enters another galaxy and billions of dollars flow in. Think about all that will happen surrounding new NFT drops when they take place on Coinbase. Coinbase’s stamp of approval will solidify many blue chip NFTs staying power as a legitimate investment.
Top-down view behind us, let’s dig deeper into the nuts and bolts. When you talk to somebody who isn't active in crypto, one of the things you'll notice almost immediately is that they have no idea what a metamask wallet is, how smart contracts work, what gas fees are, or how to interact with OpenSea really at all. Coinbase is about to eliminate arguably the largest barrier of entry (ease of use). Think about all the people who have been jealously sitting on the sidelines watching NFTs run, who can now very easily dip their toes in the water without ever having to learn what a gas fee is and being essentially automatically turned away when their $100 purchase has a $1,000 transaction fee (we’ve seen way worse).
Annoying fees aside, let's talk about how clean and gamified Coinbase’s UI is. Similar to Robinhood, Coinbase has helped turn a generation of people into investors through mobility and simplicity. Great design drives user engagement and when great design principles are applied to fintech applications, all bets are off. And remember, Coinbase is a centralized business with one goal – profits. Since they will earn fees on every NFT transaction through their platform, they are going to do everything they can to make this as easy and addicting as possible, urging you to “invest” more and more into jpegs. Just some thoughts of ours!
One final thought on some strategy that may or may not work here if you’re looking for how to “trade” this. Coinbase is likely to be more selective when allowing specific NFTs on their platform. This means, if you’re able to discover alpha on the projects that are expected to launch on Coinbase, you can front run the mania. Right now is a good time to buy some floors on projects you believe Coinbase has the potential to pick up (since everything is getting crushed)/ The second consideration within this strategy is to seek out projects with “mass appeal” that you think the average person would enjoy holding and/or showing their friends as a first purchase. Coinbase will likely be the place that many people buy their first NFT – they’re likely not apeing into crazily expensive blue chips right off the bat. We wish we had the answer here on which projects to buy, and in our next newsletter we’ll cover some potential winners, but as we’ve stated before and will state again, we’re vibe collectors, not fortune tellers. Anyways, good things are coming so be prepared to pounce.
That's all for this week folks. In line with our mission of reducing noise, we wanted to keep things simple and pointed at the big picture. Thank you for subscribing and making it through the eighth 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.