The Future Is Bright

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 been some time since I decided to put my thoughts on paper (3 weeks but who’s counting), so I figured it’s time to get back to writing. For those that care, everything has been going quite well. Almost too well where it’s -EV for me to spend a few hours writing compared to using that time to pay attention to the markets. As mentioned earlier in the month, this blog hasn’t really existed during “bull market” times. Looking back at the bear, I forget how much free time we had. Now, going outside for 15 minutes could mean missing a new launch. As always, these blogs are really just a consolidation of my 10+ daily mini rants I have in discord. We’re already 6 months into 2024 and it’s only January!

Since my last post, we’ve had the ETF approval, new airdrop announcements, new mints, new narratives, and much more. This will be more of a follow up post to my article on Jan 9th, but I’ll generally touch on as much as I can. If you haven’t yet read my last post, NFTs Are Fun Again (it’s a short read), I’d recommend checking it out before you read this or this post will probably make less sense for you.

As a reminder, I am not qualified to give any advice and am just your average person who stares at my screen 24/7, observing market trends and the memes that create them.

Past Post:

Airdrops

Airdrops are a lot of fun as we all enjoy getting free money…

With the recent launch of $ALT + $DYM, and with $FRAME, $JUP and many more on the horizon, airdrops are the talk of the town. Because of this, many people will spend countless ETH, SOL, and whatever other tokens in turn to make it all back via an airdrop. This has led to hundreds of “instructional” threads on X, to the point where many protocols are becoming “over-farmed”, leading to disappointment when your 100,000 points generates $17 of so called token.

Earlier this month I mentioned I have been focusing heavily on farming Tensor. Based on how quickly I’ve been moving up the leaderboard, I still feel that Tensor is extremely under-farmed (I covered some of the reasoning for this in my last post). Despite a disproportionate amount of attention on their farming program, the Tensor team continues to ship new products. With their new price lock feature, you can farm points while also collecting yield on your NFTs by “locking” them. It’s essentially a covered call, and if you’re holding a jpeg you plan on holding for the long term, you can lock it up at a higher price which you’re comfortable selling it at. If it hits, you collect that $, and if it doesn’t you get your jpeg back. In both scenarios, you’re getting free yield and Tensor points.

What I like about farming Tensor is that it’s decently time consuming so it helps avoid ape’ing into random shitcoins and over-trading on days that may be slower. Instead, you can farm what, in my opinion, has the potential to be the biggest airdrop on Sol, while also earning a decent amount of Sol in the process. Post airdrop, I expect $TNSR to have a blur like effect in the sense that all Solana NFTs rip hard. For me, I’m building a bag of Tensorians and Claynosaurz and looking to do this via funding shorts that I want to get hit. I also expect MadLads to do extremely well in the future which is definitely not an unpopular opinion. If you’re currently farming Tensor and haven’t used a code yet, I’ll shamelessly plug my referral here (WKC470) which will give you a 5% boost.

Capitalizing on the Narrative

One of the most important things to do in Crypto, web3, NFTs, or really any market is capitalize on the narrative. This is not some new sage wisdom, and Cobie has a post on this called Trading the metagame that is 100x better articulated and smarter than anything I can put together. Would highly recommend reading this old post from 2021 if you haven’t.

Earlier this month I discussed the SEI NFT narrative. I don’t want to say I sold the top, but looking back this did age quite well:

<sub>Now, it seems like every influencer is shilling you their SEI bags. I think catching small narratives like these are extremely +EV but only if you get in early and get out quick. It’s important to recognize what is a short term, medium term, and long term play. For those wondering, I sold 90% of my SEI NFTs for some large multiples and am not super bullish anymore. A lot of the hype seems manufactured to me and every project has the name “SEI” in it. This is where I found grinding throughout the bear market really helped me succeed. If you were around for Canto, this “SEI NFT rush” has played out identically so far.

Where does this go from here? Not sure, but won’t remain too focused on it outside of trying to get WL for anything that seems legit on the chain.</sub>

Why does this matter anyways? It’s important to know what the difference between a long-term hold and trading is. If you are active in this space 24/7 like myself, you most likely have your long-term spot bags but are really here to add to those via trading whether it be shitcoins, NFTs, low caps, farming, etc. As we know, NFTs tend to be my focus.

Following the narrative or flavor of the week can potentially be a great recipe to grow your portfolio. For the coming weeks, I’m looking forward to getting some sort of Base season. Base is the L2 built by Coinbase, and there’s a ton of new shitcoins and NFTs heating up in that ecosystem. For what it’s worth, if you haven’t bridged to base yet, you are definitely not early.

