🥩 NFTs leak into meat-world.
Gary Vee Takes NFTs Retail
Gary Vee keeps innovating on business models, and we are here for it. The offer? Buy more books than you need, get an NFT.
In what is probably a first, the entrepreneur offered fans an opportunity to buy 12 copies of his coming book, Twelve and a Half: Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients Necessary for Business Success, to redeem for a special Gary Vee NFT. The offer is valid until 5pm today, so hopefully you’re reading this in the morning!
The offer is a guerilla onboarding tactic to bring “normies” into the NFT world. While the books are available to purchase with fiat, the value in the digital world is only available to those who take the small operational (but large mental) leap to download MetaMask and claim a token.
Facebook joining Shopify in NFTs
David Marcus, the head of Facebook Financial, stated that the firm is “definitely looking” to support NFTs within its Novi crypto-wallet. Facebook is the latest in a string of companies including Shopify, Microsoft, CocaCola, and Twitter to publicly incorporate NFTs into their overall business strategy.
In addition to NFTs, the wallet will eventually support stable-coins, as well as Facebook’s own digital currency Diem (fka Libra). The Libra rollout was put on hold last year after concern from regulators.
Tom Sachs Rocket Factory x Budweiser
Budweiser is the latest big brand to partner with modern curators of culture in the NFT world.
The brand purchased a rocket with the Budweiser name and logo for 8 ETH (that’s $25,000, based on Tuesday’s ETHUSD rate). Budweiser also acquired the beer.eth ENS domain (for another pretty 30 ETH) to further solidify their presence within web3.
The brand will partner with Tom Sachs to produce the First Ten Launch today, where 10 rockets (5 perfect, 5 Franken-Rockets made up of incompatible parts) will fly over New York starting at 1pm on Governor’s Island.
If you’re reading Morning Drop, and didn’t manage to make it to Governor’s Island to collect one of these sweet POAPs - drop us a line by replying to this email, and we’ll hook you up.
Speaking of "new projects"...
Lost Boys NFT
TLDR: Cool art, mental health initiatives, and great lo-fi vibes. That’s pretty much it, and its not a bad thing.
Big Picture:
In a surprising twist, this one isn’t about making money. The community is strong, shares hard things, and claims the roots of early online communities by gaming together and just hanging out listening to Lo-Fi
LostBoys has a lot of strong initiatives around mental health lined up, including a weekly anonymized therapy voice channel run by a mental health professional that will be converted into podcasts for people struggling with mental health topics.
The art itself does something a little different: an animation, original music, and a clean avatar with relatively fewer traits. Its art meant to be experienced, but the original music can be repurposed.
Bird’s Eye View:
Lost Boys creates a strong sense of community by encouraging members to talk about the hard things. Unlike a number of servers where the conversation devolves to talk about the latest mint and the floor price, Lost Boys actively discourages money talk in favor of creating deeper connections between members and focusing on the mission.
This comes as a breath of fresh air for a lot of degenerates feeling burned out by NFT summer. It appeals to a part of us that craves community, minus the transactional aspects of this world that can come to dominate the conversation. Despite beating the no-monetization drum, however, the team is working on giving holders royalties.
We love a team that can move in silence.
The Sevens
TLDR: 0N1 Force thinks they’re a dupe, but the Sevens team made a good case against it. And even if they are a dupe, the execution is impeccable.
Bigger picture:
Sevens is a narrative structured around a Ready-Player-One style dystopia: we’re finding salvation in a digital universe while the world burns. In addition to the sentiment hitting a little close to home (talk about realism!) the concept reminds us a lot of our coverage of 0N1 Force last week… and the folks at 0N1 Force seemed to agree.
Drama aside, the Sevens launch is looking strong out of the gate. With launch looming on September 7th, the Discord is already up to 16,000 people, which rivals the numbers 0N1 was seeing in the days before the mint opened.
In addition to the treasure hunt that dominates Roadmap 1.0, Sevens has plans for the development of a fashion brand, work with other brands, artist incubation, a DAO, and a decentralized mutation mechanism. At least 3 seasons are envisioned by the brand, with a deflationary mechanic in the works towards the end of the road to maintain scarcity.
