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- 🥛 NFTs - do you love 'em or hate 'em?
🥛 NFTs - do you love 'em or hate 'em?
Shaan Puri & Ben Levy
May 19, 2022
GM. This is the Milk Road where we come up with a different one-liner every day right here to explain what we do. Because we like to keep the Milk Fresh. It’s the little things, ya know?
We have good stuff today (and I swear to god, we’re not talking about Luna)
Estimated read time: 3 minutes and 31 seconds
🖼️ NFT's - Love 'Em or Hate 'Em
🚶 Stepn outside for some crypto
🍪 Bite-sized cookies
🤣 Meme of the day
NFTS - LOVE EM OR HATE EM?
I’ve never seen a tech trend as polarizing as NFTs.
The people who buy NFTs…love them. They are emotionally attached. They f*cking love their Apes, Punks, Penguins and more.
I swear I saw a guy say “goodnight” to his NFT the other day, the same way my daughter tucks her stuffed animals in for bed.
On the other hand…some people HATE NFTs.
They think they are stupid, and get enraged every time they hear a picture of a monkey just sold for more than their mortgage.
At first, I didn’t get the hate.
I mean..it’s ok if it’s not your thing. But why hate it? Do you hate paintings the same way you hate NFTs?
Now, I get it.
Because NFTs feel like get-rich-quick schemes. Artists making millions for a digital doodle? Random dudes flipping NFTs and making millions? And if a get-rich-quick scheme is happening, and you’re not the one getting rich…it feels bad. I get it.
That’s why I love Beeple.
He’s the #1 or #2 NFT artist in the world. He sold a single NFT for ~$69M+.
His art is cool - but that’s not why I love Beeple.
I love Beeple because of his backstory. The guy has created a new piece of digital art, every single day, for 15 years straight.
FIFTEEN YEARS STRAIGHT. EVERYDAY.
The Milk Road goes out 5 days a week. I’ve been doing this for 5 months and I feel like I deserve a purple heart award.
I can’t imagine doing 15 years straight of original art. Every. Damn. Day.
But he’s been doing that.
Look at his Instagram where he posts it every day. The art is great. But the endurance and consistency of creativity are what make him a 1 of 1 superstar.
And let’s be perfectly clear..he wasn’t making any money off these daily art pieces. There were no NFTs 15 years ago. But there he was, making digital art. Honing his craft. Building his fanbase. And finally, NFTs arrived as a business model for digital artists.
It makes me wonder... when all art was sculptured, and every artist was sweating in the sun chiseling away, did they hate the first painters?
Dude, you just sit inside and mix colors with a brush? Get out here with a hammer and chisel and make some REAL art. Do you have any idea how many tiny d*cks I’ve hand-carved from stone?
I feel like that’s what’s happening today. Haters view NFTs as something less than “real art.”
Artists are seen as money grabbers, and early NFT buyers are seen as undeserving winners of the crypto lottery.
And sure, there’s some truth to all of that.
But that takes nothing away from someone like Beeple. Fifteen years. Daily art creation. A decade before NFTs were even a thing. In my opinion, he deserves every frickin coin!
WE'VE BEEN STEPN FOR SOME CRYPTO
About a month ago, we told you we bought a $1,000 pair of digital shoes to play a Web3 game called StepN.
The idea is simple: if you walk or run, you earn tokens in the game.
And these tokens aren’t chuck-e-cheese tickets. They have a real market price. You can sell tokens you earn from StepN (currently 1 token = ~$3.00)
The cool kids are calling it “move-to-earn”.
There’s chit-chat that StepN is the next big game - so we decided to dive in & look at the stats:
StepN Stat Dive:
136k active users over the last week (impressive)
13,000 new users yesterday
~9,500 new shoes were minted
Users deposited about 579k SOL (~$30m) into StepN yesterday to buy from the marketplace
They currently hold $70m in the company wallets
Hot diggity dog. That revenue is nutty.
And they have ~460k+ lifetime users, just look at their growth over the last few months.
They’ve also been the number 1 GameFi token this year and have had an average daily trading volume of nearly $100 million last month.
StepN made about $30M in the first quarter and is picking up steam.
The Milk Road’s Take: It’s a fun idea, and it's cool to see it picking up real momentum. But what happens when user growth slows?
I honestly don’t think the game and payouts are sustainable with it's current tokenomics... Right now, new users buy shoes, and that pays the current users.
But I ask again, what happens when new user growth slows down? Will people stop playing the game if they're earning less than $0.50 for every walk? Or is it more about working out and earning a little cash? Time will tell.
TODAY'S MILK ROAD IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SORARE
Everyone knows about fantasy sports leagues. Either you’re in a league or you have a friend who’s in a league and follows every player on a week-to-week basis.
After all, the fantasy sports industry has been booming and is expected to reach ~$50B by 2027.
What Sorare does differently is they let you purchase officially licensed NFT digital cards for your favorite players (Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Bryce Harper, etc)
Build your squad, set your lineup each week and win rewards for how well your team does.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES
Facebook has filed 5 new trademarks for Meta Pay, their digital payments product. The trademarks cover things like a crypto wallet and an exchange.
Aave, a popular lending protocol, has launched an NFT-based decentralized social media platform called Lens. The new platforms let users own, control, and profit from their own content.
The creator of Rick and Morty is creating a new blockchain animated series called Krapopolis. There’s gonna be NFTs and tokens that provide exclusive perks and rewards to fans.
Coinbase launches a global crypto think tank - The Coinbase Institute. The goal is to help shape convos around policies for crypto.
MEME OF THE DAY
See ya tomorrow!
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DISCLAIMER:
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
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