Summary Sunday v1 - 17 October 2021
This week we saw several major mints take place, a major reveal scandal for Mekaverse, a few derivative (NFTs based on other NFTs) get launched, and more - all for an exceptionally profitable week! I'll highlight 3 projects that did particularly well this week, followed by a shortened list of others that are worth mentioning. Let's dive in...
Project #1: Jungle Freaks (Website | Discord currently closed | Twitter | OpenSea)
The talk of the town all over Twitter and Discord was for Jungle Freaks, a 10,000 collection hand-drawn (!!!) by a semi-famous artist who has been drawing cartoons for the lightly pornographic magazine Hustler for 30 years. He created a very unique style which was somewhat divisive - many loved the art, while some thought that it was ugly. Thankfully, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This project had a very competitive series of white lists (those who were allowed to mint ahead of the public sale) that was very divisive. In order to get onto this white list, one must be "active" in their Discord such that you earn XP points with every post you make. However, this was easily gamified and turned the Discord into a spamfest with hundreds of messages being posted every minute, slowing the server down to a crawl. The mods attempted to prevent this by adding a bot that removed spam-like messages, but the community quickly figured out how to circumvent the bot and continue spamming.
Those who got onto the whitelists (there were 3 total) were allowed to mint Freaks ahead of time early this week. White List 1 (which I was lucky enough to get on early, before the spam fest) were allowed to mint 5 Freaks. White List 2 (which at least one of our own community members - @rik - was able to get onto) were allowed to mint 3. White List 3 was allowed to mint 1.
Details:
- Mint cost: 0.07 ETH
- Floor after White List mint: 0.9 ETH (13x return on investment!)
- Largest sale pre-reveal: 3.0 ETH
Summary:
After the public sale this past Friday, something interesting happened. Unlike other mega-hyped projects that had a revealing of the NFTs after the sale concluded, the price of this project didn't plummet to rock-bottom prices. The price floor right now is 0.75, a solid 10x return on investment. This, plus the strongly positive Twitter sentiment, tells me that there is some solid expectations for this project to continue upwards in price.
Long-term prospectus:
My recommendation for those that minted more than 1 is to sell 1 around 1 ETH or so to recover your funds and lock in those profits, and then ride the rest for several weeks/months. Many are calling this the next "blue chip" (meaning a AAA-quality project) although I think it takes more than just high prices for a blue-chip project to emerge. The community in that Discord is, well... something else. It's very very active, but I find it to be very very obnoxious. Others have stated that it's their favorite NFT community so far, so who knows who is wrong or right? Either way, this project is a certified success as of this moment, and will likely continue to grow.
Project #2: Missing Frontier/The Watcher (Website | Discord | OpenSea | Rarible)
An upcoming video game project built on Ethereum, this project is headed by a team of approximately 20 people who will be revealing their real-life identities before the end of 2021. Based in Germany (probably, according to community sleuthing), they are busy securing venture capital and hiring more developers as they build a player-versus-player space-based arena video game. This project has been around since the beginning of 2021, however for the first 7 months or so was dropping artwork and teasers and small collectibles to a very small but active community. Then in early September, we saw them drop the first 2 major items:
- Black Box (Genesis)
- Lucky Watcher
The Black Box is essentially a loot box for the game. Each box contains 2 Flash Blocks, in-game utility items that are used in combat. The boxes open on 25 October, and the Flash Blocks are required for playing the game. The current Black Box is a "Genesis" item, meaning it's among the first items to be ever released and therefore will contain significantly more valuable items than future releases. This is done specifically to reward early investors and supporters of the project, a fantastic marketing technique as well as a great way to reward the community and keep people interested.
The Lucky Watcher is an in-game skin for your character. Owning a Lucky Watcher grants you special lifetime access to all future giveaways, future competitions, season passes to competitive gameplay, unique free airdrops, the upcoming gameplay Alpha test, and more. Watcher skins are not required to play the game, but owning one of the very few (there's only 500 of them!) of the first skins shows that you are a true OG in the Missing Frontier universe.
Both of these items minted for 0.1 ETH. They are now worth (at the time of writing):
- Black Box: 1.75 ETH (17.5x ROI)
- Lucky Watcher: 6.95 ETH (69.5x ROI)
In the last month, there have been 3 more mints and 2 airdrops. At the end of October the Black Boxes will be able to be opened, however there's 1 more major tool being given to early adopters. Those who own a Black Box will be airdropped a "Data Key," a utility item that unlocks in-game perks and provides the users a lifetime pass to various upcoming events and more. Those who own both a Black Box and a Lucky Watcher will be the recipient of a Stellar Data Key, a higher-quality version of the Data Key that also allows holders to influence the outcome of the game through community voting and DAO-based governance mechanisms.
Summary:
This last week, Missing Frontier community members were able to mint new in-game units (ZERO and ZERO S), receive an airdrop (Flash Drives and Stellar Flash Drives), and in a little over 1 week will be finally able to open their Black Boxes and will receive their (Stellar) Data Keys. The value created by this project for the early backers is enormous. Those who minted Black Boxes and Lucky Watchers have made enormous returns, and this project's professional quality is very clear. Therefore I strongly feel that this project is a very long-term hodl, where flipping is only advised if you can afford to mint more than 1 item at a time, so long as you hold at least one of everything they drop.
