I was raised by the wolves
GM GM, how is everyone doing tonight?
Johnny Spark, how am I sounding today? Sometimes it like get some feedback right when I turn it off but spark how are you doing?
Good good, man. The mics it's not too bad
little little crackly, but not as bad as it can be
But yeah, things are good man, I'm just creating the playlist for GDC right now and I've just
made a note to myself to make sure that that song is on repeat multiple times throughout
Johnny, are you heading to GDC man?
Yeah, 80, 20, 80, yes, 20, no, but I think I will be there, yeah.
It's a shorter trek for me than you, so how can I not?
I've got my 30-hour flight or book, so very much looking forward to that side of things.
Sparksy is going to be at GDC.
Definitely, it's going to be a sight to be seen.
It would be good to see you too, Johnny.
I know that we always kind of meet up in those events and always kick it off.
It's always good to see you, brother.
But yeah, for people that don't know, we are inbound GDC and I say we, as in not just me,
Spark and Sam, but 100 out of the 300 wolves are going to be heading there.
Some builders, some VCs, some analysts, and a lot of content creators.
You've been seeing our profile just be populated with a lot of sponsors and partners there.
We're having a lot of things planned for some of the games there and everything like that,
so we're not done with announcements either.
But we have a lot to cover, so I do not want to waste any time because this is jam-packed for an hour.
You know what, let's talk about the thing that everybody wants to talk about,
which is persona post-mit reactions.
And I want to toss it over to Spark C, lead analyst at Wolves.
Yeah, so I've rolled up out of bed and spent an hour catching up on all this.
I know that at some show I'm going to say something incredibly dumb or miss some massive news
because I just haven't had time to scroll Twitter before I jump on the call.
But I think I've got an idea of what's happened with Persona,
but my bad if I have missed something.
So floor price is currently like 0.45 when I checked.
And there was a lot of people with expectations for higher, a lot of calls for close to 1 ETH.
I know that I was expecting a lot better than 0.45, and I think everyone on the show last week was as well.
So what happened? What are the issues that went wrong?
Not the biggest issue by far, but one thing worth noting was that the Revolving Games Bight Mint was at the same time as this mint.
So you've got competing attention and liquidity there.
I think the Bight Mint underperformed a little bit in people's eyes as well.
It's only sitting at its mint price right now.
And I don't think people were expecting that to cook hard considering that it was like a 0.23 mint price.
But I don't think that helped sentiment for Persona.
Another small issue is they allowed listing after people received their NFTs, but no sales.
And the problem was that some people had their NFTs for like 16 hours, the people on the white list.
People are listing these NFTs up at really low prices and no one can buy them.
So some people are panicking and thinking the floor price is low.
They don't even realize that they can't sell and they'll just undercut.
And it's just like it's bad for sentiments, like people seeing the low mint prices and what some of the biggest paper hands are willing to sell at.
But the biggest issue was their auction.
So the way they were doing it was people could send in up to 0.29 ETH for an auction.
And everyone that put in a bid, there would be a raffle to see who got the remaining like 4,000 odd NFTs.
So let's go through all the issues with the auction.
Gas was an issue, a pretty big issue.
Some people were spending more than $100 in gas to make a bid.
And this was not only due to gas fees at the time, but also apparently it was an awfully unoptimized contract.
I know nothing about contracts. I'm just going off what other people have said.
Lots of failed gas transactions, people getting their ETH eaten up.
Apparently there was over 2,500 failed transactions with still a few hours to go.
A little side note here, I think one silver lining of all these gas fees going back up on ETH is that we won't have any more of these fucking bid and refund auctions that are going on because they'll be disincentivized.
But anyway, huge problem with these gas fees.
And it's not only the fact that people hate gas fees and they dislike the project for quote unquote, you know, making them pay the gas fees.
It's that the people paying these gas fees are the same people you want buying your personas off the secondary market.
And not only are they now pissed that they've wasted a bunch of their liquidity on gas, they've now got less liquidity to buy on the market.
So that's one of the issues with the auction with the gas.
The second issue was the way they figured out the randomness and the selecting for the raffle.
So again, this stuff is so far over my head technically.
But from what I've read, the way the raffle worked was you could tell immediately if you had lost with your bid, you couldn't immediately tell if you won.
You could immediately tell if you've lost, which pissed people off rationally.
It makes no difference if you find out immediately or at the end, but people are not rational.
But also the way the method apparently worked is that bids near the beginning had a way lower chance of winning than bids near the end.
I heard that two thirds of the bids in the last 30 minutes won and none of this was communicated ahead of time.
So it's not hard to imagine how pissed off people were that sent in their bids early because even though the bids were funded, they wasted a whole bunch of gas on it.
So I would love if the teams with these really hyped collections could just stop fucking up by adding unnecessary mechanics to their mints to try and extract like every little bit they can.
They had like a normal mint with a normal mint price.
You immediately get your NFT.
You can immediately sell your NFT.
These teams aren't really accounting for the chance that things go wrong because those that mint NFTs know that shit goes wrong like all the time.
These are not like one off things.
They're not 10 percent things.
These are like mints that have unique mint mechanics go wrong like 50 percent of the time.
They just went back to the basics.
It would end up a much better deal for them.
So if we're looking at like future price, it's like when you're dealing with FUD like this, there tends to be a critical threshold of FUD where if there's a certain amount, the project just cannot recover in the short term.
It can't get over that amount of bad sentiment.
Less FUD than that usually can blow over if the team doesn't continue fucking up.
So I haven't had time to browse Twitter yet and really get a feel for what sentiment is like and get a feel for the level of FUD.
