It was pretty much it, the hype, the negligible gas fees, the adoption - except for the low TPS of course. I was there during what was arguably the first mint on the sol network till a couple more mints later before I ghosted and came back again. It was really easy to lose your money in the middle of all the bubbles with FOMO all around you but more projects were popping up from every corner with so much potential and it was equally easy to recover the losses but...
The bear market came unexpectedly and disrupted our sweet jolly ride. Most people don't really prepare for the bear market(Including me). It was a ripple too destructive in an otherwise peaceful moment and it certainly wasn't helped by the Luna crash. Floors dropped below expectations and people who jumped at shitty projects had nothing but JPEGS to admire. I panic sold some of my holdings a little bit too late and I am happy I did.
The little story..
Whitelists were so difficult to get! They (projects) tell you to chill and vibe but your display name ends up looking like
Lvl28 17fan arts 50k msgs
Bruh🤡
If you get lucky, you get picked but after all the struggles you're not just willing to dump for a meagre 1-2 sol gain on market listing. All that hardwork will hold you back meanwhile influencers/Collab managers and alpha hunters who literally got more than one free spot can conveniently dump the floor without breaking a sweat and they are still out tweeting about paperhands.
Of course these people are important in getting projects out there. I mean literally all projects do one form or Collab or the other for visibility and followers and it kind of worked until the hype meta got blown off. It was ideally around the time when Trippin Apes launched. I mean we pretty much judged projects by their amount of twitter followers.
"It sure would not fail, it's just 10k supply against over 200k interested people"
Or so we thought
Until it really didn't work. Relative to its expectations though, we set the bar so high already. Trust me it was a successful project but we can't really say that it matched the preceding hype. Projects like Okaybears got a fair amount of hype and lived up to it. I could remember on mint day, floors dropped as people prepared liquidity for it. During the hype meta, we had a flash of degen also, Burrito Boyz and the likes that would just have an overnight floor sweep without reason and it was enjoyable.
Then the dip came and another kind of meta emerged. Only those who were actually working were the ones keeping their head above the water. Even deriv projects that offered some kind of generic feature stood a chance. The real attention was focused on the top guns like Famous Fox Federation and Blocksmith labs, those who actually offered value and not some NFT that would give you a pass into some imaginary future metaverse that wouldn't see the light of day.
What is going on right now?
Well, beneath the quietness and the relative silence, projects are still launching but I really don't know what to make of them. Some succeed but chances of failure are very high, failure to me is the floor dumping below mint price during or after mint out. The other project I got into the other day set 90% royalties until mint out but people kind of got over apprehensive before mint out and it was same story all over again.
I have a friend who about a month ago had close to 40 whitelists, I mean it's fairly easier now since the competitiveness and the grind is not really there. Such numbers could only be pulled by a Collab manager or an Alpha hunter before this time. How many of these projects did well? I guess two or three with what you would consider a relative success.
Alpha hunters are struggling to get the value for their time and I'm not sure projects can afford to pay them as much as they did during the good run.
Then there's the occasional flash of hopes in the NFT space that remind us that it is here to stay and it's not going away anytime soon. The real projects are like underground bunkers designed to withstand and thrive even during Nuclear fallouts.
The other day it was yOOts and it was kind of a no-brainer that it was going to do well given the track record of Frank. I actually applied for the whitelist and it was a big long hopeful shot that accurately missed. It was easier for the professional paperhanders(Influencers) to get in than us of course.
What will happen now? I don't know how long this bear market would last for but we have been here a couple times and we always bounce back. Everyone certainly miss the green.