🚨 The NFT opportunity of the year?

GM everyone. This is 2036, the crypto newsletter that pays you.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: we’re interrupting our regularly scheduled program to bring you the biggest NFT drama of the year that unfolded yesterday. It could be the end of an empire - or a fantastic buying opportunity.

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

Get smarter on crypto in 2 minutes

Azuki is one of the most famous NFT collections out there. In 2022 alone, they did over $1 BILLION in sales volume.

Last year they dropped a second collection - Beanz - to all Azuki holders.

And yesterday, their third and hotly anticipated collection - Elementals - was released.

Existing Azuki and Beanz holders got a chance to buy the new collection for the price of 2 ETH (∼$3,720) before everyone else - in what’s called a “pre-sale.”

This is meant to reward holders of projects with early access to new collections.

But at the time of the pre-sale, the collection hadn’t been revealed.

Nobody knew what they were buying… they just had to trust Azuki.

And trust, they did. The entire collection sold out in a few minutes. The team behind the project made a whopping $38 MILLION.

But then the collection was revealed.

duh duh duh…

Turns out they look almost exactly like the first collection. Some of the NFTs in the collection are even 100% identical to each other.

Azuki holders were shocked.

The Elementals that cost 2 ETH to mint immediately tanked. As of right now, they’re trading for 1.5 ETH though they’ve been as low as 1.2 ETH.

Their flagship collection Azuki suffered even more. It’s down 45%.

So is this the end of Azuki?

Well, it could go both ways from here.

We’ve seen NFT collections turn around and thrive, like Pudgy Penguins.

And the Azuki team has already taken responsibility for the problem:

Someone has even offered $40 million to take over the entire Azuki project and repair the damage:

And a lot could also still happen to the Elementals NFTs:

Who knows.

A lot of people in the community are not so easily convinced…

What we do know is that every crisis can present an opportunity.

One of the most prominent NFT collections in the world is down bad. 

And it’s still too early to tell what will happen. But that’s where our opportunity lies…

SO:

a/ If you believe that Azuki:

• did this on purpose to generate attention (like Zeneca👇)

• will transform the Elementals into something else

• hit a small bump in the road to building one of the most valuable IPs ever

… or any number of short-term negatives in a sea of long-term positives, then Azuki and/or Elementals (even Beanz!) could be an interesting play right now.

The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.

b/ On the other hand, if you think Azuki:

• milked their holders for another $40million because they wanted to/couldn’t raise VC money

• have lost the long-term trust of their holders

• got greedy and are on the way out

… then Azuki/Elementals may not be the right play here.

The time to repair the roof (=stacking ETH) is when the sun is shining.

We’re just the messengers, but here’s what NFT Twitter is saying:

Welcome to NFT-land. The wild wild west of crypto. Where fortunes are made and lost in a day.

Whatever you decide with Azuki, there’ll be plenty more opportunities.

In 3 days, another highly anticipated NFT is dropping: Ether.

We’ll be keeping our eyes closely on the launch. And if we see a good opportunity, we might take it.

In the meantime, we’re keeping some dry powder ready.

As Charlie Munger put it best: “the way to get rich is to keep $10 million in your checking account in case a good deal comes along”

We ain’t keeping $10 millie, but we’re keeping some ETH. It’s the dry powder of both NFT and DeFi opportunities.

We think you should have some too.

And that’s what we’ll pay you to do today.

🍨 Dessert

Stories to read if you have FOMO

1/ $4.2 TRILLION asset manager Fidelity is getting ready to file for a bitcoin ETF

(that’s really the most important one today)

📝 Task

Earn $15 in ETH for a simple crypto task

Ethereum (ETH) is the currency of NFTs and DeFi. And the easiest way to use it to buy/sell/mint NFTs is with Metamask.

So today’s task is a simple Wallet Wednesday: get Metamask and some ETH.

As always, we’ll tally all the participants in a Google sheet and mathematically choose a winner at random who’ll receive $15 in ETH.

We’ll announce the winner in Friday’s email.

🖼️ Crypto meme of the day

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