I wanted to send you a quick update on Yaku Corp., the non-fungible token tied to a dystopian metaverse game taking shape on the Solana network.
I wrote to you about Yaku in late January, noting that it had the potential to be a very popular NFT project. (You can read that mailing here.)
Well, after a weeklong delay, the project officially minted on Tuesday, Feb. 15.
This delay was due to back-office problems at the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, which was helping manage the launch. This affected the industry as a whole, not just Yaku. However, the weeklong delay allowed even more FOMO (fear of missing out) to build up around Yaku.
As a result of the massive demand for its NFTs, Yaku ultimately resorted to a multi-part minting process that split the mint between the “Senpai Whitelist” that was guaranteed to mint up to two NFTs, and a “Controlled Public Whitelist” for a chance to mint at least one NFT.
Although there was also the possibility of an “open public” mint, the reality was that demand for Yaku meant the project was not likely to reach the open public stage.
So, this ended up being a confusing, convoluted mint. If you weren’t able to buy, I’ll emphasize that not all NFT mints are this challenging. We’ll have lots of other opportunities in the future.
Anyway, Yaku…
For 12 hours, people on the Senpai Whitelist could mint a combined 4,000 NFTs that look like futuristic motorcycles. (A whitelist is basically a group of buyers who have gotten early access to a project. Some people won giveaways to make it onto the Senpai Whitelist, others were active in Discord chat and earned a whitelist slot that way, and still others were whitelisted because of the groups they are part of.)
Each person on the Senpai Whitelist minted as many as two NFTs for 0.5 Solana each, or about $48 per NFT. Here’s what one of the bikes looks like:
Next, the more than 9,900 “Controlled Public Whitelist” buyers fought for the remaining 3,000 NFTs. And that was wild. Those buyers rushed in immediately and the NFTs sold out in about 1 second, according to the team members I talked to. Most people who had these controlled whitelist tokens failed to get in on the mint because demand was so large and so instantaneous.
But if you managed to get one…you did well.
The Yaku Bike NFTs immediately started selling on secondary marketplaces at 1.5 SOL, a 3x gain in seconds.
Minutes later they were commanding 3 SOL, a 6x gain. As I write this on Thursday morning, two days after the mint, the floor price is in the 2.8 SOL range.
Going forward, owning a bike means you will receive a whitelist token in your wallet to mint a “capsule,” a futuristic apartment, in about two weeks’ time.
And owning both of those—a bike and a capsule—means earning a whitelist token for minting an avatar a few weeks after that.
The fact that the bikes sold out immediately in the Controlled Public Whitelist, and then were quickly priced 3x to 6x higher, tells me to expect good things from the capsule mint.
Capsules will mint at 2.5 SOL. My bet: They end up selling on the secondary market for between 7 and 12 SOL.
So, if you were one of the lucky few who happened to mint a Yaku Bike, congratulations. Hold your bike in your wallet and be on the lookout for whitelist tokens to mint a capsule in a few weeks. You will receive one capsule whitelist for each bike you own.
If you weren’t able to mint, seriously, don’t worry about it.
This is part of the NFT investing process. Entry requirements and timelines can change quickly. This is the bleeding edge of crypto investing after all (though again, this project ended up a bit more complex than most). But there are oodles of interesting mints coming up, including Astrals, a Shaquille O’Neal project that will mint in early March. If you want to start digging around on that one, it already has a lot of hype surrounding it. You can begin researching it here, on its Twitter page.
Elsewhere…
Coinbase has added Render Network—one of the cryptos in our Frontier Fortunes Portfolio—to its list of tokens available for trading.
This is a bullish sign.
Coinbase has always been a highly selective curator of cryptocurrencies. Because it caters to the masses, it tries to limit access to the worst of the worst and, instead, bring investors best-of-breed crypto projects.
That’s not to say every token on Coinbase is a blue-chip darling. But it is saying that Coinbase lists a token only when it achieves a certain level of acceptance and prestige in the wider cryptoconomy. And Render is clearly in that camp.
I won’t repeat the details of Render here…I spelled them out in our inaugural January issue. I will only offer a reminder that Render operates a global graphics-processing network that allows developers to “render” video on the fly—that is, convert digital coding into high-end graphics.
This is going to be a fundamentally important task in the “new internet” on the way. It will be part and parcel of metaverses and virtual reality and holographic displays on tablets and phones.
Our original buy price was just over $2.25 per Render Token. As I write this, it’s about $3.20, meaning we’re up about 40% so far. Still, we are under the $4 buy limit. So, if you were not able to grab Render for whatever reason, you now have a path to owning it through Coinbase.
We’re also up about 45% with Avalanche, about 35% with The Sandbox, and about 18% with Audius. Though up, all of them except Avalanche are still in the buy range. Avalanche, in the mid-$90s, is slightly above our $90 buy limit.
Our three laggards are Star Atlas and Uniswap, which are both roughly flat, and Terra, which is down 20%.
Terra, a stablecoin factory, is down for a funky reason. A pseudonymous Twitter user exposed a member of the Wonderland crypto project and tied him to a collapsed Canadian crypto exchange once thought to be a Ponzi scheme. That, in turn, bled over into another Wonderland project called Abracadabra, which has a vague, tangential relationship to Terra. And in the skittish crypto universe, that’s been enough to send Terra lower.
The bottom line here is that Terra has done nothing wrong. It just got hogtied to an event that indirectly brushes up against it on the periphery, but not in a way that impacts the company.
In short, Terra is a good buy at this price. It will rebound.
That’s all for now. More crypto news and NFT opportunities soon.
P.S. I wanted to offer a couple of notes based on emails I’ve received.
- Crypto.com.
If you are having issues opening an account at Crypto.com, don’t fight it. Crypto exchanges, like many other kinds of financial institutions, can be opaque and difficult to deal with. If you’re having trouble with one, often the best path is just to try another. I personally operate from multiple exchange accounts. So, if Crypto.com is giving you trouble, I’d suggest simply using Coinbase and/or Gemini instead. You will have access to the same tokens, just not all in the same place.
- Discord
Discord can be challenging if you’re new to it. When you join a channel, you will need to “verify” that you are human and that you have read the rules.
- Look for the “verify” link on the left-hand side of whatever channel you join.
- Read the instructions. Each can be different, but basically you need to “react” with an emoji, like a checkmark or a smiley face or something.
- Once you do that, you will often see a list of rules pop up. Scroll though, acknowledge that you’ve read them, and then you will end up back on the verify page…where you will have to interact with an emoji again.
- Once you’ve done that, you should see a whole list of new channels pop up on the left, including announcements, news, sneak peeks, FAQ, etc. That’s where you will find all the information you need to keep up with a project.
