🥩 NFTs leak into meat-world.

TIME drops TIMEPieces

• Tuesday night, TIME magazine president Keith Grossman made a surprise appearance in @Farokh’s Discord channel to announce a drop of 4676 NFTs from 40 artists for a project they’re calling Build a Better Future.

• The collection sold out in roughly three minutes on Thursday and immediately rocketed to a 3 ETH floor, leaving many, as usual, despairing about being left behind in yet another massive gas war

• Owners will gain utility in the form of free access to TIME magazine’s website, exclusive invites to events, including in-person artist talks for those who own the respective artists’ piece, and yet-to-be-revealed digital experiences. 

Snoop Dogg sippin’ on NFTs

• The Doggfather himself recently outed himself as person behind the NFT influencer account, @CozomoMidici 

• First appearing on Twitter in August, Cozomo de’ Midici amassed a large following while sharing massive buys. His collection now includes 9 CryptoPunks, 5 Squiggles, 10 Meebits, and, of course, plenty of 420-themed pieces. What would you expect?

• Snoop dropped another bomb Thursday when he announced his partnership with The Sandbox to produce a metaverse game, along with an absolute banger of a metaverse music video to preview the project. Go ahead and smash that fire emoji. 

Art Basel 

• The NFT artwold invasion continues as Galerie Nagel Draxler brings it’s CRYPTO Kiosk into Art Basel, showcasing a mix of NFT photography, painting, illustration, and digital art in a dazzling physical display room. 

• The annual art fair, based in Switzerland, is among the highest profile events in the art world, bringing together elite tiers of galleries, curators, and collectors to hob nob and casually drop upwards of 8 figures on the hottest new artists.

• Some confused collectors wanted to buy work directly off the wall, while the gallery’s friendly booth attendants happily helped them get acquainted with OpenSea.

• With the fair hosting upwards of 250 international galleries, it’s clear that it is still very, VERY early in the artworld’s NFT adoption phase.

Speaking of "new projects"...

Crypto Hobos

Insanity ensued across the Twitter-verse when Crypto Hobos dropped on Monday, revealing eye-popping artwork by Russian artist Valiahmed Popov.

The artwork is steeped with a grotesque aesthetic that seems to channel the spirits of Ralph Steadman and Francis Bacon. And the collection seems to fill an emotional niche that stands out in the land of cartoon pop and snark. 

In the weeds

• The launch of Crypto Hobos hit the stratosphere when, just a couple hours after minting opened, it was revealed that Pransky minted a whopping 450 pieces from the 8000 piece collection.

• The hype hit so hard that secondary sales achieved over 1k ETH in volume in the first 24 hours after the mint. This drove the project to hitting the #3 spot on OpenSea’s Top Collections Chart. Probably nothing.

• But the biggest news might just be the artwork itself. The manic line work and blotchy color schemes of these hand-drawn pieces are eye-bogglingly beautiful, while at the same time presenting a vision of the “grotesque” that offers an entirely unique visual flavor amid the growing abundance of collectables hitting the market. 

Bird’s Eye View

• With so many collectables projects mimicking the pixelated aesthetic of Cryptopunks, or cartoons like BAYC, it’s always striking to see a collection that takes the risk of trying to be a trend-setter, rather than a trend-follower. 

• With a team based in Moscow, projects like this remind us how truly international the NFT space is. The ability for anyone in the world to connect with collectors will pave the way for continued inflows of hyper-talented artists.

• We’re seeing the integration of independent artists within the collectables market. A wave of new independent artists competing with existing comic-inspired projects would introduce an interesting third category, between PFPs and 1/1s, of collectibles that approach art.

Neopets

Last week we dumped on Solana (rightfully so) for all the rip-off projects emerging on chain. This week we’re peeping the incoming launch of Neopets, which is a 20-year-old brand that has long offered “interactive family experiences” by allowing users to create and care for digital pets in a virtual world. 

In the Weeds

• The company JumpStart Games, which owns the Neopets brand, announced this week that it has partnered with Raydium, a Solana-powered automated market maker, to bring Neopets to Web 3.0.

• JumpStart Games has stated that over its history over 100 million people have engaged with the Neopet brand, giving this upcoming collectables project immediate, and pretty massive name recognition. 

• The project is aiming to launch a 20,500/20,500 collection of unique, algorithmically generated pieces in October.

Bird’s Eye View

• Integration of an existing and beloved brand name gives the Solana NFT ecosystem a much-needed boost of credibility.

• This has got us curious about other pop-culture IP still sitting on the sidelines. Pokemon Metaverse, anyone? Marvel Cinematic Metaverse? Oh goodness, things will change.

• The entrance of megabrands may threaten the independent artists who are currently thriving in the NFT space. There’s something to be said for a powerhouse company with the resources and experience to execute - the giants may move slowly, but the movements hit hard when they show up.

Since it matters...

