In NFT land, time bends and distorts. Can you believe the OpenSea email leak was only days ago? Nope, neither can we, because so much has happened over the past seven days. From a community-owned soccer club to Doodles “bucket auction” and new collections selling out in minutes, this week has been a very long month… and NFT.NYC feels like it was years ago.

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Right, let’s get straight into it!

Alpha drop 👀

On July 6, generative art curation platform TENDER will drop its TENDER Pass which will grant holders access to unique artist collaborations, discounts on prints, and other perks. It’s created 1,000 and they’re priced at 250ꜩ (~$350).

On the same day, the first WAGMI United NFTs drop (more on that below), and we’ll be watching OpenSea for the Possessed NFT collection’s artwork reveal (more on that below, too).

🐮 When the market’s bearish the bulls come out 🐻

DYOR 🧐

WAGMI (We’re All Gonna Make It) is as much a mantra in the NFT sector as it is a meme. For believers, it encapsulates the utopian and idealistic possibilities of web3. For detractors, it’s the rallying cry of scammers looking for someone to hold their proverbial bags. However you feel about it, it’s now also indelibly tied to a widely ambitious NFT project involving Adidas, a deep roster of NFT big hitters, and an English football club (or “soccer team,” depending on where you’re from).

Crawley Town FC (AKA, “The Reds” or the “Red Devils”) may not have the cachet of Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, or Arsenal, but it does have an interesting group of owners/backers/fans/hypemen-and-women.

In early 2022, the team was purchased by a group calling themselves WAGMI United. The goal? To elevate the team from the lowly ranks of League Two to the English Premier League, with the help of community input over key decisions… like what sorts of players to try and court with cold, hard, cash.

WAGMI United is led by Preston Johnson (of Pixelvault fame) and Eben Smith, who will also co-chair the actual team… unless after two full seasons they’ve failed to elevate it to League One, in which case they’ll let NFT holders vote on whether or not to replace them.

Other notable members of team WAGMI include Gary Vaynerchuk, gmoney, and Erick Calderon (AKA Snowfro) who created the Art Blocks generative art platform and the iconic Chromie Squiggles NFT collection… one of which will adorn the new Crawley team jersey being made by a little company you may have heard of called Adidas.

Considering how invested sports fans become in their teams emotionally, the opportunity to let them invest financially while also shaping decisions is doubtless going to be an appealing one for many… even if they’ve never even heard of Crawley Town FC before (and, let’s be fair, they probably haven’t). Of course, the project is also an interesting test case for NFTs and sports franchises more broadly.

Regardless of whether Crawley Town FC makes it to the big leagues or not, it’s making history as a bold, web3-flavored experiment, and we’ll be watching closely and cheering from the sidelines… because we’d definitely rather see English football clubs being owned by their fans than by Russian oligarchs. And because we do so love an underdog.

🗺 Keep looking 🔭

Probably nothing 🤔

11 Million reasons not to doubt Doodles 💰

The bear market may be showing few signs of easing, but there was one massive sign this week that there’s still plenty of appetite for innovative NFT projects, especially when they come from household name projects like Doodles.

This week Doodles sold Genesis Box NFTs containing accessories for the forthcoming Doodles 2 project. It used a novel mechanism called a “bucket auction” where participants committed a sum of their choosing with the eventual strike price derived from dividing the total pool by the supply of NFTs (20,000). Doodles raised $11 million (nearly 12,000 ETH) in the process.

And as we discussed last week, Pharrell Williams has joined the Doodles board and is taking up the role of Chief Brand Officer, which seems to have translated into significant bullishness around Doodles 2 which, let us remind you, aren’t even out yet, but for which people were more than willing to buy yet-to-be-revealed accessories at 0.5 ETH a pop, and which they’ll now be talking about for weeks to come. We tip our hats to the Doodles team because that’s shrewd. Very shrewd.

The new band T-shirt 👕

Moonbirds continues to lead from the front when it comes to rewarding its community… or at least its community in the US. Attendees of Moonbirds events can now collect “stamps” via the POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) service. We wouldn’t be surprised if holders of certain stamps later get rewarded somehow down the road.

POAPs are nothing new, but the way Moonbirds is using them is smart and incentivizes holders to engage with community events. The Moonbirds team says it hopes to hold events outside the US in due course, too, which will have their own stamps, naturally… and potentially inspire US-based birbs to fly to exotic new locales so they can collect the corresponding signifier of their loyalty/presence.

