How to Build in a Bear Market

Happy Thursday everyone! One of my favorite books ever is The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It’s a book that goes over the 4 rules of personal freedom. While I’ll cover all of them at some point, my favorite of the 4 is “take nothing personally”. Any negativity a person projects on you is just a reflection of their own insecurities. Could be a result of them having a bad day or just jealousy about the success you’ve achieved. Any over-positivity could inflate your ego or be a result of ulterior motives. The best thing you can do is take none of it personally and constantly let go. Nothing is ever as bad or as good as it seems. Once you learn to take nothing personally, you’ll find your emotions become way less volatile and you are overall way more balanced. Anyway, onto the alpha:

Contents:

1️⃣ Latest Twitter Thread

2️⃣ Sponsored: Franken DAO

3️⃣ 1% Better Every Day

4️⃣ Stories of the Week

5️⃣ Favorite Replies

Latest Twitter Thread:

SPONSORED: Franken DAO

How would you spend $1.3 million dollars?

Welcome to Punksville - a fictional universe run by the malevolent Dr. ETHvil. We are 3D FrankenPunks and this is NOT an ad for a new mint, we just passed our one-year anniversary last week.

We actually want you to spend our treasury! Over the last year, the FrankenPunk community treasury has grown to over $1.3 million (including 4 CryptoPunks).

Later this month, we will be launching our “Franken DAO”. The Franken DAO has complete control over the FrankenPunk community treasury and run by our holders.

We want your involvement! The DAO is here to ensure that the direction of the project is dictated by its holders - you.

Come join: https://discord.com/invite/8D9WD3d34y

1% Better Every Day: Building in a Bear

This week’s ‘1% Better Every Day’ is about building in a bear market. If you are invested in any markets, whether it’s stocks, crypto, or NFTs, you probably have not had a good year financially. It’s been tough for everyone. One way to lessen the burden of this pain is to make money in ways other than just A) a day job and B) investing. A lot of the time people invest any extra money they have into the markets. That could make volatile times like this incredibly stressful. Down-only markets like the one we are currently in could leave you feeling empty and depressed. A lot of the time during bull markets we are force fed dopamine hits. We become addicted to it. It gives us purpose.

So here’s my 365 day challenge to you: make $1 on something that isn’t your job or investing between now and November 10th, 2023. Dedicate your time to building something that earns you supplemental income that isn’t a dopamine factory like volatile markets. For me, this outlet is the newsletter you’re reading. By having the small sponsored section above this column, I’m able to make some supplemental income that is a result of me dedicating time and effort into creating content. I no longer am riding the highs or lows of the market as much. My satisfaction now comes from building this platform. It’s done wonders for my mental health, especially during times like this.

Let me give you some ideas on how you can take on this challenge:

Content Creation:

This is the route I’ve taken this year. By building an audience on Twitter, I was able to parlay that into a newsletter platform. From there I’ve been slowly building my subscriber list over the past 11 months. There are many ways to approach this though. There are the harder routes, mainly video platforms. Youtube and TikTok have massive upsides, but are tremendous challenges to break through. I’d say Twitter is much easier to build an audience on. Writing a tweet requires far less effort than producing a video, and can go equally as viral. I’ve built an audience of 65,000 on Twitter by writing a couple tweets a day. On top of that Elon announced Twitter content monetization is coming soon. Building your platform now will ensure you can take advantage of monetization in the future.

Coding:

There is a massive need for technical talent in this market. Every major company and project is looking for developers or smart contract auditors. This could be a great way to make a supplemental income. By learning coding you can either do part time programming for a software project or audit smart contracts for NFT or crypto projects. The demand for those roles will only grow, and they should be able to supplement your full time job at the moment. I talk about learning programming a lot, because I truly believe it’s a high leverage skill anyone can learn. I’d recommend starting off with Javascript to learn web development then Solidity if you want to get on the blockchain side.

Community Manager

This is another role a lot of crypto and NFT projects are looking for, and only requires skills you can easily pick up in your extra time after work or school. Almost every NFT project has a Discord that needs to be moderated or managed. While a lot of the time just being willing to dedicate evenings to it should be enough, bonus skills that will definitely earn you more demand include Discord management skills (understanding channels and how they work) plus bot creation skills. I like this Discord bot creation tutorial here. Being willing to dedicate some time in the evenings to managing communities will earn you some extra income, but also build you new connections in the industry.

Any other ideas you have in mind for this challenge? Feel free to send me a message at [email protected].

