Newsletter

The Nifty #16: A Mutant Invasion

This weekend felt like one to cap off NFT summer despite it not being over. So much has happened since my last newsletter that I don’t even know where to begin. As such, I’m going to focus on this weekend which was monumental.

Bored Ape Yacht Club released a project called Mutant Ape Yacht Club. Yes, the name sounds similar but it was aimed at giving people access to “the club” without the 40 ETH+ entry fee (the floor reached 60ETH this weekend but has since come down to the “reasonable” 43 ETH).

While the nuances of the drop are confusing, I think it’s important to identify a couple of key things.

Sports stars and celebrities jumped in

There have been multiple personalities to join the Bored Ape Yacht Club but on Saturday, Steph Curry switched his profile photo to a bored ape which made the club go crazy. The apes are a flex and we have fully entered the world in which NFTs are Veblen goods (as this ape describes).

The Bored Ape Brand has become an iconic club

While there will be numerous Veblen goods to come out of the NFT space, Bored Ape Yacht Club has cemented their brand. They’ve done this by delivering value to their community over and over and over. In my case I’ve received free airdrops which have generated real cash for me (nearly as much as my salary this year) and assets that are now well beyond.

However people love the apes. And based on how my Twitter feed looks, it appears that they love their mutants too. What’s wild is that people aren’t selling for the most part. I listened to a guy on Twitter spaces on Saturday who owns 5 apes, received one of the 10 most rare mutants, has a family, and he isn’t selling!

While he didn’t state his financial situation there’s no way that the average person looks at this and says holding millions of dollars in ape pictures is reasonable. However that’s increasingly what this club is doing. They’re also all creating content, like this newsletter, propagating the value of owning NFTs.

Spreading the good words as they say…

This is a Web3 media company

My favorite take on this came from a former podcast guest, Richerd Chan, who stated:

The market cap for #BAYC well exceeds that of most traditional media companies. If you are looking at what the future of web3 media media companies looks like, this is it.

I completely agree. Talented groups of individuals can create remarkable NFT projects and bootstrap communities who become part of the story and journey. The sky is the limit. With $100 million raised by launching mutants and a vocal commitment to expand this project, the sky is the limit at this point.

Keep in mind this is from a pseudonymous group of four individuals. These companies don’t look like old media…

NFTs are exploding

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club launch catapulted OpenSea’s volume to $330 million in a day. This is insane volume but in context it’s 1/100th of the daily volume of Bitcoin. Frankly, I think there are more people that would want an ape than a Bitcoin (that’s why they’re valued at more than one now).

This is a parabolic rise and frankly we are still early at this moment.

Anyways, I’m off to bed! If you had any issues with accessing data on Sunday on the site, Opensea’s system clamped down on bots so I had to update my tracker. Fortunately it should be back to normal. I also have some very exciting features to be announced very soon…

Enjoy your week!