Episode 1: The SolAnts Go Marching One By One

Website: Solluminati Order

Website: Metamounts

Website: Panzerdogs

We did not want to say this but we have to release this heartbreaking information. Our old friend dev stole all the money and we no longer have any control of the project. We can’t afford to continue we need new dev. The dev also has ownership of the discord so we must make a new one

Website: Shi Guardians

Hey bro, can I copy your homework? Sure, just change it a bit so it doesn't look obv- pic.twitter.com/m6ORWrBthC

— Transformice (@Transformice) December 9, 2021

Flash mint and Money Back explained.

Website: SolAnts

Bat City Underground

Gapettes on Sol

Gods of Solana – Proof of Pizza

Hello and welcome to episode number one of the Mint Fix podcast. I’m glad you’re here and I really appreciate you taking the time to listen. 

Mint Fix is a podcast all about NFTs, and I’m going to focus mostly on the Solana NFT space, but I’ll cover it in anything interesting to the whole NFT market as well.

I plan on it being a weekly news and reviews show, but I’ll be mixing in some interviews with artists and developers. I track a ton of Solana projects as they launch and I’m just sharing some of the things I’ve learned along the way. 

I plan on this being a weekly recap of Solana NFT news, which projects sold out, which were rug pulls and if anybody’s doing something new or different in the NFT space, I’ll share that too. 

So let me introduce myself to you. I’m your host Mike Hale. I’ve spent the last 20 plus years as a web developer. I’m an avid crypto investor and NFT collector. I started digging into Solana projects a few months ago, and I’ve already been in and out of about 50 different Solana NFTs, probably hold about 25 NFTs.

Now some winners, some not so much, speaking of winners, let’s jump right into this week’s sellouts.

The first sellout project I want to cover was called Solluminati. This is phase one of the project. There’s going to be a total of 6,666 pieces on they’re priced at two SOL each.

Phase one, there was a total of 3333. 2667 for sale and 666 were airdropped to holders of the.

And “The Eye” NFT in this project was a presale that got you, the Solluminati character NFT, as well as some other benefits. One interesting thing about this project is the NFT character holders get access to the Solluminati  tools that they’re launching. This works like a SaaS, but with holding an NFT is your subscription.

This is a new approach I’ve seen in a couple NFT projects like Shi Guardians by SolanaFloor, which I’m going to talk about in a little bit. Solluminati has three tools that holding this NFT will get you access to. The first is Radar Social Tracking. There’s no real Solana equivalent, according to the team.

It’s intended to help identify new projects and evaluate projects after launch to track how they’re adhering to the roadmap. If the audience stays engaged with the project. 

Their second tool is called Compass. This would be something like Salonanalysis or Icy tools. It’s going to give you an overall view of the Salona NFT market and project floors, volumes trends, market caps, and other information like that.

The final app that you’ll have access to is called Navigator. These are tools along the lines of Nansen, but for Solana NFTs, a lot easier to use and much cheaper. An example of this is to show when an NFT is at the floor, and it’s rank to try to flag good entry points to a project. 

Now I did not buy in to Solluminati  in this phase so I haven’t used any of the tools. I can’t say how helpful they are. They definitely sound like they’d be useful to NFT collectors, but this is an interesting trend in NFTs to use holding an NFT, to give you access to apps and tools. I think that’s something we’re going to see more of in the near future so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. 

There was another sellout this week and maybe also a bit of a rug pull and that was Metamounts. They launched with 1,111 items in their collection and they did sell out, but apparently they posted a fake link on their website. They said to stop bots, but their discord was closed so no one knew that it was a fake mint leak and it’s sold out as well as the real one. 

So obviously people were mad. They felt that they’d been ripped off calling it with a rug pull. It also didn’t help that as this mint was going on, babyhipposolana, which pulled off their own rug pull was tweeting for the first time in weeks to shill the project.

So again, a lot of people declared it a rug pull, but it didn’t appear to end up being one in the. I wasn’t in the discord as this was going on, but they did promise refunds if you minted from the fake link and I saw several people tweeting saying they’d been refunded. Their official statement was:

If you minted from the fake link, your NFT will not show up on alpha.art as verified and refunds will be carried out in the next days. 

So hopefully everyone who did mint on the fake link was able to retrieve their money in the end with a refund. 

After the mint, it came up that some of the art seemed to be borrowed from a game called MapleStory. It wasn’t outright stolen art. It was at different angles, but there were a lot of similarities.

This begs the question of is a project that borrows art from another project still original in the end? 

