Traditionally, most NFT projects follow a classic “roadmap” to establish themselves:

• #1 - Create social media vehicles, most remarkably a twitter account and a Discord channel (which sometimes only opens a bit later on);

• #2 - Release some sneak peaks about the art and/or utility of the project;

• #3 - Start building a community of “Whitelisted” members, which are supposed to be a group of persons that is especially supportive of the project and that, as such, is rewarded with the possibility to mint a collection first, to mint more pieces or to mint at a lower price. This also generates a sense of “exclusivity” and the more these people mint, the less the general public will be able to mint.

These steps are what normally comes before mint day - but where most projects used a “grinding” system, which forced people to be very active chatters on Discord to “level up” inside their servers, or to complete lots of tasks, new projects have been choosing an alternative path. That’s our topic for today.

The end of Discord grinding…

We remember clearly that, in the beginning, NFT projects based their whitelist group off of the persons which participated the most on their Discord and those who won giveaways and raffles. This system had, however, strong cons:

• Whitelisted members were, quite often, people which had a lot of time versus people which had to work, take care of their family or, in short, had a life beyond Discord;

• Many persons looking to win a whitelist status resorted to using bots, which did their work for them, as most times all that was required was to be active in a Discord chat;

• Raffles were quite often crowded and, therefore, you would have to be extremely lucky to win WL for the projects you wanted to mint (this is especially true for Solana and Ethereum projects, which were more sought after)

At some point in time, people stopped caring and just started botting these systems.

Something had to change.

… and the dawn of OG Passes 💳

Tired of the old grinding system, projects started to venture into new forms of building their group of whitelisted members - and so, OG Passes were born.

But what are OG Passes? Well, we’ll try to give you a clear and complete definition below:

In the NFT space, an OG Pass may be defined as an NFT which provides the holders with exclusive or priority access to a set of features and benefits provided by an NFT project. These features or benefits may include i) priority in minting a collection, ii) lower price when minting a collection, iii) airdrops, iv) priority access to future collections or v) exclusive or first-hand access to a project’s utility, among many other.

As we can see, OG Passes actually can go beyond simple whitelist utility, and usually allow holders to benefit even more from a project.

We are more familiar with Cardano, but the Mallard Order’s Invitation Letters, Moai’s First Class Boat Tickets and Beatboyz’s Hallpass Thingies are all good examples of this OG Pass meta, just to name a few.

Projects started to create these OG Passes with the clear intent of generating an ever greater sense of exclusivity in the form of an NFT. While there are many ways of distributing these pieces, the following are the most common:

• Free airdrops based on twitter engagement and support for a project, normally handpicking members;

• Handpicking a number of persons, based on twitter engagement, and allowing them to mint the OG Pass for a set price;

• Giveaways and raffles of OG Passes;

The first conclusion should be immediate: OG Passes did not eliminate grinding - and that’s true, indeed. If you don’t engage a lot on Twitter, you will probably be left out.

Despite this, it is much more “flexible” and easier to interact with a project on a twitter basis than reaching absurd engagement levels on a Discord, which could sometimes mean spending lots of hours talking to everyone and sharing the room with a huge number of bots. Most will agree that OG Passes via Twitter engagement made it much easier and smoother for truly dedicated users to be rewarded with these pieces.

Moreover, when you hold an NFT that can essentially represent a number of future benefits within a project, or even just a whitelist, you are free to negotiate your position, so you can decide to hold it and benefit from it, sell it to someone else or just reap the benefits you want and sell it later.

In addition to all of this, it’s also important to note that most projects nowadays have both an OG Pass and a separate whitelist, therefore we may end with the following kind of tiers:

• OG Pass holders;

• Whitelisted members;

• General Public

As a result, it is possible, and even usual, for an OG Pass to be even more valuable than a simple whitelist, depending on the exact mint and benefits structuring of the respective project. Please keep in mind that, due to their nature, it is also true that the value of OG Passes is, in most circumstances, the result of pure and simple speculation (then again, in this space, what isn’t?).

Is the OG Pass meta good for me?

