Morning Minute | How Many Pepes Is Too Many Pepes?
GM!
Take a minute to catch up on the latest in the Web3 space with today's NFT market analysis, top movers, and upcoming mints:
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TylerD's Market Summary
Notable collector Vincent Van Dough made $1.6M in 24 hours this weekend sellling over 200,000 Pepe Checks (237,869 to be exact).
Why did so many people buy them and will they have staying power?
🐸 The Pepe mint heard round the (NFT) World
"This Pepe may or may not be notable."
That was the tagline Vincent Van Dough (VVD) used in his tweet that opened the Pepe Checks mint at 4:20 pm ET on Saturday.
The Pepe-centered Checks-derivative project was of course priced at $6.90 (0.0041 ETH), and it was to be open for 24 hours.
Right off the bat, these minted like hot cakes. Over 10,000 editions were minted in the first our, and that 10k/hour rate held for several hours on Saturday.
But as things started to slow down on Sunday morning, something very unexpected happened that sent the market into a frizzy.
🎶 Is That Jack Butcher's Music?
Around Noon on Sunday, Jack Butcher changed the metadata for his cult sensation project Checks to the same image as the Pepe Checks.
This single change sent both Checks and Pepe Check into full send mode.
Checks jumped from 1.4 ETH to 1.7 ETH in seconds, before ultimately grinding up to 2.1 ETH overnight.
The Pepe Check mint went into overload, resulting in 237,869 mints by 4:20 pm on Sunday.
This ended up as a 975 ETH raise for VVD ($1.6M).
Why did people mint Pepes and what's next?
Most derivatives do not do well and have tremendously short shelf lives.
So why is Pepe Checks different?
The bull case is a bet on VVD, who has a strong reputation as a collector and creator, and a bigger reach than 99% of founders. Along with a heavy dose of speculation.
Chatter is swirling about VVD:
- turning this into a token pass to a Pepe gallery (he has a deep history with Pepes)
- doing extensive burns for art redeems, or
- making it into an NFT-version of an altcoin (i.e. $PEPE).
Of course no one knows and it's all guess work.
The Jack Butcher metadata change also helped, as people thought that they perhaps were working together. I will warn that Jack went on NFT Statistics' podcast two weeks ago and mentioned that he might change the metadata to a new deriv every day, so take this one with a grain of salt.
As for what's next - no one knows other than VVD.
But given that he has already changed the metadata once (last night about 3 hours post-mint), it does feel like he will indeed do something and not leave it alone.
Get your popcorn ready.
🚩 The Dookey DQ
A hot new player stormed on to the Dookey Dash scene this weekend causing quite the stir.
"The_Real_E_M" bought 4 T4 passes and almost immediately took 4 of the top 15 spots on the leaderboard, including the #1 spot with a score of 950,687.
He then transferred in 90 ETH to buy more passes, but before he was able to do so - he got banned (s/o Cirrus for breaking this news).
Yuga disqualified the player after a post-game audit and the scores were all removed.
Looks like you can't cheat to win in the Sewers.
🚚 What else is moving in NFTs?
A few notable headlines from the weekend:
- The NFT market saw 18k-19k ETH in trading volume each day, led by Checks which saw over 2,000 ETH Sunday in its rise to 2.1 ETH
- Killa Bears ran an open edition mint at 0.02 ETH, selling 49k editions with the floor opening around 0.024 ETH on Saturday
- LoudPunx debuted their irl music festival utility pass for 1.5 ETH on Friday, minted out and saw it surge to 2.2 ETH on secondary (+50% for minters)
- Art Blocks Curated "The Harvest" soared from 6 ETH to 11 ETH in just a few hours on Saturday, putting the recent Curated into that same tier as Memories of Qilin, Anticyclone, and Fontana
- DenDekaDen is the latest Japanese project to catch steam, as the fortune-based project of 756 supply jumped 450% on the week to 4.75 ETH
🌎 Around Crypto and Web3
A few other Crypto and Web3 headlines that caught my eye:
- A 1/1 Giannis SoRare card sold for $186,000 on Sunday, the highest ever sale for SoRare NBA
- DeGods and y00ts are hosting an NFT NYC "experience" at the Public Hotel in New York
- The X2Y2 team says its tokens won't be sold in their looming unlock, which the market liked as the token surged +80% on te week to $0.2
- BTC NFTs take off, led by the Ordinal Punks which run from 0.01 BTC to 1.4 BTC over the weekend ($32.2k or 19.6 ETH)
- FTX sends "confidential letters" to politicians demanding they return the millions of dollars SBF donated, by the end of the month
🚀 NFT Total Volume
- Checks (2,160 ETH, 2.15 ETH Floor)
- BAYC (2,015 ETH, 73 ETH)
- Otherdeeds (1,775 ETH, 1.69 ETH)
- Doodles (1,116 ETH, 5.9 ETH)
- MAYC (1,054 ETH, 14.4 ETH)
📈 NFT Floor Price Increase
- Merge (105%, 0.08 ETH Floor)
- Opepen Edition (94%, 0.24 ETH)
- Checks (58%, 2.15 ETH Floor)
- Alfie (28%, 0.38 ETH)
- a KID called Beast (27%, 0.45 ETH)
🗓 Upcoming NFT Mints and Reveals
Today has the standard Meme card and Art Blocks drops, along with the Rug Radio PFPs.
The Memes have rebounded a bit over the past few days, and this card from Dan Giuz is really nice. With just 900 supply and some solid art, this one could open in the 0.7-1 ETH range.
The Art Blocks drop has lower expectations, with the artist Devi's prior drop Cushions at just a 0.19 ETH floor.
Rug Radio is the wildcard, as Farokh is one of the leading voices in the space and Cory Van Lew is an esteemed artist. It will be very interesting to see how the market reacts to these, and if they are anchored by the Rug Radio NFTs (0.41 ETH).
- Memes by 6529 (11:00 a.m. ET)
- Art Blocks Presents: Aragnation by Devi Parikh and Abhishek Das (1 pm)
- Rug Radio PFPs (TBD)
Enjoy this write-up? Follow along with me on Twitter @tyler_did_it or reach out via email tyler.warner@luckytrader.com.
For all volume and floor price data, see Lucky Trader's Project Rankings page.
For all upcoming mints, see Lucky Trader's Project Schedule page.
