Opensea Paper Handed Your Email

The Daily Alpha 6/30- Happy Thursday everyone! In this newsletter I have a couple big stories from the day then I have some advice on "Building". A lot of people on Twitter talk about BUILDING all the time but I believe few are actually doing it in a valuable way. I go over some advice on that and what has worked for me.

Sidenote, happy July 4th weekend to all of those in the states. Few better weekends in the year. Anyways, onto the Alpha-

Today's News:

🔥Doodles Genesis Box mints

🔥Massive Opensea data breach

🛠Some advice on BUILDING

DOODLES MINTS OUT THE GENESIS BOX

Doodles completed their “bucket” auction today (I guess a new way to suck maximum liquidity out of the market?) for their Genesis Box. The Genesis Box is a new collection in the Doodles ecosystem that basically acts as a loot box on the blockchain. In each Box there will be an assortment of apparel and accessories for your Doodles 2 (launching later this year). Doodles 2 will be a layer 2 collection allowing holders to customize and interact with their Doodle. By collecting multiple Genesis boxes you’ll be able to collect potentially rare accessories which you can exchange on a new marketplace.

This new collection introduces many questions and concerns for me. First of all, can the Doodles ecosystem survive a flooding of millions of new NFT’s? The idea behind Doodles 2 and the accessories is it’ll be a new, cheaper entry point for the original Doodles NFT collection. The challenge is that this doesn’t always work. A lot of the time an expansion of this magnitude dilutes the ecosystem. The question then becomes, can the Doodles team create enough utility in the original Doodles collection so that there is a desire by Doodles 2 holders to want to upgrade to the more expensive collection. If the Doodles team doesn’t keep the value flowing to the OG collection, and the price ends up tanking, it could take the entire ecosystem down with it. Sort of like we saw with Cool Cats. It will be interesting to see how the team executes on this. This is uncharted territory in Web 3. I hope Pharrell has a solid understanding of Web 3 economics.

OPENSEA DOES IT AGAIN

Opensea announced today a massive data breach, alerting millions of users that a list of their email addresses were stolen by a vendor they use called Customer.io. As you can imagine, NFT Twitter wasn’t too happy. Already widely criticized on social media, Opensea got a whole new barrage of negative publicity throughout the day. A space who’s core tenant is privacy was not too happy their data leaked to the dark web.

While many brushed this off as not too serious, in my opinion this is incredibly serious. Now a bad actor on the dark web has a full list of people who have very valuable digital assets stored in a web 3 wallet. Not only are these digital assets highly valuable, they’re also incredibly easy to steal. These bad actors can now start sophisticated phishing attacks to try to get users to click bad links and empty out their wallet. They can also do many more things now, like search other archives of data on the dark web for passwords that match up with those specific emails in order to try to access accounts in alternative ways. If you received an email from Opensea saying you were a user that was impacted by this breach you need to move extra carefully now. Don’t click on any links in suspicious emails or any emails from Opensea. This is a giant step backwards for the entire space today. Hopefully increased competition will reduce single points of failure like this in the future.

Some advice on BUILDING

Many people on NFT Twitter talk about “building” in a bear market. Over the last couple weeks I’ve had some success building out my Twitter audience as I’ve grown from 5k followers to 13k followers in a few days. Here’s some advice I’d give on the most productive ways to build and what I believe will be the most impactful things you can do during a bear market. 

First, build an audience. Having an audience will always be beneficial to you, whether you have something to sell or not. Just build an audience without even thinking about monetizing. And then one day if you decide to market your skills for money, you’ll have that opportunity because you already built an audience. Twitter is the easiest, low touch way to build this audience.

Build this audience by providing value, not engagement farming. 99% of NFT Twitter engagement farms and it builds you fake audiences. Yes, some people have built million person followings off engagement farming, but they’re low quality audiences. Provide value and an audience will come.

Build valuable skills. Writing is a valuable skill no matter what field you’re in. Every day write something, even if it’s just a tweet or paragraph or blog post. Just write and the skill will naturally improve. Also as someone who has been in the tech space for a long time I’d highly recommend learning tech skills like programming. These will always be in demand.

Lastly, stay engaged with the market. This doesn’t mean you need to buy and sell NFT’s. It just means you need to keep your ear to the pavement. Watch which projects work and which don’t. Take notes of trends and don’t let emotion take over. 

These are just a few notes, sometime next week I’ll dedicate an entire newsletter to this with more details on each point. Hope this was helpful.