GM

Heavily caffeinated, in an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the northern hemisphere, writing about JPEGs.

In this moment all is well.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

A cult based on nothing

Context

Tomorrow CryptoUndeads will sell 10,000 PFPs for 3 SOL each (roughly $3 million total).

Our take

One way to look at projects like CryptoUndeads is that they simply provide a service that some people in this space find very useful.

You can imagine this service being expressed in a classic startup pitch deck, where Slide 1 might say: 

Problem: people want to sell something at a profit within days 

Solution: we will give them a vehicle that allows them to do this 

The target audience is the most cynical amongst us, mercenaries who don’t believe in anything beyond The Next Cook (™). 

This is a decently large group of people, and one that’s willing to spend, which explains why it’s so attractive to make these vehicles for them. 

But first, you have to give them a reason to buy your services. You need to show them that you can maximize short-term hype, perhaps through WL collabs or vague tweets, and that you will do what it takes to ensure that demand exceeds supply.

Even in cases like CryptoUndeads, where the mint price is an astounding ~$300 (remember there are 10,000 of these), if enough people convince themselves that they’ll be able to get their W flip, you can seemingly raise millions of dollars without much else. 

Hence why we still know virtually nothing about CryptoUndeads

This was true back when we first covered it here, where I gave it the benefit of the doubt that more would be shared over the coming weeks. 

Yet here we are, a day before this multi-million-dollar mint, and we still don’t know, or have seen, anything. 

It’s clear these services don’t need to worry about annoying things like art, storytelling, or even vision.

At best, they’re unnecessary garnishes, and at worst they can be counterproductive. 

Art can be critiqued, a vision can be judged. Why give people something real to debate over? 

Instead, provide as little as possible, and then rev the allowlist engine. 

Your presale holders will handle the rest. They’ll transform into loyal reply guys overnight, they’ll battle any FUD for you My Liege, they’ll write long beautiful threads, now at breakneck speed with the help from our friends over at OpenAI. 

A cult based on nothing, hoping to leave your project at the earliest convenience – all the signs of a strong future community. 

Seriously, the replies on some of these tweets make me want to take the very next train back to Web 1.0. 

All of a sudden Fortnite skins don’t seem so bad. Like, do they give you self-custodied ownership of digital property tracked on a permissionless and decentralized public ledger that will outlive us all? 

Maybe not, but at least it’s not this cringe. 

Bottom line

I don’t necessarily mean to pick on CryptoUndeads specifically, and they’re not actually doing anything wrong here. 

They offer no promises, and for all I know they could reveal a set of 1/1 Picassos tomorrow and everyone dances the can-can all the way to Valhalla together.

They’re not even necessarily unique, in the sense that we come across dozens of similarly vague meme drops every week, this just happens to be one of the more hyped examples. 

But it’s an annoying reminder that many collectors are as thirsty as they’ve ever been, and ready to accept even completely blind million-dollar mints if it means they can make a couple of SOL. 

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

neutral by ripcache

Hot off his Swarm Ordinals sale earlier this month, cryptoart OG ripcache will soon drop neutral, a new ETH piece on Particle.

As part of the artist’s public//private collection, neutral consists of a physical and a digital component, where the latter is only accessible by scratching a section of the former, revealing a key – a signature ripcache method we’ve seen multiple times over the past year, but this time with a twist: fractionalization

A total of 64 collectors can buy a “particle” to co-own the 1/1 physical and decide whether they want to scratch it to decouple the 1/1 digital (they also get some other benefits).

An experiment in fractionalization and decentralized decision-making from one of the market’s favorite artists right now.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

(ch)art by Batzdu

Undeniably one of the most popular NFT artists over the past year and a half, Batzdu, recently announced (ch)art, his second-ever generative art drop, only accessible by burning $pepe, one of his older editions.

As the name implies, it’s art about financial charts. Those seemingly impersonal red and green lines that the emotional trader anthropomorphizes on the daily.

It’s part of the artist’s packed Q1 schedule, dropping the same week as Keys, which should be Batzdu’s first generative art project.

For those who like to do technical analysis on jpegs.

Głïtçh

A collection of 256 generative PFPs on Bitcoin (inscription numbers ranging from 70k to 88k) by MAX CAPACITY, an artist with a large body of work on platforms like Foundation and Objkt.

Głïtçh takes the original PFP template from CryptoPunks and makes it its own by using text symbols to create the faces of its characters – first by scrambling the symbols to abstract the personality and give it that digital spasm vibe, then topping it all off with a neon color palette you can’t ignore.

Mint details are lacking, but I could see pixel art enjoyers digging this one.