7,777 tokens will be available to mint, at a price of 0.07 ETH. We’re willing to bet launch will take place at 7pm. The team is attempting to save gas for early adopters with a pre-launch whitelist mechanic with explicitly unstated acceptance criteria.
Bird’s Eye View:
Sevens is the latest example of how community activation efforts and best practices are maturing as the space evolves. The recognition of gas wars as a serious concern, as well as of the notion that automated systems for rewarding community members can be gamed easily by anyone who can program a Discord bot, led Sevens to a more subtle approach: reward people when you like what they’re doing and how they engage with the product, and do it very publicly.
Sevens clearly recognized the modern culture-troll’s pain points with Discord communities:
We all belong to way too many.
Changing your nickname and PFP in each one is impossible.
… and they decided to exploit them.
Early community activation initiatives involved rewarding users for changing their profile pictures to ones custom-branded by Sevens, and adding “777” to the nickname. These are both actions that brand precious real estate without asking you to give up too much of your own territory.
We love a team that’s smart about the marketing.
Since it matters...
A lot of scams going around lately! We want to help you stay safe, so here’s a quick thread by our favourite degenerate on the topic.
We might take 20% off the alarmist messaging, but in summary:
Never share your seed phrase.
No, really: Never share your seed phrase.
Wet-ware (the human brain) is the easiest entry point for scammers, so slow down.
Don’t click random links people send you
Don’t share your screen while the QR code that allows access to your Metamask wallet is exposed
Really, really, really: Don’t Share Your Seed Phrase. Nobody who means well will ask you for it.
If you’re holding big bags, consider transferring the valuables to a hardware wallet.
If you have no idea what that means, here’s a video to break it all down, with a focus on the NFT use case.
Feature: Blazed Cats
Blazed Cats has easily been one of our favourite projects since they launched with the brand narrative of “F*ck your Hollywood Cashgrab”. The project started as a satire on Stoner Cats, the series produced by Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Vitalek (somehow) and company.
The twist? The team pulled it together in about 48 hours, with a substantially similar outcome at a tenth the cost, and gave all the money - a big chunk of primary sales, and 100% of royalties - to charity. Very punk rock.
At a glance:
Floor: 0.06 ETH Highest sale: 1.6 ETH Value Traded: 360 ETH
Issues: 10,000 Unique Wallets: 2700 Average Owned: 3.15
New Tricks
Blazed Cats is far more than just a great piece of satire. As a member of the community, you also get to continuously vote on Cat Improvement Proposals, which is a great way to be involved even without a formal DAO formation - the ethos of community, decentralized decision making, and good governance obviously runs deep with the team.
Blazed Cats has done on-chain collaborations for charity with artists including Sabet and Gabe Weiss. For pedestrian things like capitalizing the project, the team is planning a secondary drop of 0xHeads (free to mint for Cat holders, but with secondary sales going to the team building the project) which will be distributed to cats in inverse proportion to rarity rank. The team continuously comes up with interesting ideas that flip the script on concepts of rarity, stakeholder engagement, and what it means to be a collector - and we love the innovators.
The kitties are pretty quiet about what they have in the works, but we do know for sure that owners can expect a collectible this fall, and an event in the winter (to keep everyone extra warm and fuzzy). The really interesting action here, though, pertains to what the Blazed Cats team is doing with the meta-data: the cats are a living project (meaning that elements are added, and rarities become dynamic), and will eventually have a dashboard where collectors will be able to see cool information like provenance, and how much money their cat has given to Mental Health America. For now, this information is available as part of a fundraising leaderboard developed by the Blazed Cats community.
Technically Speaking
Both the floor and the distribution have been growing steadily over the last weeks, with the project adding between 20 and 60 new wallets daily since mid-August.
The floor has gone up to about 3X mint price, with 15% unique ownership - a metric that becomes interesting in light of the coming 0xHeads release, given that these artifacts will be distributed to favor “floor” cats. We’re likely to see volume trickle off as anyone who is already holding (and knows that this isn’t a good time to be selling) sits on their hands while the Heads drop.
