Win Or Lose, We Move Forward

Win Or Lose, We Move Forward

(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. This newsletter is coming at you live from Beehiive. I hope you all had a wonderful New Years Eve and enjoyed some relaxing time off. I was fortunate enough to take a few days off and feel completely refreshed going into 2023. It feels good to get back to staring at jpegs every second of the day. Looking back at the last week, we had quite the uptick in volume, which isn’t surprising due to end of the year clean up, tax-loss harvesting, and rebalancing of portfolios for 2023. I’ll share my thoughts on the market and review my personal best and worst plays of 2023. Enjoy!

Market Overview

Despite what I had initially expected to be a slow December, NFTs really gained steam going into the end of the year. While this was most likely fueled by Blur airdrop farming, the fact that volume remained elevated for almost 2 months makes me a bit skeptical that this is the *only* factor. With the airdrop coming later this month, it seems that the obvious trend to note will be that volume and floor prices go back down dramatically post-airdrop. I can’t think of many good reasons why volume will continue to go up, but when the entire NFT space zigs one way it is *usually* a good idea to zag.

Volume wise we finished off the year strong. OpenSea broke 40,000 ETH traded for the first time since October and if we add in Blur, this was the most trading volume since the last week of July. While the global macro outlook and general consensus on crypto is seemingly bleak at the moment, NFTs are surprisingly holding strong. I think the main thing we’re still missing is successful new mints. While on one hand we have Memeland and the upcoming Yuga mint, we have few new projects that are up and coming. Every past NFT boom has been driven by new mint volume, which we can also see pretty clearly in the chart above.

While blur airdrop farming is great for those of us that want to dump our bags and get some free tokens, it hasn’t led to more new projects. Ultimately, in order for a true bull market to return, we need new members and a cheap entry into the market (new mints). Post-blur airdrop, I don’t think the volume drop off will be as intense as the masses think, but I don’t think we’re close to being out of the weeds just yet. There’s tons of projects that still need to go to 0 and I expect the remaining capital here to be sucked into higher quality, such as Yuga, Penguins, and undervalued ecosystems that have *big* announcements.

Overall, I feel more confident that we’ve seen the bottom for ETH volume traded which was in November for at least the rest of Q1. I’m looking forward to watching adoption continue to grow and NFTs becoming *less cringe* in 2023. My confidence for the space as a whole is unwavering and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Blue Chips

I’ve been debating how I want to address this section as it feels that sometimes I’m writing the same thing every week. I’m going to do a short floor price ranking from blur and the week-over-week delta. I’ll also do a small summary of my (biased) thoughts at the end. I’ll do some slight rounding for simplification as well.

Rankings

Thoughts

Punks are still a 63-67 ETH stablecoin for the 3rd month in a row. Yuga ecosystem looks strong. With the tease of their upcoming mint, this strength isn’t going to let up until post-mint in my opinion. Azuki’s continue to look great, nothing new here. Penguins hit an ATH of 7 ETH this week, momentum isn’t slowing down.

Moonbirds are doing a whole lot of nothing, still unsure why they’re still a level above Doodles and Clones. Clones look horrible and Doodles desperately need an announcement before they lose more loyal members. Cool Cats change week by week but I still think they’re heading in the wrong direction and I’m still debating their inclusion especially since Pengs have moved up a category. This is the NFT space so things can drastically turn on a dime.

Last Year In Review

Overall I had a blast in 2022. Despite the rough 2nd half of the year, I came out successful. To preface this, in no way I am close to the legends who have turned 1 ETH into 1000+ ETH with near-perfect precision. That being said, I do think I have a decent track record and have hit the majority of my high-conviction bets. This isn’t too surprising considering I’ve spent every waking hour of the past 1.5 years staring at jpegs. The main theme is that a few high conviction plays can outweigh losses tenfold. This is what makes NFTs so enticing, one win to make it all back. Anyways, I’ll give a quick rundown of my best and worst ideas of 2022.

Worst Plays

Ragnarok Meta (now 77-bit) - Got wrecked here. Minted a few and got in early. Held way too long and rode this down to around -75% before selling. Project took a quick dive from 4 ETH to 0 post-reveal after art looked like an Azuki copy and it came out that the founder had taken millions of funding for his personal salary. Also removed from OS and had to change their name.

We are all going to die - Watched the entire saga play out and them FOMO’d in around 1.3 - 1.5 ETH. Sold 90% down.

