Episode 2: Rug Rug Chicken Drop

Website: SolSwats

Twitter: @LuckyKittensNFT

Website: Dreamland Monkeys

Website: Angry Armadillos

Website: BitBrawl

Website: Baby Ape Social Club

We realized that the majority of the whitelisted members were here only because we offered incentives for other things such as contests or giveaways involving money only and had no interest of minting, which left us deluded. 

At one point we had reached over 15,000 members just before our mint, the hype was immense and chat hadn’t stopped for a minute in over 2 days. This hype was nowhere to be seen when our mint went live.  

Out of the 450 whitelisted I can count who actually minted on my fingers. Yeah I am disappointed and demotivated as I had bigger expectations.

This has taught me and the team and a lot of things and we saw mistakes which led us to unrealistic (for that moment) expectations. 

the fact that ungrateful people who I’ve given away money and asked them to tweet something for us after have blocked me or never talked to me again? Will any of those things stop me? NO.

Fragbite acquires hypercasual studio Lucky Kat for €7m

Website: Panzerdogs

Desolates

Welcome back to the Mint Fix podcast, your weekly review of everything in the Solana NFT space. I’m going to go ahead and jump right in with some of this week’s sellouts. 

First up, we had SolSwats. Now, this was basically a free mint. It was only .05 SOL to mint, but it did take it a while to sell out. It was about four and a half hours, and as their Twitter very specifically mentions 273 minutes and 27 seconds. 

SolSwat is a collection of pixelated SWAT team members. Their plan is to have an iOS and Android army style game released within 30 days of the NFT mint, so we’ll check back in January to see if they pulled it off. 

They do have a game preview on their website, but it’s just a screenshot not an actual playable demo. After the launch of magic Eden there were about 500 listed. The floor was just below mint at .03 and there was a total volume of 78 SOL so lower price, but definitely some decent activity on that one. 

Next up was Lucky Kittens. And if you’ve got one of these, you are pretty lucky. Lucky Kittens is a collection of 5888 unique Asian Solana NFTs, which hold the keys to physical kitten clubs and community events. 

This one sold out in about a minute and on secondary the floor prices above mint already at about one and a quarter Sol on magic Eden and one and a half on Alpha art. 

Now there have been sales of this one as high as 19 and 25 SOL with a total volume of 13,000 SOL to this one’s definitely seeing some activity. 

Another sellout that we had this week was Dreamland Monkeys, or there was 1111 of these and they sold at .8 SOL and Dreamland Monkeys are the Genesis series of a Dreamland Friends collection. I’m not clear on what the next set of this collection is going to be or when it’s going to be, but I was able to pick up my own Dreamland monkey. 

There were a few issues with the mint site. Some of that had to do with some of the Solana issues this week. Mints were going through slowly and then the issue was fixed and then it sold out in just a few minutes. I was able to snag one. Nothing special kind of ranked right in the middle of the pack. And the floor price on this one dropped to about half that price point l with just just over 1000 in volume. 

So this was a week of sell outs that just kept coming. The next one we have up is Angry Armadillos this was a collection of 2733 at half SOL each, described as: 

“once discovered and colonized by humans planet EL-12 has been turned into dystopian post-apocalyptic place reigned supreme by the angry armadillos”

So a planet run by armadillos? Sign me up. The project didn’t have a lot of utility but the artwork was pretty high quality and different. These armadillos are just cool looking. And every one of them looks rare if you ask me. 

This was another fast sell out. It sold out in seven minutes. I liked the art so I decided to go ahead and get one for my collection. Now unfortunately, the launch hype didn’t last in the floor on Magic Eden has dropped to under .2 SOL, but we’ll have to see how this one shakes out. 

And keeping with the theme this week of sellouts that dropped in secondary after the launch is Alpha Dragons. The Alpha Dragons art is pretty cool. They’re just kind of fun looking. They’re semi pixelated. They’re not one of those overly pixelated projects but they aren’t 3D art. 

The sold at .55 SOL and have dropped now on secondary at the time recording this to .15. This project was interesting, but it didn’t really promise a lot different than most other projects do. So maybe this one will rise but we’ll have to keep an eye on it.

One of the bigger more anticipated mints this week was BitBrawl and BitBrawl proclaims itself as the PVP game of Solana.:

“Fight your way into victory with 10,000 brawlers from four different regions was ranked and tournament modes bit Brawl is the only skill based competitive PVP game built on Solana.”

One fun thing is they’ve also partnered with other projects like DeGods, Pesky Penguins, Thuisbirdz and more. And you can use your NFT’s in the game as playable skins. 

This launch was on Magic Eden’s Launchpad, which is a set of tools that the marketplace provides for launching projects on there. I’ve done it a couple times. I got my baby Yoda and my Orc Racing Club through the launch pad. It doesn’t guarantee a sellout or that the project will be a success. But projects that use Launchpad are vetted by magic Eden so they’re putting their reputation on the line with the projects they select to work with. It is a positive factor when you’re evaluating a project. 