So I'm a bit in the dark there.
I'm sort of blind guessing.
I think probably the FUD is not enough that it ends up being unable to be overcome in the short term.
But I still need to do a bit of a bit of a feel out for that on what people are thinking sentiment wise.
But that's that's been my read of it so far.
That's like probably the best breakdown.
Anybody's going to get consolidated.
Definitely helped me because, you know, thank you, Spark, for people that find value to that comment.
Give Spark some props there.
Johnny, do you have anything to add there?
I do have a follow up for question for Spark, but I would love to get your take on the persona post predictions for you.
And then also anything that you want to add.
You would have thought Spark had like a full blown analysis.
Took a lot of time on that.
But that was a great breakdown as far as instant reactions go.
And he took a lot of what I had to say out of my mouth.
I just think it was bad form.
A lot of the ways that NFTs have succeeded in the past.
It just they went against the grain on that.
And the whole listing thing I felt like was a big problem because, of course, people are going to keep listing under the floor, under the floor.
Because what project out there have you bought that doesn't allow you to list and sell?
Like Overworld got fud, but you could sell it immediately.
You just couldn't sell it on blur if I remember correctly.
It just wasn't great form from like a Web 3 stance.
And they came out of nowhere.
And then to have these kind of errors is definitely a little critical in my opinion to just kind of have these blunders that could have been very easily avoided.
I hope that it doesn't fall into the ether type of category, but I don't think it will.
I do think the project does look a little better than that, but bad form on the mint day.
But I won't let mint day judge my whole sentiment on it and then agree with a lot of what Spark said.
Like I said, I feel like he put together a whole research report, but it's just been a couple of hours.
Yeah, I know exactly, Johnny.
I do have a question for you, Spark.
So, for some of the builders out there that are going to be, you know, coming in and actually doing mints during the pool.
And, Johnny, you as well.
You know, you were there in the last like 21, 22 cycle.
We were right building next to each other.
We'd like to just hear from you guys from just kind of mentorship there from the builders.
Like what type of mint is probably best for them coming into the bull market in 2024?
I mean, the answer to that is going to change quite a bit depending on the meta and what people are doing.
I think that, you know, as I mentioned before, there's a lot to be said for keeping it simple just because so many people have issues with their mint.
So many unique mechanics have issues.
I would say not to cheap out on whoever's going to build your contract, whoever's going to be testing it out.
You know, no Fiverr devs for your mint contract.
But, yeah, I mean, look, if a team is pretty unexperienced in the space, they really want their mint to go well.
There's a public sale you can immediately sell.
You can immediately list.
You know, I think there's a lot to be said for that.
You don't always have to get creative with it.
I think the teams that that can get creative with it and can pull it off and make sure the mint goes smoothly.
There's definitely advantages there.
Like there's lots of lots of ways to gamify things and min max and whatnot.
But there's a lot to be said for keeping it simple and not taking that risk as well.
But, yeah, the answers is going to change and develop over time for sure.
Johnny, you know, for for you, what do you think in terms of builders about to launch in the 24 bull market cycle?
Yeah, once again, I guess going back to bad form, I just I hate the auction model.
I just never thought that the auction model was the way to go.
Set a price, deliver on what you're going to build and go from there like an Ethereum's right around that 3K mark.
Currently, like it's not like a low price is going to result in a low fund raise like it was in the dirt bear market like at the very bottom.
So in my opinion, auctions are just not the way to roll.
And it can just it forces people in the ecosystem to get in at different prices and then everyone's sentiments a little different.
Someone's might be not getting as much out of it as someone else who paid a different price based on auction demand, which just really create.
I mean, that's hard to manage in your server.
Like when you put out a price, you meant at that price.
You can manage expectations much easier, in my opinion.
Yeah, I'll get to join here shortly.
Thanks, Jonah, for joining up.
I did. I did request him. I just want to hear his thoughts as well.
Also launching an anime PFP project soon when it comes to the I was talking with Finn last night about persona and like how like there's also a difference between the white list of point zero six nine and also the point to max bid for like point two nine.
It's actually a pretty big spread when you think about it.
And people are going to take profits like pretty consistently.
And that's actually also a huge no no when it comes to that.
So some people are going to take profit. It like puts cell pressure like automatically when it comes to the secondary and yeah and auctions.
I completely agree with Johnny and I completely agree with Spark.
These these guys have been in the space for a long time.
We all have been now, including Jonah.
And yeah, there's just like no it's unnecessary to do what you guys are doing when it comes to auctions. Yes.
But you're also losing out of sentiment and what like a lot of Web 3 is known for, which is like brand recognition.
And if you have a good sentiment right off of the mint, you're in a really good place to have like a foam at the mouth community.
That's going to go back to you regardless of what comes at you.
So, Jonah, I was just going to I invited you up here.
And you know, for persona, how do you think the mint went and your thoughts on it?
Well, for me, it went well.
I mean, I had wireless. So for me, it was great.
I had a great experience.
I wouldn't have done what they did.
The only thing I was pissed about is I don't unless there's a reason for it that's important.
I don't believe in waiting like a week or two to reveal the art.
I think that's ridiculous.
I think regardless of whatever the idea is, it takes away hype.
Like, can you imagine you open up a Pokemon card pack and it like you had to scratch and sniff to like see if you got like a holographic Pikachu.
Like nobody would buy the cards.
So I don't believe in that.
I think they should reveal within 24 hours at least.
That was the thing I thought was really annoying.
And I also don't believe in auctions for this stuff.
I have no plans to do auctions for mine.
I'm not going to do auctions.
I'm just going to sell what I'm selling.
