Happy Holidays (To Those Left)

(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 remaining survivors, or as I like to say, the chosen people. I recently started drinking Yerba Mate every day and I feel better than ever. This may or may not be correlated with another week of good jpeg price action. Unless you were trading the Trump NFTs, there were few big plays to make this week. After our 24-hour bull market the other week things have calmed down. While trading volume isn’t significantly lower, the space does feel a bit quieter over the last week. I think this is probably due to folks winding down for the end of the year and taking a much needed vacation. I’ll keep this newsletter fairly light as we have an extremely dense guest post from the criminally under-followed Cali. We’ve had some amazing guests on this newsletter but this post may be my favorite one yet. If you’ve been reading Mint Weekly for a while, you know that I’m a huge believer in the proliferation of projects building around an “IP rights meta” in 2023. This is a complicated subject that most don’t understand and Cali does an awesome job of giving a practical overview. Other than that, prices are down slightly as ETH seems to be trending lower and *macro* fears are getting more intense. Anyways, I hope you enjoy your 7 minutes of educational bear market musings while you sip your morning coffee (or better yet, morning Yerba Mate).

Quick Updates

• Don’t forget to tune into the Chillin Pod every Monday at 8pm EST

• Also, we’ll be piloting our new show “Mediocre Investment Club” every Tuesday at 8pm EST (not actually an investment club – never financial advice, ever).

NFTs In The News

Bored Ape Creator Yuga Labs Nabs New CEO From Gaming Giant Activision Blizzard

Donald Trump NFT Collection Sells Out, Price Surges

Starbucks Sees 'Unprecedented Interest' as Polygon NFT Rewards Platform Launches

Apple Plans to Allow External iOS Apps in Potential Boon for Crypto, NFTs

NFT infrastructure protocol Decent raises $3.5 million from Y Combinator and others: Exclusive

Warner Music Group Furthers Metaverse Push With Digital Fashion Startup DressX

Flow Hits New Low After NFT Trading Craters, Dapper Downsizes

Magic Eden Will Reward Loyal Traders With Discounts, Free NFTs

Market Overview

I don’t know about you but this week felt extremely dead (using Crypto/NFT twitter as my barometer). Blur + OpenSea volume was down ~7% week-over-week but is up 15% from 2 weeks ago. I’d deem this “not that bad” considering the 24 hour bull market on Dec 10/11th was the most volume we’ve seen since the first week of November. If we consider new mints, overall ETH volume is up week-over-week.

ETH has broken lower than $1,200 for the first time in December causing a bit of volatility. That being said I still think holding between $1,100 - $1,300 is a solid range for our jpegs, which when we look at blue chip performance in this range supports this thesis. This is essentially the “post FTX collapse” range and if ETH breaks lower I think we’ll get another bout of *internet picture sell-off*

Overall not the most action packed week. If you want to feel sad, remember that this time last year ETH was ~$3900. Very fun times.

Blue Chips

For the most part, we had a bunch of nothing in terms of price action this week for the blue chip projects. All discussion below is using blur.io from Monday morning EST.

Yuga labs announced a new CEO and apecoin staking has begun. This seems to have little impact on the price of everyone’s monkey’s as the Apes are down from 66 to ~63 ETH and Mutants are flat at ~13 ETH. Unsurprisingly, these continue to dominate the volume charts on blur.

Azuki’s are back below 11 ETH but nothing notable here for the most part and the grails continue to sell. Doodles are flat w/w at 6.6 ETH but have seen some solid volume compared to the other collections here. Doodles usually have super low volume relative to the other 3 collections in this bucket so this may or may not be notable. Moonbirds continued to chop in the 7-9 range and broke down below 8 ETH again. Pretty boring…Clone’s continue to take a beating are now below 6 ETH (5.8 to be precise) and still can’t seem to shake the FUD from the “shoe discount” and are down ~10% w/w.

Moving on, Penguins are flat around the 4.1 ETH range and have continued to remain at the top of the volume charts. No news here yet regarding the rog utility which may add another volume spike. Cool Cats on the other hand had the best week, right when many were willing to right them off (including myself). The cats that are cool are up ~40% over the last week at 2.7 ETH and got close to knocking on the 3 ETH floor door. Still note quite sure what the news is here but they saw some massive sweeps seemingly out of nowhere so maybe something is cooking?

