NFT God Newsletter - The Daily Alpha 5/11/22

The Daily Alpha 5/11- What a fun day today was. Day's like today are what makes the NFT space so incredibly unique. Luckily I'm not an Azuki holder so I just ate some popcorn from the sideline. Shout out to everyone who joined me in my Twitter Space today. Going to try to do it more often. Such a fun way to engage with everyone. Anyway, onto the good stuff...

Azuki Founder Has Historically Bad Interview

In what will go down as one of the most meme worthy moments in NFT history, Azuki founder Zagabond (at least that’s his name for this project) did a 30 minute interview with Andrew Wang. The whole 30 minute interview was a complete farce from the beginning. A clearly compromised Andrew sounded shaky the entire interview, only asked softball questions, and never followed up to Zagabond’s idiotic and borderline comedic answers. If there was any doubt Zagabond was a serial scammer before this interview, well that doubt clearly is gone now. He started off this masterclass in PR failure with fully admitting he only revealed his past because he is getting blackmailed. He then admitted he pretended to be a woman and various other characters for his past projects “for the storyline”. He liked to imagine Web 3 was a “choose your own adventure RPG video game”. His answers made absolutely no sense and only served to make him look even worse.

Some other interesting tidbits to note, he used “we” plenty of times when referring to his team, meaning multiple people behind Azuki are behind the other scams and rug pulls as well. I talked a little yesterday about how I wouldn’t rush to conclusions here, and that many serial entrepreneurs pull this kind of maneuver. Well after listening to his interview I’d say his actions are 100% completely indefensible. He’s a liar, fraud, and cheat who set up this interview in bad faith and only ended up making himself look worse. Andrew Wang caught a tremendous amount of collateral damage here, as he rightfully should. He was clearly compromised and biased. His biggest lie of all was saying he couldn’t bring people onto the stage to ask questions. Then the moment Zagabond left he miraculously was able to bring others onto the stage. This undoubtedly destroyed the reputation of everyone involved, including the Azuki project as a whole.

The floor price for Azuki cratered from 16 ETH at the beginning of the interview to 8 ETH after. I simply don’t know how you buy the dip here. The project’s reputation is permanently and irreversibly ruined. The entire team behind the project is now completely compromised. If you love the art then go for it, but I’m of the mindset when a project has even the tiniest red flag I get out. This is as big of a red flag as I’ve ever seen.

Market Bounces Back

In what might very well be a dead cat bounce, the market bounced back a bit today. Bored Apes made it back to 100 ETH and Mutants back to 22 ETH. Most projects across the board made back some of their losses from the last couple of days. If you bought during the mega dip yesterday and flipped today you made a pretty penny. My strategy here hasn’t changed. I’m not touching anything in this market right now. The macroeconomic environment is still the worst I’ve ever seen. I’ll need a couple of these unpredictable factors to disappear such as the war or inflation. Or I’d need the market to get a strong base and show signs of recovery over an extended period before I considered jumping back in with any sort of big purchase. You can never lose money from the sidelines.

Terra remains Depegged

Despite bouncing back from 60 cents all the way to 90 cents, the Terra stable coin slouched again today back to 80 cents. This isn’t simply a 20% dip, this is a top 10 crypto asset that promised to be a risk-off stable coin that has totally de-pegged and is bordering on rug pull here. The coin is backed by BTC and soon enough there won’t be enough BTC in the Terra reserves to keep this coin afloat. It appears at this point the coin is doomed and anyone holding will be left with nothing. It’s truly a sad situation for everyone involved. To get a sense of the sentiment in the community I’d check out the Terra subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/terraluna/

Project I’m Watching: All Anime Projects

The biggest anime project in the space has been cut down at the knees. This leaves a tremendous amount of room for another project to come in and take the throne. NFT’s are a luxury good. The luxury good market in Asia is absolutely massive. While NFT’s haven’t caught on in Asia yet, it is only a matter of time before they do. There is destined to be a tremendous amount of money that will eventually find its way into anime NFT’s. The question becomes now that the king is dead, where will this money go now? It’s as if Nike went out of business over night. The other sneaker companies would be murdering each other for market share. There are several existing anime projects I’m watching including Kiwami and Karafuru. I’d be interested to see if an upcoming project will be the winner though. The NFT space has shiny new toy syndrome. Typically older projects just can’t stand up to newly released projects. Will be insanely interesting to watch.