Since the current NFT meta is free mints with no roadmap, I want to give a quick primer on reading an NFT smart contract and ways to be safe during mint. In this article, I will cover:
Since the current NFT meta is free mints with no roadmap, I want to give a quick primer on reading an NFT smart contract and ways to be safe during mint. In this article, I will cover:
Now you are thinking – why would I want to mint directly from the Contract? What’s wrong with minting a project from their launch page? Well, there are a couple of reasons for that. Minting from a Smart Contract can help you mint a project early, and don’t miss out when there is a lot of hype. Multiple times, project launch sites crashed during mint due to the vast amount of traffic going through the website. The second reason is simple – minting directly from a Smart Contract can help you avoid scams.
Although the term smart contract can sound a bit daunting and very few people are interested in going into the nitty-gritty of it, having a basic understanding of a smart contract can help you inspect an NFT project.
We will use Etherscan – the most popular blockchain explorer for Ethereum blockchain, to read a smart contract. So, what are some basic and valuable things you can find on Etherscan when reading a smart contract?
Let’s use BAYC as an example. You can find the NFT project contract address by going to Opensea, finding your project (1), clicking on any of the NFTs and clicking on Details (2) – Contract Address (3). This will take you to the Contract on Etherscan.
On the Etherscan page, click on Contract (4), where you will be able to read the Code (5), Read Contract (6) and Write Contract (7).
Firstly, you can inspect the Code. If you know how to read lines of code, you can go nuts here and see the entire Contract – I won’t be doing this.
Secondly, you can Read the Contract – here you will see a list of different functions. The functions in various contracts may differ or be named differently, but you usually would see:
Thirdly, you can go and Write the Contract – here you will need to connect your wallet (12) to make changes to the Contract. The available functions of what you can do will differ depending on the project, and it will cost you some ETH to do any of the transactions. With BAYC, you can, for example, transfer (13) an NFT or mint (14) NFT directly from the Contract (well, this was available when the project launched).
Next, let’s see how you mint an NFT from a contract.
Follow steps 1-7 to navigate your way to the smart contract of the project you like. If the project is not on OS yet, you can search the contract address on Etherscan.
Once you click on Write Contract, you will need to connect your Web3 Wallet. When connected, go to the mint section in the Smart Contract. You will need to enter how much you will pay for how many tokens you want here. If you are familiar with the project, you will know the mint price and the max amount of tokens you can mint before the launch.
If the price is 0.08ETH (BAYC example), you will enter .08 in the first field and 1 in the second field.
If the max amount of NFTs you can mint is 20 (BAYC example), then you will enter 1.6 in the first line (15) and 20 in the second line (16). If the mint is free – the mint price will be 0, and you will only need to pay a gas fee.
If you don’t know the mint price, you can check this information in the Smart Contract. Go to Read Contract and you will find the information there:
After clicking Write, you will be prompted to confirm the transaction via your Web3 wallet provider. Double-check the transaction details and gas fee before confirming the transaction. That’s it, you minted your NFT directly from a Smart Contract!
Recently there has been a wave of NFT projects offering free mints. By free, I mean that you only need to pay the transaction fee when minting. Although I think that free mints are a great way to attract more people, who do not hold big bags of ETH, this opens the door for scammers looking to take advantage of less experienced users. Here are a few tips on how to stay safe during a mint.
Use a wallet with minimal ETH and no valuable assets in it. One wrong signature, and your precious NFT disappears. Make sure you have enough funds to pay the gas fee, though. On a related note, please don’t keep your valuable NFTs in a hot wallet; move them to a hardware wallet. Here is a helpful chart suggesting how you may want to structure your wallets.
There have been many scams where a project advertises a free mint on their site but changes the mint button to a signature request for you to approve transfers to your valuable NFTs. This is how you get your NFTs stolen quickly.
When you mint from a contract, you can call the exact (mint) function that you want to call. This reduces the chance of you signing something you didn’t intend to. Go back to part 2 of this article to see the steps on how to mint an NFT directly from a Smart Contract.
Here’s an example unverified Contract: https://etherscan.io/address/0x6c830acd0b1610f547f568abd9500012cffd5208#code. You’ll find that there’s no readable code on the Etherscan page. For a free NFT mint, this almost guarantees something malicious is going on. Unless you know how to read through decompiled bytecode, I highly recommend not minting. You also won’t be able to mint directly from the Contract.