None of the controversy seemed to matter. Last time I checked on an alpha.art, the floor was above two SOL. I didn’t mint this one, but I’m going to keep an eye on it to see how it all plays out.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a mistake that a team should make, especially when other people’s money is on the line. And while it may not have been malicious NFT teams really need to do a better job of making sure things like this don’t happen. 

Another sellout project this week was Panzerdogs, and this was a larger collection with a higher price.

There were 5,555 NFTs in the collection and these sold for one SOL. With the market conditions now that’s a tough ask, but they did sell out within 15 minutes. 

Panzerdogs is a play to earn gaming NFT.  They do have a playable demo of the game in place now, but you need a Panzerdog to play the demo.

There’s tons of gaming NFTs out there, or at least ones that have the promise of the game in the future. I tend to shy away from those collections or at least don’t hold the game as one of the real benefits of the project until there’s something in place. But Panzerdogs looks like it may be one of those that delivers on their promise. 

Andthat’s the good news. Now let’s get onto the bad. 

Of course, there were a few rug pulls at play in the market too. One was Gaikutso Demons, which completely disappeared after the mint. The account popped up just a few days before the launch, which is always a red flag and no real info or insight on what happened, but they did leave kind of a vague statement in their discord.

“We did not want to say this, but we have to release this heartbreaking information. Our old friend dev stole all the money and we no longer have any control of the project. We can’t afford to continue. We need a new dev. The dev also has ownership of the discord. So we must make a new” 

Hopefully you did not get rugged pulled by the Gaikutso Demons.

That was a pretty bad one, but there was one that was way worse. And I was watching this one. I almost joined in the mint, but I saw a few major red flags. The biggest were some very unrealistic promises, they made. 

 They pledged a hundred percent buyback policy of any NFTs under one soul on the second day. Maybe they could do that, but probably not. 

And the next promise, this one was a doozy, they claimed that Minters would get airdrop, the $RAT token, which would somehow provide $45 a day in passive income, but had zero explanation of how that would work. 

A lot of mints lately have been dropping coins to their holders, but be wary anytime a project makes claims about the tokennomics of any project coins that you receive. Obviously, a 45 day return for over 2000 holders is not feasible.

I was following along in the discord and it was pretty sketchy. The team went MIA right after the mint, and they returned only to keep making false claims about how many had sold. I saw a total of two people share theirs in the show-your-rats channel so people were not minting. The devs only kept coming out to make false claims about how many had sold, trying to get people to mint saying there’s only 48 left. Now there’s only 30 left. 

Well, looking at the candy machine on the backend, it was obvious they weren’t getting anywhere near that much. And their dev Salvador at one point gave up on even trying to hide the fact that this was a scam. He even seemed to be having fun with it. I got a DM later from someone who is in the Discord. He outright admitted to scamming over 200 people with the project. 

There’s another project I wanted to go over and while this wasn’t a full rug pull, this was kind of an example of a project that went badly. I mentioned in the Metmounts, that they had borrowed art from a game. And a worse example came this week from a project called the Solana Lab Rats.

This wasn’t a rug pull, but the project had to be put on pause because of the artwork, while not outright stolen, was basically swiped from a game called Transformice. Transformice, or T4M, isn’t an NFT based game. The object of the game is you play as mice. You collect cheese, you take it back to the hole for currency called cheese to spend on items, maps and other things.

This came up because Transformice made a funny tweet about the project. 

:Hey bro, can I copy your homework? Sure. Just change it a bit. So it doesn’t look obv-“

And then it had a picture with a side-by-side comparison of the art from the game and from the Solana lab rats project. Now this’ll be in the show notes, but it’s obviously a pretty generous take on “inspired by”.

This led to the team leader Bash making a statement in the project’s Discord about it. 

One thing this project had going for it was, it was endorsed by Kookcapital of the TiaTacosNFT project, and Bash made it very clear that kook shouldn’t be held responsible in any way for this and it was solely their fault. Kook had been advising the team had left the project and then returned, but was unaware of the issue of the stolen art before.

They claimed there were no bad intentions and that it wasn’t going to be a rug pull. The issue at heart was the artist Remy who had played and loved the Transformice game wanted to recreate the mice as an NFT PFP project, which was ok’ by Bash, who admitted on discord:

“This is something I gave the wrong advice on”

And while the art wasn’t an outright copy paste. It was close enough that I’d be okay calling it stolen. Since then Bash and Remy have stepped back from the project and are only helping transition the project to a new team. Moudi, who is the only original team member still on the project shared that they’re looking for a new artist to recreate original art for the project. 

Anyone that did mint a lab rat will be one-to-one airdropped an NFT from the new collection, which will be 2200 items at the same price of 0.13 SOL. 

