Paper 59: Silvergate bank run turns markets red
Markets suffer with latest liquidity crunch
GM - this is the BCheque Papers, edition #59.
Welcome to the 50 new subscribers this week - we are at 1,652 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 World - $1.6M Golden Key sale
Creator Corner - If you do not shoot, you do not score
On The Horizon - The Snapshot
For sponsorship enquires, please DM me on Twitter.
Have a great day,
B
This Week in NFT World - $1.6M Golden Key sale
18-year-old Fortnite gamer, Mongraal, sold the Dookey Dash golden key for 1,000 ETH
After I predicted in this newsletter that the key would sell for $1M, the key sold for $1.64M.
This was after Memeland, the project by the CEO of 9GAG, bid 999 ETH for the key.
General market sentiment: fair price (because it is a 1/1 in the Yuga Labs ecosystem - there is nothing like it.)
Yuga Labs, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, enter generative art
TwelveFold will be a limited edition 300-piece generative NFT collection on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Do I think they will be worth anything?
Notable Pepes sell out
The Notable Pepes, orchestrated Vince Van Dough, all sold out on their first drop on Sunday. And all of the prices were up immediately after.
I wrote about the Pepe Checks a few weeks ago in the article, Pepe Checks Marketcap Doubles in Days, where I bought at $10. They act like a raffle ticket for the Sunday drops. They are now trading at around $35.
Pixel Vault will launch decentralised auto-brawler game
Pixel Vault announced it will launch its auto-brawler game on Reboot, an open arcade protocol which seeks to disrupt the centralised gaming industry.
It is a technical endeavour to take on such a task, but Zen does the best job I have seen of explaining how the decentralised gaming protocol should benefit gamers and builders alike.
PROOF announce sweeping changes
PROOF, led by Kevin Rose, announced a shift in focus to art - and a cancellation / reemphasis of various aspects of their business.
Best summary out there by Signal:
Silvergate bank troubles causes crypto sell off
Coinbase, Circle, Paxos, Gemini and several other companies have severed ties with Silvergate, a crypto-friendly bank, who has told regulators it is "less than well capitalized".
According to the excellent reporting of Matt Levine in his Money Stuff newsletter, Silvergate is experiecing these problems because they are having a real run on the bank.
It has lost money, not by making dumb Bitcoin loans - the Bitcoin loans are fine - but by doing the normal business of banking, borrowing short (taking deposits from crypto firms) to lend long (buying Treasuries).
If depositors just kept their money with Silvergate, they would have had plenty of money to spare, plus more, when their bonds matured.
But because depositors wanted their money back immediately, Silvergate were forced to sell their “long term assets” for huge losses. Very bad.
Too early to say what this means. Not clear how this will shake out yet. In the meantime:
Creator Corner - If you do not shoot, you do not score
You never know what you will get back when you put something out into the universe; you just trust in serendipity.
When I started writing this more than a year ago I didn’t have that many subscribers, and I certainly did not have a great sense of how I could make money from this.
One day I decided to test a monetisation method. I wrote this:
“If you find this paper helpful - or have found helpful any of the 26 papers published over the last 26 weeks - consider supporting me by minting my genesis Creator NFT. There will only ever be 100 and are priced at only 0.02ETH each. You can mint here.”
From Paper 27: The importance of IRL connections in Web3
12 people minted - which was cool!
Some people shared who they were - so I reached out on Twitter to thank them.
One of those people was LG Doucet: the Founder of The First Mint, a hugely popular media outlet focussed on sports NFTs. So I reached out:
We had a little chat on the dynamics of monetisation and exchanged ideas.
We then didn’t chat for a long while.
Meanwhile I kept my eye on what LG was building; and I suspect he saw my consistency too.
At the turn of the year he reached back out with the suggestion of us collaborating,
We decided to recommend each others newsletters (because we genuinely like each others newsletters) and I just wrote this guest post for his newsletter: How To Mint The Next Big Thing.
Now LG is coming on my podcast next week. (Here are some clips from my latest episode.)
There are three main takeaways:
Put yourself out there; make an ask; double down on the people who backed you
Bigger creators are looking for talent always; we want to help each other; we want to participate in each others growth
Check out our conversation next week
On The Horizon - The Snapshot
Next week I will deliver a talk to a big American law firm’s real estate department on the metaverse, NFTs and crypto. Plan to touch on Otherside, Sandbox, and oncyber. Please let me know if anything else ‘land’ related should be on my radar.
I will interview LG on Tuesday and publish shortly thereafter - super excited for that conversation!
I need to get going on this. Before anyone gets anxious about getting airdropped millions of dollars, there is no wallet snapshot! I am just planning on increasing the breadth of my news coverage on Twitter and elsewhere: to give you a better “snapshot” of what is going on.
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.
I really enjoyed this newsletter. Thank you for doing the research.
Looking forward to the podcast with LG! Killing the content BCheque!