BivNFT Launch Party!
BivNFT Launch Party!
The NFT stimmy just hit and Top Shot is way off.
GM. And welcome to my weekly newsletter. Thank you for subscribing!
For those who are just tuning in, I go by Bivens and I’m on NFT Twitter as @nbivs.
Since joining the community in March, I’ve been wanting to take a leap and make a bigger life commitment to Web3. This project will be my attempt to contribute to the community by translating my shit-posting on Twitter into longer-form content that will contain if only slightly more substance than my bad jokes.
To begin, I plan to send these out every Friday. Within each post, I will be recapping the week with ALPHA, BETA, and DELTA subsections. Alpha will be something good that happened or is happening in the world of NFTs. Conversely, Beta will be the bad news or something I’m generally down on (aka FUD Corner).
In the ‘Delta’ section, I plan on sharing good tweets, articles about Web3, and anything else that I know NFT nuts like myself will find interesting.
As with anything in life, this project will be constantly evolving. I’m not saying any of this is set in stone. I also feel obligated (because I’m always hearing other people say it) that this is not financial advice, but instead just rants and raves that I’m dumping out of my degen brain.
All right, LFG!!
ALPHA
$ENS…so hot right now. Not familiar? Just think of ENS as the .com registrars of the crypto world. This week they dropped a governance token that sent NFT Twitter into a frenzy. Anyone who’s anyone was talking about it, pumping it, and cashing in from it.
Whereas registrars like GoDaddy have continued to squeeze every penny out of their customers over the years, ENS essentially did the opposite by dropping a big fat stimulus check into their customers’ wallets through their own token called $ENS.
The novelty of the airdrop, which provided their existing ENS userbase with a varying amount of coins based on how long and how many .eth domains they’ve owned caused their token value to take off. After going down to $20, it was being valued as much as $80 on Wednesday according to DexTools. As I type this, it’s settled into the $50 range.
But since the average ENS user got somewhere between 100-200 $ENS tokens based on their snapshot criteria, degens got a substantial bag they were not expecting. It was a much-needed W for many who had seen a down market for the past few weeks (myself included).
Of course, as with anything that is given away for free, people still found a way to complain about it. There were some issues with failed transactions and whales complained they didn’t get enough tokens considering their large bet on ENS. But overall, it was extremely successful for ENS and the community at large.
It’s a trend to keep an eye on. In the minutes after the airdrop, NFT Twitter called for OpenSea, in particular, to quit sitting on their hands, become a DAO, and create a governance token of their own. We will certainly see more institutions try to pull this off in the coming months, though I expect none of them will be as successful or smooth as $ENS. I can guarantee if nothing else that there will definitely be more complainers along the way.
BETA
What Top Shot thinks we want: A digital experience that mimics sportscard collecting
What we actually want from Top Shot: Literally something, anything innovative and new.
Speaking of complainers, NBA Top Shot and Dapper Labs continued to shoot themselves in the foot by revealing their next drop would be 350K packs that users would be able to buy up to 10 of. The “moments” inside would be made mostly of /60K mint counts.
The reception from Twitter was as you’d expect - fake outrage.
That being said, it’s yet another head-scratching decision from Dapper which has used the latter half of the year to anger the majority of their users more than listen to them. After securing huge funding, they decided to then allocate those resources to diluting down the product and killing all momentum it once had.
Their leader, Roham, jumped in the Nine Lives Lounge Discord (an exclusive channel for Top Shot elites) to do some damage control. My boy Benjamin23 on Twitter pulled a good quote from it:
Are we simply being impatient? Are we, as they say, “early” still and this is a slow burn? Or is Top Shot in it for the money just like the rest of us as they continue to collect millions from pack drops and moments that are becoming essentially useless?
That’s how sportscards work we know. 99% of the cards are worth nothing once they’re removed from packs. Top Shot seems to be following that model instead of going their own way.
As it stands, that’s what makes this so sad to me. Top Shot really could have been something fun for collectors like myself. Instead, it’s just the same shit, but on the blockchain.
DELTA
Beeple went on Jimmy Fallon where the digital artist talked about his journey in becoming one of NFTs most prolific artists. Then, Jimmy Fallon casually dropped that he had bought an Ape with help from MoonPay. Apes everywhere are devastated by this news I’m sure, as they hoped the true kings of late-night - Desus & Mero - were going to join BAYC.
Speaking of Apes, Universal Music Group has created a supergroup of NFTs characters called ‘Kingship’ (as the band name ‘Gorillaz’ was already taken). I have no doubt this will be an EDM “band” as those artists seem to love the anonymity already and UMG can cash in on the NFT craze for cheap.
How’d my first newsletter go? Slide in my DMs if you have suggestions for me. Or roast me in my mentions, I DGAF. Again, I’m @nbivs on Twitter.