Inbetween hitting refresh on Etherscan to check gas fees, it transpires you have a lot of time to think at 2am on Sunday morning.
Given I didn’t think gas fees could go so high, it was not always rational thinking however.
That said, this is a very real situation in which to test theories of FOMO, FUD and ROI.
As the minutes tick by and the mint counter on the Otherside website ticked up, slowly at first — from thousands through tens of thousands — always inching ever closer towards the magic 55,000 total mint number, you end up performing increasingly loose ROI calcuations.
610 APE is roughly $12,000 plus X ETH gas fee = (4+X)/2 cost per Otherdeed mint.
There are 55,000 Otherdeeds being minted now but think about the 200,000 in total. What floor price can a collection that size sustain?
If The Sandbox with 166,464 land NFTs has a floor price below 2 ETH, can Otherdeeds really sustain 5 or 10 ETH in the long run?
Factor in that while you’re waiting for the perfect moment to strike, people are already buying Otherdeeds pre-revealed on OpenSea for up to 10 ETH. Cycle through various permentations of X, feel your stomach tighten as the gas fee refuses to drop below 6,000 gwei despite the fact that we’re already one hour in.
There can’t be more than 20,000 KYC’ed accounts can there?
That would be insane given Yuga Labs has said that to mitigate gas fees there will be multiple minting waves from 2 mints per wallet, then 4 mints per wallet etc until all 55,000 NFTs are minted.
The only way to say sane is not check Twitter, and try to set some limits.
I’m not going to do anything until 3am…
I’m not going to do anything until gas is at least under 4,000 gwei…
I’m not going to do anything until 30,000 mints…
I’m not going to pay more than 1 ETH to mint…
I’m not going to do anything until 3:30am…
I’m not going to do anything until 35,000 mints…
I’m not going to pay more than 2 ETH to mint…
Then you realized you’ve dozed off, it’s now past 4am, over 45,000 Otherdeeds have been minted and gas is still 6,000 gwei.
And at that point, your thinking magically crystalizes.
It’s not about being efficient. It’s not about ROI. It was never about ROI because you aren’t going to sell, at least not until the reveal — are you?
No. Really, the question is simple.
Do you want to own two land NFTs from the largest, most hyped, most lucrative NFT collection — even if you’re sure it’s over-hyped — or do you just want to go back to sleep?
Sure that’s FOMO, but it’s a particular sort of FOMO: more about ownership than profit.
You decide you’d want to own and be part of the Otherside journey even if the eventual floor price drops below the mint cost and the Otherside implodes into just another failed blockchain experiment.
It’s hard to explain but while NFTs are about value, NFTs are also more than just value.
And given the fact you’re only spending the APE (and ETH — converted from APE) you were airdropped for owning these NFTs anyway, everything really is academic, at least that’s your conclusion at 4:09am on Sunday morning.
You submit the transaction, shut the laptop and fall into fitful sleep.