To summarise, learn how to read a Smart Contract, mint NFT directly from Smart Contract as often as possible, use a burner wallet when minting and avoid suspicious-looking contracts (no blue tick on OS, no green tick on Etherscan). Stay safe!
-By Alina Brnadic
I’m long Amazon now that markets are open!
Amazon has not wicked below the lower BB20 (on the monthly) since the 2008 GFC, indicating it is two standard deviations oversold and prices are low on a relative basis. Bollinger bands are not intended to be used on their own, so on to point 2.
Similarly, it has not wicked below the MA50 and EMA50 since 2008.
As an exponential growth stock, it has traded above EMA20 for the majority of months in the last 14 years. It will do so again.
Looking at some of the worst selloffs over the last 14 years, the GFC stands out @~-65% from peak to trough. Do I think the price will reach ~$1,308? No. Am I worried if it does? No.
Has their business model changed? No. It’s a long term investment, and long term there hasn’t been a better time to buy in years!
@aswathdamodaran, the father of valuation recently indicated that $AMZN was ~9.7% undervalued at $3068 (valuation @ $3,398). Current price is $2,226 indicating ~-34% undervalued.
He also added it to his portfolio. He tweeted on Feb 13 (not sure of the purchase date or if still holding).
Assuming he purchased on 24th Jan when prices were at their lowest, means I enter my trade 16% lower
This is not a metric, but another indicator in my arsenal to support my thesis – someone I look up to tremendously has the same idea.
@RaoulGMI recently started the macro masterclass series on @RealVision– I recommend everyone watch it if you want to understand the current macro climate from some of the greatest minds of our time.
There he also points out that $AMZN is two standard deviations oversold and that you should be a buyer. I tend to agree. The upside we’ve been given from sellers is a gift and I thank the paper hands for it.
-By Filip Brnadic
As the cryptocurrency bear market ensues, NFTs have also experienced dramatic drawdowns. The Bored Ape Yacht Club floor is down 30% from their ATH, and Moonbirds is down 50%. $APE has crashed 77% since ‘The Otherside’ mint, from its peak of $26 down to $5.84. While many think that NFT drawdowns come as a result of the bear market in the equities and crypto sector, at times like this, it is important to remember that price volatility is the nature of the crypto industry. This article aims to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what the future of NFT might hold.
NFT Market Growth
NFT market saw extraordinary growth in 2021. If there was minimal action a year ago, now we can see a steady weekly trading volume increase, with 250K ETH traded every week since Aug-21, according to Nansen.ai
Figure 1: NFT market size
To confirm that these are not the same group of people trading between themselves, we have seen massive growth in the number of users. For example, the number of weekly users for OpenSea grew from 47k in Aug-21 to 182k in May-22.
Figure 2: Users per week
Coinbase has recently launched its NFT marketplace. Instagram is testing NFT integration, and I’m sure we will see many more new marketplaces launching in the coming months. We could argue that centralized platforms adopting NFT is not the way to an open metaverse; however, it’s still a clear indicator of where the market is going. More importantly, NFTs are more than just pretty pictures on your phone, digital art or a PFP. This concept presents a much deeper idea technically as well as socially. Let’s first look at the former.
Technical idea
The technical, more profound idea is that blockchain, the underlying technology that NFTs are built on, has solved a significant problem in distributed systems and computer science. The problem of how people who don’t know and trust each other can coordinate and agree on a set of facts.
The implication of this is that we now have a way to store a set of information that is not in a database. We know that modern society runs on databases. How much money do we have in our bank account? What did we buy in a grocery shop? Which hotel do we check in at? Thousands of databases connected to the internet organize our everyday life.
It is something that’s happened in the last 50 years. Before widespread computers and the internet, this was not as important a part of human society. Now, it is integral for running any modern society. We take it for granted as completely obvious because it’s the only way to do it. I am old enough to remember the days without a computer, the internet, or a smartphone. Still, now I can hardly imagine my life without it. And what that means is that there are thousands of TTP (trusted third parties) around us. People who we are, in effect, trusting as a counterparty for some set of information. Blockchain eliminates this.