And if you like it, great.
If you don't, don't buy it.
And if people don't buy it, I'm just going to probably burn the rest and have a smaller supply.
Yeah, I keep keep eyes on what Jonah is doing.
And you're a founder that also that posts like there are pretty consistently on his profiles.
If you want to go check it out, definitely go check out Jonah's profile.
Also want to just get a state of the market from you guys, actually speaking of persona and just moving on to the broader scope.
You know, gaming ecosystems have been ripping and actually just want to toss it over to you, Johnny, because you look at the markets quite a bit.
You know, how's the state of the market looking at it?
Like, you know, Mavia's pumping, Prime's pumping, Fronin's hitting all time highs.
What are you seeing out there?
And is there any type of advice that you would give to people that are currently looking at the markets?
I think right now we're in a shiny object syndrome type of market, which I mean, like a lot of new launches, new tokens.
People missed out on pre-sales or didn't have the privilege to be in on early rounds.
So they're kind of fomoing in for Mavia.
The early it worked, we're going to see what pixels it's still hovering around its launch or like post market price.
But what I would advise is just pay attention to these tokenomics and leading up to the having.
I have to say, like, I think that the Bitcoin having we should see a little bit more momentum heading towards that.
But right now there's like six to ten tokens launching in the next six weeks that are going to get a lot of attention in the markets and are going to really try to replicate that success.
And not every one of them is going to do it.
Pay attention to those TGE unlocks.
Pay attention to when those big vestings come through the door, because that's what it's all about.
One thing with Mavia, if you look at their tokenomics, a lot of it's vested from four to six years, which is crazy.
My round that I got in there is vested for six years.
So I'm in that for a long time.
And let's be real, in six years, we don't even know if that's going to be a thing at that point in time.
Let's just be completely realistic.
So a lot of the vesting there is just very long.
And that's a good thing for retail investors to get into.
But pay attention to the tokenomics.
I implore you to go check out any source you can, check out the white papers, and see when those big vestings are, because that's how you can play it correctly.
And when the bull market comes around, if there's either still no vesting coming through the door, there's like a six-month clip or something like that, you can still play that token up in the narrative.
And another thing, it's going to be interesting to see this whole Portal thing this week, because unlike Pixel and unlike Mavia, they both have games that people do play.
Portal, we still have really no idea what they're bringing to market.
So Portal's launch is going to be very interesting to see.
And I think for people that are maybe not understanding the tokenomics, it's very important as a retail investor to understand tokenomics so you don't get completely screwed.
Like Johnny, what he's saying, and this was us like two years ago.
So I don't fault you guys for people that are maybe getting into the market right now.
You have to understand Cliff, you have to understand vesting before you can kind of play with this specific crowd, because it is PvP out here.
This is Alpha Wolves, and these guys are alphas up here on the space.
And we take advantage of the TGEs, the percentage, the vesting.
And so you just have to be careful whenever you're understanding that.
Make sure you're understanding what Cliff is.
You know, they can't sell into a certain time and understand what you're getting into whenever you start playing with tokens, especially with some of these speculative gaming tokens currently.
And Spark, I want to kind of just go to you in terms of some of the tokenomics, maybe some lessons learned for you and also the state of the market.
Yeah, I mean, I just want to be like abundantly clear for people that are trading, people that are holding gaming tokens, right?
Or any tokens at all, anyone that's buying tokens for a new coin and they want to hold them for years.
If you don't understand tokenomics, you will get fucked.
Like you need to understand tokenomics if you're holding something for years, otherwise you will lose.
So in terms of like state of the market for me, yeah, I think a lot of the new gaming coins have been doing really well.
Marvia and Pixel have definitely brought gaming back into the light for those in the space outside of gaming.
They're definitely paying some more attention.
It does often happen that when a new coin in a sector has a big launch, then the market can start to treat that new coin as the new indicator for that sector.
So it's like, okay, pixels is up, Marvia is up.
That means gaming is hot right now.
And that's like the bellwether that they use.
So now I think how pixels performs sort of from now onwards can definitely have an outsized impact on how the rest of the market perceives the health of gaming coins.
If you look at previous gaming launches on Binance, recent ones like Sleepless AI, Ace, Zai, they all spent like a little less than a week after launch just consolidating before either dumping or going on a run.
And we're in that same little brief window of consolidation now for Pixel.
So I think we'll see pretty soon what the direction will be for it.
For my money, as long as the wider market remains healthy, I think the direction is up.
I'm not personally invested in pixels.
It's a bit larger market cap than I usually like, and I prefer less crowded trades.
But if I had to guess, I would say it's going to be going up.
I think wider sentiment on general on gaming is pretty high.
When people are making lists of the biggest narratives right now in crypto or the biggest narratives for the cycle, most of them mention gaming.
I think the better that these tokens perform, the more that gaming NFTs should eventually benefit.
That correlation is going to be pretty strong when gaming NFTs provide token airdrops.
So I think sentiment is good right now.
Jonah, do you have anything in terms of sentiment or state of the market that you want to comment on?
But I would love to also get your thoughts on the next question if you have no comment on this one.
Yeah, I think everything is high right now.
And we've had these tier one narratives I call that.
The tier one narrative is Bitcoin ETF inflows.
The other tier one narrative is ETH ETF.
And probably the other tier one narrative is VC inflow.
Those are my three tier one narratives.
And then your tier two narratives, which are, OK, new L1s, new L2s.
That's my tier two narrative.
My tier three narrative is applications.
And I think if you kind of look at everything, then you're going to be good at nothing.
So for me, I just stick to gaming as my tier three.
