Newsletter
The Nifty #11: An absolute surge in NFT collectibles
Happy Tuesday!
Am delayed again on this week’s newsletter but glad to finally get to edition #11. Keep them all in your inbox and who knows, maybe this very email will become an NFT months or years from now and will be priced like a Bored Ape! As such an early “you’re welcome” for sending over thousands of dollars worth of value ;)
On to the real news…
Proof Of Ape
Wanted to welcome some fellow apes to the list. I’m doing a fun side project ProofOfApe.com which will give Bored Ape Yacht Club members access to special merch and events. Here’s a shot of some of the merch:
This is not some major business plan, just having fun with my Bored Apes…
A Collectible Boom
This past week was bonkers as we saw a flood of new collectibles pop up and promptly sell out. The projects included:
- Gutter Cat Gang - $3mm in sales - Cute cat characters that are reminiscent of Bored Ape Yacht Club. The only issue is that there are some fundamental issues with the code in their contract and they hit a number of speed bumps at launch. The numbers speak for themselves though.
- Super Yeti - $770k in sales - Cute randomly generated yetis. Currently, the yetis have not been revealed and instead people are buying them as lotto tickets for 2X the cost of minting.
- Dream Loops - $562k in sales - These are 8-bit video loops combined with short audio loops that you own the rights to use commercially as part of the purchase.
- NFTheo - $259k in sales - Supposedly this team has been doing an awful job with communication and may have disappeared with the money. Time will tell though :)
Bored Apes also saw some huge sales including a 55ETH ($137k) sale and a 40ETH ($100k) sale last night alone. In other words, things aren’t letting up in ape land.
This all leads to the question: should you be buying into these projects early on? As a general investment strategy it seems to be a poor one. If you had bought into Gutter Cat Gang or Super Yeti then you ended up with a great outcome. However I saw a lot of people trying to offload their Dream Loops yesterday and they couldn’t unless they sold below cost. That still appears to be the case today.
Regardless of your strategy, there is a growing group of collectors who are interested in primarily in the collectible space as opposed to the digital art space which has seen a small slowdown.
The result is a lot of entrepreneurs capitalizing on short-term FOMO. If you were to operate in the space there are generally two strategies that appear to be effective at the moment:
- Create a collectible - If you can get some influencers on board to promote your collectible, it’s not unreasonable to expect a short-term windfall.
- Buy what you love - A lot of people are diving head first into a collectible hoping for the quick flip. As I tweeted yesterday, this is on average destined for failure. Pick the ones that truly stand out.
Recent Podcasts
Last week I published episodes with:
- Ben Nolan, the founder of Cryptovoxels
- Elise Swopes, the original “iPhone artist”
- Nate Alex, co-founder of NFT42
- Sebastien Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox Game
You can check them all out here.
This week I have an insane set of recordings with a whopping 8 guests (I think I’m going a little overboard here).
- AJ Vaynerchuk - Gary’s brother and also super early to investing in NFTs
- FVCKRENDER - Incredible artist that has been killing it in NFTs
- Alex Salnikov (co-founder of Rarible)
- Farokh Sarmad - The hub of NFTs on Clubhouse
- Sam Brukhman - Async Art
- Robbie Trevino - Artist
- Thom Canto - Artist
- Kevin Wu - Founder of Gray Singapore
Next week’s lineup is also pretty crazy. I’m going to likely slow the publishing rate though so I can take my time thoroughly covering each episode.
That’s it for today. See you next week!
~Nick