Social idea
NFTs present a moment of crypto consumerization. It is well-known that technology becomes consumerized when you stop talking about it. For example, Instagram uses Python, machine learning, cloud computing, routers, and servers. But no one has ever said, hey, you should use this cool Instagram app; it uses Python. That’s not how consumer technology works. And that is because technology isn’t interesting to most people – technology is interesting to meet human needs.
The second aspect of this consumerization moment is that every organization on the planet has an incentive to mint an NFT. NFTs can represent anything and everything, including Dolce Gabbana dresses, Nike sneakers, and Ray-Ban sunglasses. And all of these companies have incredible brand equity and a customer base. With NFTs, they can monetize that with a ~90% gross margin product.
Figure 3: NFT adoption curve by @WRabbit1111
We will have every single fashion lifestyle company showing NFTs in the coming months and years. It will then roll over to the consumer-packaged goods companies. You’ll have a QR code on your six-pack of Coke. You’ll scratch that, and you’ll get an NFT. Why? Because then they can directly airdrop you a coupon for the two to one sale. Universities will do it for their alumni base. Sports teams will do it for their fans.
Eventually, you’ll be in the local barbecue pit masters club, and you will get the barbecue master of the month NFT. Everyone is coming. Over a decade, everyone is going to have many, many NFTs.
The point here is that a society with television is different from a society without television. And a society with the internet is different from society without the internet. Society itself changes when you have Twitter, Facebook, Tinder and Uber. The way people communicate and do business changes fundamentally. Society will change because we now have permissionless innovation with digital cultural objects.
What’s next?
The metaverse becomes epically compelling when you put those two things together – the open source, trustless rails to store and transfer digital cultural objects. This is the part where people say – “I’m not going to wear those glasses”. Just like you’re not going to get a smartphone. Just like you’re not going to use Google, Twitter, and email. We use all these devices and platforms because it is hugely convenient. It makes us more productive; it increases our efficiency; it fires our dopamine levels.
The metaverse won’t be like another Facebook or Instagram in the decade ahead. It will be everywhere around us and infinity times better – photorealistic, mixed with augmented reality, with all these cool features to better our everyday lives. And since we’re inevitably going to live in this world, the most important discussion we should be having is how this world should be architected?
It’s time to build, my friends, and the time to build is now.
-By Alina Brnadic
The truth is, generational wealth is created in bear markets, not bull markets, as some would have you believe.
Crypto “influencers”, Crypto Twitter (CT) accounts, and YouTubers (YT’ers) will tell you to “buy the dip”, but this advice is not reasonable nor actionable. Where we are in the market is critical to understanding how to “play the market”. We are currently in a bear market.
Those that made life-changing money in 2020/2021 did so because between 2018 and 2020, they were doing the research, accumulating, studying trends, and positioning themselves for what was to come.
Here we will cover the three (3) most important things to position yourself in a bear market to maximize the chances of life-changing returns in the next bull run. Our team readily implements this, and we cover these in more detail in our workshops.
Your sole focus should be on learning, accumulating, and surviving in a bear market. Speculating on micro-cap altcoins in a clear downtrend can only end one way (for most people) and is akin to catching a falling knife. There is no path to generational wealth if you buy micro-caps, shitcoins, and other illiquid projects (NFTs) that continue to bleed out for the next two years. The crypto space will break All-Time-Highs (ATHs) again. Still, many projects will remain remnants in the ever-growing crypto graveyard, never to be thought of again. That’s why it’s essential to position yourself correctly.
Here are some bear market portfolio examples depending on your risk appetite.
This is a sample portfolio, and the digital assets therein are interchangeable. However, your focus should be on having a portfolio that mitigates downside risk and aligns with your risk tolerance. What’s the best way to reduce downside risk in a bear market? Stablecoins! Second best way? Blue-chip assets!
Your risk tolerance is defined by
Regardless of your risk tolerance, the universal takeaway is that you should always have a sizeable stablecoin position. How?
Grow your stablecoin portfolio using the following strategies:
Let’s break down how to execute each of these strategies.
Let’s say you’re a firm believer in what Nexo is doing in the space, and you’ve been accumulating their digital token $NEXO.
The figure below shows that $NEXO (and most other digital assets) have been in a clear downtrend since the market peaked in November 2021. Pay careful attention to the volume bars at the bottom. This is a helpful indicator of market narrative or tailwind effects in play. Since Feb 2022, there has been minimal trading volume compared to the mid-end of 2021.