So if I can find, well, gaming and AI and D-pin, like mix those together sort of deal.
So if you can find those three narratives that or two of the three, then they probably have a decent chance.
If you only have one of the three, then maybe probably not.
So that's really what I'm looking at currently.
And I don't see that changing for a fair bit.
I think maybe in May we have like some slight drop, but nothing serious.
Because Coinbase is making a lot of money in Coinbase summer or whatever you call it.
On-chain summer is like their big thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had on-chain summer again.
And on-chain summer creates a lot of excitement during that time period.
So seems pretty good so far, but something can always come out of nowhere and derail it.
Yeah, and I'll just, it's a little bit of a joke, but Spark mentioned how everyone's now starting to talk about gaming because of these launches.
Ran from the main banter channel asked me to come do a portfolio video on the banter channel coming up soon.
So whenever he's asking about gaming, it might be time to look to exit.
All jokes aside, just kidding.
But yeah, it's definitely getting a little hot.
And whenever it gets a little overheated, you know, the narrative typically does shift.
So just be careful out there.
It's now getting into gaming tokens.
It could be something that's kind of near a pinnacle.
And if some of these launches coming up, like Portal, Aether Games, some of those that do really well, maybe the run does continue.
But the valuations are looking pretty high right now.
That's the way I look at it as well.
But, you know, we saw crazier things last cycle.
That is something that I've also had to do, like mid curve and like tell tell myself, like, hey, you know, there isn't like a really big inflow of people just yet.
Like we saw last year or last couple of years in twenty twenty one twenty one two.
We'll get back to this in terms of like undervalued plays.
But also going to kind of shift that question a little bit from the show notes from like undervalued place.
But once we have that correction, Johnny, you know, to your point of like, you know, it's it is pretty hot, you know, ran from crypto banner talking about it.
And then it going down what people would like to pick up or scoop up.
I would love to hear your guys thoughts on that.
Well, before we do that, I want to kind of go into like kind of this this topic that we have is called like DAU and MAU and how it's kind of sometimes some smoke and mirrors to like really boost up sentiment.
And I want to toss this over to Spark and then I want to go over to Jonah for this.
But, you know, how is DAU and MAU being perceived from the gaming market, at least from the Web 3 gaming market?
Is it a bullish sign? Is it, you know, a bearish sign when it comes to like, oh, DAU, MAU.
But how are they using it and weaponizing it for the retail trader?
I think first of all, in this cycle compared to last cycle, many of the biggest token launches are coming from projects that actually have games to back them up, which means they can have players.
And, you know, being able to throw around some big player numbers is being seen as a strong sign of legitimacy.
On the flip side, games that don't have those player numbers, I don't think it's seen too bad.
It depends. I've not really seen a new token launch with a game.
Try and get player numbers and sort of sort of fail because as we'll go into, it's not very hard to manipulate player numbers.
But I imagine a game that did have that, you know, the market is pretty good at being endlessly optimistic about what's coming in the future.
And I can certainly imagine people being like, oh, the game's only in alpha.
Like, of course, they don't have player numbers yet.
So I think it's there's probably not too much downside at the moment.
But yeah, I mean, the thing is that player numbers can be easily manipulated in general, not even in Web3.
And Web3 just gives you like a whole bunch more levers to manipulate numbers easier than ever before.
Right. Like you can incentivize player numbers through air drops really easily.
Marvia did a great job with that.
They gave out like twelve dollars or something worth a Marvia, which became worth a lot more because of how well the token did.
But they had huge amounts of people signing up, downloading the app to get that air drop.
It's the reason why they're up on the leaderboards and all that sort of stuff for app downloads.
So it's not hard to get those sorts of player numbers.
You can straight up buy players for way cheaper than twelve dollars per install.
The Army of Fortune strat where you spend like cents on the dollar to get downloads in tier three countries from people that produce absolutely no revenue.
And you'll see your player numbers spike right up and your revenue chart flatline and stay exactly the same because you get literally no money off these players at all.
Which is the thing with player numbers.
It's not about how many players you have.
It's about the quality of the players you have.
So if you want revenue, there's tier one players and there's tier three players.
So I think teams are going to keep doing this because it's definitely perceived as bullish by the market.
People in the market do not at all understand any of that.
They just see one million players and they get massively optimistic about it.
A lot of VCs are honestly like no better and they see those huge numbers and they buy in as well.
So the actual important numbers, if you're looking to hold something long term, is like revenue numbers, you know, revenue per user.
There's better metrics in that and like Paden and Jonah can get into perhaps like LTV and all that stuff if they want to.
But just as most basic form, like if you just look at revenue rather than player numbers, you'll do better than just looking at player numbers.
So I think these metrics are really important for judging how the market will perceive a project.
Like even if DAU is not that important, knowing that the team will boost their DAU is important for understanding how the market will see it.
But it's not important for determining like long term health and success of the game itself.
And I was going to do a follow up question, but you're kind of touching on it, but I just want to be abundantly clear.
Like how can like the retail trader, retail gamer, when it comes to like looking at this sometimes, I think even some of the wolves, they have an issue with it.
Some of the builders that, you know, come from Web two and coming into Web three, they look at like, let's say just Mavia or like pixels and they just see that token keep on going up.
And sometimes they just get like upset, right, more than like, you know, maybe a little bit jealous, not calling out anybody specifically.
But like that, that to me sometimes is like also where I kind of mid curve now being part of like building and all that stuff and like how cheap it is to do that.
Like sometimes you think like, oh, that's easy to get.
Like there's no way that they're going to like pump this token.
