It’s certainly not pretty out there in the crypto market these days.
Prices are experiencing significant downward pressure once again, as the stock market also slides into bear market territory.
I’m following the situation closely, and I’m seeing the impacts in my own wallet. I was buying the cryptocurrency Solana at $150, then $200, then $250…and now I’m buying it again below $25.
That’s my way of saying I remain bullish about the crypto market in the long term because I know the reason why the decline is happening, and I know why that reason is a temporary factor.
That reason is the Federal Reserve.
The Fed’s Open Market Committee, which sets interest rate policy in America, has done a hideous job of managing inflation.
Last year, it was telling us not to worry about inflation, saying the problem was “transitionary.”
That was a historically bad call.
On Friday, the May inflation figure was released and it didn’t make for pretty reading. Inflation in America hit 8.6%, a 40-year high.
Now, the Fed is desperately trying to tame this runaway inflation, so it’s running around frantically raising interest rates and scaring the bejesus out of the markets for stocks, bonds, crypto and just about any non-dollar-related asset.
But that will change soon.
By raising rates so fast, the Fed is actually engineering a recession. The bottom line is that America cannot absorb these rate hikes.
These hikes raise the returns on bank deposits, but they also raise rates on debt. And the U.S. simply has too much debt at the government, business, and consumer level.
That’s why the Fed will have to reverse course on rate hikes later this year.
I predict that the Fed will only be able to raise interest rates on two more occasions, in June and July. Then by late fall, it will have to begin lowering rates again to prevent a full-blown recession.
When that happens, stocks and crypto will rebound strongly.
So, my advice is to be patient.
Crypto is an incredibly volatile space, no question, but it is also the future. In time, our assets will rebound strongly. I remain confident in our investments and I am monitoring our positions carefully.
All of which is probably an interesting, if not downright weird way to introduce you to a new opportunity in NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
Thing is, crummy markets or great markets, real businesses continue to build. And that means opportunities are always arising…regardless of the mayhem or the euphoria that might be occurring at any given moment in the broader market.
And one of the project teams I’ve been talking to recently is building an NFT that is innovative, exciting, and, well, a little crazy.
This NFT offers you a way to get paid to sleep.
To be clear, I don’t mean getting paid while you sleep. I mean literally getting paid to go to bed at a normal hour and sleep for a healthy seven or eight hours, and then get paid directly because of that.
That’s the utility behind a new NFT project minting on June 17 called Snuggle Squad. The project will mint 7,777 NFTs, at a price to be determined closer to the mint date.
NFTs, are I’m sure you’re aware, are non-fungible tokens. These are one-off, one-of-a-kind cryptocurrencies that represent ownership of a digital asset. Before reading this alert, I’d suggest that you check out the two NFT reports I’ve prepared as part of Frontier Fortunes, if you haven’t already done so. These are: How to Invest in NFTs and The Frontier Fortunes Guide to NFT Wallets.
The founders of the Snuggle Squad NFT project have a simple goal: to promote mental and physical health.
They’ve seen that some people who originally jumped into the NFT game for fun, maybe to chase a little profit, have become addicted to the rush of this world.
They’re chasing whitelists…they’re participating in Discord communities…they’re discussing and voting on issues in the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) that they’re part of.
The point here is that NFTs, for a lot of people in this space, have become a full-time job in a very literal sense. I see it myself. I am involved with NFTs every single day. I serve as an adviser/consultant to numerous projects. I am interviewing teams all over the world at the oddest hours. And I am minting/trading every week. Quite often the mints I am involved with happen at midnight here in Prague, or even as late as 2 a.m.
I am up for all that, I go to bed, and I am awake again at 7 a.m.
I know that’s not so healthy.
The Snuggle Squad teams knows that as well. They’ve lived the same life trading and investing in NFTs over the last year or so. And for people like them, they see this project as a way to “bribe them into wellness,” as one of the team members told me.
That team of founders, by the way, is comprised of a developer tied to Degenerate Ape Academy, one of the bluest of blue-chip NFTs in the Solana ecosystem, and a scientist with a Ph.D. in pharmacology. So, we’re not talking about kids who dreamed up a cute project but have no technical expertise in pulling it off.
Here’s what I like about Snuggle Squad:
The whole “X-to-earn” movement is an emerging and popular trend within the NFT space these days, led by play-to-earn gaming and walk-to-earn apps.
Sleep-to-earn is a unique spin on this.
The NFT, linked to a smartphone app, will track when you go to bed, your sleep pattern, etc. It will pay you in the in-house token called $Zzzs, and offer bonuses for following a sleep schedule.
It will also offer meditation and ambient sound packages that users can purchase a la carte or subscribe to. For those who don’t own an NFT or who aren’t part of a subscription package, it will present discreet advertising as part of the company’s income stream.
For me, it’s really easy to see how Snuggle Squad’s offering will appeal to Web2 companies that are just now looking for a way into the Web3 world. (Web2 is the internet era of today, dominated as it is by big-data companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Web3 is the emerging internet era of today, which will be based on decentralized crypto blockchain technology.)
It’s easy to see a high-tech mattress company wanting to partner with Snuggle Squad. It’s easy to see a company like Nike or Adidas partnering with Snuggle Squad, since they’re both invested heavily into health and techy wearables that connect to a smartphone.
And it’s really easy to see a company like Lululemon want to be part of what Snuggle Squad is offering. Lululemon’s focus on yoga and wellness fits squarely within the Snuggle Squad wheelhouse.
As such, I can see real-world partnerships happening that ultimately flow through the NFT in some fashion. What that fashion looks like isn’t clear yet. Could be something like X% of all royalty/marketing income goes to the DAO, which then directly distributes payments to the DAO members. Or it could be the company uses that income to buy and burn $Zzzs tokens, which would drive up the value of all the remaining tokens.
Basically, there are many ways to approach a plan that sees the company’s income flow in large measure directly to NFT owners.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t going to happen immediately. The team will need some time to work through contracts and such. While Web3 moves pretty much at the speed of thought, Web2 moves pretty much at the speed of dial-up modems circa 1997. It takes time to steer those companies to where they want to go.
As such, Snuggle Squad is one you buy, you connect it to your phone, you earn while you sleep, and you await the day the team starts bringing in big-name sleep, wellness, and healthy-activity brands that want a partner in Web3.
It’s likely too late to aim for a whitelist for this project, but you will be able to pick up an Snuggle Squad NFT in the secondary market on MagicEden.io, or on CoralCube.io, in the immediate aftermath of the mint.
I am certain paper-hand traders will emerge and will be selling at, or slightly above/below mint cost, so being on a whitelist likely won’t matter much with Snuggle Squad.
To learn more about Snuggle Squad, check out its Twitter page here and its Discord channel here.
