🥩 NFTs leak into meat-world.
Gutter Cat Gang is partnering with Dez Bryant to bring us all Personal Corner, a platform for athletes and fans to connect. The platform will provide an avenue for fans to shop with their favourite athletes, and earn in the platform’s native coin.
This is a big deal for athletes, cats and rats alike. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has historically capped benefits athletes can receive through schools as well as at tournaments, significantly kneecapping their earning potential. Personal Corner, launching September 1st, aims to distribute some of the value athletes create back to them, rewarding members of the Gutter Cat Gang with cool stuff in the process.
NFTs are really, really leaking into meat world.
We haven’t seen a week since the Christie’s announcement that’s passed without an NFT gang making it into the paper. This week must be a record, with appearances made by Fame Lady Squad, Pudgy Penguins, and a Cool Cats x Time Magazine collaboration.
Everyone made it in for different reasons: Fame Lady Squad for the historic unravelling and redemption arc, Cool Cats because (per Keith Grossman, Time’s President) they’re “in TIME’s DNA”, and Pudgy Penguins because… they’re fun?
That last one is a little hard to understand and gets the conspiracy wheels turning, but it’s starting to feel like making the news is no longer much of an achievement for our zoo of PFPs. Morning Drop may need to think about re-naming this section.
Launches and (un)Rugs
Launching the first female-led, woman-focused NFT project is a lot more marketable if you and your colleagues are actually a team of women. The young Russian men who started Fame Lady Squad, at least, definitely seemed to think so - and to be fair, they had a point.
And then one day, just as a few other projects were gearing up to launch, Fedor Linnik came out with a piece of investigative journalism that put everyone for a loop. The long story short, he had used the blockchain transaction record to connect Fame Lady Squad to several other projects, and to developers known for a fact to be Russian men, who had received funds from the deployer wallet, and cashed them out. Oops.
What followed was a flurry of events that started with the Fame Lady Squad tokens plummeting in value, and saw an emergency committee assemble and eventually take over the project. Artchick brokered the transfer of the contract from the original developers into the hands of a new and verifiably female leadership team headed by one Bored Becky.
The project will be undergoing a turnaround, aiming to create value for existing holders, and maintain some of its history, while moving towards more authentic representation. We call it a reverse rug.
Cyber City Girls Club: Brought to you by the Russians
We thought it was only right to spend some time discussing the Cyber City Girls Club - lead up, fall-out, and moving forward.
Run by a large portion of the Fame Lady Squad team plus their girlfriends, CCGC was pushed out with the same marketing strategy as FLS. The project was positioned as fighting hate against Asian women, and took a lot of inspiration from Tokyo, Singapore and Shanghai on the style and architecture front.
Unfortunately, trust in leadership is everything, and the big overlap with FLS created a lot of tension for the project right out of the gate. Developers are doing their best to continue to manage the Discord and deliver on their roadmap, but getting hit with a torpedo 6 hours after launch isn’t helping the project’s success.
The floor is currently stuck around 0.005ETH, or a fraction of mint price. While its hard to say if the project will ultimately recover from this, the event is acting as a forcing function for CCGC to build a strong community internally before trying to re-launch. Sometimes, being forced to slow down is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Since it matters...
Due diligence, and the role of big accounts in hyping projects, has been a hot topic this week. Here are a few tips from the smartest collectors in the game, plus a couple of our own!
Look for substance: Take a cue from Steph, and look at the project’s fundamentals. In order to survive turbulent waters, a project needs capital, both human and economic.
Art Matters: This generation of collectibles is still very much about the art. DCInvestor breaks down some of the qualities that make art valuable here.
Bet on innovation: Look for the projects doing what nobody else is doing. You want to look for projects following a blue ocean strategy - the ones doing something so unique that competition isn’t relevant.
Unique and innovative always brings technological risk, so remember you’re betting on people as much as anything. This is a second reason to look at the team you’re betting on: if they’re taking on risk, you need the team to be able to execute.
Marketing matters: When it comes to especially the short term success of a project, marketing and distribution matters at least as much (and probably more) than product.
What is the team doing to bring visibility to the project, and how well is it working? Look for a clear message and target demographic that aligns with a distribution strategy.
Feature: Pudgy Penguins
Pudgy Penguins is the latest addition to the zoo that has been gracing our timelines, with the floor exploding to 3.5 ETH within a week of launch. The devastatingly cute cartoons have been surrounded with controversy and accusations of manipulation, so we decided to do a bit of digging.
