Paper 64: Nakamigos Madness
The crazy price storm - before the calm?
GM - this is the BCheque Papers, edition #64.
Welcome to the 28 new subscribers this week - we are at 1,778 subscribers now!
I write about NFTs/crypto, and trying to make it independently in web3.
This is what we’ve got this week:
This Week In NFT/Crypto World
Sponsored Post - Chimpers
Notable Sales
On The Horizon - The Twitter Algorithm
For sponsorship enquires, please DM me on Twitter.
Have a great day,
B
This Week in NFT/Crypto World
Elon tweets “Seize the Memes” and Twitter changes logo to Doge
The week started in the craziest way possible:
(i) Elon changed the Twitter bird to the Doge coin logo, which sent the cryptocurrency rocketing above $0.10.
(ii) Elon then tweeted the photo of the Seize The Memes Of Production NFT from 6529’s The Memes collection, which made the price rip from 1 ETH to 3-4 ETH, with someone paying as much as 8 ETH! (He then deleted the tweet…was fun while it lasted!)
Nakamigos on a rollercoaster
The Nakamigos collection also went on a wild rollercoaster.
The Nakamigos wild ride this week
There are many ways to make sense of this sort of monumental rise in such a short space of time.
I am increasingly persuaded that the main reason people are happy and sentiment is positive is because collectively traders have made 2,660 ETH of profits in the last month on this collection.
Sometimes it can really be that simply - money talks!
Where does it go from here?
Some prominent collectors / traders have huge positions and seem committed. But I don’t think that’s a guarantee for anything in this market.
So it’s anyone’s guess, I’m afraid…
Euler hacker gives back $200M back
Another great way money talks is when $200M of it is returned after it has been stolen.
This was the news Euler - a decentralised finance protocol - had after a few weeks of critical investigations into a hacker.
This goes down as one of the largest recoveries in DeFi history.
Pudgy Penguins hit toy stores
In more “physical news”, Pudgy Penguins launched a bunch of IRL toys with “NFT redemptions”.
Think this could be a really cool way to onboard new people to NFTs - and the toys are also cute!
Opensea under pressure from Blur so drop OpenSea PRO NFTs
The NFT marketplace battles continue.
OpenSea - the former marketplace leader - this week dropped a Gemesis NFT.
This was for all of the users of the Gem marketplace aggregator (which OpenSea acquired) before a certain date.
People are enjoying the prospect that this might be related to a future airdrop - though I am not hopeful. Nevertheless, it’s some free money, trading for around $75 at the moment.
Fewocious reveals the FEWOS
The prodigious talent, Fewocious, revealed the FEWO art in some videos this week.
Because Twitter is rugging Substack at the moment I can’t share it here, so go here to see it.
This will be Fewocious’ PFP-style collection, which is linked to the Paint purchased more than a year ago.
Nike Our Force 1 announcement
Nike has made a big announcement regarding their next play in the metaverse. It’s good to see their commitment to the space after some prominent players have been shying away recently.
Boxes are always good to….speculate on…
Soulja Boy NFT sells out
And finally, Soulja Boy was the first rapper to sell out an NFT collection…have it delisted by OpenSea within hours…and then have it relisted again shortly after.
Evidently one of the finest investment opportunities of the year, it pumped off its 0.01 ETH mint price to a 0.2 ETH price out of the gate (a quick 20x), after which it has now settled at around 0.08 ETH (a calm 8x).
When you are forming your investment theses for 2023, remember to include this one in the playbook!
Sponsored Post - Chimpers
When everyone is talking about "building" a game, the Chimpers team have shipped a game - twice!
Adventure 2 was a proper blockchain board-game which got me logging in every day to roll my dice.
How did we play the game?
There was a huge expanse of a map. Each day Master Chimpo greeted us and wished us luck as we tried to roll the highest number to speed across the map - snakes-and-ladders style.
This included fun prizes which acted as boosts and devilish pitfalls which sent you hurtling backwards.
What was the end-game?
If you got to the final dojo first, you were in store for a wealth of prizes like TBAC artwork editions, random rare Legend Cards, AND guest art from other amazing artists!
But even if you were not in the leading pack, there were all sorts of delights to collect. Here is some of what I picked up on my adventure.
Now that Adventure 2 is over, we will be returning to the dojo to participate in battles once again. Each day we we will be matching up in head-to-head battles against another chimp for victory - and XP!
If you don’t want to miss out on Adventure 3 - with more rewards, greater prizes and tons of fun promised - check out the Chimpers Discord to see how you can jump in with us!
Notable Sales
87 CryptoPunks sold in 1 transaction for 9.5M
Once again, the Blur NFT marketplace with its incentivised bidding market is making it very easy to access deep liquidity for high value, popular NFTs.
William Mapan - 75 ETH ($139,000)
William Mapan, the popular generative artist, continues to see strong sales.
I actually just collected some of his physical work, so this was nice to see.
Huge Azuki Lightning sale 218 ETH ($416,000)
The super popular PFP project, Azuki, which has branded itself very well as one of the coolest brands in Web 3, routinely sees high sales like this for some of their most rare PFPs.
Luka Doncic 1/1 Sorare Card - 40.44 ETH ($76,500)
The fantasy sports basketball game, Sorare, continues to see high sales for top players’ cards!
On The Horizon - The Twitter Algorithm
The Snapshot - The daily news on Twitter has been going really well. I am actively thinking about the most appropriate way to scale this. If you have any thoughts or would like to collaborate, let me know.
Twitter has open sourced its algorithm - this is a really interesting development about which all entrepreneurial people should be aware. It is now known what sorts of tweets help and hinder your reach.
Legendary dove into some of the key learnings in this thread and explains how you can improve your tweets.
My key takeaways: write cleanly; and stay on topic.
Have a great day and a blessed long Easter weekend,
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
Gm Gm, Really loving this piece and the work you do here. I also run a web3 news substack for underrepresented creators called Facesofweb3. Would you be open to a recommendation exchange? Our subscribers need to be able to find each other!
Great job, once again!