In our opinion, yes! Some of the reasons why we believe this can be summarized as follows:

• You will not have to grind like crazy, even if you still have to work for your bags;

• You are able to more accurately define your strategy, giving you a head start to see how the project develops until mint day and after mint day;

• Many OG Passes are free and airdropped, so you may be in a position where you can’t effectively lose anything;

• Many OG Passes collections have a small supply, therefore making it easier for them to reach higher valuations;

• You can freely trade your OG Passes on the market;

The above are the main advantages we see with the OG Pass meta. In short, you, as the holder, will be in a much better and privileged position by holding one of these - and that’s why most of them are worth it, even if all you want is a quick flip.

In addition to this, from the perspective of a project, it is also positive to build this kind of “special membership”. Why you ask? Because it will be able to maximize the creation of a sense of exclusivity (e.g. a club of very limited 100 holders with a huge set of benefits) and may earn royalties for all the trading that occurs on smart contract marketplaces - thus, further enhancing the project’s ability to raise funds at an earlier stage.

Considering the above, we consider the OG Pass meta to be very beneficial to both the holders and the respective projects.

I hold an OG Pass from a project I love! What is the best strategy to follow now?

First of all, the following does not constitute any kind of financial advice and is purely an opinion from someone who has traded his fair share of OG Passes.

Our two main strategies for holders of OG Passes are the following:

• HODL - If you love a project and, in your research, consider the benefits that an OG Pass assigns worth the shot, then you should hold it and mint the collection. After that, you can reassess if you want to keep the OG Pass, but be aware prices normally drop very sharply.

• SELL - if you have an OG Pass from a project that you don’t fully trust or that you feel won’t be worth it, then consider holding the pass until a few days prior to the mint. This is normally the best time to sell an OG Pass, since the hype and speculation is at the highest point.

When you are in doubt, but don’t consider holding, a common thing to keep in mind before choosing one of the above is making an easy question to yourself:

Will I be able to profit more from selling my OG Pass mint allocation than I would by just selling the pass now?

If the answer to the above is “no”, then you should probably sell your OG Pass and keep the profit. Nothing wrong in doing so, and you’ll “free some space” for someone who believes more in the project.

If the answer is “yes”, then you are probably invested in a project which is very valuable, and you should keep the OG Pass - by doing so, even if you sell all your mint allocation, you will always have access to the best benefits of a project (at least that’s usually how it works).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is our modest opinion regarding trading OG Passes.

Do you think we’re seeing things wrong here? Do you have a different perspective that you would like to share?

Then by all means, feel free to quote us and ratio us on Twitter (and give us a follow while you’re at it😂)

* PS: Don’t forget to subscribe to us by clicking the button below! (Don’t worry, we’ll only be able to see your ETH address and nothing else)

The Cardano monoliths fell short of expectations😐

24 hours have passed since the public mint of Mysterious Moai Association, a Cardano NFT project which had huge promise…but ended up failing to deliver on the high expectations the users had for its mint (us included).

Floor price is now hovering at around 70 $ADA, which is not bad, but below mint price after royalties and marketplace fees are deducted. As of today, the supply of 3333 Moais is completely sold out, so if you want to get your hands on one of those beautiful pieces of art you’ll need to visit jpg.store or epoch.art, the two main Cardano marketplaces.

It’s time to shed some light on why this mint was so expected by many and what may have caused it to go south of optimal in terms of volume, price and overall profitability, given the hype generated.

The how and why of the monolith’s hype 🗿

Project social and market metrics

MMA (strange to use this acronym…) currently has more than 7k members on their discord and over 6k followers on Twitter. Sneak peaks and posts related to their mint also regularly managed to get between 100-200 retweets and easily over 200/250 likes on Twitter; plus, discord announcements prior to mint also managed to easily reach 300/400, sometimes even more interactions.

https://twitter.com/MysteriousMoai/status/1571876772634935296

Considering the Cardano space, these numbers are quite positive, especially given the fact that the main Moai collection is comprised of just 3333 NFTs. Add to this the fact that mint price was set at just 70 $ADA ($31~), making it a mint which was accessible even during times of low liquidity- the low price might even allow for people to go ahead and get more than just one NFT.

So if we take Discord membership as a reference (7k members), there would be just around 0,47 Moais per person to be minted - naturally, the Moailist (WL), OG Role and First Class Boat Tickets made this a bit more tricky, as will be explained bellow.

Moreover, the team was also active, especially on Discord, and did not commit any visible mistake prior to mint that could be used to diminish the project’s image.

