NFT for Normies Week(s) in Review
News Items, March 26th Edition
It’s Saturday, not that that matters in NFT-time. I’m going to provide some easy weekend reading here in the form of brief capsule items (Nope, not that capsule), coated with delicious, easy-to-swallow boldface font and headings so you can glide your (Tired? Relaxed? Hungover?) eyes to the most relevant and / or interesting topic.
NFT Security and Safety
Maybe you’ve already seen Google’s ultra-urgent security update for Chrome. There is a big security vulnerability, and you should update to 99.0.4844.84 immediately. Please update your Chrome browser now, if you have not already! Look for the “update” button, or click the 3 dots in the upper right-hand corner. It never hurts to change your most important passwords while you’re at it, too. I particularly like this secure password generator. Once you’ve done it, come back and keep reading. I’ll wait and hum the “Final Jeopardy” jingle.
Tip: How to Find Projects
Premint.xyz is a safe, simple tool that lets projects administer white/allowlists, raffles, and other admin. I saw this tip in one of my Discord servers this morning (props to the guy who shared it, as usual I already forgot the username, sorry, but if by chance you’re reading, let me know and I’ll thank you by name): If you’re on the prowl for new projects, search on Twitter for “premint.” This is what I’d add to that tip, though: When searching, you’ll see a lot of posts falling into several categories: a) People sharing that they entered a Premint drawing or completed a form, b) Projects or teams announcing PreMints on their own accounts, c) Posts about Premint (e.g,. “Is Premint safe?” “When is the Premint drawing, @Project?”), d) Garbage spam (this is 80% of Twitter anyway), and e) Truly tragic misspellings of “permanent.” Based on the volume and how often you see the same projects mentioned in categories A-C, you can get a decent sense of which are the most popular projects. Depending on what interests you, sign up! Keep in mind that most projects will require you to follow them on Twitter and be in their Discord to enter these raffles. Increasingly, you need to have a minimum wallet balance for higher prestige projects, which is kind of icky.
Although this method for finding projects might eliminate certain kinds of projects – specifically, those with small communities and organic, slow growth – I have yet to hear of scammers using Premint (though I’m sure it’s bound to happen). This is presumably since projects or creators have to pay if they have more than 250 addresses to collect or if they want to use any of the service’s most compelling features. Therefore, this is a pretty good approach to finding some new projects. It obviously won’t eliminate all risk, and you still need to “do your own research” on creators, teams, projects, and so on. Lots of crummy projects use PreMint, too, and lots of promising, well-intentioned projects fail… but this is one way to find projects that at least clear the bar of using the service, which means that they have a Twitter and Discord, and probably have at least 1ETH in their budget.
Project Updates
Last time, I told you about several projects I was excited about. Here’s how each of them is doing as of today:
o Ikani’s release has been pushed back a few weeks due to a few minor technical changes. You can still get on the allowlist! The Discord remains limited-access only. Check out their Twitter for updates and occasional Discord invites.
o Sadly, Luckies basically struck out :( . For some reason, the mint topped out at about 1,300 items and floor price is currently .04. I minted one after seeing how slowly the mint went, and I had also won a second item from a game in their community. The team is vowing to continue to work with the brand under the OddFutur3 brand, and while I’m biased because I think they’re very professional and have a good plan, it is pretty sad. We’ll have to see how things continue!
o The Meta-Church of St. Ethereum hasn’t had many major developments in the past few weeks (I got outbid on my attempt to buy a saint, though, which was sad). They’ve made a few new acolytes and the church continues to grow apace. Blockchain’s blessing.
NFT News in the Non-Metaverse
Probably the biggest news story of the week, at least in America, was the Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment of (allegedly) serial NFT scammers Ethan Nguyen and Andre Lacuna. Nguyen and Lacuna (allegedly) committed a rug pull in January and were (allegedly) planning another project, called Embers. While they are innocent until proven guilty, the anonymity of Web3 is balanced with the ease of tracking transactions - it's astonishing to me that people even try this type of thing. The whole incident is a good reminder that this is a risky space and despite its decentralization, it does exist within, like, legal jurisdictions. So don’t try nonsense. And also don’t be gullible. You can read the entire indictment here.
My Biggest Recent Win(s)
Please repeat after me: THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.
…Anyway, maybe it’s helpful or at least entertaining for some people to see what I’m doing with NFT’s and how it pans out. The other day, I saw ShinesNFT on Icy.tools’s “Trending” mints page, and checked it out. I was impressed by the team, the lore, and, uh, the price…although the Georgia-based team (Think Tbilisi, not Atlanta) had not intended to release an entirely free mint, all 3,333 items ended up minting for free. I minted 30 for a total of $25.68 USD (.008212 ETH) in gas and expected nothing other than vague warm fuzzies. But then something cool happened. They just ran with it and decided to adjust the pricing of the planned companion collection to compensate for the entirely free mint. Then something cooler happened: On Thursday night, it really popped. The sales volume was so high you pretty much had to use a third-party site like Gem or Genie to purchase on secondary.
A floor price of about .01 ETH is a huge ROI for a free mint and it was one of the top trending projects on aggregators like IcyTools and Coniun for most of Thursday night. As of right now, I’ve sold slightly more than half of what I minted (16 out of 30), and after the fee OpenSea charges for, well, nothing, and the creator fees, I’m sitting at …*checks Excel* about a 2,436% ROI. Considering how low-risk this was to invest in, and how gracious and friendly the team has been in their server, I’m really excited to see how their game develops and how their community evolves!
That’s about it for this edition! Was this helpful? What content would you like to see? I made a one-question survey that I hope you’ll fill out as I start to plan the next newsletter.
Disclosures and disclaimers: Other than as described above, I have no financial interest in, or professional relationship with , any of these projects. No project creators have paid me or given me anything for this coverage. They probably do not even know I exist. All the information about these projects was accurate as of the time I wrote this, and I verified this information to the best of my ability.
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