hello from the otherside
GM! Here I go with my first Monday edition of the daily newsletter. ICYMI, BivNFT will now be coming at you every (week)day.
I don’t know how I’m going to keep this up (likely no sleep), but luckily there was no shortage of NFT news over the weekend so I at least could knock this one out quickly.
This should be easy.
ALPHA
On Friday, it was announced that Cool Cats CEO Chris Hasset was stepping down after only 1 quarter with the team. Hasset? More like Hack-ett, amirite?
Jokes aside, his departure hopefully marks the end of a disastrous run for Cool Cats.
Somehow Cool Cats managed to go from OG status…closing out 2021 with all-time highs and announcements of a game and a “companion”…to a project that outsiders were questioning as if it were a rug by the end of April.
What happened? Delays, confusing reveal dynamics, and poor communication with the community caused a lot to lose faith in the project and its leadership.
Chris (fair or not) fell on the sword as a good leader should. I’ll give him that at least.
But the hire never made sense and even less so once you realized how little we actually heard from the guy before he decided to leave.
Cool Cats announced they will be using outside help this time (the last hire was made seemingly because Tom - one of the Cool Cats cofounders - knew him from a previous job and Chris had “cryptogaming” experience).
They have also started to leverage CAA to create partnerships outside of the gaming space (plushies coming soon!) and hey! the game works now too. Things are looking up for the Cool Cats, even though the optics of letting your CEO walk after only a few months are admittedly awful.
Cool Cats will likely suffer in the short term from such a decision. However, long term, one hopes that they can return to their roots, focus on community, and hell, maybe even an official collaboration with Yuga Labs and the Otherside will restore them back to blue-chip status.
At least, my bags certainly hope so.
BETA
The long-awaited Otherside release (aka the Bored Ape land sale) was on Saturday and it went smoothly…nothing to see here! Please move along.
Actually, it was kind of a disaster.
While attempts were made by the Yuga team to mitigate gas wars, that’s exactly what ended up happening. Some were seeing as much as 6000 GWEI in gas fees and the consensus is that it took about 2 ETH in gas alone in order for the transaction to go through (on top of the 305 $APE it took to mint one land plot).
Oh yeah, and $APE tanked after the sale too.
About 18K of those who KYC’ed (know your customer, a way of identifying the wallet as legitimate in order to prevent bots) were left without an ‘Otherdeed’ and even worse they had failed txs totaling thousands of dollars.
Yuga will be reimbursing the gas fees lost by those who did not secure a Deed, but the damage was done. After a poorly written apology, they also seemed to imply they’ll be starting their own chain at some point down the line - shifting blame to Ethereum and not their own contracts.
This contributed to the many conspiracies now floating online. Was the minting experience intentionally bad so they could position themselves to launch their own chain? Were the drop and drop mechanics done by the Animoca team as opposed to the Yuga team?
We may never know exactly what the Yuga team was thinking with this one, but us NFT degens are nothing if not predictable.
People were outraged on Saturday, but by Sunday most of the FUD was forgotten once the reveals started to come in and people were rushing to see if their land had a Koda or not.
Already the rare lands have had some massive sales, including a 300 ETH sale for land with no Koda.
True, the land without resources, artifacts, or Kodas have mostly crashed back down to the metaverse…as I type this, some of the “floor” land plots are sitting around mint price (when you factor in the crazy gas) on marketplaces.
Is this the first of many mistakes for Yuga that leads to them losing their throne? I doubt it. In case you forgot, money reigns supreme around here, so until people start losing a lot more of it, they’ll continue to be loyal to Yuga Labs.
DELTA
What’s a good mint cost these days?
I was able to mint a Kitbash Booger this weekend (a collab between Toy Boogers, Cool Cats, Deadfellaz, and Robotos), but wasn’t willing to pull the trigger at .25 ETH. It seems strange to me that a derivative project (from a great team, I admit) would cost almost more to mint than buying an actual Roboto or Toy Booger.
As teams continue to build out their projects, it’s becoming obvious to me that they’re using derivatives and companions to “raise capital”. However, if your project is hovering at anything less than 5 ETH, I cannot see why it makes sense to further dilute it and complicate your message.
I assume their funds are drying up from secondary sales, and in order to continue building, they feel the need to release more into the ecosystem. I don’t know the alternative, but I can assure you…these high mint prices are not it.
Gone are the days of .02 ETH mints, but I for one would welcome them back with open arms.