I don’t feel like there was any evil intent with this project and I do appreciate the way the team took responsibility for what happened, but it’s a shame that a project with promise had such bad decisions that ultimately hurt everyone involved the rest of the team, the people that minted, even the influencers that helped promote the project.

This is a shame because you often can’t vet every project you want to join in that it’s using original art until it’s too late.

There were some other interesting projects that came out this week that I wanted to mention. I talked about Shi Guardians before, and they had an interesting Mint. Shi Guardians was launched by the team that built SolanaFloor, which is an NFT analysis project.

This was also a project where holding the NFT gets you access to their SolanaFloor Pro app.There are four classes of guardians they released. And if you held one of each, this also gave you access to the project DAO at launch.

Solana Floor has the ability to export NFT data as CSV, show a history of projects, set targeted alerts for NFTs, which is a good way to snipe as well as giving early access for partner collections and pro only channels on discord.

Future plans include real-time data, transaction history, wallet activity, API access, and advanced floor insights sites based on various traits and attributes for the NFT project itself. There were a total of 8,888 in the project. They’re doing this as a phased release to onboard people into the app not all at once.

And they sold about 1200 of the 2000. So about three quarters or so, The Mecca guardian class was the most popular with 434 sold. And the Dance class sold the least at 220. 

There are also a few projects this week that I did mint into. And a couple that I regret, the first one I got in was SolAnts/ SolAnts had a new take on minting.

They did what they call the flash mint. This is partial drops of the project that only lasts five minutes each time. That may be a bit longer due to the way that candy machine works and transactions still being processed. There’s a notification in the discord shortly before the phase opens. Now, whitelist members get a bit more notice and I’d been white listed for holding a Pesky Penguin.

The intention of this way of minting, according to the team is to let the most active members of the community have the best chances to mint and avoid a slow mint, which can cause a lot of FUD. It also attracts supporters to push the following mints. 

The ants themselves, there are four types. There’s the black, the fire, the Pharaoh and the mythic ant. And one unique thing about the way they did this flash mint is whichever of the four classes of ant sells the least, everyone who bought one in that round gets refunded. 

So I got lucky and I not only minted a cool looking black ant, but black was the winner or in this case loser and I got refunded. The nice part about this was the refund didn’t require any action on my part shortly after the mint phase the SOL was back in my wallet. 

And I got to admit, it was a bit of fun on the discord to see the different teams reading for their classes and to sell the least. I’ve seen a lot of various ways projects launched their mints and I don’t know if the flash mint would work for every project, but it was cool to see a project trying something new like this. 

Another project I did mint into this week was bat city underground. 3333 at .3 SOL each. When I bought in there was about 1800 sold. So about half by the time I mintedt, the one I got was pretty plain, but still kind of cute. It’s just a fun little project. I thought the art was nice. 

I also minted a Gapette on SOL. Why? I’m not sure why. And we’ll just pretend that I didn’t, they had done a Free ming with Gapes on soul and you could burn five of them to get one Gapette. And I’m going to say Gapes, because it sounds better than Gape. It was a smaller project. There was only, I believe 696 available. That’s kind of what drew me in. But unfortunately last I checked the floor price is about one third of the price so taking an L on that one. 

And finally, the other project I bought into was Gods of Solana. Now Gods of Solan is the first project I’ve come across that is verified by the Proof of Pizza project. Proof of Pizza was started by one of the metaplex developers Levicook. The aim is to vet and validate salon NFT projects to help prevent rugs.

Part of that process is there’s an interview. They’ll review your social media accounts, an ID verification and code review by the team. So NFT teams are doxxed to the proof of pizza team, but now publicly, and while this makes me feel a little bit more comfortable in this case, it didn’t seem to help much with the sales. 

Despite a 0.35 SOL price there were 190 sold in a pre-sale on the same candy machine when the mint started. And then when I checked later on the mint day, they had only sold about 250 total. I checked back just before recording this and they had sold over 400 by then. 

Personally, I don’t get too bothered when a project doesn’t sell a ton of NFTs. I find when that happens, it’s usually people that really want to support and be involved in the project. I like the art of these. Although once again, the one I minted wasn’t too lucky and it wasn’t anything too rare. 

So that wraps up the first episode of the mint fix podcast. I hope you liked it and stick around for the next one. If I missed a sellout or anything noteworthy just ping me on Twitter at @mintfixart, and I’ll try to get it into next week’s show. 

I’m also scheduling some interview episodes so if you’d like to have your project featured on the show, I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you to get in touch with me. So again, thanks for listening. I hope this was helpful to you and I’ll see you next time.