GM

I did the math.

~20,000 newsletter subscribers

~8.1 billion humans

That means that if each of you refers our newsletter to just 405,000 people, we can reach everyone on Earth.

plz guys

In today’s edition:

• End of an era

• The Top 25

• 4 fresh drops

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Did you know?

We have a premium pass that gives you access to a directory of every drop we cover, complete with detailed information on how to get on every whitelist (including those underrated ones that aren’t already full).

And for those curatooors out there, you can get free NFTs just by finding drops that end up on the Mint or Watch list.

Lastly, hang with me and the MoS team in a private discord with weekly voice chats. The vibes are great.

Would you like to be featured in Mint or Skip like the above ☝️ ?

End of an era

It’s like a scene from a movie. Picture a group of high-powered Wall Street execs in a boardroom drinking whiskey while plotting a hostile takeover.

That’s sort of what happened here, except in this case, it’s crypto nerds on Discord raiding the treasury of a collective of JPEGs.

First, some context: Nouns is a DAO where members join by minting NFTs through daily auctions. After joining, every Noun gets a vote on how to use the treasury (this is important).

Since launching in 2021 they’ve raised over $100 million from these NFTs, making it one of the most well-funded DAOs in the space.

The plan was simple: use that money to fund proposals that “proliferated” the Nouns meme.

The more projects funded, the more influence and recognition would flow to the Nouns brand, and thus more demand for the NFTs themselves.

But there was one problem: NFTs crashed

As Punk4156, one of the founders of the project put it:

Demand for Nouns began to drop just like all other JPEGs. Partly because of macro factors, but you could also argue that Nouns were spending money ineffectively which didn’t help.

This meant that the floor price of a Noun became a lot lower than the value of their share of the treasury (book value) if you were to evenly divide it.

And that gap was getting bigger.

However, this was sort of irrelevant because there wasn’t a way for a Noun to “ragequit” the DAO and take their share of the treasury with them.

But soon arbitrageurs figured something out

If they bought enough Nouns, they could call for a fork of the original DAO which would allow them to add that ragequit mechanic.

And if that fork passed, they’d be able to pocket the difference between the lower floor price and the book value.

That’s exactly what happened last week. By Friday, when the fork proposal closed, a total of 472 Nouns (55% of the supply) voted to leave the original DAO.

This group included:

1. Arbitrageurs

2. Members who no longer believe in the vision

3. Capitulators who just needed the ETH

Most of these forked members have already ragequit and exited the community entirely.

What now?

While the fork included a majority of the NFTs, the original DAO still retained ~65% of the total members.

Now this group has some runway to build harmoniously without the tension of a large internal cohort pushing for the exits.

They also still have $22 million, which is nice.

But the danger of future forks is on the horizon. There’s pressure to keep the prices from falling further, or else the arb presents itself again.

Unfortunately, the biggest losers are the earliest supporters who bought at higher prices, like Xaix who minted Noun #1 for 613 ETH (some of which gets redistributed to others during a fork).

C’est la vie.

No one ever joined an NFT Backed Decentralized Autonomous Organization because they thought it’d be easy.

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

ANONS by Matt Kane

Matt Kane, creator of Gazers and one of the most esteemed generative artists in the game, delves into the meaning of anonymity and online persona building with ANONS.

These vintage portraits immortalize photo booth users onchain long after their real identities have been lost to time. Each one contains multiple variations (Multitudes) of the original, but we still don’t know the technicalities of this feature yet.

ANONS starts off with 4 portraits this week, but the supply should scale up to hundreds over time. Kane’s work has repeatedly attracted collectors during this bear market so I’ve…

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

Web by Jan Robert Leegte

Why be a boring jpeg collector when you can be a web page collector, anon?

In partnership with Fingerprints DAO, OG digital artist Jan Robert Leegte melds web1, web3 and AI with Web, a fully onchain collection.

This generative network of 1,000 interlinked web pages (although devoid of content) feels eerily familiar to anyone who browsed the internet pre-Windows Vista times.

The HTML web pages are the art here, making this a drop for the more conceptually-inclined collectooor.

Four Seasons: Autumn by Matteo Mauro

Italian artist Matteo Mauro continues his generative art series Four Sesasons with the third installment, Autumn.

This collection contains multiple editions featuring different price points and sales mechanisms, some of which are exclusive to collectors of past work.

The previous releases, Spring and Summer, successfully sold out in March and June respectively, and I think this might be a three-peat.

Atti NFT

Atticc, a web3 social platform built around NFT communities, will soon release the Atti NFT.

It’s a membership collection that provides access to the platform’s upcoming $ATT token, which uses ERC6551 for airdrop allocation and other types of contract interaction.

Max supply is between 6,666 and 9,999. More info here.