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WL Meta, when will it end?
The markets having fun, everyone wins?
When the sun goes down,
and floor prices too.
How will it hold, fumble, or moon?
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
WL META
With that out of the way, let’s take an in-depth look about this WL (whitelist) meta going on and how we can fill our bags. The WL craze is literally everywhere. We’re seeing 300k twitter and discord accounts on projects based off pure speculation and hype. I can’t lie, I am pretty envious of those with WL, but I like to take a step back and ask if I wasn’t able to mint it, will I be somebody's exit liquidity? If so, what price makes sense to my situation and my investing strategy.
It goes to say that in a time of mint everything season everyone expects every new project to be the next blue-chip, and everyone finds themselves comparing every new project to BAYC, Okay Bears, Degods, you name it—though as long as we aren’t comparing it to anything on Cardano, I am bullish. In reality, we have nothing to back these claims up with. The mint everything season only lasts, until it doesn’t, so we have to look at these all with a degree of caution. Just like any investment, treat your money with respect, or it will find a new owner.
Let’s break down Trippin Ape Tribe (TAT) pre-mint and compare it to Okay Bears (OKB) for a second. Everyone has seemingly been comparing them to each other so it’s only fair. On a surface level, we can look at hype, community, art and potential utility pre-mint, and up to this point:
Hype Level
Trippin Ape - We could likely measure the hype by followers alone. Assuming they weren’t using bots. 300k followers is double OKB’s current count… Let’s go with a 15/10. This is definitely record breaking.
Okay Bears - Let’s go with 8 or 9/10, I only say this because the market was still touchy around mint day and nobody was really expecting OKB to do as well as they did. Most of the big plays always come out of nowhere. Or do they? They still held the record at the time of mint, hovering around the mid 100k follower level.
Community
TAT and OKB I would rank very similarly, they were both comprised of influencers, and a mix of unique holders. Today we’re looking around TAT’s unique holders to be 5.8k and OKB’s around 5.6k
The difference in these is that I would say Trippin Apes did an excellent job in attracting normies to the space whereas OKB stole $ETH Maxis. Which are both bullish for the space.
Art
Both projects' artwork is a lowkey derivative to an extent. I say extent because one is a literal ape, and the other is a bear, in the style of BAYC. I am not claiming copy or anything, just pointing out facts.
TAT is a psychedelic ape deriv, that has influence from pop culture and drug culture that have seemingly sufficed on the Solana chain, with unique approaches to the PFP concept.
OKB is a super clean cartoon bear that gives great aesthetic and emotion while smelling like blue-chip potential right off the bat. Compared to BAYC is pretty easy, given my first comments about the art…
Utility
This is where both projects seem to pose questions. Neither have a technical roadmap, but seem to have great connections in the broader scheme and have tossed around big partnerships, and the true essence of “brand building” as a major buzzword. Granted we have seen some other top projects remove the “listed” roadmap and push for some cool art with hints as to leave the holders guessing, so we can let that slide.
A fair amount of speculation does exist with these, and both have yet to truly do anything that a typical project has done in regards to providing value to its holders. No staking, no breeding and no mutants yet. On the surface this is bullish for the space and new mints, but this also begs the question of where valuation of floor prices will be generated. Betting on the jockey rather than the horse is about all we can say. It all boils down to what a buyer is willing to pay that drives these floor prices.
A pitfall we might see on Trippin Ape Tribe in the short term, is that the floor reached close to a 23x gain within seconds after minting out. So naturally people are going to exit with crazy returns, and move liquidity into other established projects.
Looking at this chart from Solsniper.xyz - we can clearly see some selling pressure and maybe potential bottom forming in the 40’s? But we won’t know until buyers truly step in. Where TAT differs short term from Okay Bears—and more closely relates to something like Communi3o—is that with such large short term price action, the chart needs to cool off. Bears had a great first few days, but didn’t go 20x in seconds so we have to err on the side of caution if we’re expecting TAT to get to 100 SOL floor or more. The same way that Communi3o ran up a near 23x as well it notably fell 69% within 6 days post mint from the ATH’s. If history repeats itself, place your buy orders in the ~25 SOL range.
So, how does all this relate to the stupid poem about WL meta?
Fine, I'll tell you.
A lot of projects are going to adopt the Trippin Ape hype, simply because of this new meta, which will cause projects who lack innovation or utility for holders to seemingly do well in the short term, masking their true ability to provide value to holders. This will cause inflated floor prices and people getting a little bit too extended in unworthy projects. Not to say that the next wave of newer projects won’t be goated, but never play with money you can’t afford to lose.