Alpha Schedule #12 - Elon Musk, a troll or an ape?
Alpha Schedule #12 - Elon Musk, a troll or an ape?
*Read this newsletter online to see our upcoming mint research*
Hi Fellaz,
This week was quite calm, as the dust had to settle after Yuga Labs sold 55.000 plots of Otherside land. This doesn't mean there wasn't any news - here are the most interesting topics I came across:
🐵 Elon Musk, a troll or an ape?
💰 Yuga Labs sees $561M in Otherside sales
🏴☠️ Shanghai Residents Switch to NFT to protest
🙃 Did Coinbase NFT flop?
😿 Cool Cats CEO Steps Down
Next to these talking points, this newsletter is filled with other alpha and insights, so please take your time to read through everything!
— 🩸💀 AMERICAN RADASS
Elon Musk, a troll or an ape?
Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO in the process of buying Twitter, appeared to change his profile picture featuring multiple Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.
As a reaction, $Apecoin surged by 15% and reached a (temporarily) four-day high of $17.6 on Tuesday. The floor price of BAYC has likewise risen to 119.6 ETH.
Meanwhile, people started to call him out for using the picture for Sotheby's $24 million sale, after which Musk joked about the nature of NFTs’ supposed uniqueness, posting “I dunno … seems kinda fungible".
According to some users, Elon actually bought an ape.
Yuga Labs sees $561M in Otherside sales
Over $310 million was raised in its much-anticipated NFT release this weekend for Yuga Labs’ new Metaverse, created by the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club.
On April 30, Yuga Labs began minting Otherdeeds NFTs for pre-approved wallets, making 55,000 NFTs accessible. At 305 APE each, Yuga’s drop brought in more than $310 million into its bank account at the moment of minting.
Due to the high number of NFTs and higher demand, the Otherdeed mint immediately caused an Ethereum gas war, which caused backlash from its community.
A few other notable and relatable headlines from the past few days:
OpenSea User 6DD881 purchased 9 Otherdeeds for 1,187 ETH ($3.5 Million USD)
Otherside will be partnering up with the Improbable ecosystem. (Preview of their work)
An Alpha post that explains what types of land might be the most useful in the future.
Shanghai Residents Switch to NFT to protest
Chinese internet users shared a six-minute video called “Voices of April” that documents some of the most challenging public moments the city has experienced in the nearly month-long COVID lockdown.
The government attempted to suppress the internet by removing recordings and images of the lockdown limitations. In response, the people of Shanghai have resorted to NFTs, generating hundreds of movies, images, and artwork depicting the restrictions in a manner that the government cannot control.
Did Coinbase NFT flop?
Two weeks after its initial launch, Coinbase is opening its NFT marketplace beta to all prospective users.
However, it doesn't seem to be a success, as its beta had less than 900 transactions on their NFT marketplace in the opening week.
As a reminder, Coinbase hired a VP from Google, Surojit Chatterjee, as their head of product with $646 million compensation package in 2020 to build Coinbase NFT.
Cool Cats CEO Steps Down
The Cool Cats NFT project team has announced in a TownHall meeting, that Chris Hassett has stepped down as CEO, and now the team is working with a top recruitment firm to find its next world-class CEO for the project.
📰 OTHER NEWS FROM THE PAST WEEK
Larva Labs removed every tweet from their timeline, marking the end of an era.
Yuga Labs' venture capitalists Nural/Kinetic sold its ape.
Ryan Carson says his 121G NFT fund has seen $40 million in commitments from investors.
MetaMask wallet architect Joel Dietz is trying to reinvent the public Internet’s Domain Name System with an entirely new mechanism for the metaverse based on coordinates.
OpenSea launched a beta version of their Stream API for developers.
✨ NEW IN THE SPACE
Spotify has announced that it will team up with the video game company Roblox, a platform that allows users to make their own games or interact with other people’s games.
The Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) announced the purchase of a piece of land in The Sandbox metaverse.
Blur announced Wednesday that it will begin opening beta access to its trader-focused NFT marketplace. You can access their platform via blur.io.
According to the recent blog post, old-timer cryptocurrency and Bitcoin exchange Kraken announced the launch of its waitlist for the upcoming NFT platform.
Global investment manager VanEck has announced the launch of a community NFT based on the Ethereum in partnership with the South Korea-headquartered creative NFT agency, NUMOMO.
Okay Bears NFTs are the first Solana-powered NFT collection to achieve 24-hour sales records on the world's largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea.
💀 HOW TO RECOGNIZE A RUG PULL
Takashi Murakami has been sniping the rare NFTs from his own Murakami Flowers project immediately upon release before metadata has been updated and the collection was sold out.
📅 UPCOMING MINTS
This chapter of the newsletter functions as the extension of my public NFT mint calendar, which is meant to highlight projects I’m looking forward to.
For this week, I'm mostly looking forward BBRC. However: do your own research into them if they sound interesting because this shouldn’t be considered as financial advice.
BBRC x IVY BOYS
Mint date: May 9
Supply: 7.777
Mint price: 0.1 – 0.12
Twitter: @BBRCOfficial
BBRC x IVY BOYS is an NFT collection created by the renowned Korean illustrator Aaron Chang and exists out of 7.777 NFTs. These NFTs are based on characters from Aaron Chang's popular IVY BOYS digital art series dressed in ivy wear (think button-down oxford shirts, blazers, cardigans, loafers, and more).
Aaron Chang, who’s currently the design director of New Balance Korea, has created a whole studio team around BBRC with the goal to close the gap between fashion, art, and WEB3 culture.
Both Aaron and BBRC have received a lot of press, which pushed their social media platforms to crazy levels: the project has 240K followers on Twitter.
🔮 LOOKING FORWARD
We are already looking ahead to the next few weeks, meaning we’re currently doing our due diligence and researching the projects listed below.
It’s no financial advice at all, but you might want to start doing your research and grinding for these allowlists before it’s too late.
PS - Don’t hesitate to tell them you found out about them via this newsletter ;)
Tool Highlight: Derisk Tools
NFT collector and developer Cody created a powerful tool called derisk.tools which helps traders to calculate the minimum amount they need to sell their NFT to create a profit.
📖 LEARN HOW TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH
Crypto investor and analyst Miles Deutscher posted an amazing Twitter Thread in which he explains the saying "millionaires are created in bear markets."
Its a handy 25 tweet thread in which he shares insights and tools that might be handy for new investors to find their way into the NFT scene.
😂 LAUGH OUT LOUD
You have to open this Twitter thread to fully appreciate the memes 😂 😂 😂
Podcast highlight: NerdFT Radio
Deadfellaz x NerdFT Radio — open.spotify.com
Co-Founder and Artist Psych from Deadfellaz joins NerdFT Radio to talk about Deadfellaz's brand new roadmap; Their upcoming Trading card game.
😊 ENJOYED THIS WEEK'S ALPHA?
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🤓 DISCLAIMER: NFA & DYOR
This newsletter is a curated overview of the most interesting things I’ve read the past week, the projects I’ve researched, and the NFTs I’ll be trying to buy.
This means I’m - per definition - biased, so don’t consider this as financial advice and keep doing your own research if you see something you like.