Immeasurable Disappointment...

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.

Good MORNING kings. Once again, I apologize for my much-needed absence. Another friendly reminder that yes, I do have a real job and yes, I have in fact been going through it lately. Regardless, I always make time for what’s important, and on that shortlist includes scanning Dexscreener for shitcoins to punt on (shout out to Pepe 2.0 for a nice foray back into the octagon) and catching up on the latest Twitter tea.

It seems that my fellow Mint Media partners have taken a page out of my book. Wilson has gone almost entirely dark in parts unknown while Paul has seemingly reached escape velocity and is currently being fanned with palm leaves in a tropical location. Do not fear - rest assured that they still have mobile Metamask access.

Meanwhile the rest of us are holding the line and continue to engage in poor financial controls, shelling out money for vaporware left and right.

This week, I will do my best Wilson impression and pretend like I know a thing or two about ETH. Contrary to popular belief, I haven’t filled my coffers all on Ferdy Flip (but it helped).

Azuki / Elementals

Let’s kick things off with the topic du jour - Azuki minted out their newest collection called Elementals earlier this week. Holders of both Azukis and Beanz were able to mint for 2 ETH per token and man, what an absolute shitshow this was to watch. I’m sure you saw plenty of people angrily smashing their keyboards typing in frustration on Twitter over the last 48 hours, but I took the time to aggregate some of the highlights:

It’s safe to say that the people were… dissatisfied. It was excellent from a content generation perspective, though.

A rare and seemingly costly fumble from the Azuki team. My thoughts?

While I certainly appreciate the wanting to expand the collection to attract more holders at a lower price point a la Lil Pudgies, there needs to be a level of differentiation. Beanz was an excellent way to keep brand continuity within the Garden while creating very separate and distinct collections, so I’m curious on the rationale for going this route. Very, very odd decision-making.

It goes without saying that Elementals’ artistic approach is borderline identical to the OG collection and has created two massive issues:

Not only has it sowed distrust in the team and highlighted the dangers of execution risk (i.e., no one is immune to fumbling), but it also has significantly diluted the OG Azuki collection.

In my view, the only thing separating these collections now is that one is called Azuki and one is called Elementals, both of which have vastly different price points (OGs fell to between 9-10 ETH and Elementals are below mint of 2 ETH). My prediction is that the price gap will close between these two collections - whether that means Azuki trends down to a more modest price or Elementals enjoy a ride higher once the FUD has settled remains to be seen. There’s some very interesting game theory at play here.

Is it worth a punt? Probably not at least for right now. NFTs are generally not doing so great - Blur farmers continue to rack up mindboggling losses and dump into their own bids while speculators seem to be playing in the shitcoin sandbox once again. I’d sit this one out and wait for the dust to settle (NFA of course).

AVAX.wtf

When I unplugged from CT about three weeks ago, it ended with me scrolling through some typical AVAX NFT Twitter drama. Nothing nonstandard about that - usually when things get boring over there, people tend to start infighting. Fine (I guess).

I logged into Twitter yesterday and got some extra spice dumped into my morning tea.

Yikes.

Not to transform this newsletter into AVAX TMZ, but I’d like to pose the question very diplomatically and somewhat rhetorically - what the hell is going on?

Blue (Marketing Lead @ Trader Joe) kicked things off with a pretty hot take: PFPs are worthless.

I honestly really hate this stance. If the proliferation of social media has proven anything, it’s that there’s obvious intrinsic value in having a digital identity. This will only become more evident as more people devote more time into establishing and maintaining an online presence. Not every project needs to be this pseudo-metaverse nonsense that promises to distract you from reality in perpetuity.

Long-term, we’ll have a few legacy PFP projects remain and most will experience mean reversion to zero. Not really a take I find worth debating, but anyway…

Enter stage left - our friendly neighborhood sponge came in quick to reply and was not espousing high praises for the AVAX DAO incentive program.

This kicked off a brief argument in which VQ and Fish started getting into it and ended with Fish blocking VQ and a handful of others like Chef Goose. What followed was a whole can of worms where folks started to publicly voice their displeasure with how Joe Studios has been operating over the last 12 months.

I’m not gonna rehash every tweet and sentiment that was expressed. Most of it is stuff I’ve heard from multiple people over a long period of time so I wasn’t exactly surprised to see the contents of the dirty laundry being aired out.

For the record - I own Peons, I own an OG Smol Joe and a handful of Smol Joes v2 and have always have been a supporter of Joe Studios and their work. That said, I can’t pretend that I’ve loved everything they’ve done since their inception either which is fine. I’m a big penguin and I have the autonomy to make my own decisions.

Before I go on, let me give you some real alpha:

Two things can be true at the same time.

I know that’s a shocker to some of you reading this. You probably also use your feet to type but consider that for a moment. I see both sides.

I won’t comment specifically on Fish because I don’t know anything about how corporate governance works across Trader Joe, Joepegs and Joe Studios, but I know that many feel like there is clearly a conflict of interest in managing an NFT studio while leveraging the ability to maximize influence on the #1 AVAX NFT platform because the same group operates it. I tend to agree.

To use tradfi as an example, there are “chinese walls” between the buyside and the sellside to prevent different sides of the table from commingling and influencing decisions. In a world where rules don’t exist and we spend thousands on pictures, this doesn’t seem like a big deal but I would say it definitely does matter.

I think many would feel more comfortable if there was a clear delineation between these two entities functioning in siloes as opposed to their current structure where there is significant overlap. That would be a good start.

I’ll leave it at that, otherwise this will become a short novel. Given that our subscriber base has the reading comprehension level of Floyd Mayweather reading Cat In the Hat, it wouldn’t be efficient for me to ramble on about this topic. Maybe next time.

Conclusion

Lots to write about this week. Thanks again to Wilson for making my job so much easier (harder). Really appreciate you brother!

Wishing you all luck in the casino this week and if you’re American, enjoy the holiday weekend. Back to my coffee.

Cheers,
Chuck