However, following the world’s biggest exchange listing (Binance) the token, the price has surged +63%. This was a perfect time to take profit on your holdings during a bear market pump. Why?
Before the listing, the number of daily social mentions was ~100-300. Following the listing, it climbed to 1,860. How did the price react to this? It almost hit ATH (see Figure 3).
Courtesy of @LunarCrush, we can overlay the price on the social mentions. We see that the price surge matched the last three (3) candles to a tee. Peak social mentions = peak price. Falling social mentions = retracement of price.
Bottom line: Take profit on holdings during pumps so that you can replenish your stablecoin holdings or buy back lower.
Pro Tip: If your investment doubles, take your principle out. That way, you are effectively riding risk-free.
Some of the best stablecoin farming information can be found on @Coindix. You can filter for stablecoins only and sort by Annual Percentage Yield (APY). For farming, our approach is simple. The majority of stablecoins are in farms with high TVL. This is a great strategy for passive income and to keep topping up your stablecoin reserves.
More advanced users can check out
Just remember, stablecoins are not entirely risk-free. Here are some inherent risks to consider.
Then again, holding cash is also at risk from dollar devaluation and inflation.
There are only a few reasons users should not stake their PoS assets for passive income. With the proper security protections in place and due diligence, it is a relatively simple way to earn an additional yield on your asset of choice, secure the network and rotate into stablecoins during pumps. This isn’t necessary, however, and you can simply hold the underlying asset.
Solo staking is considered the gold standard. Essentially, it is the act of running a node connected to the internet. This method provides full participation rewards, improves a network’s decentralization, and never requires trusting anyone else with your funds.
However, most users will opt for Staking-as-a-Service (StaaS) or pooled staking. This involves delegating node operations to a 3rd party validator for a commission or a cut of your profits. Three (3) things to consider when selecting a validator.
Let’s use Solana as an example. We can use stakeview.app and validators.app to find high performing validators with low commissions.
The largest validator pool on Solana is @Everstake, with 625,000 users and 12.9M $SOL staked. However, it also charges a 7% commission and has an ~11% skipped vote percentage. The fewer votes skipped, the higher the rewards earned each epoch. The higher the rewards, the greater your own share.
On the other hand, Shinobi Systems (stakeview’s own validator) has a consistently low skipped vote % and commission fee.
This is confirmed on the stakeview.app website along with the estimated APY. Shinobi’s APY is 5.24%.
Everstake APY is 4.36%
You could then build a comparison tool to determine the yield difference between two (2) validators based on these metrics. We’ve created a simple tool below which we freely distribute to our “How to DeFi” workshop attendees.
The data shows a ~40%% difference in staking yields between the largest validator (Everstake) and Shinobi Systems.
An excellent time to deploy capital in a bear market is when markets are down significantly.
When heatmaps bleed red such as this one from @Coin360.
When the Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index starts looking like an (empty) petrol indicator on your vehicle.
When we are in a downtrend and an On-Balance-Volume (OBV) indicator is so deep in the red, it has been months or even years since it last hit those levels (see November 2019 and March 2020). There’s more to it than ‘when it is red’, but you get the gist.
When that time comes, it’s equally as important to not deploy your capital all at once. Remember, bear markets are brutal, and as history shows, they can last for years. Instead, use the Dollar-Cost-Average (DCA) method, and what you may find is that not only is
Aside from DeFi plays, earning additional or passive income is critical. Here are some examples:
Side-hustles/jobs are sure-fire ways to earn additional income and keep you in the game during the often-gruesome bear markets. I know these may seem abstract, but I can assure you they work. Why? Because I’ve done each of them at some point in my life.
Most of all, bear markets are for learning. Upgrade your DeFi skills, learn trading principles, whale watch on the blockchain, learn to write, and learn to code. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Remember. Take risks. Shoot your shot. Generational wealth is created in bear markets, not bull markets. That’s all for now.
If you’re interested in exploring this further, come along to our “How to DeFi” workshops and learn ‘on the job’.
-By Filip Brnadic
Tune in to find out how Web3, the decentralized web, will revolutionize our world.
