to NFT...and beyond!

2021 quick recap from BivNFT

What a year.

I’m still recovering from Christmas vacation, so I’m using today’s newsletter to recap a few of my noteworthy stories and experiences from this year in NFTs. I hope you dig it.

I also hope you all had a nice holiday and claimed your $SOS for an additional gift from Santa (the Red Ryder Beebee gun hidden behind the credenza). Please don’t go too crazy with it…

ALPHA

How grateful am I for my Cool Cat? Very. Do I wish I had more? Of course.

But I am one of the lucky ones. For many like myself, their NFT journey began with a project that then became extremely successful. That’s how NFTs got their hooks in and now we are still chasing that high...

I’ll map out briefly how I got here and why it’s important to just keep swimming and follow your heart in this crazy world of NFTs…

First off, I knew nothing of the team or the project when I bought my first Cool Cat. I bought solely on aesthetics as I had seen a few Top Shotters on Twitter flaunting them. On a Friday in July, I decided to “ape in” as they say.

(This was a time after Bored Apes had started making waves and everyone I knew was changing their PFPs.)

I myself had already been messing around with PFP NFTs and knew how to buy them on OpenSea. I had enough ETH in my wallet for 2 floor cats. In particular, I really liked ones that had a Bob Ross head on a television screen, but they were already out of my price range by then. “No worries,” I said to myself. “I’ll flip my way to one in a few months.”

(Currently, the lowest priced TV Head Bob Ross is 32 ETH)

With what I had, I opted to start with just 1 rarer Cool Cat so I wasn’t too overexposed. “I’ll just start with the one,” I told myself. “And if on Monday, I still want another I will add ETH to my wallet and swoop another.”

Oops.

Of course, the next day a run on Cool Cats began while I was away from my computer. By the end of the weekend, my cat was worth almost 5x my initial investment. I told my wife what had happened and updated her frequently on the price of my cartoon cat. She was impressed (nice).

At the time, a few hundred USD for it seemed crazy. I thought about selling many times between then and the time I finally did.

The only reason I kept it for as long as I did was that in that time between, 1) the price kept going up 2) I learned about the Cool Cats team and 3) I made some frenz on Twitter who also had Cool Cats as PFPs.

Because I only had the one, I didn’t want to sell out and have to find another project to change my PFP to. The Cool Cat I had spoke to me, for some reason. The cat was me, and I was the cat.

So I kept it for a month while I explored other communities. Eventually, the prices leveled, with Cool Cats having a lot of trouble cracking the 1 ETH floor (remember those days?). That’s when I sold and used the profits to buy a Gutter Cat.

However, it didn’t take long for the Cool Cats to begin calling me back. While I was in the Gutter, Cool Cats announced their collab with Time Magazine, so I had quite a bit of FOMO.

(To think now I almost missed out on way more!)

Quickly, I realized the Cool Cats community just resonated with me a bit more than the Gutter. Luckily, I flipped my Cat and a new Rat which both had recently pumped for a Cool Cat with lederhosen that was freshly listed. It cost me 3 ETH at the end of August, which at the time meant I spent almost $8K USD on a picture of a cartoon cat. Degen stuff.

The funny thing? It turned out to be a pretty good decision. How far I’ve come. I’m still so happy I did it to find my “forever cat” as they say.

BETA

But don’t get it twisted…

The world of NFTs can be ruthless too. We’ve all heard of “rugs” and if you’re truly a degen then it’s happened to you more than you would like to admit.

We’re in a Wild Wild West right now.

My most memorable (and least favorite) drama of the year stemmed from a project called ‘Untamed Elephants’ - a community I was intimately apart of.

In fact, it was the first NFT that I successfully made a profit from. From them, I also learned how it all worked - rarity, what “sweeping the floor” meant, Discord, etc.

I was bullish on them despite the feeling that something about the project was a bit off. But I was making money so I turned a blind eye. Eventually, I had consolidated about 4 elephants into a rare-ish one. Meanwhile, NFTs across the board were pumping and being minted daily. I eventually turned my focus to other communities.

That was until one day, Twitter notified me that the owner’s brother had passed. I extended my condolences and saw countless others do the same. I was impressed how strong the community still was.

What came next, I’m still a bit confused by.

By the next morning, the community was suddenly in a full scale collapse. People were being banned from the Discord, nasty DMs were being exchanged, and they were being posted to Twitter for all to see.

The drama ensued after the community wallet had suddenly been drained. The owner of the project (whose brother had passed) of course was the main suspect, and after some namecalling, denials, and possible coverups, he agreed to sell the project and its contracts. He quickly did, and he walked away with millions.

But others, who had been involved and committed to the project, were conversely left holding the bag. That’s because most everyone with some common sense had sold off their Untamed Elephants as the floor plummeted. To this day the community has never regained its same energy despite the owner’s renewed efforts and attempts to save the project.

It’s sad really.

I suppose “doing your own research” can only do so much out here in the NFT space. You can trust in something and invest in it with good intentions only to get burned.

All in all, you’re probably going to be more unlucky than lucky with NFTs, so try to be grateful for your wins and don’t dwell in the losses. We’ve all had ‘em.

DELTA

• You know how to do the ‘In Memoriam’ at the Oscars? We should do that for all the NFTs that have gone to 0 in 2021. The video would probably log a 45-minute runtime.

• If you didn’t try to create and draw your own NFT project this year, did you even NFT, bro? Here’s my creation, still available on OpenSea for .005 ETH (still too much if you ask me)

• Biggest regret of 2021? It’s probably not buying an Ape like most everyone, but to be honest, there was only one time where it was both on my radar and feasible for me to do so. But I would have had to dump pretty much everything I had into it, so I opted against it. If you have a Bored Ape, be sure to thank your lucky stars tonight!