One of the interesting things which was kind of a pain in the butt to was this launch requires a CAPTCHA to mint. Now, I hate these things. Personally. You think you know what a bicycle looks like until you have to find them with old eyes. I’m not sure who calls it a motor bus. But what are you going to do? You would click mint, the capture would pop up and once you’ve verified that, then you could approve the transaction in Phantom. 

This one was very hyped and it’s sold out in about 10 minutes, it probably would have been much quicker without the CAPTCHA. That does slow people down. But I was able to snag one. I tried to get more than one of this one, but every transaction was failing. 

And one note, you have to be careful on this because the one that did go through said the mint had failed, not that it was a success. And I only noticed it because I had another tab open to try again and I saw that my SOL balance had changed. 

I’ve accidentally ended up with more than one mint on a project because I got the minting failed message even though it went through. So now I make it a habit to check my wallet balance. After I attempt to mint to make sure it hasn’t changed before I tried to mint a second time. 

With a big collection like this. I expected the floor to drop right after the mint and it did. It dropped to about half the mint price of .5. One of the issues is when you have a project like this one that has 8300 items in it, people are going to mint into it, especially when it’s this hyped, then when they don’t get something that’s rare, they just dump it on the secondary. 

With the one I got, I would have probably been better off skipping them completely and just picking them up on the secondary, but I do like that chance that maybe I’m gonna get something special. 

Now I don’t know if you’re like me, but if you tend to step back a little bit on the weekends, or maybe you’re sick of all the different ape and ape derivative projects yet. If you are, you missed one big time and that’s the baby ape Social Club. 

“Baby Apes Social Club is 5000 Baby apes that reside on DAB Island, which is in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle. Inspired by our fellow Board Apes on Ethereum. We’re here to bring the baby a social club to the Solana ecosystem.”

These launched on a Sunday night for me. And despite hearing a lot of people talking about this project, I just wasn’t paying attention and let it slip by. I might be kicking myself for a while for that. The floor shot up and at the time of recording this the floor price was 15 SOL and they started at 0.9. 

The floor price has moved up and down a bit but it hasn’t gone that dramatically. You might get a lucky chance to pick one up at a bargain but it looks like this one might stay out of reach for most people for a while. 

So if you wrap up the sell outs this week, I saw seven sellouts. Three of them are now above the mint price on secondary and four below. I minted three of the sellout projects. Do you want to guess which side of that win/loss column I was? I was three for three below int. Better luck next week. 

But it wasn’t all fun and games that it wouldn’t be a full week without some Rug Pulls. The first was Werewolf Pack which had some major red flags going in. The biggest, and this is just a no-no now, is the transaction was just sending your SOL to an address. When you’re minting an NFT in Phantom wallet, you can click View advanced transaction details, you’ll see a multi step process with steps like create account, initialize mint, create token account, if there’s just one step to send SOL you’re putting your SOL at risk. 

Now this is how things used to be. My first alarm was pre candy machine which, a candy machine is the smart contracts code that most Solana NFT Mints are using now, I just sent my SOL to a wallet and waited hoping it would show in my wallet. Six hours later, I eventually got it. 

That project is totally worthless now. And things have definitely come a long way in the months that I’ve been in the Solana and NFT space. But if a project is just asking you to send SOL to an address, chances are you are not going to get anything in return. 

They also promised a refund of one to five sold to everyone. But I don’t understand why you would promise to refund somebody and not just price it at the actual price if you’re going to refund everyone surprise surprise, Werewolf Pack completely disappeared shortly after the so-called mint. 

And this is a shame because most experienced NFT collectors would stay away from a project like this one. But if you’re new to NFTs, you’re more likely to get rugged by a project like this. 

Another Rug Pull I saw was Run Run Chicken Drop. Well, they ran ran and maybe we should call it rug rug chicken drop. And it’s a shame because I love chicken NFTs. I was gonna add one to my chicken tribe and chicken mafia collection. 

This was another one that promised a game and they even sold out their collection. But within just a couple of days, Twitter and discord were gone. I don’t see them listed on secondary anywhere. But when I checked they had quickly joined the .01 SOL Club, which is not where you want your project to be. 

There were also a couple things that jumped out at me this week. And I want to talk about one project in particular, because going into the mint this looked like it was going to be a pretty solid project that is Solana Empire. They had more than 12,000 members in their discord. They had reduced the collection down to 2000 items. And these are 3D cool looking warrior cats. The art on these was better than average for some of the projects I’ve been seeing lately. The only real roadblock for me was there was a 1.5 SOL mint price. And honestly, that did keep me from minting it. I may not have been the only one because when I checked this not long after their mint started, they had only sold 100 NFT’s. And I’m going to read some of a statement the team made about this in their discord. They said:

“we realized that the majority of whitelisted members were here only because we offered incentives for other things such as contests or giveaways involving money only, and had no interest of minting, which left us deluded. At one point we had reached over 15,000 members just before I meant the hype was immense and chat hadn’t stopped for a minute in over two days. This hype was nowhere to be seen when our mint went live. Out of the 450 whitelist I can count who actually minted on my fingers. I am disappointed and demotivated as I had bigger expectations. This has taught me and the team a lot of things. And we saw mistakes which led us to unrealistic, for that moment, expectations.”