Long-term prospectus:
Delivering a video game is hard. Like, really hard. A good friend of mine is a developer for an indie studio and has been working on a project for 5 years, and they're STILL working on it. Therefore, you must take everything in "Gaming NFT-land" with several grains of salt. That being said, the team has proven that they are masters at community management, have incredible art and style, and are working around the clock delivering loads of content for early supporters - telling me that this is a very productive team and one of the front-runners in NFT gaming.
Project 3: Pesky Penguins (Website | Discord | MagicEden Marketplace)
Pesky Penguins is a 8888 collection of profile pictures of pixelated penguins. Yeah, that's about it. HOWEVER: there's a unique mechanic. The royalties accrued by the project go towards something they call "The Snowball," where they "sweep the floor" (buy the cheapest NFTs for sale) and burn them, forever destroying them and removing them from existence. This reduces the supply and makes the traits of each penguin more and more rare. So far they've already accrued close to 30k SOL in volume (almost $5m!!!) and have used the snowball close to 10 times!
Mint was 0.25 SOL (about $45 at the time) and the floor is now 8.5 SOL (about a 35x return so far). The community has their own meme, "noot noot", which you might see on Twitter and in other Discord servers. This is taken from the Swiss children's television show Pingu about a penguin who always goes "noot noot." That's it, nothing more to it! The Discord is really active, the community is great, and the volume is very high, so the probability of this project succeeding long-term is relatively decent.
That being said, the bearish case for this project is that it's on Solana, which means that the upper ceiling for profits is much lower than you'd expect for ETH projects (due to fewer players on the SOL ecosystem) and will potentially face more competition as the SOL ecosystem grows. However, I bought mine for 0.35 (didn't get the chance to mint) and will hold it to Valhalla!
Long-term prospectus:
Solana is still trying to find its feet - there are loads of quality projects out there, but Solana can't seem to shake its image of being the platform for ETH copycats and scam projects, regardless of how (un)true this is. Furthermore, there is no "central" marketplace for SOL projects like there is for ETH projects. Solanart is clearly the most polished marketplace, but only has a small fraction of the platform's projects listed. Other marketplaces such as MagicEden and DigitalEyes are somewhat rudimentary, lack the flexibility of OpenSea, and are less polished (ignoring all the glaring issues with OpenSea, of course). However, their low mint/transaction fees are an attractive plus for new NFT projects. Either way, I feel that Pesky Penguins could easily settle at a double-digit SOL floor as the snowball continues to burn the floor.
Scandal of the Week:
Mekaverse had their big reveal this week, but somebody discovered that prior to the reveal, the Metadata of the project was leaked from an insider and many people were able to find the rare Mekas before they were even revealed. This, combined with the fact that many Mekas are so strikingly similar that many were disgusted by how boring and non-unique the NFTs were, caused the price to plummet from about 7 ETH pre-reveal all the way down to 2 ETH at the time of this writing.
Loads of people who were skeptical of the project from the beginning were rejoicing in Meka's failures, while many who minted were also upset. However, the mint was 0.2 ETH and even if you sell your cheapest Meka at 2 ETH, that's still a 10x return! I don't think anyone can complain about that, but after the reveal fiasco I think it's safe to stay away from this project, regardless of how much profit a select few individuals make.
Notable Mentions: These projects I won't do detailed write-ups about, but I'll include some basic info and links for those that are interested in learning more.
- Kaiju Kingz is a pixelated Kaiju NFT that skyrocketed in price. I believe the mint price was 0.1 ETH and the floor is currently 3.5 ETH. Holding a Kaiju in your wallet acts as a key to unlock a private community of NFT traders and flippers. However, the price already being so high, this community is likely populated with whales and crypto-boomers (those who have been around a long time and can afford such NFTs) which can be quite a good thing - lots of experience in this group, and strong positive sentiment towards the project.
- Belugies (Marketplace) is a brand new SOL project created entirely by a 14 year old girl who hand-drew all the artwork herself! It was mentioned on Crypto Twitter and quickly went viral, and she sold 8000 beluga whale NFTs for 0.8 SOL. This was a somewhat hefty mint price for a SOL project, but the fact that she was so young and excited, plus the fact that significant portions of the project's profits are being donated towards a save-the-whales foundation (where sponsorship of real-life beluga whales in the wild will be gifted to random Belugie NFT holders) has drawn considerable hype. So far she's brought in over $1.3m in revenue in just a few days. Good for her!
- OG Crystals is a generative project depicting unique crystals on the blockchain. Every time the item is transferred or sold, the crystal changes or "evolves" into something new. The team is doxxed and non-anonymous, and is a team of 2 artists who have been involved in generative projects for several years. The OG crystals finally unlocked this week, and while the price is a "meager" 70% higher than the mint price (0.17 current vs. the 0.1 ETH mint), the project is unique in that the NFTs change over time, and are an example of a new mechanic that I expect to see in future iterations of NFT projects.
That's it for the Sunday update! If you want to see projects you're interested in covered here, feel free to send me a DM in Discord and I'll do some investigating and might include it in the next weekly summary. See you guys on Tech Tuesday where we will cover generative NFTs (and how they work), modular NFTs and how they may play out in the future, and evolving NFTs (such as the OG crystals mentioned above).
Have a great Sunday!