A very special mention to the artist, which is apparently doxxed, and makes some killer art - these monoliths are beautiful! Just for reference, look at my favourite pull:

Overall, it’s safe to say that social media and Discord metrics, as well as team behaviour and art quality, allowed most Cardano users to dream with a mint reminiscent of the “good old days”.

Moailist, OG Role and First Class Boat Ticket privileges

In order to generate perceived exclusivity, the Moais focused on creating three ways of being assured a mint:

• Obtaining a First Class Boat Ticket (or “FCBT”), which served as the “season pass” of the project, guaranteeing 5 mints and a further list of benefits:

https://twitter.com/MysteriousMoai/status/1561658185181569025/photo/1

• Obtaining the OG Role on Discord, a very limited role that allowed people to mint 2 NFTs before the Public mint phase.

• Obtaining the Moailist on Discord, a role which allowed you to also mint 2 NFTs before the Public mint phase.

The total supply of FCBT was 100, as was the supply of OG’s; however, the Moailist had 1000 members. The team calculated a supply for public of around 600 NFTs.

As a result, this perceived exclusivity helped generate more hype around the project and may have incentivised people to plan on buying as many as possible

The original minting schedule

MMA released, on 6th September, their minting plan, which appeared rather promising:

https://twitter.com/MysteriousMoai/status/1567214799553024008

As we can see from the tweet above, the potential advantages were undeniable:

• Time slot 1 - FCBT holders would get a 2 hour advantage to mint a maximum of 300 NFTs - this meant that they could mint and trade in a market where supply was very short vs demand. In a sense, most probably believed that they would be able to effectively “control” the narrative and lock in their profits and future time slot mint costs during this phase - an almost perfect scenario.

• Time slot 2 - OG/Moailist would also be able to mint 2 NFTs and trade in a market with about 2/3 of the available supply. Now in this phase, minting times would be very sensitive - those minting first could end up being able to more easily offset their costs by selling one piece at a high price. FCBT holders were also able to participate and probably imagined they would be doing so with profits from the earlier phase. This would also present a good opportunity to accurately measure market demand for the public mint, which would be just 2 hours away.

• Time slot 3 - Public minters (1 NFT per tx; unlimited per wallet) had the worst scenario - if prices were high, demand was likely to be huge and therefore they would have to be very fast to secure an NFT. They would also be competing with FCBT and OG/Moailist, so that would make minting even more difficult. In any case, they were the stars of the show: if public demand was strong, that would most likely seal the success of the Moais; however, if market prices were not optimal, public minters would lose interest and deny the project a quick and swift sell out scenario.

The interval of 2 hours between each time slot seemed appropriate. It stroked a balance between allowing everyone to mint and not taking too long to move on to the next phase, guaranteeing an inflow of new holders in a most likely healthy price environment - it meant that, with great probability, the public would rush to mint these monoliths as they would be instantly worth more than the 70 $ADA price.

All of the above basically sums up why most people on Cardano had huge expectations for the Moais’ mint. In essence, the project had a good mix of marketing, community building, beautiful art, perceived exclusivity and minting mechanics.

I know some you will also point to the utility - and we will touch on that point, we just don’t feel it played a very relevant part in building the hype. It’s the opposite really - if people understood the promised utility, the hype would be much bigger.

With such good indicators, what could go wrong?

Jpg.store…and an odd way to celebrate International NFT Day

For those of you who are not aware (and we were not), it appears that the 20th of September of 2022 marks the first-ever International NFT Day - apparently, this date marks five years since Dieter Shirley submitted the ERC-721 proposal — a token standard that developers agreed to follow on Ethereum for NFTs.

To commemorate this day, the largest marketplace on Cardano - our friends from jpg.store - decided to… undergo maintenance 🙃

https://twitter.com/jpgstoreNFT/status/1571973535647821824/photo/1

In principle, this should not have been a problem, since maintenance was scheduled to end when the FCBT mint was starting. But those who know our yellow friends and recall other similar events know that these things are not always that easy.

MMA team, after consulting jpg.store, decided to maintain the mint schedule untouched, since the changes to the marketplace were supposed to take only a few minutes and not a full two hours.