Sprite Club - If you’ve been following us for a while then you’re definitely aware of what an utter disaster this project was. Leading up to mint had built a great community and hype, the minting process was perfect but with many issues regarding the reveal and lack of execution on roadmap (or lack thereof) this project faded and was abandonned. This did a 3x post-reveal where I had de-risked some so my monetary losses weren’t horrible, but it was more the emotional investment of how excited I was for this one. Major disappointment.

Degenheim - I was so hyped for this project. I minted and then kept sweeping after a quick 2.5x off of mint price. Post-reveal, the art was disappointing to say the least with very few announcements from the team as well as a lack of a finite timeline on the game. Sold out down 90% on this.

Fading Azuki - Absolutely disgusting behavior from myself. While I was so caught up in the Creepz mania, I faded azuki multiple times from the 1-5 ETH run-up waiting for a dip thinking it was “too-hyped”. Disgraceful.

Volume chasing - Too many occasions of staring at moby.gg and tossing anywhere from .5 to 1 ETH into projects looking for a quick flip only to have been a few minutes late and get wrecked. A ton of quick smaller losses here but added up a ton during the June/July free mint mania. I also minted a ton of projects that never got above mint price during this phase.

Fading RENGA - This one is actually pathetic and a great example of getting in your own head. I wrote about Renga for months and was so excited. Obviously market conditions weren’t great and mentally my trading was struggling around this time. No excuses. I had a great plan for this project and had swept black boxes around .5 ETH (the pico schmico bottom). I then proceeded to sell these all on the run up from .5 to .7 for practically breakeven on fees after FUDing myself. Around 2-3 weeks later these hit a 5 ETH floor. Sad!

Best Plays

Overlord (Creepz) - Easily the best play of 2022 as this hit a 100x+ post mint. At the same time, you accrued more in-ecosystem assets and farmed a "shitcoin" (loomi) that was turning into multiple ETH per day. I de-risked well on this despite getting caught up in some FOMO. Project crashed to 1 ETH but is now sitting around 2.5 ETH and still a 30x+ mint. Not as heavily invested anymore but creepz holds a special place in my heart. I think they’re going to be one of the most successful projects of 2023.

Pudgy Penguins - After screaming into the void for a year that this project was undervalued, the last month has made me feel *less crazy*. The bag here was mainly made from sweeping lil pudgy's in the .1-.15 area throughout October/November where these hit .6 recently. My favorite project going into 2023.

Fading Invisible friends and March hype - Some of the best moves are making no moves at all. Publicly tweeted very anti invisible friends thoughts, and warned the community of FOMOing early. This immediately opened up at 11 ETH and quickly went down to its 2 ETH floor now. I also wrote an entire article about not buying into any of the “hyped” march projects (Tasty Bones, Imaginary Ones, Starcatchers). These have all been down-only ~90% since reveal day.

Fading Otherside - I discuss this very rarely in this newsletter since it’s extremely unpopular. If you’ve heard me on spaces I’ve always been adamant that spending 5 ETH + on digital land for something with no MVP makes zero sense to me. Outside of the quick .8 ETH to 1.3 pump recently, Otherside has probably lost participants more money than any other project in this space.

Fading Hape Prime and Mekaverse - 8 ETH for an unrevealed lego robot with no roadmap and then calling Hape the next Mekaverse at the pico top was a shining moment for myself and this newsletter. Sometimes the best play is sitting on your hands and I’m glad I was able to warn others to do the same, or at the very least always remain skeptical.

Minting projects and selling pre-reveal - There’s a ton of projects included in here that I minted and sold for a 5/10/20x pre-reveal. One of the best was minting a Wonderpal for .08 and selling immediately for over 1 ETH. There were tons of other projects in this category as well like Multibeasts, Catblox, and Bad Influence.

Conclusion

2022 was a year of ups and downs. A lot of learning experiences and I’m going into 2023 much more confident in my ability to evaluate what a successful ecosystem, project founder, and roadmap look like. I’m happy with our evolution from Mint Calendar to Mint Media and feel that as a media brand we are well positioned. I think we’re going to see NFT technology evolve this year and truly enter the mainstream. Personally I am most excited to see how the gaming industry evolves to incorporate NFTs and think web3 gaming will be what takes us to the next level. Still, we have to be rational, and this will be very slow moving. Nonetheless, tons to look forward to. That’s all for now, I hope you all have an amazing start to the new year. Wishing you all the best. See you next week.

Cheers,

Wilson