Alright folks, there’s a bunch of topics into today’s piece, too many interesting things going on 😉

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about REKT and the introduction a new subcategory of memecoin: brand coins. Rekt’s public push was ahead of the launch of their newest drink flavor Ship Rekt in collaboration with OpenSea.

How did the drop work?

• Ship Rekt dropped in the form of NFTs on OpenSea

• There were two collections: one for USA/Canada and the other for UK/EU/Rest of World

• Each collection had a supply of 3,750 NFTs was priced at 0.029 ETH (~$75 at the time of mint) on Abstract

• Each NFT is redeemable for a 24-pack of Ship Rekt on a Rekt’s website with a 3 day redemption window

Unless you’re a diehard community member and Rekt fan, why bother? And how the hell did this mint out in 17 minutes, effectively selling 180k drinks?! 🤯

These Ship Rekt NFTs don’t just get you some tasty drinks. Redeeming the NFT gets you a juicy 4-in-1 deal:

1. The Ship Rekt drink

2. OpenSea XP for their eventual token

3. Abstract XP for their eventual token

4. Rekt DRANK points for their next REKT airdrop, which is already live

Whether your primary reason for redeeming is for the drink itself, to support the Rekt brand, or finding additional ways to gain XP for eventual airdrops efficiently, the answer is yes.

These types of cross-promo + co-marketing efforts exist in our everyday lives, reminding me of credit card cash back bonus and brand loyalty partnership promotions.

Use your Chase card for Amazon, streaming services, or your internet/cable/phone bill in Q2 and get 5% cash back (via XP points). Earn 2x Starbucks Stars and miles every time you reload your Starbucks Rewards account with $25+.

The Ship Rekt drop employs a similar strategy, with the caveats that no one knows what the XP to token conversion rate is and the value of the token itself since they aren’t out yet.

Why create two geofenced collections? To create some friendly rivalry and increase the chances of a sellout of course!

Thanks to Rekt’s global community, this created some good-natured jabbing and cheerleading from both sides. The founder OSF joined in on the fun as well, setting up a poll to fan the flames.

In the end, the US/CA collection minted out in ~10 minutes and the UK/EU/RoW collection followed suit 7 minutes later.

The Rekt team also set public goals and milestones, encouraging more drinks sold at a faster and faster pace. The About tab of the NFT collections calls out how quickly previous drops sold out, subconsciously creating urgency to purchase instead of a wait-and-see approach.

After the successful sellout, OSF reminds everyone what has been achieved so far.

This type provides anchoring on several levels:

• Each drop is sold out

• Drops are sold out in a matter of hours and now minutes, faster every time

• The goal is to sell 1 million drinks, and once that’s achieved add a 0?

We now understand why the collections sold out so quickly. But why create a NFT collection instead and require an extra redemption step instead of just selling DTC on the website. A few reasons.

The Partner

The Ship Rekt launch was in partnership with OpenSea, so it naturally made sense that there would be a NFT collection minted on their platform as a collaborative effort.

The Art

OSF is also an artist, so there may be some people who minted multiple NFTs and decide not to redeem one (or more) of them to keep as a part of their digital art collection.

Creating an additional revenue stream and margin opportunity

The NFT collection has a 5% creator fee on secondary market transactions, creating an additional revenue stream. At the time of this writing, there is 250 ETH ($600k) of secondary volume which means an additional $30k in revenue.

On top of that, if some of NFTs aren’t redeemed for collecting or forgetfulness reasons, increasing revenue margin.

As unfortunate as it’s been to see almost every major web2 brand shutter their efforts (RIP Starbucks, Nike, and many more 💀, shoutout to Flow and Disney though!), it’s great to see crypto-native brands take the baton and continue pushing adoption forward.

Have you purchased a drink before? If so, share or subscribe!

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I’ll admit I was wayyyyy too optimistic about this one when I wrote about it last week.

Although this was an interesting experiment in theory, there were multiple factors that caused the screams of “Loud”, “Loudio” and “$LOUD” to gradually fade into whispers:

• 4% of the swap volume funded the mindshare prize pool, but other liquidity pools with much lower fees popped up and sucked up the volume because they didn’t need a hefty fee to fund said prize pool. As a result, the mindshare pool grew at a slower and slower pace instead of ballooning to a number that could create a positive attention flywheel

• LOUD was not a pure memecoin nor was it a token related to a product. If a token is in no-man’s land, it’s appealing to no one and doesn’t have a good narrative.

