The Art of the Grift: Scattered Thoughts on Taiyo, Cets, Dope Growers, Liquid Capital, and Mindfolk
Projects old and new under the microscope of me, an asshole.
Cets enlightenment is an eyesore.
I have always been a fan of the original Cets artwork. The linework and style is of course derivative of BAYC but the art package is cleaner all things considered. They were also, in my opinion, the first to really nail the style on Solana. They popped onto the scene with a slick and slightly mysterious website that made you think they had a good eye for aesthetics and a solid idea of how this all works. The NFTs make wonderful PFPs at any size and the trait varieties branch in enough directions to appeal to both streetwear aficionados and nerds.
They are ruining the aesthetic with the garish enlightenment artwork. I get what they are going for - the BAYC derivative is now simply copying MAYC. They are probably trying to appeal to a different subset of NFT owners (evidently, people who like to stare at jambalaya). The comparison to BAYC/MAYC starts to break down though when you consider that the original BAYC art is, objectively, pretty bad and stupid and the original Cets art was clean and cool. It hurts that the enlightened artwork replaces your original Cets art. Even if they wanted to ship these abstract abominations (hey, some people love jambalaya) they probably make more sense as a new collection.
More generally, the enlightenment ordeal has pulled back the curtain on the project. It took them many months to ship this questionable art “upgrade” and they obfuscated the entire process by placating holders along the way with multiple basically pointless airdrops. What once was an exciting project shrouded in just enough mystery now squarely looks like a more amateur enterprise that was flying by the seat of their pants. There is nothing entirely wrong with not being a professional, but maybe it’s time to drop all the “who is Peblo” crap.
Solport Tom has awoken.
I have been critical of Taiyo Robotics in the past. I have seen it as a token ponzi, and a cult of personality around Tom. Nobody needs Graphite and most of the Pilot art previews to date have looked like shitty dating sim cartoons.
But people can change. Earlier today, Tom revealed that they continue to invest heavily in the yet-unrevealed Pilots art and they contracted @meltytanti on a temporary basis to direct the art. Maybe by iterating and collaborating with talented people outside of his own project Taiyo will find a way to land on Pilots art that doesn’t suck.
More importantly, Tom may be more self aware than I gave him credit for. I mean if he’s going to start making fun of himself for the porn baron background then I won’t have much cynical ammunition going forward. Peep the difference in tone between the Jan. 20 tweet at the top (the one I am quoting) and the tweet below it from earlier today. Is Tom starting to sort of get it?
The Mindfolk grifters are back.
There is a reason that people call NFT flippers “degenerates.” If there is any possibility that number might go up, NFT degens will throw money at it even if the principal beneficiary is a verifiable piece of garbage.
That is pretty much the case here. Mindfolk is one of the most notorious grifts in Solana NFT history; they built a token and art ponzi that rose to extreme heights before completely collapsing. A real Burj Khalifa pattern on the price charts, which left lots of people thoroughly rekt.
Even if the intent of the Mindfolk was never to build an Eiffel tower sized ponzi out of popsicle sticks and then watch it crush a ton of people as it collapsed, they deserve to be held socially responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of, you know, building an Eiffel tower sized ponzi out of popsicle sticks.
Now they want 44,000 SOL for their new 10,000 piece collection which kind of seems to just recycle the original art and visuals. As I type this, 6200+ people have already minted on the whitelist.
The roadmap of this new grift also gives me pause. Part of this new pitch is a DAO driven project - we have seen how hard this is for any collection to pull off sustainably, let alone a large collection, and there is no reason to believe that these people can get that framework in place or that the holders will be the right type of community to support a functional DAO. But only 20% of mint funds even go to the DAO treasury. Assuming the worst, the setup here is to keep most funds with the creators and then blame the DAO when it does not work. They are also naming and promising various future applications in their roadmap, a good way to get speculators hyped up.
