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There is never a week without controversy in the land of nfts and this week was no exception. A lot of the discussion on the timeline surrounded upcoming mints – namely just ape, great goats and fresh social experiment goofy dao. Hell, even Jikan caught some strays regarding WL spots.
To be fair, with the price of Solana all the way down the last 6-8 weeks, the sentiment on twitter has been a lot more volatile. This phenomenon is not uncommon across our space as we’ve often noticed that during bearish pullbacks, CT tends to get a little quieter, voices become a little more intolerable and accusations get thrown around like paper mache in a kindergarten arts and crafts class.
Regardless, I am here to cover all that happened across Solana twitterverse.
Let’s start with Jikan Studios. Prior to mint there was a thread going around suggesting that someone from their team (believe it was a MOD) proposed to the Solana Yacht Club to market manipulate the price by sweeping a certain amount of NFTs in their collection at various price ranges. There were also issues when it came to Solana Yacht Club confirming their 100 WL spots that were supposedly promised. The discord messages around market manipulation were denied as project owners refer to Dyno as a rogue moderator and suggest that the WL issue was related to purging in the discord prior to mint.
Jikan Studios was one of the recent relatively hyped mints with over 250K twitter followers that was arguably impacted by these allegations. Despite these accusations, Jikan Studios still minted out 8888 supply and has transacted over 46K Solana in their first week on secondary. From the solsniper chart you can see that there was an aggressive dump after almost hitting 6 SOL out the gate and found bottoms of 2.5 SOL. It is currently hovering around the 4 SOL mark bouncing off that 6 SOL local top.
Moving onto Just Ape (@justape_), another upcoming mint that has somehow miraculously gathered over 329K followers on twitter was caught in the crosshairs of multiple notable accounts.
Famous Fox Federation owner Draxx, called out Rabbels for being someone who was removed from their team despite being a cofounder of FFF at the time. The accusations go further to stipulate that Rabbels (owner of @justape_), withdrew the majority of FFF mint funds and swindled their community for another debatable project – chimpions.
SOLBigBrain took it another step further and directly called out the team for establishing mint prices at 5 SOL for a 10K supply project. Personally, I can’t remember the last time any mint was over the price of 3 SOL since August, and yes despite SOL currently sitting at a miserable $38USD, it’s still a $380K USD mint raise + yet to be confirmed slice of royalties. You can argue all day that it’s only roughly $200USD per mint, and back in November that’s not even 1 SOL, but the fact of the matter is, in the current market state, there’s a large sector of the space that is down bad, and you’re asking for 5 SOL, regardless of the value for a 10K supply, seemingly cash grab for a project that is now likely going to be dumped on secondary for 3-4 SOL within 2 hours? Oh and yeah, the project owner's credibility and moral compass was called into question by one of the most credible teams/actual founders in the space at FFF? You’ve helped me make my mind up already.
It's almost comical at this point that all projects discussed so far are ones with over 250K twitter followers. Well you guessed it, the next one up is Great Goats with over 420K followers and arguably the easiest to pick of the bunch. @SweeperSolana, a frequent user in twitter spaces (who always asks the right questions) during AMAs had a pretty comprehensive thread on why @GreatGoatsNFT is suss af.
Amongst all this noise, @The_Solstice decided it was the right time to launch @GoofyDao - a project with no roadmap, no promises, just a community run DAO combined with questionable pixel art. A fair few were riled up in the space regarding this project, some claiming that an influencer like Solstice should have protected his followers more by launching a ‘legitimate project’. Solstice openly marketed @GoofyDao as a no-utility play, as an ‘un-ruggable’ project. To be fair, I lowkey believe this was a genius launch amidst the controversy that came out this week. It was kind of a fuck you to overhyped mints we’ve mentioned before who are asking for 3-5 SOL for almost no promises. Sure, new entrants into the space who blindly buy into projects without researching may end up holding the bag or absorbing the price action on the way down. However, those who do not research what they’re investing into are basically gambling. To be even more honest, they are asking to be dumped on. If you’re a copy trader and your copy-trade turns out to be a loss making trade, you are still responsible for 100% of your own losses. Just because you’ve mimicked someone else’s buy or sell order does not mean they are responsible for your win or loss.There’s a difference between being hoodwinked, bamboozled, run amok and flat out deceived and copy trading.
Either way, it’s been a pretty hectic week on twitter as always, perhaps more intense than usual. Make sure you find enough time to stand up, go outside and touch some grass.
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