The FCBT mint went smoothly and almost all 300 NFTs were minted. Floor prices were between 120-200 during this time slot and trading only occurred on epoch.art - volume was, however, shockingly low for a project of this magnitude. Considering jpg.store has a market share of over 94%, you can easily see how critical it is for the marketplace to be up for a project’s volume during mint.

However, since maintenance ended up lasting for a lot longer than it was supposed to, the second time slot was moved a few hours and expanded to last 12 hours, instead of just 2 hours. By the time it started, jpg.store was already up once again.

This decision proved, in my opinion, to be fatal and wrong in those circumstances and here’s why:

An expanded time slot was positive for OG/WL, as they could wait and enter only if a profit opportunity arose. However, from the project’s perspective, this time expansion allowed more supply to hit the market and floor prices to drop further, at a time when volume was very low and the “barrage” of public demand was still torn between buying a cheap Moai off the market or waiting to try their luck during the final time slot.

As a result, WL/OG mints were way below the expected numbers, as a significant part of the community did not risk minting due to low floor prices (~70 $ADA). Volume also failed to pick up as expected, and people concentrated on sniping good deals, instead of sweeping the floor - by this time, we were very worried the project wouldn’t sell out, especially in current bear conditions. It’s safe to say the team was probably as stressed as we were.

The events of that afternoon/evening, combined with the choice to extend time slot 2, were proving to be very challenging. Now, looking backwards, we reckon the correct choice would have to be one of the following:

• Minting as planned during jpg.store downtime - this would probably end up maximizing the mint, as minters would be likely to rush to mint as many as possible because they were not aware of real demand (they could only try and “guess” it). It would also ensure everyone who prepared in advance for the mint got to participate on the announced time, and FCBT, WL and OG mints would hit the market at the same time.

• Delaying the mint for a full 24 hours -this would ensure the mint happened with jpg.store up and running, and in normal planned conditions.

Thankfully, during the 12 hours of WL/OG time slot, the floor held up between 60 and 70 $ADA, bringing more confidence to public minters, which showed up in force and minted all remaining NFTs in 20 minutes - for around 1.3k pieces, this was still nowhere near Cardano records (I’m think Cornucopias’ kind of mints), but positive.

The announcement (“Sold Out”!) came shortly after but prices did not manage to break above mint price consistently - we believe the damage was already done.

Unfortunately, the Moais got to the public mint in an already dire situation and their fate, at least for mint day, and from a purely financial opportunity point of view, was sealed.

If you believe in the project though, this may be just the start.

As for the team, now is the time to build like hell.

The mystery of “El Gigante”, the rigged one

Another issue that haunted the Moais mint was the curious case of “El Gigante”, the apparently “rigged” 1/1.

So the gold monolith above was one of the most desired pieces of the collection and it ended up being minted right at the start of FCBT mint.

As the community would later find out, this NFT was minted by a shady character called “Megaboss”, which later decided to show off his pull on Discord… only to be accused of “rigging” the mint, since he had also pulled, with the same wallet, two 1/1’s from other two mints conducted by NFTPin. After this confrontation, this person “dumped” this NFT, along some others and a FCBT, for 70 $ADA on jpg.store:

Naturally, this issue raised a lot of eyebrows within the community. The team was immediately alerted to it and began conducting an investigation with the help of the minting company.

NFTPin has since released a statement about this issue:

NFTPIN Statement

Any big project that aims for success and builds real utility has always been subject of hackers, scammers and different kinds of fraud.

While some projects have been directly broken into, NFTpin mint after mint has been straight wall technology to all customers fully protecting projects money (that over 7million Ada has came through our server wallet system) And providing smoothest possible mint experience.

While hackers could not directly inject fraud code into our servers, multiple times all our developers have been subject of social engineering and different kinds of informational attacks, as long as servers have been DDoSed on regular basis.

On the last mint with Mysterious Moai Association it has been spotted that some account called “MegaBoss” could successfully take advantage of the system by minting 1 NFT with high rarity.

While doing our investigation we have figured out that it was not only one account who has been involved, there existed full network of accounts (email, discord, other social media) managed by hackers over the world who constantly social engineered our developers on different levels: email, personal conversations, GitHub, participation in public alpha testing etc. as well as communicated with other members of community trying to achieve more credibility and important information. While checking those accounts transactions that was discovered that they have traded and exchanged the Ada with some of top players in the Cardano space. (We will contact all of these companies and personal people that we could confirm, privately to warn and protect them against this activity).

