GM

Today marks exactly 1 year since we began publishing Mint or Skip.

A big GM to the readers who have been with us during this first chapter. In the name of valor and virtue, I hereby declare you all Day 1 ride-or-die OGs.

So much more to come!

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

I heard you like to speculate 👀

This is another edition of our Magic Loot Bus series, where we go off the beaten path and tour weird alleyways and side-quests that you don’t normally get to see in Web3. 

And, O Most Genteel Reader, at the risk of offending your enlightened sensibilities, today’s double-header has a crude theme:

Degeneracy 

maincharacters

Yesterday we spoke about how 2024 might be the year that memecoins and NFTs fully merge, and this is yet another example. 

maincharacters is both an art collection and a marketplace. At its core, you buy and sell “characters” (currently there’s only Gary Gensler) which are 1155 tokens with simplistic pixel art.

But here’s where it’s interesting: the marketplace uses a bonding curve contract where the price of a character adjusts with each transaction (technically each buy/sell is a mint/burn).

This means there’s always liquidity, but there’s also always a chance of getting dumped on by your fellow speculators. 

An unapologetic, stripped-down gambling showcase designed to hit your dopamine receptors within seconds. And surprisingly already over 700 ETH in volume in just 24 hrs. 

The website is worth checking out for its fun user interface alone. My personal favorite is the wallet-connected chatbox, which I now believe should be mandatory on all mint pages.

Note: This is an experimental contract: proceed at your own risk and use a burner for the love of god! 

chatFUKR

Harvey Rayner is a popular generative artist who has benefited quite a bit from the rise in NFTs. 

But it seems all that time spent in this rough cyber-pleasure-island we call Web3 might’ve taken a toll. 

Clearly he’s seen some shit, and now he’s distilling all that madness into chatFUKR, a collection of 6,942 fully onchain PFPs launching on Bitcoin in batches starting next month. 

His target audience is “degens, art-loving degens, and art lovers who love degens”.

There’s a lot happening here.

The art consists of surreal characters on squares that resemble playing cards, and zooming in reveals impressively rich detail from the many chaotic patterns and crypto references overlapping each other. 

Plus, the underlying message is amusing. The weird character represents “a troll that has evolved in the wild of interconnected chat and social servers, consuming the discord of Web3 communities. It screams as its consciousness comes online, an AI that has evolved in the wild.” 

In other words, it’s a visual representation of  “what 2 years in NFTs does to a mfer”. 

I don’t know what an AI-trained-on-Web3 would look like, but screaming as its consciousness comes online sounds about right. 

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

Overt Flow NFT Paris 2024 Special Edition by Botto

Our favorite art robot overlord is back for a special in-person-only limited edition at NFT Paris, courtesy of Makersplace.

Celebrating one of Botto’s early outputs (#24 - Overt Flow), it includes both a physical print (the artist’s first) and an NFT, with the latter serving as a raffle entry for a potential 10k $BOTTO prize.

With a low supply and an in-person-only mint, I could see this one becoming a bit of a collector’s item for Botto believers, given enough time.

Okay Dogs

Okay Dogs, a collection by okay.xyz coming later this month, is a cross-chain follow-up to one of the top PFPs on Solana (Okay Bears) and the first collection to drop on Magic Eden’s new royalty-enforcing marketplace (which I covered here).

Plans for the project are still under wraps, but just one sneak peek of the 2021-wagmi-era art makes it clear that this one is for the most faithful believoors of the cartoon animal PFP genre.

Battle Derby

A free gaming mint backed by Immutable drops later this month with Battle Derby, a F2P mobile racing game by Spanish studio TripleO Games.

The game’s currently in closed beta with little gameplay revealed so far. Also, we still don’t know the use case for the NFTs, but at least it’s a low-cost opportunity to get involved in a game early.