And it ends up being, you know, it just keeps on climbing up and you're just like, holy crap.
Do you have like any advice for people that like maybe are coming from like more Web two into Web three spark?
Like maybe these numbers are just like kind of sentiment like bending like Web three and making that token go up.
Yeah. I mean, you just have to look at why are people playing the game?
Why are people downloading the game?
So are there financial incentives, right?
Do you get points or tokens for downloading and signing up to the game for completing a tutorial?
Are there big competitions and raffles going on for playing that have unsustainable prizes?
Like, you know, there's incentives in Web two by games that do well, like incentives are not the issue.
It's are there unsustainable incentives?
And look, even then you can I think some games will do very well by having unsustainable incentives at the start to draw people in and try and, you know, build up retention and retain them.
But you can't do that with an incomplete game.
You know, there's some games with huge player numbers that are so woefully incomplete that people will just churn out of it.
So you've got to think, are these sustainable incentives?
Are people only downloading it for incentives?
Is there enough of a game there to retain these people?
The answer to that is almost always no at the moment and try to get numbers on revenue.
Like, is the team trying to make revenue off these players that are coming in?
Is it sustainable revenue?
Because sometimes people are paying money to get in game rewards that help them earn more of the airdrop.
So they're only going to be spending that money to buy battle passes or whatnot while the airdrop is live.
I mean, it's you know, we're getting like a little more complicated here.
There's there's a lot more to it.
But I guess the main thing is to just think about why people are playing the game.
And if it is for financial incentives, then it's probably not long term sustainable, depending on there's asterisks and caveats to all this.
But as a general rule, that's good to know.
And John, I would like to toss it over to you.
You know, you spend a lot of time in the VC funding world.
You know, how in terms of like your perspective and your experience, how are VCs kind of looking at Web 3 and kind of the DAU and the MAU that's currently happening?
I can give you like what I used to think and I can give you what I think today.
Used to be D1, D30 retention.
Used to be ARP, ARPDAU or ARPU, which is average revenue per user.
MAU, all these other fun acronyms that basically mean is the game making money.
Long story short, that's all that matters is the game making money.
And I sit here and I think about it in the bull market.
I'm like, none of that matters in the bull market because if they did, then I would have been, you know, then it wouldn't.
The Maviya and Portal wouldn't be appreciating a price.
What matters is the reality of something very simple, which is unless you're getting distributions directly from the token, nobody cares about metrics.
So all they care about is feelings.
Because if you can't get distributions, aka royalties or something in kind that's continuous cash flow to your account, nobody gives a fuck.
So if a game looks good and people are happy, price go up.
If a game has big investor, Asia-like game, big boob girl in game, price go up.
If meme token make game, meme token is good at meme, meme go up.
If NFT brand like a penguin make game, NFT brand gives me airdrops and other things, price go up.
These are the things that make price go up.
Nothing else really matters for now.
In the bear cycle, it will matter.
In a bull cycle, it does not.
So, you know, I got to think in the bull market and not think in the bear market.
So in the bull market, if Wolf's Dow did a token, I go, do I like Wolf?
Does Wolf give me airdrop?
And if all those things align, then I go Wolf, go up.
Also, he is not talking about the sim swap that happened to me a few weeks ago that is the Wolf token.
Just saying, it's not out there.
Move it on because I don't want to labor that point too much.
But in terms of under the radar projects that are coming out, and I also wanted to kind of shift it a little bit because Johnny also mentioned a really good point.
Hey, the market's going parabolic and there might be some time for a cool off, right?
This happened like a few weeks ago whenever all of us were kind of a little hesitant when we kind of took a break from alpha wolves for a second.
We're like, hey, guys, like, you know, let's just take a break for a second because the market needs to cool off a little bit.
We're not going to take a break, though, by the way.
I want to kind of get to your guy's points.
There's a massive correction or also underrated projects.
I kind of want to go for both.
I would love to just hear your thoughts on either underrated projects.
Oh, he just disconnected.
So Spark would love to hear your thoughts on underrated projects or for ones that if in a massive correction, what are you going to pick up?
Yeah, I mean, underrated, I'm more looking at a future play here, I guess, that's no longer out.
I think that Blade of God X is a really interesting game to keep an eye on.
It was a pretty successful game series in Asia and had some previous Web two titles with like 14 million revenue.
It's a RPG souls like I've not been particularly impressed with the other Web three souls likes that I've seen.
And I think that that is a genre where expectations on execution from players is really high mediocre execution.
I don't think can be made up for in other ways.
Gameplay isn't public yet for it, but the team is showing me some footage and it's the best looking gameplay I've seen in that genre for Web three.
Definitely really polished, really nails down that sort of grand ominous vibe.
So, yeah, they've got some big partners and big backers.
They've got some narratives to latch on to.
Can't give details on any of that, but I think it will surprise people when it comes out.
So I think like a lot of games that are going to be big in the East, it'll probably be slept on by a lot of people in the West.
That's one I recommend keeping an eye on.
The second play, I'm actually waiting on a possible entry for this one myself.
So I'm not going to say too much about it, except that for being the first game and token to launch by a team with a one billion dollar plus market cap, it's definitely slid under the radar.
So I'll just leave that there. And in terms of if we get a big dip, a big correction, what am I looking to pick up?
I guess it depends how big the dip is.
There's two projects that I've wanted to get into for some time and have just been priced out.
And I don't think we're probably going to get a dip big enough for me to really yolo back in.
But I would love to be able to get into Pirate Nation if it had like a really sizable drop.
Yeah, like a really pretty sizable ones.
I'm not into buying gaming NFTs at anywhere near 0.5 East, generally speaking.