This week base had it’s first real “NFT rush”. Mochimons minted out and within 4 days had done a 50x from mint. Many people made an absolute killing in a very short amount of time, in turn directing more attention to other Base NFT projects which have all seen their floors rise post Mochimon mint. Mochimon, while still a 20x+ from mint, is down ~40-50% from it’s ATH. If you were early to the CANTO/SEI NFT rush, you’d recognize these quick pumps which is helpful for taking profits. As with SEI NFTs, close to the Mochimon top you had a slush of influencers start to shill on X which of course then proceeded to mark the local top for Mochimon. I sold all of mine when I noticed this and currently hold 0, but I do like the project, I think it’s great for the Base ecosystem and my other Base bags – I am rooting for them.

When you think you find something that looks interesting and has potential, if nobody is talking about it yet then you’re usually early. Of course, you don’t want to fall into the trap of ape’ing into something that nobody ever talks about! Base, however, is a bit different in my opinion than other narratives we see. I’m a strong believer that Base will be the #1 or #2 L2 by the end of 2024 and this isn’t just some quick narrative to capitalize on and leave forever. That being said, similar to when $Bald launched over the summer and Base coins ripped for a bit, I think there’s a decent chance we get a big uptick in Base activity over the next few weeks. For those wondering, I use the Base official bridge to bridge from mainnet → Base, and then Stargate or Orbiter to bridge back.

NFT Season and NFT Tokens

Earlier this month I called for an NFT season saying that NFTs will do quite well post-ETF approval as things consolidate. We definitely haven’t had a full blown NFT boom yet, that’s for sure. Some jpegs have certainly been doing quite well though, such as Penguins which ripped from 10e to 17e, BAYC recovering nicely from it’s 22e nuke, and most of CT finally learned about the 8th wonder of the world: Berachain NFTs.

Overall, NFT volume has been flat since Dec 2023 and there isn’t much of an uptick in new wallets. Looks like we haven’t quite reached ETH NFT season yet.

On the other hand, Ordinals are looking quite strong, with Bitcoin puppets doing a 2x over the last week, Nodemonkes holding steady with solid volume, and RSICs being airdropped which is currently a free $1000 per RSIC if you received it. With the upcoming Quantum cats mint, I expect there to be a lot more liquidity added to Ordinals compared to those who think it will be sucking liquidity from the top projects. Stop being lazy and writing off Bitcoin NFTs as dumb, they’re clearly here to stay and you’re missing out on a ton of opportunities at the moment.

With that aside, ETH NFTs are in an interesting place. While Azuki, Overworld, and other projects look to launch their own tokens, Penguins have been capitalizing on the $dym airdrop hype. While many upcoming hyped airdrops like $zro and $zks have been sybil’d by so many bots, it begs the question of how these teams should allocate tokens. Should they give tokens to airdrop farmers with 100 wallets, or to holders who have been diamond handing their NFTs for years and stuck around in the bear market?

Penguins received way more $dym for just owning a penguin than those who spent time farming or staking coins. While $dym hasn’t launched yet, it’s looking like a conservative estimate that each penguin will be airdropped high 4 figs to low 5 figs of $Dym. We’re already seeing rumors that Layer 0 will be giving allocation to Penguins and Pandas and this is a real narrative that can push projects floors higher. Pandas floor has done a 2x over the past 2 weeks and there’s 0 mention of it on the timeline. I think a lot of people who said we’ll never have another NFT cycle will be caught by surprise when owning a jpeg becomes it’s own airdrop farm, and you get to join a community as well.

Bull Market

Finally, with the the recent nuke in Bitcoin (a nuke for ants) the bears have come out to play. We get it, it was a “sell the news” event and everybody on CT clearly sold the top, then shorted and rebought the bottom the other day with leverage. Bears sound smart, and a lot of what they say is scary. But, we are not in a bear market, and these bears will sound stupid just like they did when they called for $12K bitcoin.

The above tweet is about equities, but I like to look at it from a crypto perspective. If you believe in the future of crypto, web3, blockchain, decentralization, or whatever you want to call it - why are you sidelined? The bull market is here and I’m surprised at how many people are still afraid to admit this.

Anyways, back to farming tensor and bragging about buying my Penguin PFP at 1 ETH. Have a wonderful week everyone.

Cheers,
Wilson