Hi there,

Hello all and welcome back. I hope everybody had a great week as the world begins to wind down for the holidays.

(Not in Vegas, though. In Vegas, Real Vision is getting ready for The Takeover, which starts tomorrow. Virtual Passes are this way.)

We had another slow week in NFTs, which, if you’re looking to get involved in the space, should be amazing news.

That said, let’s run through the biggest news of the week and how we can take advantage of this in practice.

Following last week’s newsletter, adidas released a 30-second promotional video of their metaverse plans. It didn’t reveal much, but it did get many people excited. Further, they changed their profile picture to Bored Ape #8774. As a cherry on top, Meta replied to the tweet, saying: “We can’t wait to see adidas in the metaverse.”

Following up on what I highlighted in the latter portion of the newsletter last week, the gap between Old School and New School projects shrank substantially this week in the form of the price difference between CryptoPunks and Bored Apes. The Ape to Punk ratio is at its highest level ever at 0.72.

This has been fueled by a few things.

• The prospects of $APE. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) plans to airdrop a token known as $APE in Q1 of 2022 to anybody who owns a Bored Ape, Mutant Ape, or Dog. The specifics are not yet known but given how lucrative recent airdrops in the space have been ($ENS, $AXS, $RARE), the anticipation for $APE is high. Further, as BAYC has also announced plans to transition the brand to a DAO, there is speculation that $APE may play a role in the governance of it. Other possibilities include $APE being the in-game currency of the top-secret BAYC blockchain game in development (also to be released in 2022), or that $APE may function as a form of passive income if staked. In short, the potential of $APE has increased demand for all Bored Ape Yacht Club products.
• The biggest reason for the gap closing though is not due to increased prices in Apes, it is more a result of a major decrease in the price of Punks...

What’s the reason for this decrease? There’s a growing outcry in the CryptoPunk community about the level of centralization in the project. The biggest problem: Larva Labs does not grant commercial rights to owners of CryptoPunks. What this means is that the owner of a CryptoPunk cannot use their NFT to produce any commercial products. Essentially, CryptoPunks cannot be used for many creative pursuits at all. What makes this worse in the eyes of the market is that this is the exact opposite of Bored Apes, who are granted full commercial rights to the Ape they own.

The biggest markers of this outcry come from two of the most prevalent NFT investors and influencers.

Vincent Van Dough, known in the space to be one of the wealthy investors and collectors of NFTs in the market, made his stance clear when he changed his profile picture on Twitter to a CryptoPhunk on Monday.

What is a CryptoPhunk and why should I care?

A CryptoPhunk is simply a CryptoPunk flipped backward, everything else is the exact same. CryptoPhunks were created as a direct protest to CryptoPunks and the licensing rights available to them. CryptoPhunks were essentially an open-source project, with owners able to do anything they want with them. The significance of Vincent Van Dough changing his profile picture to a CryptoPhunk is that it is a blatant protest of Larva Labs. VVD has over 100,000 Twitter followers and is one of the most respected voices in the space.

The second notable outcry against CryptoPunks came from Punk 4156, who after a few days of venting, finally switched his profile picture from his CryptoPunk to the 3D rendering of his CrypToad. He said: “It’s not about copyright vs. no copyright; it’s about making the pixels as censorship-resistant as the token they’re attached to. if you don’t assign the token and the image the same rights, what’s the point of binding them together eternally on a blockchain?” This is important because Punk 4156 has been, for a long time, considered one of the core voices of CryptoPunk holders. His switch to a profile picture of a CrypToad is also significant because Toadz are one of the more popular and recent projects that have come out that are accompanied by a Creative Commons license, which essentially allows the holder to do whatever they want with their NFT.

These two demonstrations by major voices in the sector are representative of the market-wide sentiment that has seen CryptoPunks slide from their all-time high of 140 ETH to their low of 66 ETH just a few days ago. In the same time, Bored Apes have seen a steady increase of over 20 ETH in the last month and a half.

And in the final piece of news — the word on the street is that instead of continuing to build a company in Web3 fashion, OpenSea (which facilitates 90% of all secondary-market volume in NFTs) is pursuing an initial public offering. This sent ripples through the NFT community as speculation was growing as to whether or not OpenSea was going to transition to a fully decentralized platform by airdropping governance tokens of the platform to its most active users. Further proof of their IPO intentions is found in the form of their most recent hire — Brian Roberts — who will be joining as CFO. He just recently took Lyft public as their CFO.

Why is this important?

It is some of the biggest evidence in a long time that we are still early. There will be an NFT marketplace that is fully decentralized, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it came out (and experienced tremendous growth) in the next 12 months.

How do we take all of this information and use it in practice?

First and foremost, continue learning — particularly if your baseline knowledge still has some gaps.

If you’re at a place where you believe you understand the general market forces in NFTs and crypto-at-large, along with concepts such as the metaverse, the creator/ownership economy, and the long-term vision of Web3, I recommend you begin getting involved in the space on Twitter. This can begin by simply creating a profile and following four or five of the most reputable/important accounts in the space.

Assuming you are already following the great @RaoulGMI you can add great content to your feed through the following accounts:

@punk6529

@cdixon

@DeezeFi

@Cooophatroopa

@beaniemaxi

There are tens of others that could be substituted for any of the names above — this is not an all-inclusive list. The point, though, is that if you simply start by following and learning from these 6 accounts, your knowledge of the day-to-day space will grow dramatically.

Once you feel you’ve outgrown these accounts, you will find new people to follow organically. Look through who these accounts most often interact with and begin following them. Once more, do research into everything these new accounts are talking about. As you continue this process, you will begin to find your own niche based on the concepts and content you will naturally gravitate to. If you stick to this process for even 30 days, I promise you that you will become exponentially more aware of how this space operates.

Nobody ever got rich trying to chase quick money. Shift your focus to learning as much as you can. If mastery is the goal, the money will follow. There are no shortcuts in this game...!

I’ve been quite busy in the real world over the last week, so I haven’t been able to get back to as many people who have reached out as I would have liked. I will get back to all of you. That said, do feel free to reach out on Twitter: @f4ntast1cmrf0x, email: mrfox@realvision.com, or if you’d like to learn about projects I’m looking at specifically, you can subscribe to my personal newsletter at mrfox.substack.com.

All the best.

And down the Rabbit Hole we continue.

Mr. Fox