• Kaito, the InfoFi partner that Loudio worked with to create the leaderboards, has many toggles to customize scoring (loyalty, insightfulness, sentiment, reputation etc.). Loudio decided to optimize the leaderboards for awareness.

• Market conditions. Although Bitcoin is still flirting with all-time highs, almost everything else is in a much less comfy position, especially memecoins.

Quoting boot and Breadguy with some key learnings:

Loudio has categorically proven that timeline mindshare does not correlate 1:1 with price action.

Attention is needed, but it's not all you need.

And lastly, influencer x product fit matters. Sounds obvious (and it sorta is), and Loudio’s free for all leaderboard optimized for pure awareness and mindshare show that.

You wouldn’t want a bald person to promote shampoo (although that’d be funny and could work). In a similar vein, many of the individuals on the mindshare leaderboard aren’t known for trading memecoins, so why would you buy it because they talk about them?

And lastly (again lol)…I wonder if the overtransparent nature of the Loud’s mindshare prize pool approach is unappealing in a ‘the rich get richer’ sort of way (influencers were able to access a presale and sell at ~100x out the gate). When you purchase a memecoin, the odds are grossly stacked against you, but that reality is obfuscated by Telegram communities, a funny meme, and scammy strategies. As sketchy as that it, it makes the average memecoin buyer more comfortable.

Imagine if you go to a casino and sit at the blackjack table or your slot machine and there’s a digital sign that says “today, we’ve made $41,859,198 from awesome patrons like YOU” with the number updating every 10 minutes. Doesn’t feel great…

In a counterintuitive way, too much transparency may be counterproductive to number go up.

As one attention token rides off into the sunset that is 0, another one takes its place. GRIND is an attention token created by Pons and The Plague NFT team, which has been around for a few years.

What caught my eye about this token is that they partnered with Slingshot (crypto trading mobile app):

• Users sign up with Pons’ referral code ‘Pons’

• All trading fees will go back to the GRIND team

• The team will split those fees

  • 50% of all fees collected will go toward the buyback and burning GRIND token

  • 40% of all fees will go towards marketing or the LP

  • 10% of all fees will go to the community of your choice

What’s happening is this:

Slingshot flips its fee revenue into user acquisition spend, while GRIND gets an external funding source. This is a creative partnership (this reminds me of the OKX Wallet x Stakestone airdrop) and I expect more flavors of this to pop up.

Stablecoins continue to be one of the major topics and use cases everyone can agree upon in crypto, and a couple new reports were published with some impressive stats.

Fireblocks: State of Stablecoins

Fireblocks surveyed 295 payment providers, banks, and fintech companies and shared some notable insights:

• 90% are using, pilot testing, or planning stablecoin payments

• 86% are ready to support stablecoin integration

• 71% in Latam use stablecoins for cross-border payments

Artemis: Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up

The actual report (you’re welcome for sparing you from an email signup 😉)

Artemis spoke with dozens of companies to understand how stablecoins are used, gather estimates, and analyzed blockchain data around the $250B stablecoin space.

What stuck out the most to me was how stablecoin volume by blockchain differs drastically by country, even if they’re in the same region. Network effects are very real.

Earlier today I came across 3Jane, a ‘credit-based money market’. I am not qualified to speak about the details of how it works, but in short it’s a credit line based on onchain (wallet) and offchain data sources (Credit Karma, bank accounts, Coinbase account).

By just connecting my wallet, I can access 528 USDC at a 10.92% APR. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but this is just with Jane analyzing it in 15 seconds. No background check, no credit history, just onchain history for one wallet.

I can increase my credit line by up to 4.5x and decrease my APR up to 2x through Credit Karma via zkTLS, and I can increase my credit line up to 2x by connecting my bank account via Plaid.

This is the first instance where I’ve come across a meaningful use case of zkTLS, which I covered last year. Pretty cool if you ask me!

And that’s the roundup, did you make it till the end?

I’ll be out next week, so see you in 2 weeks!