At a glance:
Floor: 3.5 Highest sale: 150 ETH Value Traded: 14.8K ETH
Issues: 8,888 Unique Wallets: 4.3K Average Owned: 2.10
“Same Old Project” by Fast Owners?
One of the core objections to people liking the penguins is effectively, that the project is nothing special. Apart from the notoriety of the creators, the penguin roadmap elicits a sort of shrug - airdrops, partnerships, merch, and a Lo-Fi channel. The developers have a history of prior projects, which some have cited as a good reason to avoid getting in.
There’s more to the story. Critics of the serial developers would do well to remember that on average, founders will launch 2 companies that fail before founding a successful company - in other words, experience plays a large role in success. And for whatever else you want to say about it, the project does have some wins in the execution tool-belt.
However it happened, getting a story in the NYT is a point on the PR front, and creator notoriety may score a point in terms of getting developers access to partnerships they may not have otherwise. The developers are also heavily focused on gamers (with volunteers from the community building out a penguin Minecraft server) and the crypto crowd, as well as early adopters of NFTs that may have missed the first wave of generative avatar projects.
The art also gives us strong Club Penguin 2.0 vibes, if that counts for anything.
By the numbers
Beyond the hype, trading data tells its own story. Penguins see approximately a 10% overlap with bigger projects (looking at you, Cool Cats), with about half of those positioned for a flip.
Distribution was supported by a small but significant group that minted penguins en masse, and sold at a loss. Collectively, nearly 80 accounts minted over 50 penguins, with most of those selling at a loss - this would account for the substantial distribution the project is seeing in spite of it being so new.
Owner distribution is the most interesting part of the Pudgy Penguins story. Over 75% of owners hold 2 penguins or fewer (50% hold just one), so the majority of owners are choosing between staying in the club and selling. Normally, projects see the floor skyrocket during this phase.
However, penguins are seeing the opposite:
a reversal of buying and selling pressure (sellers overtook buyers for the first time yesterday);
a drop in the floor price and a corresponding spike in bot sales; and
a slight inching up in the “average owned” metric, an indication that penguin ownership is being consolidated into a smaller pool of wallets as the weak hands get flipped out.
We have some ideas about where things could go from here, so if you’re interested, make sure you check out our Special Issue on Tuesday, which will dive deeper into the project and the data, and offer a scenario analysis with some data points to watch.
We’ll even send you a fancy dashboard so you can check our work.
Portfolio Management 🥩
We’ve all had questions about valuing our collection of PNGs and JPEGs, but it gets really tricky, especially once you start accounting for non-floor traits on collectible tokens.
Tax season, and tracking cost basis for not just the tokens you purchased, but the ETH you bought and sold, just keeps getting more intimidating. Luckily, these two apps make valuation and portfolio management easy.
All you need to do is connect your MetaMask wallet.
Visualize your portfolio: NFTBank offers a nifty visual breakdown of how much you paid for everything in your portfolio, complete with useful support for tax season.
Free alpha alert 🚨: NFTBank has some social features - users can follow portfolios from other collectors. They also have an API you can hit up as a developer, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Coming soon: Valuations, tools for sellers, and Axie scholarship management are all on the roadmap. Today, NFTBank is used to manage approximately $600M dollars across approximately 20,000 user accounts.
NFT stock market: Evaluate.market goes further down the valuation rabbit hole, aiming to track floor prices for traits across seven major projects.
Tools for owners: Collection owners can apply to get listed via a link at the bottom of the site. Not obvious, but damn handy.
Watch this space: Evaluate.market is shooting to let individuals value their own collections, with aggressive plans to expand their data offerings across the Ethereum and Flow blockchains, as well as into more collections.
Also brewing...
Alphabettys was the other hot launch this week that has everyone excited. The project was focusing on kids education well before they went down the NFT road, so we’re really enthusiastic about the potential here.
Deadfellaz, Moondogs, Zunks, and Hungry Pandas were some of the hot launches this week. Zunks and Hungry Pandas are both playing with the mutable metadata trend, following the Blazed Cats who did it first.
Collaborations with OG crypto artists - Sabet, PopWonder, and Gabe Weis - has been the other theme we’ve been seeing lots of. We’re all for it.
Floors for Long Neckie Ladies and World of Women both moved up early this week in response to the Fame Lady Squad debacle.
World of Women is revealing the seven Worlds that each of the 10,000 Women belongs to, in preparation for subgroups within WoW that can participate in challenges and events. Woah.
Koala Intelligence Agency is the launch on our radar, but honestly… apart from that, not much. What should we be paying more attention to?
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