Our take: the project is seeing a consolidation period leading up to a big marketing push by the team, once the project that actually puts food on their table gets released. The crew has had ample time to build a reputation of integrity and a hyper-engaged community, and the upcoming collaborations (Rumor: Dario, of MINDSS, may be on the roster) as well as a robust roster of partnerships with other new projects, hint that the set up for bigger things is afoot.
We’d be looking to see the number of cats listed for direct sale on Opensea as an indicator of where things are going. With prices on the project as low as they are, any tightening of the supply side would send the floor through the roof quickly.
WTF, DAO?
Collector DAOs are the latest social innovation having their moment on Web3. This is a layer of social structure that’s organized on top of the non-fungible projects being produced, that offer members the ability to commune with like-minded collectors.
Belonging to a DAO opens possibilities for the group to provide ancilliary services (investing through a fractionalized fund curated by the DAO portfolio manager), and collective bargaining power - three things that are a huge advantage to anyone that doesn’t have a few hundred ETH lying around in a cold wallet.
Here are a few to have a look at:
Whale Community
Whale Community (token $WHALE) is a social currency backed by a vault of digital assets. Over $2M has been spent acquiring the collection to date, with curatorial decisions made by WhaleShark (the DAO founder) based on a process detailed on his blog.
NFT Rentals: Members can rent NFTs from the vault, which is useful for anyone who enjoys “community surfing”, or who is looking to participate in owners-only events.
Vault Purchases: Selected NFTs are made available to members to purchase, presumably at below-market rates. Vault value is appraised regularly by an independent third party at NonFungible, and we like to imagine the $WHALE team doesn’t aim to fleece members on the 5000% profits that are becoming typical in this space.
Networking: As with many clubs, a big part of the value that a community like Whale brings is access to other individuals who are deep enough in the space to know it exists and to see the value in participation. How much that’s worth to any given person is somewhat subjective, but there is absolutely something to be said for finding proximity to smart people.
Friends With Benefits
Friends With Benefits brands itself as a home to the web3 creative class. In effect, its a Dashboard, a Discord, and pop-up IRL experiences organized by the community and funded by the DAO.
Season Two, officially closed July 9th, saw the community accomplish a number of milestones including the development of a community curated newsletter, a WHALE token swap, launch of an on-chain budget allocation initiative, chats with a variety of Web3 culture icons, and an IRL rager in Miami during BTC Miami.
Season Three intends to build a decentralized structure within the DAO consisting of Product, Editorial, Membership, and Treasury functions (much like a real company) with leads who will organize with the community to provide real-world value.
This all has big web3-proletariat-uprising vibes to it, and we get that the level of involvement is not for everyone. If you’re a lot more interested in the “just buy an index fund” approach, we recommend you look into the $MVI index on IndexCoop. All the diversified exposure to the Metaverse you might want, with at least 90% less crypto-anarchy.
Also brewing...
The mutants are here, and they really are nuts. dGen has the scoop.
Drops: Creature, Fang Gang, and the next edition of Art Blocks
BYOPills launched their v1.0 trip app, which lets you use your pill to remix the NFTs you already have. Holders were also rewarded with Access Keys, which will be redeemable for an avatar in the future. Find the FAQ here, and the apps on Google Play and Apple Test Flight.
RSOP has a companion NFT (a dual-sided chip, developed by world-class playing card illustrator Oban Jones), slated for release September 3rd. Wicked Craniums released a Skull Candy collaboration.
The Koala Intelligence Agency floor went straight to the moon, and then to Yahoo! Finance. Don’t tell us we didn’t tell you.
Liked this issue?
Send it to a friend - or, better yet:
Tweet about it, and become a member of Deep Drops for a month. Deep Drops is our subscription offering, where we’ll be covering one project every week - market analysis and evaluation by the numbers.
For a $10 membership fee, members will nominate and vote on projects for our team to cover. Your own research analyst for the price of a couple cups of coffee - there’s no better value than that.
Oh - and don’t forget to reply to this email and ask for a POAP. You’re really, really gonna want one.
Create your profile
Only paid subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.