🔍 The Memes by 6529

Memes are more than just images overlaid with text that make people laugh. Memes have the power to influence the narrative, change how people think, and push them toward action. Especially in the crypto zeitgeist, memes serve as the universal language that binds us together. It could be a crucial life lesson such as ‘not your keys, not your coins’, or just a simple ‘gm’ from a wassie Twitter account.

The Memes by 6529 is a multi-season NFT project that attempts to leverage this role of memes in crypto. Every season, artists create visual representations of prompts given by the project such as ‘Freedom To Transact’ or ‘Open Metaverse’. Each season consists of eight meme prompts, and there are between two to eleven meme cards for each prompt. The meme cards are limited-edition NFTs that feature the visual representations.

The project is spearheaded by Punk6529, a prominent web3 thought leader. Initially appearing on crypto Twitter in July 2021 as an NFT collector, Punk6529 has transformed into a mission-driven builder through their many philosophical tweet threads. The Memes NFT collection is intended to promote 6529’s principles of an open metaverse, such as decentralization, community, self-sovereignty, and more.

While many NFTs in the collection are designed by 6529 and 6529er, the project invites artists to collaborate and has since grown to include artwork from big artists such as XCOPY. All released artwork is stored on Arweave and placed in the public domain. Essentially, 6529 and their team prepares the meme prompts, vets the artists interested in meme cards, and curates the artwork selected for release. This curation aspect is also present in other popular NFT projects, such as Art Blocks. The Curated collection tier of Art Blocks includes projects that have passed a verification process and exemplify the vision of the Art Blocks team.

Featured NFTs are by artists 6529 and Arsonic.

The NFT collection has experienced a massive bull run over the past three months. The combined market cap of all NFTs has rallied more than 17x from 2.7K ETH in November 2022 to almost 50K today. The combined market cap hit an all-time high of 71.8K ETH on Jan. 23, 2023. Alongside, the number of unique wallets holding the NFTs has also increased 76% from 3.5K to 6.2K during the same period.

Full set collectors are wallets that include one NFT from all editions released so far. Currently, there are 95 wallets that are full set collectors. In the weeks after the project launch, there were as many as 618 full set collectors but that number has trended down as more NFTs are released and the cost to acquire a full set increases. On Jan. 19, 2023, a full set collection was exchanged for 1 CryptoPunk NFT. Currently, a full set costs 101 ETH and includes 60 NFTs released by the project so far.

The project aims to release NFTs with a large supply size and low prices to encourage widespread distribution. Currently, 21% of the collections have a supply size higher than 900 NFTs. Moreover, 21% of the collections are also held by more than 700 unique wallets. The cost to mint is always 0.06529 ETH per NFT with 50% of the revenue shared with the original artist. The collection also has a creator fee of 6.9%.

The project implements a standard mint model whereby each release has a fixed supply and fixed cost during mint. The mint begins with a limited allowlist that generally includes holders of previous work by the artist and holders of previous meme card NFTs. The allowlist is followed by a public mint. However, users may struggle to mint editions released by popular artists or those with low supply size due to the high demand and may need to purchase from the secondary market instead.

The average sale price on OpenSea has increased by 300% from 0.1609 ETH in November 2022 to 0.6535 ETH today. However, prices can vary a lot from card to card, depending on the artist, and supply size. Currently, the cheapest listing is the FirstGM for 0.3529 ETH (highest supply size of 2,434) while the most expensive listing is the NakamotoFreedom for 27 ETH (lowest supply size of 222).

The project is currently releasing NFTs from Season 2. Users can remain updated with new drops by following the 6529 Collections Twitter account.

📅 This Week in Delphi Research

A Look Back at Aave’s 2022 Fundamentals

Aave is one of the core DeFi layers for the entire ecosystem. But if we consider Aave a business, how is it performing? Are token holders stewarding the DAO’s funds well? Is spending in line with revenue? Is Aave’s revenue in line with the rest of the market? In this deep dive, Aaron attempts to answer these questions by looking at Aave’s fundamentals.

The Wallet Wars

In this must-read piece, Ceteris takes a look at the crypto wallet space and segments available solutions into three categories: standard wallets, smart contract wallets, and MPC wallets. He analyzes all the major options and concludes that wallets of the future will no longer be just a way for users to connect to dApps, but will need to offer more compelling features to stay competitive.

SOL Surges and Stalls

After the FTX collapse, many users wrote off Solana as yet another hyped L1 but the recent resurgence in SOL has them speechless. In this market note, Priyansh digs into the technical data to construct a top-down view of the SOL market and points out the key levels for resistance and support over various time frames.

The Great Reset: Your 2023 Guide To Web3 Games

2022 was a brutal year for web3 gaming as the widespread focus on player earnings proved to be unsustainable and the play-to-earn narrative unravelled. What will 2023 bring? This extensive read by Piers and Joseph reports on the state of web3 gaming by diving into the funding outlook, land-based virtual worlds, play-to-earn guilds, gaming infrastructure, regulatory concerns, and emerging trends to monitor. This report was a joint-effort between Delphi Research and Naavik.

📖 Delphi Reads

As we covered in our last edition of Delphi Digest, the liquid staking derivative wars have taken the center stage in 2023. TJ’s Substack has published a post that takes a look at the current landscape and predicts ETH flows after the crucial Shanghai upgrade. The post concludes that Lido will still be the largest player despite diminishing market share while Coinbase takes the second spot. Read more here.

A recent discovery has revealed that you can store NFTs on Bitcoin by inscribing a file onto individual satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain. In a tweet thread, Trust Machines breaks down the technical details behind this finding. While the increased utility can drive more transactions and fees on Bitcoin, it has also led to concerns that non-financial transactions could end up spamming the network. Read more here.

Sudoswap, the AMM for NFT trading, has announced the launch of their governance module alongside the SUDO airdrop. The token will allow holders to adjust the fee switch, add new routers, whitelist external contracts, add new bonding curves, and more. Early sudoAMM LPs and 0xmons NFT holders qualify for the airdrop, while XMON holders can lock tokens to get SUDO. Read more here.

🔥 Meme of the Week

Twitter is designing a system to allow payments through the social media platform. Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, said that he wants the payment system to support fiat currencies initially but wants the ability to add cryptocurrencies later. DOGE is up 10% on the news.

“Submitting to the narrative” is a term used by traders to reflect the importance of embracing what the market presents, rather than trying to predict what’s next. Maybe sometimes you just have to submit.

Meme via @Awawat_Trades.