But would love to be able to get into that in some way.
I missed out on that, unfortunately, had some bids in.
But why why Pirate Nation out of all the other ones that are like kind of blowing up right now,
why would you want a massive dip out of Pirate Nation versus another blockchain game or another NFT?
Yeah, you sound a little bit underwater, by the way.
But I think they've got incredible team, one of the best teams in Web 3.
And they're building a game that is in the same sort of genre is probably not the right word,
but the same sort of style as games they've previously built and had a lot of success with.
The game's been building for a couple of years now.
So it's a decent ways along in development.
And I think it's soon going to get its chance to actually launch and try and see Web 2 adoption.
So it's going to have access to that narrative.
I think at some point there'll be a big on-chain narrative and it will benefit from that.
It will probably be the biggest, most well-known game that is on-chain.
Having said that, it's so polished compared to other on-chain games that it doesn't need that narrative to do well.
So it can access like just the normal gaming narratives.
And they're hinting at a token soon, which was one of the things that stopped me buying even after it pumped
and went from like 0.4 to 0.2.
If I had have known there was a token like I would have bought.
Most U.S. teams at that time were very much avoiding a token.
And while there's not been a token explicitly announced, there's a lot of hints that there is going to be one.
So yeah, if I could go back in time, would love to have a position in Pirate Nation.
And sorry, you had a couple more or you had one more before I interrupted you and asked you to go a little bit deeper.
Yeah, I've blanked on that.
So maybe skip me on that one for now.
Oh, sorry, guys. I really do appreciate it.
I can hear it in the comments now.
You know, hate me in the comments.
That helps with engagement anyway.
So, Jonah, what are you looking at in terms of either corrections or, you know, something that you're looking at?
Maybe if the market cools down a little bit, what you're picking up or even maybe things that are going to be coming out to mint soon.
Yeah, there's a number I'm looking at.
That's one of the clients I have, which I can't share yet.
I think that one's really interesting.
But of course, I'm biased, right?
Because I think they're going to do something in the mobile space that's different because it is a Web3 mobile game.
And I think people like it.
As I said before, Fableborn, I think Fableborn, because of like, Mavia's price, people are going to do what's called a coke buy.
When they didn't get into Mavia, they'll look for a second place and second place sometimes can become first place.
So I'll buy Fableborn purely on the coke buy.
Let me pull up my list actually.
Yeah, you did like a 20 token list recently, didn't you?
Yeah, I was seeing if I still feel like my I'm going to do this once a month is what I decided.
So I'm going to see how I still feel.
So persona, I'm actually thinking of listing my NFT because I just don't like the auction thing.
So I was really excited before.
But like whenever a team doesn't have like a great smart contract and get that level of like exposure, it makes me really nervous.
Because if you can't do like a pretty decent smart contract, it doesn't tell me give me good signs about the future versus like Azuki had a really good smart contract.
So like that's a pretty good barometer.
Oh, this one is going to come out, I assume next month or something, but Gaiman, G-A-I-M-I-N.
The reason I'm interested in this one, I don't know how much I'll buy.
Disclosure, I do have an opportunity to write a check into them.
So I'm thinking about it.
Is the fact that it hits like three narratives in one.
They already have a Web2 business, so they do GPU compute, which is really good with AI right now because everyone's looking for compute power.
Two is D-PEN because they can connect to like GPUs all around the world and D-PEN is a big narrative in the crypto space.
And then three is gaming.
And they just announced they're doing a layer two chain on top of BNB, which I think they're the first in the world to do.
All those things make me interested in the token, which is not out yet.
So Gaiman is interesting.
I put Azuki here, but mainly for anime token.
I think if Persona fails, it's just more bullish for Azuki because it shows how hard it actually is to make it Azuki level collection.
And if they have a token that's adjacent, even if it's third party, it'll probably suck the oxygen and have almost all their anime projects in the space,
which would mean that a lot of them go under the one banner of anime token.
So excited to see what they do with Azuki.
BEAM was one of them just because if Polygon has IMX, then Avax has BEAM.
That's my thesis. Simple as that.
Every chain that has like these child chains needs to have one winner.
And it looks like everyone's picking BEAM as the winner publisher chain, just like how IMX is appreciating now.
I put Polygon because I think it's an underdog, but I'm biased and I think they want to win badly, so I think they'll try.
And if they don't, they'll die.
But if they try, then they could go up big in the cycle.
My other thesis there is simple.
People on the last cycle know what Polygon is.
That's one of those tokens that made it into the mainstream.
So if mainstream does come back, they'll probably just buy things they already knew about before.
That's just my thought there.
Number nine was Ronin, simply because of the staking for more games and more game tokens.
And you know, they just showed Kaedro, so I think they have a healthy set of games continuing out.
Plus they have Wild Forest, and if Wild Forest does a token, that has a mobile narrative.
Ten was Shuffle, which is a gambling platform that has stake executives.
I like that one because of gambling, and they have it legally, and they're making money.
Number eleven on biased Nifty Island, because they're one of my clients.
But every time Yuga fails, it's another bullish point for Nifty Island.
Every time Yuga fucks up, Nifty Island token can go up.
So I feel like they just play the inverse card of Yuga.
And so that would be my personal bet.
And then number twelve, again, biased Pixelmon.
I did write a check into there, and I think it's pretty obvious why I like Pixelmon.
It's just got, like, the most attention.
And it has an interesting story in fucking Kevin.
And Kevin is such a powerful meme that you can't really fuck with Kevin.
I put Aria on number thirteen.
I'm not sure if I still feel that way.
