Some Time To Breathe

(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. We’ve officially made it through our first month of 2023 and it ain't as bad as we had initially thought it would be. Personally, this was a slow week for myself as I tended to some IRL activities instead of trading pictures. For the most part, it seems like the rest of the market touched some grass as well, especially with how slow the news has been. Accordingly, this will probably be one of my lighter newsletters, but as always, I’ll share my market commentary on topics such as the Blur airdrop, while also ruining any last bit of hope you had that your favorite PFP will ever come back from the grave. Let’s dive in.

Market Overview

Outside of Fortnite players live streaming dookie dash and the poorer part of the market gambling .01 ETH on open editions, I did not find much interest in anything notable this week. This is the first time since November I didn’t spend every waking hour of my life staring at cartoon pictures on the blockchain, so I guess this is somewhat healthy.

All in all, ETH seems to be ranging rather than mooning or dying, so this is a good sign. Jpeg wise, I don’t really care what ETH does as long as it picks a price to stay at for more than a week. It seems like we’re solid within the 1500-1700 range for now which will inevitably chop up the fungible traders who in turn will have to gamble on jpegs to make it all back. This is what I like to see.

Overall volume ticked down slightly week over week but nothing significant. We’re at the same point we were 2 weeks ago and now we have some catalyst on the horizon. With the Sewer Pass mint reveal, blur airdrop, and Captainz, we’ll definitely see some volume spikes in February. What is important is that if you look at the chart, December was a slow climb up, and January was a nice consolidation of volume remaining at levels not seen since July/August. 

I think what I’d like to see to give me some more confidence is a new mint becoming successful. Yes, I know Mutant Hounds Collars had a nice run but the reveal is down 75% from the ATH. A Kid Called Beast has been nothing but a disaster (which I won’t go into) and as I mentioned I’m over gambling $10 on open editions and pretending I care about the “Art”. Maybe it’s just the case that new mints are a bull market phenomenon. Outside of RENGA and Captainz nothing has really made a splash. Valhalla and KPR have been underwhelming at best. I have mixed thoughts on Ether but the art reveal looks pretty amazing not going to lie (seen below). I guess it looks like we’re in for 1 uber-successful new project a quarter in the bear market, which seems reasonable to me.

To sum this up, it’s amazing how fast the market changes, and I do stress being bipolar and never riding the ship into the ground. The last 2 weeks were successful for you if you turned your brain off and bought garbage, which proceeded to then *moon*. This has swiftly ended for the most part this week. Turns out owning digital pictures of feet wasn’t the best idea. Just part of the game.

Blue Chips

Super underwhelming week here in the world of high-end PFPs outside of Doodles. For the below I am using Blur as of Tuesday morning EST and removing flagged items.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Monkey pictures are still $100K USD

2. Punks are a stable coin at 66-68 ETH

3. Ugly Monkey pictures are ¼ of non-ugly monkey pictures

4. Azuki is the clear #3 PFP 

5. People still want to be a part of Proof

6. Doodles announcement did not go over well, again

7. Lil Pudgy announcement was great but underwhelming market reaction

8. Still holding on hopium that Nike will save this brand

Overall not much. People clearly love playing Dookie Dash, the rest of the bunch is having trouble catching up to Azuki, and most are not happy about Doodles moving to FLOW. Wouldn’t be surprised to see most of these grind and consolidate over the next few weeks in anticipation of an announcement. For what it’s worth, if Captainz can hold above a 4 ETH floor for a month or so post-mint, this will be the next contender to add to this list.

Musings

Luckily for you my ramblings this week will be short, once again. I was completely wrong about Porsche being a failure last week (sort of). But, to reconcile this, they did in fact read the market and were in touch with what the community wanted, cut supply, and this led to a rise in floor price above 2 ETH or 2x+ mint. Will this stay here, who knows. But I wanted to bring this up.

I shared my thoughts below on twitter but as prices rise I am seeing a lot of hopium and cope. Many participants are bag holding projects down 90%, know these projects are dead, and are still under the impression that these will come back “next cycle”.

This mentality of, “I’ll just hold and sell to some greater fool when the bull is back” is a losing one in my opinion. Remember, these are altcoins with pictures. Of course, they’re better because you have a down-bad community that has tied their digital identities to cartoons (very healthy) and is willing to “bet on the team”. That being said, I think these will have a similar fate to the darlings of the 2017 bear market like IOTA and EOS.

Maybe there will be some old narrative about legacy projects returning, but at best in my view they get back to 30-40% of ATH floor price in USD, and this will be rare. The main difference with altcoins and jpegs is that jpegs are 100% attention driven. It’s going to be much harder for XYZ to stir up a narrative when in the bull market there’s 10 new mints a day with large funding behind them (yes, I think this will be the case). Anyways, I was in a violent mood to address the cope on the timeline. I’d prefer to clear house and start fresh rather than hold on to my losers. If this sounds like you, I don’t mean to dunk on you, I just had to do it to them.

Finally, if you’ve been following me I’ve become Canto pilled. First of all, I’m a terrible fungible token trader and I’m definitely not making recommendations here. What I want to discuss is that their NFT ecosystem is running, and I believe this FOMO in turn *contributing* to an increase in the coin price. NFTs are game changing and it’s interesting to see a new L1 catch steam through NFTs, rather than the “tech”. Of course, this is just the *vibe* I get from my following, which is mostly jpeg enthusiasts. That being said, it’s hard to ignore that Canto Longnecks are currently $1800 and hit an ATH of $3000, flipping y00ts. Never underestimate memes. We seem to forget that there are folks making millions on the new dog coin every day, of course this will translate in some sense to NFTs.

That’s it for now. I’ll probably take another week off from gambling my networth on pictures again. I’d like to see where everything settles and in February I’ll develop another long-term thesis to make some sort of big bet most likely (like my Penguin bet which has been playing out well 🐧🫡. Until then, I’ll be sitting tight, and simply enjooooying. Have a great one!

Cheers,

Wilson