They do promise that despite having so few minutes from the tens of thousands they spent on promotion, and having only six minutes in the public sale, three by one person, and I’m quoting here: 

“The fact that ungrateful people who have been given money and ask them to tweet something for us after have blocked me or never talked to me again. Will any of these things stop me? No.”

They promised to execute on every single word they wrote in the roadmap. Now this might be a tough road, if the mint only brought in the 15k to 20k US Dollars those numbers would mean especially if they are already in the hole spending tens of thousands on marketing, but at least they’re trying to make something of the project. 

This is also a good example of why a large whitelist or large discord membership doesn’t always mean a successful launch. There are a lot of people that are just going to get involved to get whatever free benefits they can in won’t truly support the project. 

One of the best things about blockchain projects is all the data is public. That can also be a bit of a negative too, because you can have bots and clever people find ways to time their minutes to try to snag legendary NFT’s. 

This was a problem with the mint of the Degen Trash Pandas a couple of weeks ago, one person was able to mint about 20 legendary level rarity items by timing their mints, when rares were coming up. 

One project trying to prevent something like this happening this week was mighty kingdom, they implemented what they called a bot users prevention system. And this would randomly make a limited number of the NFT’s in the collection with just a dark background. And during the minting session, you receive just the orcs head. Then after the mint, the metadata would be updated and the orc head would be replaced with the actual NFT. 

One thing I wasn’t clear on is if the traits were also hidden, because that is what somebody who wants to manipulate the mint would be looking at. If I know ahead of time, looking at candy machine items that NFT has rare traits and I know where it falls in the collection. I can try to time my mint to snag that particular NFT. 

I don’t know if this spot users prevention system they had in place was effective because the project didn’t sell out. It only sold about 10% of the 4000 items shortly after mint when I checked, I was a bit surprised they didn’t sell more. They seem to have a strong community, the art was pretty original and unique. But I do like seeing teams try to address issues like this in different ways. 

We have big news coming out of the NFT gaming space this week. Last week I talked about PanzerDogs selling out. Well this week LuckyKat Studios, the maker of PanzerDogs,  were acquired by Sweden based eSports and gaming company Fragbite Group, for an estimated 7.8 million US dollars. And they stated:

“With our move in play to earn with PanzerDogs , we see great synergies with the leading eSports company. Let’s go”

We’ll have to wait and see how PanzerDogs the game plays out. But this is definitely a good sign when gaming NFT collections are being acquired by game studios like that. 

Another project I did mint this week was Desolates. They released this collection in several phases and this was the fifth phase of release for the NFTS Desilets is a collection of 6666 NFT’s of planet in Alpha Centauri. Each NFT comes with a unique computer generated Twitter banner image as well as the keys to your own planet in a 3D multiverse. 

Now this is a unique project. The desolate NFT is a planet with traits like Moon, Sun, rings, terrain, the NFT size to be used as a social media banner, not just square art or a profile picture. But what’s cool about this project is that Desolates are 3D worlds. If you’ve ever played Roblox or Minecraft, you’ll get the feeling for how this works. 

An early version is live that will show all the NF T’s you have in your wallet automatically displayed on your planet. And eventually you’ll be able to customize your planet and add additional art. 

If you’re bored looking at your own collection. Planets also have portals for other worlds for you to explore. One neat surprise, and I forgot to mention this in last week’s episode, but I did mint an NFT from The Neighborhood which are 3D houses, and the neighborhood is also doing a batch releases where the price goes up incrementally until the full launch. 

But walking around my Desolates planet, my house was there in 3D and not just displayed like the other NFT’s. This does open up a lot of fun options for other NFT projects. I can have an ocean filled with rogue sharks, a coop for my chicken tribe, and I could see my DJ and trash panda rummaging through a virtual garbage can at night. I think one of the big NFT trends we’re going to see are projects like this that let you house and display your NFT collection in a way other than just a gallery in your wallet. 

Alright, that wraps up episode two of the Mint Fix podcast. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. I’ve added links in the show notes to some of the projects we discussed on the show. We’re now listed in most of the major podcast players and there’s links on the website mintfix.art where you can subscribe. 

I’m also trying something new and publishing this podcast on Audius. Audius is a really cool Solana based platform for music and audio. You should check it out and some of the artists there. So until next time, thanks for listening and I hope your floors continue to rise!