Just like, it's got, it's a really good game.
I've seen the game in private.
I think it has potential.
I just worry about web two people coming to web three and not knowing what they're doing.
Especially after looking at Persona.
Number fifteen and sixteen is Guildfie and Shrapnel.
Guildfie, because they're going the beam model, so they feel like an early beam.
Although I haven't bought anything there yet.
In Shrapnel, I'm biased, but my thesis on Shrapnel is,
if they actually do have a successful game, then they'll end up becoming a publisher.
Which would mean they acquire other games under that umbrella.
I just don't know how long that play pans.
I don't know what the scope of that play is.
That may be more of a long term thing for me than a short term.
There's a bunch of others that I can't talk about yet,
because I have interviewed them, and they're not public.
But they don't have token out yet, so I'm not getting alpha.
But there are some that have not come to this space yet,
that are planning to around the time of GDC,
that I think are going to surprise people.
They're all waiting for GDC to announce it and talk about it.
It's what it looks like for most of these things.
Yeah, there's a lot of same.
Whenever coming to talking to some of the founders,
they're coming out with a lot of announcements during GDC, which is cool.
I think GDC is becoming a hub for a lot of these web 3 gaming,
to be able to kind of make announcements, making partnerships,
doing all that stuff, co-marketing and everything like that.
And it's like three years, and also it's really close to the halving as well.
Just works out a lot for people this year.
Last GDC was the Polygon immutable type of partnership for that.
Jonah also mentioned Kaedro, and I also put that up whenever he did mention it.
Icy put out a trailer, and that's something that's going to be coming to Ronin as well.
Not sponsored by Ronin or anything like that, but just very clean.
They have a lot of Web 2 attention already,
so there can be a narrative that comes with it.
A lot of different types of, Web 3 also likes the different types of companies
that they worked for before, and the Avatar, the Last Airbender, Avatar, the actual,
I guess I like Avatar, the Last Airbender better actually,
but Avatar also the recent production as well.
A lot of things coming up for Ronin as well when it comes to Kaedro,
so I did post that up top.
I also wanted to double-click on Guildfie as well.
No Guildfie. They have some stuff coming up as well.
I think Spark has mentioned it previously, so we all aligned there.
Yeah, Fableborn, we all mentioned it last time, and we're doing it again.
Fableborn is something that we're looking at that we think that's going to cook
over the course because they have a solid game and mafia thing.
Thank you, Jonah, for stealing all the thunder there.
One thing to note here, guys, we kind of already said it,
so I'm going to bypass this question of what have you bought lately.
Spark, I'll send this to you just because people like to see that,
and then we'll just go on to the next topic after that.
What have you bought lately, Spark, if anything?
Yeah, I guess I should briefly, I probably should have talked about this
for the last question, but I've not bought any of these,
but only because I am already so overexposed to it
But with everything being overvalued at the moment
and there being so little, most projects that are not currently overvalued,
it's for a very good reason. They're not great projects.
So Infinity Guards is one of the very few high quality projects
that has airdrops for their Genesis NFT in gaming
that you can buy at like 0.1 ETH right now.
They've got a lot of shit coming up in the next few months.
They're like my number one gaming project personally
and super undervalued right now.
I think you're going to make it, Matt. I think you're going to make it.
SparkC's been doing this for the longest time,
so I think you're going to make it, Jon.
Two years of SparkC saying this, I think you're good.
But yeah, in terms of what I have bought lately,
I bought actually the Fire token by Matrix.
So Matrix is like a mobile shooter game.
It's by a Chinese team, like good VC backing,
They've got an NFT collection that's sitting at like 2.5 ETH for
being stable there for months.
Pretty good amount of hype around it, I'd say.
And they've got a governance token launching soon,
but they've put out their in-game utility token first,
We've all seen what happens to utility tokens.
I'm not going to sit here and say that a utility token is a great long-term hold.
At least this isn't like an infinite supply one,
but it's still going to face heaps of dilution
and it's rarely a priority for the team
or even a good idea for them to drive long-term value to the utility token.
But it's currently the only liquid way to bet on the success of Matrix
and it's how I think a lot of people will bet
on the success of the governance token, which is coming.
I think it's in the team's interest to pump this token in the lead-up
to their governance token.
And the team has shown a willingness with their NFTs
to market-make a pump if they want to.
And it's a very low-float token right now,
so it's not hard to do that.
The other thing is there's an upcoming bit of utility for the token.
It's needed to open these loot crates that you can get for playing the game
and there's speculation that these loot crates,
speculation by one of their VC backers no less on Twitter,
that these loot crates will contain the governance token.
So I can definitely imagine people buying the fire token,
the utility token, and burning it to gain access
to the governance token in the crate.
I think market cap's like seven mil right now.
Do your own research on that in case I'm mistaken.
Definitely a pretty degen play, but I like the risk reward there,
so I picked up a little bit like a week ago
at a pretty similar price to what it is right now.
Just wanted to say I just sold my persona.
Yeah, it's up like above .5 now, right? I think I saw.
Yeah, I just sold mine for .5. I don't know.
A lot of people, like whenever people sell and make money,
they always cry that like, oh my God, I could have made $100,000.
First off, I'm very lucky. I got it for .069, which is $200.
I just sold it for like $1,405. I'm going to make $1,200.
Like that's a pretty good multiple for an NFT
that's had a pretty bad auction system.
I actually was really wanting to hold it,
but I have this weird feeling that they didn't even bother
to do their contract at all in any capacity
and that they just like asked Exterio to pull one off the shelf
because I remember this exact same issue with Overworld,
which makes me think it's a similar contract to Overworld,
and I love Exterio from a launchpad perspective
of like the way they conduct the marketing.
