- The Metadata
- Posts
- Weekend Friend Tech Edition
Weekend Friend Tech Edition
Curating the most interesting NFT takes on FT this week
The Metadata
September 10, 2023
It’s a special weekend edition!
We’ve been deep in the trenches on Friend Tech, spending 100+ hours on it over the last weeks. So thought we’d curate our favorite NFT takes and share them with you.
This coming week is Token2049 (a big crypto conference) so our publishing schedule will be disrupted. But expect us to drop interesting content from the conference and Friend Tech so you won’t miss out.
Before we dive in, just 2 quick notes:
None of this is financial advice. Please do your own research
We parsed these messages directly from the app and left grammatical errors as per the original chats
The Best Friend Tech NFT Alpha (4 - 10 Sep)
On Generative Art
“Long form Gen art is better viewed as an entire collection not single pieces. So the initial revenue at sale is cost of piece while Mcap represents todays value. In those terms some is overvalued.
But also in those terms, supply is now 1 instead of 1/X where most X > 200 and sometimes 1000. So under that guise, putting out N = 1 every 6-18 months and making 250K - 1.5mill is NOT that far fetched for an elite artist.
But how many elite tier artists are there? Debatable topic. In 2021/22 clearly way too many Gen-artist drops were overpaid. But now we aren’t seeing many drops and market is slowly differentiating.
Those 2021/22 collections like you said, are dropping in price and will likely have difficult time returning. Some will surprise you though, as my argument above goes to say they were overvalued but not all in terms of N and Mcap.
In the same breath though, in art markets the real $$ is for top pieces. Looking through historic art reports, clear that in bear markets ppl shift buying to only the creamiest of cream like ringers and gooses. Those will further standout down the road and have the highest ROI, but it doesn’t take away from my belief that good collections from good artists will return.”
“main gen art collection I’m trying to add more of right now is themes and variations by Vera waiting for T&V to drop back below 3 ETH Vera early pioneer of gen art and also unlikely to be pumping out more collections. Maybe a few physical 1/1s that have an NFT counterpart”
On Gaming
sparkc on SugarTown, the Zynga Web3 game
“SugarTown mint info.
The large portion of supply their holding is a great incentive for the team to drive value to the NFTs. It’s also a lot of sell pressure in the future.
Bullish short term, bearish long term.
I’m only bullish on them short term anyway so that’s fine.
The geo-restrictions aren’t ideal - only a small group of countries can mint. Anyone with half a brain will use a vpn but a lot of crypto people are without any brain at all and a lot of people won’t realise they need a vpn until they go to mint, which will cause fud.
They have enough fcfs people to quickly sell out regardless so it probably won’t matter but it’s something to keep in mind Re: price expectations post-mint.”
Raymond Chng on Sipher
vietnam studio, pretty solid founder who hires good devs, and just wants to build a good game (heard founder is alrdy wealthy so this aint all about money, about building good stuff)
they should be good on runway, so good proj to watch
gameplay: top down shooter type game, simple but yet can potentially appeal to more hybrid casual players? Its still in dev, so hard to comment on gameplay
last i heard game is likely in beta by eoy or q1 too.
the token price is pretty badly hit, and irrc, it’s alrdy below seed round. Need to dble check this
they are adopting a transmedia strategy, if they can pull it off - would be v positive
JACL on Korea Blockhain Week:
“I’ve had 1:1 meetings with all the major developers, par Nexon, most see web3 as a way to gain an edge in international markets - allowing them to better compete with China.
This is great news for developer adoption and testing theories but bad news is that I didn’t see any teams that are innovating in the space. Nexon will be the gold standard short term. I.e., they will control the narrative provided it doesn’t get fudded to hell.
How to get exposure? I’m actually more bullish on the small time Korean teams that are innovative and nimble. Not bullish on Platforms like Iskra and Marblex but the narrative could carry their tokens.”
Degentraland on his favourite P2E games:
“Yeah. First wouldn’t saying P2E. That model is dead. Web3 gaming or GameFi. We’ve signed up a few web3 gaming tokens set to launch in 1H of 2024.
Separate from those, I like:
EVE online
DEADROP
Illuvium (though wouldn’t buy the token)
Kaidro
Limit Break
Parallel
Shrapnel”
Raymond Chng & Sparkc on Pirate Nation, the web3 game by the creator of Farmville
Raymond Chng says:
“Another proj im semi-bullish on is Pirate nations. Founder made farmville. So there is some solid web2 track record. Not the top of my list but defo in the watchlist
Pirate nation devs are now preping for Free to play players. If they can onboard these players in, and metrics look good. We might have a potential winner here”
sparkc says:
“Haven’t been keeping up with it in depth. My original thoughts was that gameplay was too simplistic and access being NFT gated meant no shot at adoption.
I believe gameplay has been expanded a decent amount (including with animation being added) and that there’s going to be another NFT collection for access to expand the playerbase, so they seem to be heading in the right direction.”
Other NFT Topics
8zal on 3-digital ETH names
“I personally think it’s an incredible valuable asset that is kind of an index or “market temp” on ENS as a whole. Namely that 3 Digits consistently have high liquidity available to sell into WETH (around 5eth ATM) and can also be used as collateral for a loan on Teller.
If you think that crypto will continue to seep into the mainstream and ENS adoption will only continue to grow => then to me buying a 3D is a no brainer: numbers are universal to any language and whether there’ll be 10million/ 100million/ 1billion people with ENS, there will ONLY ever be 999 3Ds”
Cirrus’ outlook on NFT markets
“Not really short-term bullish on anything tbh. Penguins are the only thing that have a chance at running in Q4. Theres also these velocity passes that give you a free mint of a 2000 piece snowfro drop in october which feel semi underpriced at .8'“
Teng Yan on Blur
“Blur will be a force to reckon with if they can leverage their existing channels (marketplace, lending) to give them a leg up and win in adjacent verticals like perps. Essentially becoming the Binance of NFTs.
I'm personally waiting for the Season 2 ending announcement to go out at some point in the coming wks/months. IMO it would be paired with an additional announcement about a new product or staking mechanism, in order to soften the blow of 300M tokens coming into circulation. From there will make a decision about buying, but in the long term I'm looking to accumulate more BLUR, just a matter of timing and getting a good entry.
$BLUR has been down only since its launch but if you think NFTs will make a comeback, it's the easiest horse to bet on.
Probably +EV to set notifications on for the Blur Twitter account. It doesn't tweet often so there's not much spam.”
Our Favourite FT Tools
If you’re just starting out on Friend Tech, here are some useful links (Courtesy of @spvce_ and his Complete FT Guide)
How to run Friend Tech on MacOS ->
How to run Friend Tech on Desktop ->
Trading Tools
Dune Overall stats ->
Portfolio value ->
Friend Tech Dune Wallet Tracker ->
Search any account stats ->
Misc. stats ->
Trading fees stats ->
🚨 The Alpha Assembly
We are part of the Alpha Assembly, a central hub for all the newsletters you will ever need:
A reflection of Castle's opinions (DeFi-focused, news, narratives, on-chain wallet sleuthing, macro & in-depth research).
News, alpha, and on-the-pulse content.
The Metadata (That’s us)
Covering everything NFT related: Collections, tools, NFT-fi, you name it.
High-level on-chain capital movements.
Web3 Gaming insights
DeFi research and strategies to give you an edge
Join the Telegram channel today!
That's it for today folks. If you want more, follow us on Twitter (@the_metadata). If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can subscribe with just one-click:
Disclaimer: This newsletter is for educational purposes only. None of this is financial or investment advice. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell any assets. Minting and buying NFTs is risky. Please do your own research.