NFT God Newsletter - The Daily Alpha 5/17/22

The Daily Alpha 5/17- Happy Tuesday everyone! Another day in the NFT space, another day of spicy controversy and stories. Twitter Spaces have been incredibly fascinating to be. part of tonight. Let's get into the tea:

Not Okay Bears Are Not Okay

The NFT market finds a way to always remain interesting, even in the middle of incredibly dead markets. The newly crowned Solana blue chip Okay Bears got its first derivative yesterday, the NOT Okay Bears. They were a flipped version of the original PFP collection. It’s a business model we’ve seen plenty of derivatives use before. Smart one too, many ETH maxi’s were clearly feeling some FOMO about the bears, as this derivative collection quickly picked up tons of heat. At its peak it got over .4 ETH which is insanely good for a derivative collection. Just as they were hitting terminal velocity they were gone. A DMCA takedown from the original Okay Bears team led to Opensea taking down the collection.

Immediate debate broke out across the entire community. Was Not Okay Bears a copy? Is it art? Is it parody? Is this "web 3"? Self righteous internet bullies got angry. Everyone became a copy-write expert. Kinda silly of the Okay Bears creators to take down the collection. Every successful project has derivatives. Literally none become successful. Typically these derivatives actually work to drive MORE attention to the original collection. While I don’t agree with the takedown, Opensea is a private company with he right to do it. It brings up interesting conversations about competition in the NFT marketplace space as X2Y2 immediately went on to advertise they were allowing the collection to stay up. At the end of the day we're trading pictures of bears, chill out.

Baby Okay Bears Are Okay

Shortly after Not Okay Bears got taken down, Baby Okay Bears launched. But those are cool though, because instead of being backwards bears, they are just slightly younger looking bears. This category of jpeg cartoon bears has been deemed acceptable to trade by Opensea.

Zagabond is Doxxed

After getting blackmailed, publicly shamed, tarred and feathered, making millions of dollars, and keeping his job, Zagabond finally got doxxed by NFT white knight NFTEthics. Turns out he has tons of connections in the industry and with venture capital firms. Not a big surprise, there's a very good chance every collection making any sort of money are all created and promoted by the same group of people connected to the same venture capitalists. Shouldn't be breaking news to anyone.

Project I’m Watching: TBAC

One of the few projects to actually pump over the last few weeks is about to mint their main PFP collection on the 20th. Chimpers is an NFT ecosystem by pixel artist Timpers, filled with backstory and lore. They've built an entire NFT world with characters, stories, and an ever evolving narrative. Through community engagement they've built a hardcore community that has pumped their mint NFT to over 4 eth. In a few days you'll be able to take that NFT and mint a Chimper. This is an ecosystem that has built a massive following in slow times. I'd be watching this ecosystem closely.