I don't love the smart contract stuff,
and I highly advise companies to,
even if they have a launchpad,
hire an independent contractor to review it anyway,
because man, I was so excited to hold this,
This wasn't something where I was going to dump on people
after posting it sort of shit.
My thought was I was going to hold this
and wait for the Unagi token
because they're going to do an Unagi token,
but my fear is that they don't know about smart contracts
like what happens when they do like tokenomics
and they do like a token release,
like that makes me really nervous,
so I could definitely be wrong,
and it would mean like these pumped to the moon,
but you know, I'll take my little gain
and you know, use it to pay editors or something.
content has been definitely leveling up, Big Doc.
Spark, I know also a lot of people asked you a question
a few weeks ago about your,
I forget what the collection was,
the little, I don't even know why, I forget,
Goblin Town? Yeah, I think it was Goblin Town.
How you were down bad on that as well.
Maybe I'm wrong there, but we'll have to hear that.
Yeah, I'm not sure what you're talking about there,
unless you mean the story about when I saw Goblin Town early,
I think it was Castaways too.
In saying like, don't you think,
don't you ever think about like, how much money you lost?
You said it was story time from you for a few weeks ago.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, in terms of like that goes towards
what Jonah was saying about some people will sell
and the NFT goes on to do a 10X
and they just like can't get over it,
like they're bitter about that decision for a long while to come.
I also don't have that problem and don't try and pick local tops
and more than happy to sell, even if it could go higher.
For me, I only get upset if I had like bad decision making process.
You know, I think if the process to make the sell was correct,
like you're not going to be right all the time.
You can go all in with aces in poker
and you're still going to lose a bunch of hands.
It's not about the results, it's about the process.
I think for me, I'm going to hold my personas despite everything I've said.
I don't commit to decisions like that and just not change it.
Like I could change my mind like later today or tomorrow,
but my current thinking is that I will end up holding them.
Completely agree with what Jonah said though,
when you're looking at how a team is going to perform in the future
on things that they've never done before, right?
They've never launched a token, come up with tokenomics.
So you can't look at their past actions.
You can't look at past token launches or past tokenomics
to try and figure out if the team has the skills for it.
You've got to go off what they've done recently that's unrelated to that.
And if they've had issues with their entertainment,
then those issues can crop up in other ways for different things
I do think that ultimately if they don't continue to fuck up,
that sentiment will probably recover.
I don't think it's been bad enough fud to sink it yet.
I do think that's like perhaps a little bit of hopium here,
but if the team is smart and they want to get people back on side,
announcing a few things sooner than they might otherwise have
about the token, about the staking,
perhaps about how big of an airdrop people will get,
there's the capacity for that to happen, for them to try and recover.
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if selling now is not a bad call,
but for the time being, I'm going to hold.
Knowing me, it'll go to the moon, but I'll be happy for everyone else.
I'm still making my money.
I'm still happy, still running a business.
Look, I faded portal coin.
Yep, also faded portal coin.
Also, again, not upset about that.
I think my process for fading it was good, but yeah.
I also faded Mavia for the same reason, which is why I've changed money.
I haven't lost money really.
When I make trades, I think I might lose money at overworld
because I've still been holding it, by the way,
because I've been waiting for that token.
Do you think I've over-held?
I've been a big proponent of holding overworld.
I feel like Jeremy knows Pompanomics better than anyone else
in terms of his own project.
And I'm just betting that no matter how far I hold,
I'm going to get a fat drop.
Plus, here's the difference.
Persona, I don't see anything on Persona's site that says Binance Backed.
When I look at overworld, I see Binance Backed,
so I'm like, all right, I'll just hold this thing, right?
I'll hold it through the duration.
Actually, were they in Binance Labs?
If that's true, then I just fucked up.
I didn't see that, but it's not eventing.
I'll buy a good dinner and cry about it.
Anytime I see Binance, I'm like, okay, I'll buy it.
Yeah, I mean, look, I've been saying this for a bit on Twitter,
where if overworld does get Binance,
like the NFTs right now are an absolute fucking bargain.
Yeah, they're a massive buyer.
Well, they do get Binance. They're backed by them.
I've never seen anyone get invested in my Binance,
and when they have a token not get listed on Binance.
It's going to be a pretty big win in my opinion.
I also faded mafia, by the way,
and that is one where I think I actually was wrong
in the decision-making process.
Can you explain what you thought was wrong?
Because I don't feel like I was wrong
in terms of thinking like an actual investor.
I was wrong in the way that we think about narratives and sentiment.
Yes, that's how I think I was wrong as well.
Because I had a lot of issues with the game,
and not only that, like the vesting schedule for the round
that I could have got into,
for the FDV that it was launching at,
which was pretty high by new token standards.
I guess some things I can't go into too much,
but some interactions with people that were offering me the round.
Oh yeah, I know about those too.
I won't say it, but people who are supposedly investors,
who aren't actually investors.
Definitely some red flags there, yeah.
Ultimately, a lot of that stuff does not matter
if there's enough hype for the token.
I don't think I did enough research into their airdrop strategy,
because I think that helped them get a lot of metrics,
which helped them pull in a lot of hype.
I was arming and arring over getting into the round,
and I ultimately ended up fighting it, so alas.
It's okay with Fableborn, that's our co-pie, remember?
Yeah, exactly. All of us are on the...
I tell you, that's my thesis.
Everyone who missed Mavia has copium.
They're going to see Fableborn.
All that I need to do with Fableborn is show it to the non-gaming spaces,