NFT God Newsletter 7/30: ETH Rips, Gary Vee Raises 50 Million, 10KTF + Gucci

The Daily Alpha 7/30- Happy Saturday everyone! One thing I pride myself on is never making the same mistake twice. I'm not perfect, sometimes I slip up, but I make it one of my goals in life to never make the same mistake twice. I think too many people try to be perfect, and this leads to a lot of internal conflict. Being perfect is impossible. But if you truly focus on understanding mistakes when you make them, internalizing the lessons learned from the mistake, and fighting to never make the mistake again, you're setting yourself up for continuous and steady improvement. This will be critical to remember as we potentially enter another bull market. Anyway, onto the alpha-

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Today's News:

🔥 ETH Rips, NFTs Sink

🔥 Gary Vee Raises 50 million

🔥 10KTF and Gucci Reward Holders

ETH RIPS, NFTs SINK

All attention this week was focused on the Federal Reserve and their announcements around GDP growth and interest rate changes. As expected, GDP shrank for the 2nd quarter in a row and interest rates were increased 75 basis points. Apparently way worse was priced in because the market reacted with an intense bull rally that sent all markets, especially crypto sky rocketing. The only market that really went unaffected by this rally was NFT’s, as prices of almost every single project continued to tick lower. In fact, today (7/30) will be the first time in history NFT volume is lower year over year. Which is especially sad because ETH is almost double its previous low. A truly pathetic statistic.

The only way this can be explained is there is nothing going on in the NFT market that is attracting new participants. There has been absolutely no innovation in NFT’s. Current utility and functionality has attracted current participants, but is not attracting anyone else. What is the current functionality top NFT projects provide? Staking, airdrops of other NFT’s, and merchandise. Except for the merchandise, these other forms of utility are just Ponzi schemes. While this utility is attractive to the degen-gambling addicts that make up a decent portion of the NFT market, this isn’t what the general public is looking for.

We need innovation bad. We need thinkers in the space to be putting their energy towards the code, rather than the marketing. Unfortunately all the innovation at the moment is happening in the marketing. Whether it’s free mints, unique Twitter Spaces, or pictures of goblins farting, marketing is the only thing that seems to be refreshing on a regular basis. The average consumer is looking for more than that. They are looking for new experiences. New sensations. New uses of their digital assets. They are looking to learn something, interact in a new way, or experience new things. Buying an asset and hoping it gives you more assets is not a unique experience. 

The NFT market is going to keep shrinking. 2.5% marketplace fees + 10% royalty fees + gas fees will eat up the liquidity way faster than it’s coming in. Until technological innovation catches up to marketing innovation, the fees will keep outpacing the new money. It’s time we expect more out of our projects

GARY VEE RAISES 50 MILLION

Serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk made news this week as he raised a 50 million dollar round from many famous investors including Yuga investor A16Z. The capital is going towards the Vee Friends NFT ecosystem, a popular NFT collection that launched a year ago and has formed a highly dedicated community. Vee Friends has become immensely popular off of Gary's cult of personality and large roster of colorful animals and characters. Through these Vee Friends Gary has rewarded holders with tickets to his annual Web3 conference VeeCon, a conference that got rave reviews from the community when it took place back in May.

This is an exciting move for the VeeFriends community, as this large amount of capital should go towards building out the ecosystem and hopefully returning value back to holders. It will be interesting to see how this value is returned though. I'd really like to see Gary innovate here. Instead of using that money just to send free merch or new NFT's to holders, I'd like him to build out digital experiences that reward holders with something other than free money. With the resources Gary now has, he can truly push the space forward with fresh ideas, rather than the stale ideas that are plaguing the space today. While I'm not buying at the moment, I'm definitely watching close to see how Web3 can be transformed by one of it's current thought leaders.

10KTF AND GUCCI REWARDS HOLDERS

Popular digital clothing collection 10KTF finally has done something with their Gucci Grail collection, allowing holders to temporarily stake their asset in order to receive digital Gucci cloth. Users who sent their NFT into battle (aka staking) were rewarded with this digital cloth, which just like the rest of the 10KTF collection, does absolutely nothing. While many others are big believers in the 10KTF collection, I'm a lot more skeptical. This innovative "utility" is just more of the same from the NFT space. Stake to earn more useless assets. Ponzinomics disguised as utility. I wasn't a buyer before and I'm not a buyer now. I've talked a lot about how utility in the NFT space is a lot more valuable when it's getting hyped, not when it's actually getting put into practice. 10KTF is the shining example of this. For months this collection has done literally nothing, but through short teaser trailers they have been hyping what the collection could eventually do. All bark and no bite.

I don't blame 10KTF for taking this route though. If they actually released their utility and it just turned out to be clothes for your avatar, the assets probably wouldn't be going for thousands of dollars. So if they truly want to keep the money train rolling, they have to stick to this hype and ponzi business model that is working so well for most projects in the NFT space. I look forward to the day a project does something different.