#122 Back To The Gold Mines
Blast TGE Is Delayed - But Crypto Is Back
GM - this is The Snapshot, edition #122.
This is what I’ve got for you this week.
This Week In NFT World - We Are So Back
Notable Sales - CryptoPunks, BAYC, Azuki, Fantasy Top
Investor Focus - $150k Angel Investing This Cycle: A Review
For sponsorship enquires, please DM me on Twitter.
Have a great day,
B
This Week In NFT World - We Are So Back
State of Wisconsin Investment Board buys $99M of BTC
The recent move by a state pension fund to invest in the $IBIT Bitcoin ETF during its first quarter is pretty bullish.
"Wow, a state pension bought $IBIT in first quarter. Normally you don't get these big fish institutions in the 13Fs for a year or so (when the ETF gets more liquidity) but as we've seen these are no ordinary launches. Good sign, expect more, as institutions tend to move in herds"
This investment, managed by an agency overseeing the Wisconsin Retirement System and other state funds, has surprised with how early it has come after ETF approval - but I guess it shows the growing confidence and acceptance of Bitcoin among institutional investors.
"Kinda seems like a big deal no? This was always the end goal, funds, states, and nations adding bitcoin to their portfolio holdings and treating it like a commodity like Gold"
This was always the plan: the long-term goal of seeing funds, states, and even nations include Bitcoin in their portfolios, treating it like traditional commodities like gold.
You would think more institutions, states, nations will follow. BTC up 4% to $66k this week.
Pumpdotfun makes $18.7M in 3 months with current fees rivalling Solana
Memecoin maker Pumpdotfun was making as much money as the Solana blockchain this week - absolutely wild.
In one period of 36 hours, there were 21,985 new memecoins deployed, pushing daily fees to an all-time high of $1.2 million.
Over the past week, the platform raked in over $4 million in revenue, which is on par with Solana's revenue. They're on track to hit a $100 million annual run rate.
Crypto is obsessed with memecoins right now, as many are calling for a memecoin supercycle. I exercise caution in this post.
GameStop $GME stock trading halted for 5th time after surging 110% yesterday on Roaring Kittie return
The Roaring Kittie account came back this week to send Gamestop into a frenzy. (Roaring Kitty, the online persona of Keith Gill, played a pivotal role in the GameStop stock surge of early 2021)
The account continued to post hyper bullish memes from popular culture to stir up their followers .
It seems to be dying down now, but many considered this some type of indicator, since the GME short squeeze of 2021 happened just before the crazy crypto bull of the same year.
I think people are doing a little bit too much of ‘‘X happened in this year, then Y happened after, so if X happens again now, that means Y will happen after.”
I do think the future rhymes with the past, but a little too much transposing history on top of the present and thinking things will play out exactly the same.
Linked to the pumpdotfun news though, the volume that is ready and waiting for the most speculative, degenerate plays right now is enormous: people really want to gamble.
Fantasy Top Cards have 2nd highest vol day at $5M after announcing Stars Capped Competition
Last week we spoke about Fantasy Top - the new socialfi game taking over CT - and this week it continued to hit ATH volume days with more than $5M traded.
With the announcement of new tournaments (main tournament and commons only tournament live now, with rare only and another common only tournament soon) - people have been trading a lot.
In fact, the majority of ETH trading liquidity has moved here, with as much as 58% of ETH mainnet NFT volume being on Fantasy Top one day this week.
Cards sold off a little as the tournaments started; a slight recovery has begun.
What seems to be challening is that noone really knows WHY certain cards are performing well.
The exact measurement of success appears to be a black box, all we know is that follower count effect has been minimised.
Nevertheless, it continues to capture mindshare and I am playing the game (even though I simply forgot to enter the common-only tournament even though I was at my computer lol).
My initial investment was 1 ETH, and now my 16 card portfolio sits at 1.025 ETH with 1.161 ETH in ‘the bank’. Will monitor this over the next few weeks.
Blast delays its TGE to June 26
The highly anticipated Blast L2 airdrop has been delayed from the end of May to the end of June.