We normally want to show off projects we’re excited about, but Baby Ballers is the kind of thing we expect to see much more of as celebrity culture seeks to take advantage of NFT mania: clout leveraged for cash grabs.

Sponsored by NBA player John Wall, the project appears to have been organized by a professional marketing and dev team, and will feature artwork by Dinotomic, an artist with a whopping 890k Instagram followers.

The marketing plan spelled out is somewhere between lofty and “giving us the ick”. Promises of a PR blitz, NBA player tweets, mass DMs on Twitter, Discord, and Telegram, and curiously, NFT influencer tweets…

BenJammin.eth ᵍᵐ 🍌 @xBenJamminx

Influencer Tweets and mass DMs. They said the quiet part out loud

hotlneblng.eth👑 @hotlneblng_

Hey @JohnWall, this “marketing plan” ain’t it bro. https://t.co/1eP6zC9U69

September 22nd 2021

1 Retweet21 Likes

Then the record scratch: background image for a recent promo piece was cribbed from Fortnight. It just goes to show us that big names and reputable teams do not always amount to quality projects.

Bless the Crypto sleuths for keeping a watchful eye.

While announcing that 100k of proceeds from the project will be donated to charity, the project reeks of cash-grab driven by an investor team that brought John Wall on for the publicity. We could be wrong, but we’re probably not. 

Feature: Lazy Lions

Here’s a new one: 10,000/10,000 PFP featuring cartoon animals. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.

We really had to ask ourselves about whether we would be able to look ourselves in the mirror after writing this piece, but the answer appears to be obviously yes. Read on to find out why.

Floor: 2.7 ETH  Highest sale: 19.69 ETH  Value Traded: 11,600 ETH

Issues: 10,000  Unique Wallets: 4600  Average Owned: 2.17

The first look at the artwork from the project was revealed on Discord back on July 31st, and in two short months that very Discord has climbed to a whopping 33.5k members.

That’s a pretty damn big pride, and the team behind the project continues to reward community engagement through the use of ROARwards (heh), a community wallet dubbed the “Cabana Bar”, a private, owners-only Discord channel, and even a Professional Networking channel that owners can use to find opportunities to collaborate. 

On the radar:

• A game with play-to-earn utility

• Merch

• Free NFTs: a Cabana to show off your zoo of animals in your Twitter profile header. I’ll admit, this is a pretty good idea.

So you may still be asking yourself what this project is doing in Morning Drop. Two things brought the Lazy Lions to our attention on the marketing end.

The first: Brand loyalty. The community has become so passionate that the team has pled owners not to shame those leaving the community - we are long cults, and Lazy Lions seem to have the makings of one.

The second: The cringily-named ROARwards program. Lazy Lions have a very structured program around how they reward community members that engage with the project in ways that raise the project’s profile. This is somewhat antithetical to the spirit of authenticity that pervades most NFT projects, but slimy as it is, it seems to be working.

Technically Speaking

Among the denizens of cartoon PFP projects, Lazy Lions is roaring (sorry) to the top of the charts. Currently sitting 6th in 7-day volume sales, just behind the one and only Cool Cats, the average sales price has risen 300% in the last two weeks.

After the launch August 6th, the floor was holding steady for about a month around 0.1E before pumping to 0.65E August 30th, pulling back to 0.5E, and in the last two weeks (starting around September 12th) going on a run to hit the current peak of 3.14E.

This move seems to be based on healthy volume and a steady distribution of new holders, which make us think the trend may have room to run.

Social, and the return of Farmville

This week, nostalgia seems to be the theme. Web3 is bringing 2008-Facebook back.

Minds

Minds describes itself as a crypto social media platform that allows users to earn tokens (called MINDS) for generating content.

It promises a new model for creators and brands to monetize their content simply using the platform and sharing with friends and groups.

The platform appears to have received attention from platforms such as Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch, NPR, and WIRED magazine, which has dubbed Minds “..the anti-Facebook that pays you for your time.”

We’re intrigued!

Farmer’s World

At long last, farming (wait, farming?) has entered the Metaverse fold as the first play-to-earn NFT game based solely on, well, I think you can guess. Basically, it’s crypto-farmville.

Farmer’s World promises the ability to grow and harvest crops, and exchange fruits with other players to build collections that yield rewards.

Players can also mine gold, wood, and food which correlate to tokens that can be spent on crafting new tools, buying in-game NFTs, or simply to buy and sell on decentralized marketplaces.

The platform runs on the WAX blockchain, and the team behind the project offers monthly development reports on their Twitter profile.

Also brewing...

• OnChainMonkeys seeing a quiet pump. We’ve heard the team has some SV backing, but haven’t quite had time to investigate.

• The touching story of one ape getting representation by CAA, the biggest entertainment agency in the game. Congratulations, Jenkins the Valet!

• Early collectors came back with a vengeance to get a coveted Ghxsts piece, whales be damned. We’re reminded there is strength in numbers.

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We’ll feature the most interesting entries in our release next week, and send you something for the trouble. We heard it’s rare.