Moonbirds Frustration Boiling Over

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Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! Here at the Drop we hope you had a great long weekend with family and friends 🎄

Here is the breakdown of today's newsletter:

🦉 Will Moonbirds Sell?

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• KaiCent: One of the biggest influencers and Twitch streamers in the world (8.4 million subs on Twitch) opened a Pudgy Penguin Toy plushy live on stream. Check out the reveal here. 

• NFT Hack: After the turbulent recent events with NFT hacks varying across multiple collections and communities, the space banded together set things straight: Yuga paid the bounty for holders in the NFTTrader hack, Flooring Protocol covered the losses to users, Ledger reimbursed all funds lost as a result of the malicious code commit. One could say it was a Christmas miracle! (@BoringSecDao)

• 2024: How are NFTs going to continue to make a comeback? We got you covered here. 

• Metaverse Land: Yuga Labs was the clear winner in 2023 when it came to virtual land sales (Otherdeed for Otherside / Otherdeed Expanded) with one piece selling for over $500,000 USD. In total Otherdeed for Otherside has done 615,000+ ETH in volume and holds a 0.53 ETH floor. (TB)

• $COIN: Coinbase stock has had a huge year. It’s up over 437% in the past year alone and is sitting at $175 a share. (YF)

🦉 Time For Moonbirds To Sell?

2023 was a year of frustration for many in this space, no surprise there. NFT investors saw some of their favorite projects over promise and underdeliver - with many meeting their fate and vanishing into obscurity in the bear market. Some projects faired out better than others in this recent bullish run, especially the coined “blue chips” who raised millions of their mint and post-sellout sales. However, one former blue chip project in particular, Moonbirds has gone from fan favorite to a lump of coal in the eyes of most holders, and in turn the community frustration has boiled over.

⏪ Let’s Rewind

• Kevin Rose is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and has vast connections in Silicon Valley. Interesting note: His Wiki page states that after starting Digg, a once successful news site “CEO Rose lost interest in helping the site continue its growth, focusing on a series of non-Digg outside projects; the board eventually replaced him as CEO”.

• Rose co-founded the Proof Collective, a group of NFT collectors, alongside Justin Mezzell. The collective released a collaboration called Moonbirds, a collection of 10,000 pixelated-bird non-fungible tokens that had $281 million in sales as of April 2022. Rose said Proof would use the proceeds to “build a new media company.”

• Proof raised a $10 million seed round from Seven Seven Six and then another $50 million in Series A funding from A16z.

• At its height in the bull market, Moonbirds reached a 40 ETH floor and the upcoming token, plans, and events had the entire space captivated.

• Moonbirds launched several other attached collections: Moonbird Mythics, Oddities, and Eggs fetching over 42,000 ETH in sales volume total.

💡 Where did things go wrong?

With millions in the bank, the future looked bright for Moonbirds holders - well I think we all know how that went. That light faded as some events got canceled, COOs left (Ryan Carson) along with other upper management, and countless other value propositions that many felt just simply never came to fruition. To be fair, Proof and Moonbirds did provide an incredible community, some merch, live events, some tokenized utility, and more. But with tens of millions of dollars raised and tens of thousands of ETH sale volume, there’s no question that the value holders have gotten in return is less than underwhelming.

💡 What’s happening now?

Frustration with the community has boiled over and holders are looking for answers from Kevin Rose. Many ask simple questions such as “Where did the $75 million go?” or “You raised $75 million to give us fanny packs?”. Hard questions to answer, especially if you never answer. The cherry on the cake is Kevin just posted this the other day - stepping away from X for a “hiatus”.

One twitter user Joey Moose came up with an idea, buying Moonbirds from Rose. he posted his offers publically day in and day out.

Even after the multiple million-dollar offers from Moose, not a single response has come from Rose or anyone apart of the Proof team (that we are aware of). Moose has raised his offer several times starting at $1 million to now recently offering $4.5 million to buy the project off of Kevin Rose.

There is hope still, at one point Pudgy Penguins looked completely lost a project until visionary Lucas Netz took over the brand and turned it into a behemoth of a brand. Maybe Joey could do the same?

Look we don’t want to kick a project while its down, and we are aware many readers might still hold Moonbirds but it’s our responsibility to report and highlight alleged slow rugs in broad daylight - in the hopes that those responsible to the right thing and make changes.

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• Here is a full breakdown of the top 10 cryptocurrencies of 2023.

• Ledger will refund all victims of last weeks attack. (MR)

• Avalanche transactions skyrocket 2000%. (TD)

• Trezor adds support for Solana. (TB)

• Phantom crypto wallet adds Bitcoin integration. (@Phantom)

Giancarlo put out an excellent deep dive ranking the top ten NFT mints of all of 2023 (in his humble opinion). It’s mind boggling to realize that these mints happened months ago even though they felt just like yesterday! If you click on anything in this article, this is definitely worth the watch.

That's all for today's issue! Thanks for reading this far and also make sure to give our Twitter a follow daily for breaking web3 news! (@TheDropNFT)

• Who Let The BoDoggos Out?

• BREAKING: Ledger Hacked

• Pudgy Penguins > Club Penguin

• We Are So Back (find out why)

Written by: Gannon Breslin

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.