Even trying that hard they could achieve very little. During the mint hackers, could get access to some of our algorithms (which includes spoofing incoming transaction) that allowed them to increase 99% of getting better rarity on their first NFT mint. Also during the mint hackers have been multiple times trying to DDoS our service which resulted in stopping minting page few times on short period of times between 23:00 utc to 03:30 utc.

As for now our team:

Did detailed investigation of any tools used by the hackers, we have limited any access and changed any algorithm that could be achieved by hackers during past months, we educated our developers and all team members on possible social engineering attempts and developer protocol of actions of any of these attempts are spotted in order to avoid any future consequences.

We remain transparent, fully doxxed and responsible for the service we provide. Our company is a branch of Ukraine company LLC ITEX Agency and we are at the process of creating legal departments in EU and USA.

In the following weeks we will create a separate channel in our discord with AMA and live sessions where we would share our bad experience in details in order for other projects and individuals to be protected from scam, fraud and hacking attempts.

So is this the end of the story? Well, some would argue this statement was exactly what was to be expected from a minter’s business perspective, so we might never actually know if they had or not any direct involvement in this case. It’s also unclear if the social engineering that NFTPin speaks of was or not the main way hackers managed to rig the mint.

As users we should all exercise extreme caution in the coming mints carried out by NFTPin, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt- their explanation is also entirely possible. Plus, aside from some minor situations, the mint seemed to work fast and as intended, with no visible errors. The Moai’s team is also not linked in any way to this issue, from our understanding.

What’s next for the Monoliths?

After a difficult and rough mint, it’s safe to say that MMA managed to accomplish their first objective, selling out. So congratulations to the team, you’ve made it this far, many projects fail to do so!

If you are holding a Moai, the road map seems a bit fuzzy, but the star of the show is “Moai mechanics” and the $MOAI token, which constitute the project’s main utility:

https://twitter.com/MysteriousMoai/status/1569627071378243584/photo/1

In our opinion, there is a lot of merit to trying to build a tool like this, but we have yet to see exactly what the team is able to deliver. We are keeping in mind that implementing a system like this, as well as issuing a token and a non-custodial staking mechanism, takes not only time, but also expertise and good amount of planning.

It’s especially worrying to see that there are only 3 core project members and none of them appears to be a Cardano developer (Burt is a project manager, Tommy is a content marketeer and Merel is an artist). While the art and marketing were very positive, based on these arguments, one could argue we might not ever see “Moai mechanics” in action - we’ll just have to see what happens.

We may however speculate that this platform is being outsourced to some developer.

Despite this, if the team manages to pull this out and launch Moai Mechanics, then we can see it being a huge success, right along the lines of similar platforms on other chains. The prime example would be Mercury, by Blocksmith Labs, on Solana, a platform which allows you to easily manage your whitelists, participate in raffles and earn rewards - oh, and they currently have a floor price of 115 SOL and are considered one of the best team of builders of that space. I’m keeping my hopes up that the team ends up delivering on their promises and launches Moai Mechanics, since there’ nothing similar running on Cardano at the moment and we could very well use a tool like this.

For FCBT owners, do remember that you have also been promised an exclusive Moai airdrop (100 supply), lifetime WL, a 1.5k $ADA raffle and the possibility of winning a real life 1/1 Moai painting. Plus, they will be the ones with the ability to decide the project’s future decisions, so that’s a governance bonus there for holders - there’s no indication, however, exactly which topics will FCBT holders be able to vote on.

As per a team announcement made today, new details about Moai Mechanics and the project’s roadmap are scheduled to be shared on the week of 26-30 September.

Taking into account all that we have said above, we want to share the following conclusions:

• Moais had a disappointing mint from a purely financial point of view, as the collection was a victim of horrible jpg.store timing and information, as well as ultimately wrong decisions by the team (although, given the information shared, they were understandable);

• The collection managed to sell out, which means we now have a limited supply and team’s first objective and fund raise was successfully accomplished. This means the mint flip opportunity didn’t materialize, but now the future belongs to the project’s ability to build their vision;

• The issue of “El Gigante” remains to be clarified, but may shed some light on what is happening during NFTPin mints;

• Moais have a fuzzy roadmap, but also a cool utility that could disrupt and innovate the space (Moai Mechanics);

• Team continues to give an appearence of being dedicated, present and communicative. Only had good interactions with them until now;

• Moais plan to issue a token ($MOAI) to be used within their ecosystem for raffles and buying WLs;

• It remains to be seen if they will be able to deliver Moai Mechanics, given the fact that MMA only has 3 core team members, none of which are developers - if they do, expect the floor to react accordingly to the incentives of holding a Moai.

