NFT God Newsletter - The Daily Alpha 7/15

The Daily Alpha 7/15- Happy Friday everyone! In 2022 attention spans are at all time lows. I know sending out a long form newsletter a couple times a week doesn't exactly fit into the trend of ADD content, so I really appreciate those who take the 5 minutes a week that's required to read these. I think in a space where 99% of the communication is 240 characters or less, it's healthy to every once in a while put some longer form thinking out there. Anyways, let's get to the Alpha-

Latest Twitter Thread:

Today's News:

🔥 WZRDs Go Up in Smoke

🔥 Yawww marketplace says screw the artists

🔥 Macroeconomics continue to pound the market

WZRDs START BURNING

Flavor of the moment NFT project WZRDs introduced a new mechanic to the NFT space this week, as they started burning all NFT’s that were listed below a certain floor price. Let me paint you a picture real quick. It’s the end of the month. Rent is due. You just got laid off because the economy is in the toilet. You need some extra dough so you list your JPEG of a cartoon wizard just below the floor of $3,000. It disappears and turns into a pile of bones. Hope you own a tent!

This is obviously a ridiculous mechanic that should never be implemented again. It seems every other week projects find a new way of trying to manipulate supply and the floor price. Whether it’s “staking” that earns you a shit coin with 0 value or it’s quite literally destroying the NFT if you try to sell, a lot of shady project founders will try anything to manipulate the market in order to earn a few bucks. This kind of market manipulation simply does not work though and only hurts the holders. Nobody was paying anything remotely close to the floor price of 3 ETH for WZRDs. Most offers were going for under a tenth of that.

If you’re considering entering into a project like this because you think these ponzi mechanics will somehow artificially boost the value of the NFT, please reconsider. People in this market focus too much on supply count. Supply count means literally nothing. It’s easily manipulated and can change as prices fluctuate. Demand is a much more important factor here. Demand needs to be driven in order to raise floor prices. Think less about listings and more about how will this project drive more demand. If the answer is ponzi mechanics, you will most likely lose money.

YAWWW MARKETPLACE ELIMINATES ROYALTIES

A new Solana market has just launched allowing the ability to buy and sell NFT’s with 0 creator or market fees. This is made possible by some code trickery that technically makes the trades OTC transfers, an action that is not impacted by fees. This has led to major backlash from the artist community for obvious reasons. If this marketplace were to pick up steam, royalties for artists and creators would be severely impacted. While I’m primarily an ETH investor, this impacts everybody because this type of functionality is technically possible in the ETH ecosystem as well.

Some of the same people that hail decentralization as the future are angry at Yawww, which is mildly hypocritical. Ethics aside, people being able to bend and break rules without recourse is totally a result of decentralization. “Free market” principles has long been a rallying cry for crypto and NFT’s. Now the free market will decide if they want fees on every transaction. Projects will have to find new ways to innovate without royalty fees. And if we’re being quite honest, there wasn’t a ton of innovation going on WITH royalty fees. If this trend picks up, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see some web 2 business models come to the space like subscriptions or micro transactions in order to drive revenue.

THE BEAR MARKET SHOWS NO SIGNS OF SLOWING

Every once in a while I like to dedicate a column just to a market outlook and how my strategy is impacted by it. At the moment you’ll hear a lot about “isolated wins”. People in Discords and on Twitter talk about this as really your only shot at making money right now. If I’m going to place a bet, I don’t want to place it on an “isolated win”. This tells me odds are strongly against me. So instead I’m just making super long term investments.

The meta at the moment is clearly fine art, so I’m placing a couple bets there (Cryptopunks and Cryptopunks V1 are two projects a lot of people talk about). I’m also buying into blue chip “utility” projects who’s vision I strongly believe in. My thesis at the moment is NFT’s will eventually revolutionize video games, but not any of the video games we see today. I’d rather put my money into a category that I believe more strongly aligns with what NFT’s are, luxury collectibles. To me RTFKT is uniquely positioned to succeed in that category due to their branding and manufacturing capabilities via Nike.

For the record I’m not slinging ETH here right now. I’m picking and choosing my spots. I might have made only like 4 buys in the last 2 months. Prices are dropping like flies on a lot of these small cap to mid cap projects. Patience is king right now, wait for the right time and strike. The worst thing you can do is buy after a pump. Think about what your market thesis is, wait for the right time, and place educated bets. It's also a great time to reevaluate your entire financial portfolio. Make sure it's well rounded with stocks and other assets.