This was greeted mostly by disappointment because users were expecting that free money stimulus from its token drop - but the more opportunistic saw it as an opportunity, as many are burnt out by “farming” the protocol for so long - and think others will give up, leaving more of that sweet airdrop for themselves.
NFT Stats rightly reduced his Gold (the “points” given to people which represent their participation in the ecosystem) estimates because a key detail announced was that there would be two more Gold distributions. This clearly dilutes the Gold already in circulation.
Now that Gold estimate is around $6. (It was as high as $18 at one point.)
This serves as an important reminder on Blast:
My key takeaway: do not overcommit to farming something so much that if the perceived value decreases it becomes -EV because you have spent so much time on it.
I will continue to participate, but in a slightly less active way (feel free to take all the gold from me I am leaving on the table!)
Notable Sales - CryptoPunks, BAYC, Azuki, Fantasy Top
CryptoPunk, 0 attribute - 270 ETH
CryptoPunk, 3D - 59.5 ETH
BAYC, Rainbow - 17.1 ETH
Azuki Elemental - 16 ETH
@Zeneca Legendary, Fantasy Top - 9 ETH
Investor Focus - $150k Angel Investing This Cycle: A Review
Kodama is a distinguished jpeg collector, prolific angel investor, and friend. I welcome him this week to share his big learnings - the good, the bad and the ugly - from angel investing $155k in the last year to make more than $330k so far. I hope these key numbers and learnings are helpful.
Q: How much angel investing have you done this cycle and why did you identify it as a good opportunity?
A: In total I have made 21 angel investments with an average ticket size of $7.5k.
I started in November 2023 and closed my last investment 2 weeks ago.
Why did I make the start in November 2023?
I had the feeling that the timing was right and that the risk of possibly being a little too early was acceptable.
The market had picked up positive momentum again.
People were hyped about the potential BTC ETFs and the halving.
The forecasts for 2024 were all bullish.
Deal flow was increasing rapidly and the terms were very favorable: relatively loose vestings and reasonable valuations by web3 standards.
The teams were already building the products in the bear and were not opportunistic grifters.
All in all, it was a mixture of different circumstances, which were then confirmed by the overall crypto pump and the early approval of BTC ETFs.
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Q: What was your biggest win and what made it so successful?
A: My biggest win was Portal.
I invested $14k and have already realized more than $130k with 60% of tokens still being locked.
At the current price level that would be another 100k and make it a 17x return on my initial investment.
Why did this go so parabolic?
They won because they fitted perfectly into the current web3 gaming trend and started the social farming meta.
$PORTAL was all over the timeline. However, a lot of people faded it because they judged farmers and felt they were too good for it.
Besides that, they closed 100+ partnerships, announced several huge upcoming announcements, and even managed to get a Binance listing right away.
They have perfectly played all tricks of hype marketing and created extreme FOMO.
Interestingly, they have not been able to maintain the momentum and the price is down significantly from a high of $2.70 to $0.70 - but this is still huge in profit for me as an investor.
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Q: Why is angel investing starting to go wrong now? What has changed that means tokens are struggling to succeed when they come to market?
A: Sentiment is strange at the moment.
The market has been going sideways for quite some time, alts are bleeding, NFTs are doing little to nothing.
People are becoming uncertain and accordingly more cautious when investing. Money is not sitting so loosely.
In addition, many degens are already 100% invested and are waiting for TGEs - but these are being postponed by projects due to the market situation. A vicious circle.
On top of that valuations have been rising sharply and vesting schedules are becoming longer. Meaning terms in general are less attractive.
Supply of tokens has outpaced demand in my opinion.
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Q: What are your key learnings from going through such a volatile set of investments and doing so successfully?
Here are my 3 key learnings:
If you are sure about an investment, then take a greater risk. Invest more.
Always keep some liquidity on the sidelines because you never know what opportunity might present itself next.
Investors and teams are entirely at the mercy of the market. Act accordingly and invest not all at once. DCA (Dollar Cost Average) but Angel Investment style.
Thanks so much to Kodama for sharing his thoughts with us. You can follow his journey here on X.
Have a great day,
B
Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered as investment advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
I hold some of the NFTs mentioned in these newsletters