So this wraps up our post-mint analysis of MMA, hope you enjoyed the deep dive.

We would love to know your thoughts on this one, so feel free to follow us and comment on Twitter or slide into our DMs!

Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe so you can get all of our articles in your email and maybe, just maybe, you’ll end up getting a special surprise on your Metamask wallet too 🤫

Welcome to a fresh and brand new publication based in Web3 or, as we like to call it, the Block 🏡.

I’m the Adalyst, a devoted Cardano investor and community member that you might have heard of on Twitter. I have been actively investing in crypto since 2017, but only since 2020 have I been more involved in the social space; and on day one of 2022, I decided to finally join and participate in the Cardano twitter community, a place where I met amazing people, discovered amazing projects and learned heavily about web3 and blockchain. Especially it’s potential to make us all live in a more decentralized and fair world (and it can also make you rich so, yeah, that’s a good bonus right?).

After spending a lot of time on the sidelines, I got bored of being just a spectator in a game where I think we all can play our part. As a result, the idea of creating a “publication” where I could share my thoughts, opinions and even some analysis started to ring in my mind constantly - and so The Block’s Epoch (or TBE for short) started popping in my mind.

For now, there’s no further roadmap for this project, so let’s just see where it goes.

Why are you using Mirror instead of Medium/other blogging platforms?

Great question! Two arguments weighted heavily on my choice:

A) Mirror is an Ethereum project which allows us to use an ENS address and by using a platform like this I hope that this publication may be able to reach and be better received in that community. Plus, the wallet integration allows people to save our articles as NFTs.

B) It is much more in line with our philosophy to use a platform that is fully integrated into web3 and decentralized, instead of a centralized and prone to censorship one like Medium, Blogger or Wordpress. While Mirror is not as powerful as those platforms, everything is transparent, immutable and recorded thanks to the Ethereum blockchain technology.

For the record, the only other platform similar to Mirror that I’m aware of is Sigle (https://www.sigle.io/), which is powered by Stacks (STX) and, to be fair, also appears to be a good solution.

Who is that guy on your logo?

Being a project with deep roots in Web3, there was no way around it - our image is, in fact, a Cardano NFT from the recent BeatBoyz™ collection.

We see BB as an inspiration to this project. They taught us that web3 can be fun, positive and different, not just a series of marketing, hype, mint and fast or slow rug. And this guy, well, he really does look like the kind of dedicated nerd that probably knows something useful!

In essence, we wanted to capitalize on the IP rights of Jamie #2177 because we feel that one of the least explored potential use-cases of NFTs is precisely this one - with the right asset, you can build a commercial or personal brand around the art and IP rights you are entitled to (please note, however, that is not always the case).

Okay, okay, we get it. But what will you be writing about?

While there’s no closed list of subjects which will be addressed by TBE, the following will be for sure an important part of this project:

📖 - Opinion articles on Crypto, NFTs or other web3 matters;

🔍- Reviews of NFT or Defi projects;

✍️ - Market insights/thesis based on metrics;

💭 - Ideas to solve web3 problems;

When building TBE, one of the things I had envisioned was for it to be a “different” kind of publication.

As such, it’s important to note that we have a commitment to being a fully transparent publication, therefore expect me to make lots of disclaimers when I cover NFT projects or Dapps which I use or have been involved with. Not only is this a crucial part of writing about blockchain technology, it’s also the only way readers can judge, by themselves, the writer’s bias - something that has become increasingly important in a world where everyone is trying to “pump their bags”.

We’re always open to writing about other topics, so if you want us to look at a specific matter, please feel free to suggest it!

Alright! So we’re all set… right?

Well yes, we are! That basically sums all information about TBE as of today.

Soon we’ll start publishing our first articles so if you wish to remain up to date about our project, just follow us on Twitter and subscribe to us by clicking the button below!

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