It’s been a wild couple of weeks in crypto and NFT-land.
Bald Jesus Drinking Club Update
The Bald Jesus Drinking Club continues but is a slow burn. It’s funny, I’m pretty positive that if I’d have been able to launch it a month earlier – it would have sold out in 24 hours. As it stands right now, we haven’t yet been able to even sell 25% for a variety of reasons. First is that (and I take responsibility for this) – I did zero marketing and zero paid promotion. I sincerely thought that the idea of fractionalizing a piece of land in Hawaii would drive sales – especially with tokens only around $150 each.
That leads to the next issue – Ethereum gas fees went through the roof pretty precisely at the time of our launch. The affordable $150 (.04 ETH) tokens I hoped to sell spiked up to as much as $1500 with 90% of that being gas fees. Nobody wants to pay 10x the price of something with 90% of it being taxes and fees.
Finally, the reason why gas went so high was because suddenly there were 10-20 new high profile projects with marketing and hype driving people into frenzies. This hasn’t stopped. I’ll get into all those projects in a few minutes but first I want to address everything I’ve said above.
I’m not worried that we haven’t sold out. This is a slow burn project and that is fine. With the revenue from the sales so far I was able to pay out all the developers and contractors who assisted and worked on the project. In addition, I was able to pull enough from the contract to start putting together our business structure – ‘The Bald Jesus Cult’ – yes, we’re going to call it that. I’m going to endeavor to make it a tax free religious organization. If Bob Dobbs, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the Dude can make religions and be religious figures, I don’t see why Bald Jesus shouldn’t be. The people who did buy BJDC tokens are cool and willing to be patient. There hasn’t been a single person who has suggested sweeping the floor, asked ‘Wen Moon?’ , or made issues about the pace of progress. This makes me incredibly sure that I will enjoy drinking a beer with these people in Hawai’i when we get this all put together and working.
One of the things I didn’t expect from this project was the deep sense of responsibility I feel towards the people who invested in it. I won’t rug, I won’t disappear, and I won’t let you down. We are all gonna make it. 100%
Crypto Markets
The crypto markets appear to be taking off. Bitcoin is pushing towards breaking the all time high and if things go as they usually do – ETH and then alt coins should follow. As a result of this, a lot of NFTs are being sold as people buy into the crypto markets. This has created a lot of downward pressure on prices of some really good projects. This combined with the many many many major projects being launched has created a liquidity crunch for many people (myself included) – where we are trapped in projects we really believe in long term that are selling far below where we bought in. Only a loss if you sell, but it still doesn’t feel good and creates a strange psychological pressure on holders.
The Many Many Projects
Big projects used to happen once or twice a week – lately there are one or two a day and many of them are not going well. Metasaurs had a screwed up launch where people who promoted and supported the project to get white-listed were left out to dry. The Boonji launch was upended by spam bots and postponed. Mekaverse launched to huge numbers only to have people realize that all the rare and valuable offerings had been handed to known wallets – in other words, people got scammed. Even respected projects like Pixel Vault’s Metaheroes and Gutter Cat Gang’s 3rd and 4th species reveal weren’t without controversy as PV’s planet sale had insiders seemingly front running the sale of Pluto and GCG stuck half their users with big breasted pigeons and gave the other half fierce looking dogs – a price disparity of more than an ETH on the floor prices. There have been art projects and AI projects and projects by adult magazine cartoonists and projects by known NFT artists and the bottom line is – it has been too much for me (or most people) to keep track of.
That being said – I’ve watched a few people in insider groups I’m in (Alpha Groups) get positively rich in the past few weeks from starting with about $10k or so. Meanwhile, I picked different projects – and didn’t get rich. Lol. But, maybe with time my picks will yield rewards. I hope so.
Projects I’m Holding
I’m likely not going to invest in anything else until some of what I currently hold yields rewards of some sort. Also, a word of caution. I feel like we are in that stage where everyone is denying that we have entered an actual bear market for NFTs. This is like the period from Feb-Jun with altcoins back in 2018. Things will pump, lots of profit to be made if you are in at the right time and out at the right time – but I’m lousy at that. I think for this moment, being in solid projects with people you like and feel a connection to is the only way to go. Personally here are the projects I feel confident about that I’m currently in:
1. Pixelvault & Metahero. I’m including Monkeybets in this group.
2. BAYC/MAYC/APE DAO/JENKINS & 10KTF
3. Raini Lords of Light
4. Doctor Who Worlds Apart
5. Impact Theory
6. cMyKatz – I just trust this dev. and love what they are doing.
7. Dotdotdots – I still feel like this could be Banksy
8. Buzzed Bear Hideout – There is hidden value in BBH
9. On Chain Monkeys / FLOW – I love what they are doing.
10. BYOP and MTA – These are my Metaverse play and I feel like they are connected.
Additional Projects:
I’m also in Deadheadz, BOTB, GCG, Nifty League, HoK, and a slew of others that I hope will win but don’t have the same certainty about. They could all be losses – total losses. And – I can certainly be wrong – in fact, I often am.
It seems like Creatures, Cool Cats, Cryptoadz, Anonymice , VeeFriends , and a few others are probably all going to make it in the long term. I’m just not in those. I missed them.
I’m in a fair number of strange speculative spaces – Spottie Wifi (blockchain rapper), Tiki Festival (blockchain music festival), GG (Art Collective), Heaven Computer (I can’t quite describe it), Pixelglyphs (blockchain code as art), Cubeverse (generative geometric art), Aivatars (generated fake people giving 
AI generated answers) , Template (hard to explain), Genetic Chain (again, generative geometric art) – just kind of innovative and adventurous ideas that I hope make it.
And…then there’s the purely for fun category. Cheap, bright, funny, fun, projects: One Day Bae, Hobo Beards, Bear Market Bears, Bloot, Invaders – I really don’t expect these to make it in terms of money, but somehow I think they will all survive because they are fun and cheap and I like the art and communities.
Conclusion:
God, that’s a lot. If you want to talk about any of these or get links to their project pages or Discords – come ask for them in my Vagobond Discord server. We’ve got a fun community forming there of people who like NFTs, travel, and more.