At this exact moment in time the CryptoPunk floor is about .5 ETH higher than BAYC at a 63.7 ETH floor. Crypto Punks have still not broken its 65 ETH (+/- 2 ETH) stable coin floor in just about 2 months now. This is some heavy consolidation and at this point the Punks may be gearing up for a big move.

Overall a boring week for our favorite Blue Chip PFPs. Boring is better than down though, so no complaints.

Guest Post: IP Right and NFTs by Cali

Mint Media Disclaimer: Cali has helped lead many successful projects in the NFT space and is involved with various high-performing teams. As many of you know, I am extremely confident we will see an IP Rights Meta in 2023 and Cali has a great grasp on how this stuff works and a practical read on the actual utility. None of the below is financial advice. Definitely give him a follow and enjoy!

Hey everyone, Cali here and signing on for a guest blog for Mint Media. This is a particular subject I’ve researched extensively for my professional career, argued with about at great length with random discord anons, and blabbered about to anyone who will listen after a few drinks. Does that make me qualified to write about it? Maybe, maybe not… but here we go.

Anyways.

IP Rights

First, to properly discuss IP rights, we need to understand what I am referring to here. For starters, the abbreviation IP has several different meanings across several other sectors of our culture, creating inherent confusion regarding the subject. Being both incredibly basic and lazy, I asked ChatGPT to define IP, and it spit out the following “Internet Protocol which is a is a set of rules that govern how data is transmitted over the internet.” While this is incorrect for this article, this is the most common and original usage of the term IP. However, in Web3, this is never what the abbreviation IP refers to, which clearly causes confusion for the masses directly off the bat.

In Web3, when individuals discuss IP, they are 99% of the time referring to Intellectual Property. Intellectual Property can be defined as “a work or invention that is the result of creativity, such as a manuscript or a design, to which one has rights and for which one may apply for a patent, copyright, trademark, etc.”. Using this definition, all NFT’s are inherently Intellectual Property of the artist, project, or company that created them. This dynamic creates a fundamental and deep-rooted issue between the NFT holder and the NFT creator.

You may now be asking yourself, “Cali, why does that create an issue?” Well, there is a prevalent misconception in the Web3 space that if you own and hold the NFT, you are the owner of both the artwork and IP. I’m talking so prevalent from my discussions with anons that 90% of holders do not realize what owning an NFT actually means. When you dig into the terms and conditions of most projects (which I’m sure all of you have done cause it’s a super common thing to do), the only commercial right you are granted by holding the NFT is a deed to a token on the blockchain that grants you the freedom to display your NFT as a PFP. Many holders falsely assume they can make merchandise, repackage their NFT in a new digital medium, or make derivatives from their NFT. This couldn’t be further from the truth with most collections (not all, though).

However, if you don’t believe me, that is fine; you don’t have to take my word for it. Instead, let’s look at what some of your favorite project’s legal teams have to say on the matter.

You have no rights, and you’ll like it.

To truly understand what IP rights you are granted by owning an NFT from a particular collection, you must look closely at their terms and conditions. When it comes to terms and conditions, no one actually reads them, *but*, if you have plans to use your NFT for anything other than displaying it as a PFP, this is a necessity. In every single project’s terms and conditions, you will 100% find a sub-header addressing Intellectual Property. How do I know this? Well, I’ve had the pleasure of reading around 100 different terms and conditions for various projects for research for my day job. Let’s look at a baseline and easy-to-comprehend T&C with 10KTF’s.

Under the subheading Intellectual Property, they state:

“Each owner of a Finished Item or 10KTF NFT (“Collector”) owns a cryptographic token representing a creative work(s) as a piece of property. The Collector does not own any rights in the underlying creative works or works featured in the Finished Item or 10KTF NFT, unless such right or license is expressly granted to You: (i) under the terms of the Parent PFP license, (ii) by WENEW, or (iii) by a third-party licensor under the Special Terms.”

Essentially, this translates to: “you own a token on the block chain but not the actual art or IP associated with it.” Furthermore, they go on to explicitly state:

“Collectors may display their Finished Item or 10KTF NFT(s) but, unless expressly granted, Collectors do not have any legal ownership, right, or title to any copyrights, trademarks, or other intellectual property rights to the 10KTF NFTs or Finished Items, excepting the limited license granted by this Agreement.”

This statement means that as a holder, you can not repackage and use the NFT for your own commercial gain in any way, shape, or form. This means you cannot sell merchandise, create derivatives, or do anything cool people assume you can do with your NFT. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this rule I should highlight. Yuga, Forgotten Runes, Cryptokitties, and CloneX, Pudgy Penguins are all changing this up a bit. However, even with a few of these projects extending more commercial IP rights, most still implement two clauses, a revenue share and a commercial clause.

