After yesterday’s buff comes today’s nerf: If you’re so clever, why didn’t you buy Goblintown.wtf?
I did not.
For those not following every twist and turn of the NFT market, Goblintown is the current boom collection, which since it launched as a one free mint per wallet on Ethereum on 22th May has become the top traded NFT with $48 million of volume and a floor price of around 7 ETH (c.$11,500).
For some Goblintown has generated attention in a bear market thanks to its fugly art style and its signature goblinspeak textual style …
“ₐₐₐₐₐₐₐᵤᵤᵤᵤᵤGGGₕₕₕₕₕ gₒbbₗᵢₙₛ GₒBₗᵢₙₙₙₙₙₙₙₙₙₛ ₙₒ ₑₑₙₛₜₐgᵣᵤₘ ₙₒ” dₑₛcᵤᵣd
… translation “Goblins no Instagram, no Discord”— being one simple example.
For others, it’s been the rejection of a lot of conventional NFT wisdom, notably there’s no Discord channel. And as the website clearly states “No roadmap. No Discord. No Utility”.
This means all activity has been funnelled through Twitter, which has allowed the pseudonymous creators to better control the narrative in a way that’s more open than usual to people not in the direct community.
Of course, as with all these projects, once you’ve attracted enough attention to break into the top trading charts, momentum becomes automatic for a period, particularly if you’re the only bright spark in an otherwise bear market.
In that regard, the rise of Goblintown is perhaps less unique than we might consider. We’ll have to see if what happens when price stops going up and when tricky factors such as the core team holding 10% of total supply come into play.
Nevertheless, it has to be said that from
the free mint launch to
the art style/theme,
the quick launch of the companion McGoblin Burrgr project, as well as
the knowing humor including a goblinspeak translation bot and
use of ironic hashtags such as #seriousinvestorsonly,
…Goblintown has executed its launch perfectly.
As ever, my problem with projects such as this is that they’re visually just too ugly for me to get excited about, which is a personal flaw as the value of NFTs is never aesthetic, so I guess I’m not as clever as I think I am.
Still despite not buying Goblintown at 0.5 ETH, the pretty Boki NFTs are still on the rise, currently up 250%.
Maybe there’s life in the old dog yet!
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: “The Hiro team is mixed in gender, nationality, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, education and age. We have family who are disabled. We are strongly inclusive and we like teams, tech & games with an open, hybrid mix.”
Product news
Polish mobile game developer BoomBit has announced the launch of its web3 platform BoomLand.
It’s working with Polygon Studios and using its Supernets technology, an outworking of Polygon’s Edge network, which allow developers to run their own dedicated infrastructure in a flexible manner.
Adoption is supported by Polygon’s $100 million fund and Polygon Studios also invested into BoomLand.
As for BoomLand, the first game to launch on the platform will be Hunters On-Chain, a F2P game with play-and-earn elements, NFTs and a marketplace. Other announced games include Archery Club and TCG Mighty Chain Heroes.
Over time, governance for BoomLand will transition to its Decentralized Publishing Organization via the BOOM token, which is due to launch in Q3 alongside the first playable version of Hunter On-Chain.
One of my advisory gigs has rebranded. What was originally Soccer Manager Crypto and previously Soccer Manager Elite is now Soccerverse.
The game itself hasn’t changed at all. It’s still a super hardcore soccer management game in which clubs and players are all effectively fractionalized NFTs (and DAOs), in which players can own shares.
Then there are managers and agents, which are single positions controlling a club and a player, respectively. Ownership of all these assets drives passive income depending on the player and the club's performance.
The game, which has been in development since 2020, is still in open beta mode with the next season about to kick off during July.
Find out more via the Medium or check out a(n old) video here.
Funding news
OKX Blockdream Ventures, the investing arm of crypto exchange OKX, has invested more than $10 million into WAX Studios.
The funding will help the WAX blockchain build out infrastructure to improve its gaming ecosystem, including WAXex, a custom exchange for game tokens, and new features for the WAX Cloud Wallet. In addition, WAX Studios will release better development tools including integrations with Unity and Unreal Engine.
Despite hosting a couple of the most popular blockchain games with Alien Worlds and Farmers World, WAX has instead previously focused on NFT collections; a strategy which hasn’t found success, with WAX ranked only #6 in terms of all-time trading volume behind the likes of Polygon and Flow.
Axie Infinity Referral news
Sky Mavis is now publicly testing Axie Infinity’s universal referral program, which allows anyone to get their own referral code, which — when used — will divert 1% of the standard 4.25% Axie marketplace trading fee to that individual’s Ronin wallet.
Usually all of the 4.25% fee goes into the game’s Community Treasury so Sky Mavis will also refund the treasury on a monthly basis for any referral 1% flow from the game’s Ecosystem fund.
Personally I’m a big fan of referral codes — having first experienced their power in Splinterlands. It’s something with the potential to really drive network effects as well as being an outworking of the decentralization of value flow to the community, which is typically the key marketing muscle for these games.
Insider Trading news
Although NFTs (as cryptocurrencies) are themselves unregulated assets, former OpenSea head of product Nathanial Chastain has been arrested in New York and charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering “in connection with a scheme to commit insider trading”. Each carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Infamously between June and September 2021, Chastain, 31, secretly purchased 45 NFTs in collections he knew were about to go live on OpenSea’s homepage, a process that typically resulted in a large price increase. Indeed, the indictment states he sold these NFTs “at profits of two- to five-times his initial purchase price”.
Solana Not Working Again news
Another day, another Solana outtage. This time (on 1st June) it was “a bug in the durable nonce transactions”, which resulted in a four hour lack of consensus and a full node restart.
That said, Solana Status has uptime over the past 90 days at 99.4%.