This week I'm starting this newsletter very late. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, investigating a very strange NFT project on Stargaze and now I'm trying to figure out how to build my own IBC wallet tracking software so I can figure out how to trace funds across the interchain.

This is both the most awesome, and most terrible, part of blockchains. I find myself getting completely distracted by something that has quite literally nothing to do with what I'm trying to accomplish, yet I'm doing it anyways.

Here's the story. There's this NFT collection that recently launched on Stargaze called y00 punks. It's a derivative collection based on a different NFT collection called y00ts.

Derivatives can have eye catching visuals, because they have source material / inspiration from a project that had previous success. The y00t collection has some really stunning artwork for an NFT collection it's quite vibrant, detailed and creative. Anyways, this y00 punks derivative collection launches out of nowhere on Stargaze with a very high mint price and then out of the blue cuts the mint price to zero with a super strange tweet.

This is honestly the weirdest messaging I've seen from an NFT collection, and I've seen a lot of NFT collections in the past 3 years. Anyways, I caught wind of this collection and took a look a the art. It seems very nice and well thought out:

Now, by the point I'm learning about this collection, all hell has broken loose in their community. The people that minted from the collection for 400 stars (about $20) at the time, are all extremely angry, because well... they paid $20 to mint multiple NFTs that now can be minted for free. They start demanding refunds. The "community manager" starts hurling insults at community members and kicking people out of their discord server. I don't know. Lots of drama.

Anyways, the collection appears to be a 100% certified grade-A rug pull. So that's interesting to me, because it seems that the creators haven't closed up shop yet, and are trying to squeeze a few final bits of money out of the community by announcing that they will be airdropping new collections and that they are building some sort of token economy on top of the collection. So anyways, I spent some time in the Discord, confirmed my suspicions, and now here I am writing about it when I should be sleeping. This was a big waste of time.

You know how I know we are in a bull market? NFT rug pulls are back in style. This time with a slightly different flavor, but if you've been reading my newsletter you will know that I've written about rug pulls multiple other times in the past. All of the rug pulls that I was unfortunate enough to participate in (not as a rug pull-er, but as a rug pull-ee), were on the Solana blockchain ecosystem. Solana is still probably crawling with rug pulls, but now it seems that Stargaze has made it to the big leagues with a Solana Style rug pull. That's bullish for Stargaze in my opinion.

I'm supposed to talk about crypto markets

Markets are UP BABY, in a very big way. Bitcoin, for a very short moment, touched it's all time high of around $69,000. It promptly dropped down to around $60k (last week's peak), before bouncing up to $66k where it's comfortably sitting right now.

So Bitcoin is soaring, what is happening in the rest of crypto? Everything seems to be up. The entire crypto market capitalization has increased from $2.3 trillion to $2.6 trillion in a single week. That's $300 billion dollars of value added to the crypto markets in only 7 days. That's pretty amazing. For reference, last bull market peaked at around $3.5 trillion of value.

In the coming weeks, as we approach the Bitcoin halving event, I anticipate lots more volatility, and then a crazy summer of wild swings up and down, but with higher highs and higher lows. I think that this market will reach $10 trillion by the end of this year (unless of course we have some sort of black swan event).

Market Animal

This week's market animal is obviously a bull. It's been a bull now for two weeks in a row (🐂🐂). That would actually be six weeks in a row, but three weeks ago was a frog market, to commemorate the NFT collection I deployed called "frogs". To all of you frog holders out there, let me say this up front - frogs is not, and never will be, a rug pull. I am emotionally attached to those things. I put a lot of work into making those drawings, and I think they are cool.

So here's the part where I talk about how I spent way too much time drawing the market animal to talk about anything else this week, but really, truly honestly... I just got started way too late and spent far too much time messing around in the y00 punks discord. I will forever now blame all of my problems on y00 punks.

52 weeks of huahua

This is week 15 of the experiment. I have purchased 1.2 million HUAHUA over the past 15 weeks with various staking rewards and other crypto income. This 1.2 million HUAHUA was purchased for a total cost of $286 and is currently worth $385 for a current unrealized gain of 35.14%. Not bad for a bunch of Chihuahuas. If Huahua does what I hope it will do... I think we can turn that 35% into 3,500%. Jk jk. Here's the chart of the past 3 months of price performance for Huahua:

What's interesting to me about this chart is that if we zoom in, it looks like Huahua has peaked:

But really... that's just a tiny blip on the radar of the very long term price chart of huahua:

So basically... there's a lot more room to go up for Huahua - if it catches hold of a mainstream crypto narrative that is.

That's it for tonight (this morning). If you read this far, hope you enjoyed it! I certainly appreciate having you readers here. If you read this far, let me know your thoughts in the comments. Best comment will get a frog day nft minted to their stargaze wallet (stargaze wallet required).

Have a wonderful rest of your week!

Cheers!

-Flarn

🤘🤘