For example, with CryptoKitties, you can use their IP for personal use until you make $100,000 USD in revenue merchandising their product. If you exceed this threshold in revenue (I don’t think it will be a problem with crypto kitties), you are then liable to split the profit with the project. Furthermore, the commercial entity clause is an industry-wide standard. CloneX’s commercial entity clause reads:“You are eligible to commercialize your CloneX Avatar if: 1) You own a CloneX NFT where the Avatar has Only RTFKT Content (No Murakami Drip or DNA). 2) You are an individual or entity with less than 1,500 employees and less than $40 million in annual revenue.”

CloneX has a relatively high annual revenue for its commercial entity clause, and the industry standard is usually $5 million or below. Furthermore, the commercial entity clause, which I promise you exists in the terms and conditions of every project that allows for the commercialization of IP, dispels another very prevalent myth in the space. This myth, and I’ve heard it countless times, is that a large corporation can come in, sweep the floor, and then use its NFTs for advertising, marketing, etc. In fact, this argument is often used by anons as the basis of their FUD against projects attempting to do licensing deals. However, the commercial entity clause within all project’s terms and conditions, even if they allow outside parties to use their IP, eliminates that right off the bat.Thoughts and OpinionsAnyway you shake it, commercial IP rights are a complicated subject for several reasons. On the one hand, in the traditional world, no one would expect to be able to profit from selling merch for a Disney Character. On the other hand, the entire idea of the NFT space is predicated on people believing they own the IP and are free to do with it as they wish. On the third hand (nuclear accident here), isn’t the creator who spent months to years developing the idea, concept, and art entitled to retain the rights? Terminology and legal clauses aside, this is a highly complex subject, and I don’t think a clear answer has emerged for a space in such a nascent phase. However, some very cool developments and trends are happening in this area. Yuga leads the charge in allowing Ape holders to do what they wish with their Bored Apes, and perhaps that’s part of the reason they’ve been so successful. Furthermore, Remaster, a blockchain-focused legal infrastructure company, is paving the way for T&Cs to be converted into “smart” legal contracts that protect holders. (Sidenote: If this subject interests you, I’d highly recommend checking Remaster out).In my research, I’ve found that Web3 brands entering Web3 with highly restrictive IP usage have been nowhere near as successful as those with liberal IP usage rights, such as Nike and CloneX/RTFKT. All in all, if I were forced to pick a side, I recommend projects opening up their IP usage for people to take advantage of. After all, that is the spirit of Web3, and it’s hard to beat community guerilla marketing, just ask Ape holders.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this post as much I enjoy educating internet anons on this subject (that realistically, no one probably cares about 😂).Feel free to dm me on twitter if you want to chat more or are just looking to connect. Thanks for listening to me rant and I don’t think it will be the last time you all will be hearing from me.Cheers,

Cali

Final Thoughts

While a slow week relative to the last, the Trump trading cards were pretty funny (politics aside). A 45,000 piece collection sold out at $99 and hit a floor of .7 ETH. Now floating around a .3 floor and still remaining at the top of OpenSea volume, this is pretty remarkable. First of all, “for those that have been here for a while, one fundamental, undeniable truth is that memes continue to cement themselves as currency in a hype-driven market” - Me. We continue to see this play out in NFTs and I don’t think this will ever go away. A friend texted me about the Trump NFTs and my thoughts. I replied something along the lines of: The project was destined to do a 2x as memes are currency. IMO the pump won’t last more than a week but because it’s funny to watch, more will want to be part of the meme. At now 7x, this will die down as something new comes along but overall good for the space.Why is something like this good for NFTs? Hate Trump or love him, this project was able to raise over $4 million dollars in the matter of 24 hours. Corporations are going to see this. Nike and Adidas were early to this trend but now we see companies like Starbucks and Disney looking to get involved. This is only going to expedite the digital ownership movement.Anyways, this pump was quite obvious to me but of course I missed it due to my laziness and having to bridge to Polygon. However, I do enjoy watching “funny things that make no sense to outsiders” pump, as it’s a staple of NFTs and a competitive advantage for those who are constantly paying attention.

Next week we’ll do a Mint Media team portfolio update, some final end of the year predictions, and look back on our biggest wins/losses of 2022. Should be a fun read.With that, I hope you all have a great week and enjoy the Holidays!Cheers!