The Blockchain Market

New Mint Rankings, Visionrare Shut Down, Breaking NFT News, and more

Welcome to The Drop NFT Newsletter. Subscribe for breaking NFT news, project breakdowns, & artist spotlights. Thank you to all who are following along on this journey!

Happy Friday!

What a wild week - Happy to say that there are A LOT of new faces here. Over 4,578 new frens are subbed to The Drop! We are so excited to keep delivering you the best content we can possibly muster with our reader's good intentions in mind.

As always - for the community, by the community.

New Mint PFP Rankings

MekaVerse dropped yesterday and if you are reading this you likely didn't get one. It's okay we didn't either. Regardless it shot straight to the top of the new mint power rankings as expected.

The Blockchain Market

This idea has been thrown around for a while: "Use Blockchain technology for the stock market!" Back in January, GameStop (GME) short sellers had sold over 100% of available shares. Problematic? YES. Smart contracts presented a solution for this huge issue in the stock market. Unfortunately, brokerages rejected the idea, shrugging it off for one reason or another. But now a company has risen to the challenge of using NFT's... but for gaming purposes.

Visionrare is an online game that uses smart contracts which enable you to virtually invest in start-ups, inspired by fantasy sports games. According to their website, "a selection of YCombinator W18 - S20 startups is available." They launched Wednesday, Oct. 6th and were shut down by Thursday, Oct. 7th. Why? Visionrare was selling fake shares of real start-ups. Buyers knew shares were fake, but clearly, the game pissed off the wrong person.

For the few hours Visionrare existed in paid form, startups were permitted to verify their profiles and receive a percentage of their NFT shares or could contact Visionrare to take their startup’s profile down. After the shutdown, the company announced it would refund all customers and revamp the platform to offer a free-to-play game. It would have been interesting if this played out a little longer. Kudo's to you, Visionrare. Keep up the innovation using NFT's! (Read more in their White Paper here!)

We Got Your Back

It doesn't matter whether you're new to NFT's or have been around since Cryptokitties in 2017, you know it's not always easy to pick "successful" projects. Some of the best art goes unseen, and some of the unusual art (for lack of a better word) pops off. There are a few things that The Drop looks for solid projects.

First, we'll start with the obvious: good art! Let's all be real, we've seen some really bad art sold for far too much. One project that we've covered that has good art and award-winning artists behind it are Guardians of the Metaverse (read the blog here!). This project also included the second major value— utility!

Utility can be anything from gaming, off-chain experiences, merchandise, airdrops, and mint-passes to name a few. If you don't know what some of those mean, we can cover that later! Every project The Drop has covered so far has a roadmap for utility. Why is this important? Because buying an NFT that unlocks a world of additional opportunity is an incentive for a lot of buyers.

Finally, we look for strong communities. Please keep in mind— not just large followings. Followers can be bought. We are talking about active and engaged communities. The buzz must be real. Why? This will increase liquidity (the ability to buy or sell in a secondary market like OpenSea). Which means the buyer is less likely to be locked into a loss.

Strong communities, incentives through utility, and good art are three important things to look out for when finding NFT's. These three don't indicate a project will moon, but at least then the holder can feel like they are part of something more.

(p.s. If you believe your project fits this description, fill out this form here! We're always on the lookout for what's dropping)

What's Dropping

Meme Drop

Source: @satoshi_nft

Thank you for reading today's issue of The Drop Newsletter!

Disclaimer: The Drop DOES NOT provide financial advice. All content is for informational purposes only. The Drop is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor or a broker/dealer. Trading any crypto-related asset is extremely risky and could result in significant capital losses.

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