Bag boosters 💰

The week that was (June 24 - July 1, 2022) 🗓

The surprise entry on this week’s chart is Moonrunners, a free-to-mint project that looks like Moonbirds but… you know… with wolves. Other newcomers include The Possessed and WZRDS, and ENS (the Ethereum Name Service) makes an appearance because .eth addresses continue to be big business. Are traders bored? Or do they just really, really want their birthday digits followed by .eth?

😢 Like we said, the longest month 🫠

NGMI ☄️

A little too open, see? ⚓️

If you’re an OpenSea user, your email may have been leaked this week. The company announced the unfortunate news in a blog post this week and emailed affected users. It’s not a good look for the world’s most popular NFT trading platform, especially given it suffered a phishing attack earlier this year (in related news, Nouns also fell victim to a phishing attack this week that saw 25 people lose a combined 42 ETH).

In a sector where many players value and guard their anonymity, these sorts of data leaks are especially painful… but they’re also not surprising: If you’re the platform where the most action takes place you’re also going to be the one with the biggest target on your back, and the one from which users expect the most thorough security measures. That’s simply the price of success.

To the moon 🌜

Proof Collective COO (and former Moonbirder) Ryan Carson swept the Moonbirds floor, buying 34 Moonbirds for the fund he’s started and boosted the project’s floor to 24 ETH (~$25,000) in the process.

Cryptoys revealed their adorable “genesis” story.

Facebook is testing a new feature that’ll let users display NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon on their profiles.

PFP project The Possessed sold out in seven minutes with a public mint price of 0.35 ETH. At the time of writing the floor is sitting at 0.6 ETH (~$650)

Coca-Cola put out a collection of Pride-themed NFTs with the bulk of the proceeds earmarked for LGBTQIA+ charities.

San Francisco is getting its first restaurant that’ll use NFTs for membership. There are three membership tiers for SHŌ Club: $7,500, $15,000 and $300,000. Only the top two include complimentary valet parking, in case you’re wondering.

Meanwhile, a new industry report is predicting the NFT market will be worth £84bn ($97.6 billion) by 2028. We’ll have what they’re having, please.

🪡 Thread of the week 🧵

Bedtime reading 📚

McKinsey & Company put out a report a couple of weeks ago we didn’t get to until this week. It’s called “Value creation in the metaverse,” and it makes some salient points about where opportunities might lie (despite the cringy art that peppers the section headers).

Our primary investor CoinFund turned seven and put out a post reflecting on what it’s learned over the years, and where it’s placing its bets for the next seven.

And over at The Defiant, Aleksandar Gilbert had a great piece on the real winners of NFT.NYC mindshare with a title as bombastic as its subject matter: “Fear and Reveling in Goblintown: A Savage Journey into NFT Land.”

🍻 Two Fudweisers and a Rusty Whale, please 🐳

Goats only 🐐

Whether you’re a soccer fan or a synchronized swimming aficionado, you should be watching or listening to Goats and the Metaverse.

In each episode, collectibles OG and entrepreneur Stan “The Goat” Meytin and Metaversal co-founder and CEO Yossi Hasson talk about digital and IRL collectibles, NFTs, and the week’s news worth knowing.

This week, they look at three new NFT projects under 1 ETH (one of which is almost certainly a scam), elucidate where most of the NFT market’s action has been of late, unpacked Doodles 2 and the Dooplicators, and offered their take on newcomer project, The Possessed.

Check out the latest episode here:

Aside from providing invaluable insights into digital art and collectibles, Stan and Yossi are also putting together a collection of NFTs dubbed “The Goat Vault.” When the show hits 5,000 subscribers on YouTube, one of those lucky subscribers will win the contents of the vault which, at last count, was valued at over $16,000 (~15 ETH).

Prefer listening? Check out Goats and the Metaverse on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, or wherever you get your podcasts.

LFG 🎉

Money <> mouth 💸

Each week we’ll offer you a look at an NFT project we’ve invested in and the motivation behind it. This week we’re looking at “Loom #161” by Andreas Rau.

Andreas Rau is an interaction designer and generative artist based in Berlin, Germany, and Oslo, Norway. Loom was Rau’s first series on fx(hash), and he describes it as, “A unique sketch of an imaginary weave,” with a “[c]olor palette inspired by the great works of Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, or Hilma af Klint.” As the name suggests, we think Loom pieces would make for excellent tapestries… but we’d settle for a throw or a knee blanket.

IYKYK 😉

Until next time, see you in the Metaverse.