This Week's News:

🔥 FTX Collapses

🔥 Opensea Waivers on Royalties

🔥 Solana Takes a Hit

FTX COLLAPSES

By far the biggest story of the week, and possibly the year went down two days ago as FTX completely collapsed and was almost purchased by Binance. Out of what felt like a movie script, Binance head CZ announced he was liquidating all of his FTT token (FTX’s token) for about 2 billion dollars. This happened at the same time rumors of FTX insolvency were starting to surface. All of this FUD created a bank run as thousands of FTX holders started withdrawing from their accounts, only making the situation worse. First, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) tried to calm fears, tweeting there was no risk of insolvency. Hours later CZ announced he entered into a non binding agreement to purchase FTX. Somehow, it doesn’t end there. As just hours after that announcement CZ resurfaced again on Twitter to announce that after taking a look at their books he was no longer going to save FTX.

Just another day in the crypto space. While CZ has denied any premeditation here, it’s rather funny a tweet about how he was going to dump FTX’s token set off a chain event that eventually led to Binance’s biggest rival’s demise. FTX was the second biggest exchange in the entire space. Imagine if the second biggest bank in the world collapsed. All of this is very similar to what happened in 2008 during the mortgage crisis. Banks were collapsing left and right due to greed. The only difference is the US government was there to bail the banks out. Nobody is bailing these crypto exchanges out. And instead of having a government backstop that could bail out this greed, the retail investor is the one taking all the collateral damage. It truly is sad. As long as there is money to be made, there will always be people who try to centralize all the money to themselves.

A lot of people in the crypto space decry regulation. But this is why regulation exists, to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of the average Joe. FTX US was left completely unharmed by these events because they were a separate entity protected by US regulation. US laws prevented bad behavior here. As long as lawlessness and lack of regulation exist in the crypto space the mainstream will never get involved. It’s too risky. If we truly care about the future of crypto and mass adoption, we need to start getting used to the idea of regulation. Hopefully this will be another lesson learned in a year filled with expensive lessons.

OPENSEA WAIVERS ON ROYALTIES

This week Opensea announced they were implementing new technology when it comes to creator’s royalties. This new smart contract functionality will enforce royalties at the contract level, meaning any new projects moving forward that uses this code will be able to rely on royalties for revenue. The issue is two fold. One, no older projects will gain these protections and two, if you implemented this new smart contract code you’d only be able to sell on Opensea. The feedback was immediate and largely negative. First because Opensea wasn’t going to protect creators and second because this would further centralize NFTs to Opensea’s marketplace.

The royalty debate isn’t close to being over. Here’s what it comes down to: royalties aren’t enforceable in an elegant manner. This means most people will do whatever they can to NOT pay these royalties. Instead of fighting this, project founders need to adapt. Web 2 revenue streams need to be adopted. Whether it’s subscription fees or ecommerce, if you are building a Web 3 business you simply cannot rely on secondary markets. This isn’t a new problem. Physical collectibles have never earned secondary market revenue. The Web 2 founders A) rely on primary market revenue and B) find other sources of revenue. Up until now almost no industry in the world has made money off secondary markets. The Pokemon Company has never made a penny off Pokemon card holders selling cards to their friends. It’s time to look ourselves in the mirror and admit this fight is over. The technology doesn’t enable enforcement of royalties. We need to look for new solutions, rather than fixes to an unsolvable problem.

SOLANA DUMPS

The second largest NFT blockchain in the world has taken an absolutely massive hit this week as SOL prices moved from a peak of $38 five days ago to a low of $12 yesterday. On top of that, major Solana NFT projects like Y00ts and DeGods tumbled in price as well, with DeGods reaching lows of $1,440. Down from peaks of over $12,000 in July. Major issues with the Solana blockchain are catching up to it, forcing holders to sell their NFTs and tokens. Every other week it seems the blockchain has downtime. On top of that, almost a billion dollars of tokens were unlocked during the crash, leaving more liquidity to be dumped on the market. To make matters worse, a large portion of FTX’s balance sheet was Solana, adding even more selling pressure to the token.

Fear is at an all time high for the Solana community. Almost all projects are being dumped. Major Solana influencer and founder Frank is even openly discussing bridging his projects over to Ethereum. While typically this type of insane fear makes me want to purchase, I simply can’t do that here because of all the risk involved with liquidation. It’s unknown how this unstaking of tokens will impact the price and how much SOL FTX will need to sell as they get liquidated. I will say this though, typically when everyone unanimously agrees something will happen in a market, the opposite ends up happening. There’s a really large community of investors and developers backing Solana. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the entire thing goes up in smoke.

Replies of the Week

Thank you so much to everyone who’s replied to my tweets or emailed me this week! Look forward to hearing from more of you soon! Take care and have an excellent weekend!