There are so many marketing buzzwords from the roadmap on Magic Eden that I feel sorry for earnest minters. The bolded words in the following sentence are all cut and pasted from their roadmap: Yeah bro, we are just going to “take the OG Solana collection but expand our IP of the Mindfolk brand to empower builders and empower artists through a web3 collective of on-chain governance and community empowerment and subDAOs, all to create the multi-chain future of digital art and also some SaaS products.” It’s like they brainstormed terms for conning gullible NFT degens into minting.
It’s always good to remember that the opportunities in this space are endless; you can always just NOT give money to grifters and tomorrow you’ll probably have a chance to give money to someone who is not as gross.
Dope Growers: weed + NFTs = retail trap.
The 2017/2018 ICO craze was infamous for vapourware launches which intended to create lazy amalgamations of old world businesses with crypto. Think, Uber but on the blockchain. Or Netflix, but on the blockchain (literally, TaTaTu).
We have seen this repeat during the rise of NFTs. One great example on Solana is froots. If you want to cut down to first principles, the questions to ask are: 1) does the traditional business need a blockchain? and 2) even if it does not need it, does the traditional business benefit directly and obviously from incorporating a blockchain?
With froots, the answers are pretty obviously no and no. Some fruit juice or smoothie bullshit does not need any blockchain, and the traditional business would not benefit at all from the blockchain. Note that the owners of the traditional business making money from stupid crypto speculators is not the same as the business benefiting.
Dope Growers is the same bullshit but for stoners. You may have seen Jeff Opdyke shill this. This is the old guy who compared froots to Amazon.
Dope Growers claim to be a licensed cannabis cultivation company based in Europe. Perhaps that is true. Their roadmap is basically: mint NFTs to give them money to grow and sell cannabis and NFT holders get revenue sharing. It looks like 70% of their profits go to NFT holders.
It’s a simple enough roadmap. It’s also remarkably fucking stupid at its core.
The cannabis production industry continues to grow but it is incredibly competitive. A lot of you have messed around with penny weed stocks so you would be familiar with how many of these companies simply do not make it.
Startups don’t pay dividends because they either don’t make profits or they are reinvesting all of their profits in the business to grow and stay competitive.
What do you think happens to a wannabe cannabis startup if 70% of its profits immediately flow out of the business? It probably dies, quickly, right?
This business will either flop or it will have to rug its NFT holders on the revenue sharing promises for a long time. Either way, you don’t want to own one of their jpegs.
Another good rule of thumb is to shut down your computer and go for a walk if you ever see this button in a project website:
Liquid Capital: a really dumb NFT DeFi mutual fund.
When people pool money and some other person or entity invests that money on their behalf, you have a mutual fund. The fees that person or entity tends to take in the traditional world are 0.5% to 2% of the capital, annually, depending on the level of hands on management.
Liquid Capital (Maties and Doubloons) is a newer project on Solana where most of the mint money goes into an investment fund which the project principals will invest and manage on the existing Solana NFT DeFi infrastructure: sharky.fi, Hadeswap, etc. And then profits from the investments flow back to NFT holders through some Learn2Earn bullshit I am not going to read about.
Look at the percentages on the above image. 10% to 20% of the mint funds are GONE immediately (depending on what the vague “project wallet” slice means) so we are already something like 5x to 10x worse on fees than a traditional mutual fund. Then we lose 15% of the profits, again, to the vague “project wallet” monster before payout, while another 10% of the profits are reinvested automatically.
On numbers alone this is horrendous. Why would anyone buy these NFTs to join this fund when they could just, uhhhhhh, put money out on sharky.fi on their own and keep 100% of the profits?
By joining this fund you are also adding literal risk to your portfolio: the rug risk for the Liquid Capital project. These dudes could just take your money. Layering risks on top of other risks is never a great idea.
So the fees are bad, you are adding rug risk, and you are not really avoiding any of the existing protocol risks that come with apps like Hadeswap and sharky.fi… you’d have to be a bit of a mark to touch this project.