February 11, 2021 8:00 am
February 2, 2021 8:00 am
Since the current NFT meta is free mints with no roadmap, I want to give a quick primer on reading an NFT smart contract and ways to be safe during mint. In this article, I will cover:
Now you are thinking – why would I want to mint directly from the Contract? What’s wrong with minting a project from their launch page? Well, there are a couple of reasons for that. Minting from a Smart Contract can help you mint a project early, and don’t miss out when there is a lot of hype. Multiple times, project launch sites crashed during mint due to the vast amount of traffic going through the website. The second reason is simple – minting directly from a Smart Contract can help you avoid scams.
Although the term smart contract can sound a bit daunting and very few people are interested in going into the nitty-gritty of it, having a basic understanding of a smart contract can help you inspect an NFT project.
We will use Etherscan – the most popular blockchain explorer for Ethereum blockchain, to read a smart contract. So, what are some basic and valuable things you can find on Etherscan when reading a smart contract?
Let’s use BAYC as an example. You can find the NFT project contract address by going to Opensea, finding your project (1), clicking on any of the NFTs and clicking on Details (2) – Contract Address (3). This will take you to the Contract on Etherscan.
On the Etherscan page, click on Contract (4), where you will be able to read the Code (5), Read Contract (6) and Write Contract (7).
Firstly, you can inspect the Code. If you know how to read lines of code, you can go nuts here and see the entire Contract – I won’t be doing this.
Secondly, you can Read the Contract – here you will see a list of different functions. The functions in various contracts may differ or be named differently, but you usually would see:
Thirdly, you can go and Write the Contract – here you will need to connect your wallet (12) to make changes to the Contract. The available functions of what you can do will differ depending on the project, and it will cost you some ETH to do any of the transactions. With BAYC, you can, for example, transfer (13) an NFT or mint (14) NFT directly from the Contract (well, this was available when the project launched).
Next, let’s see how you mint an NFT from a contract.
Follow steps 1-7 to navigate your way to the smart contract of the project you like. If the project is not on OS yet, you can search the contract address on Etherscan.
Once you click on Write Contract, you will need to connect your Web3 Wallet. When connected, go to the mint section in the Smart Contract. You will need to enter how much you will pay for how many tokens you want here. If you are familiar with the project, you will know the mint price and the max amount of tokens you can mint before the launch.
If the price is 0.08ETH (BAYC example), you will enter .08 in the first field and 1 in the second field.
If the max amount of NFTs you can mint is 20 (BAYC example), then you will enter 1.6 in the first line (15) and 20 in the second line (16). If the mint is free – the mint price will be 0, and you will only need to pay a gas fee.
If you don’t know the mint price, you can check this information in the Smart Contract. Go to Read Contract and you will find the information there:
After clicking Write, you will be prompted to confirm the transaction via your Web3 wallet provider. Double-check the transaction details and gas fee before confirming the transaction. That’s it, you minted your NFT directly from a Smart Contract!
Recently there has been a wave of NFT projects offering free mints. By free, I mean that you only need to pay the transaction fee when minting. Although I think that free mints are a great way to attract more people, who do not hold big bags of ETH, this opens the door for scammers looking to take advantage of less experienced users. Here are a few tips on how to stay safe during a mint.
Use a wallet with minimal ETH and no valuable assets in it. One wrong signature, and your precious NFT disappears. Make sure you have enough funds to pay the gas fee, though. On a related note, please don’t keep your valuable NFTs in a hot wallet; move them to a hardware wallet. Here is a helpful chart suggesting how you may want to structure your wallets.
There have been many scams where a project advertises a free mint on their site but changes the mint button to a signature request for you to approve transfers to your valuable NFTs. This is how you get your NFTs stolen quickly.
When you mint from a contract, you can call the exact (mint) function that you want to call. This reduces the chance of you signing something you didn’t intend to. Go back to part 2 of this article to see the steps on how to mint an NFT directly from a Smart Contract.
Here’s an example unverified Contract: https://etherscan.io/address/0x6c830acd0b1610f547f568abd9500012cffd5208#code. You’ll find that there’s no readable code on the Etherscan page. For a free NFT mint, this almost guarantees something malicious is going on. Unless you know how to read through decompiled bytecode, I highly recommend not minting. You also won’t be able to mint directly from the Contract.
To summarise, learn how to read a Smart Contract, mint NFT directly from Smart Contract as often as possible, use a burner wallet when minting and avoid suspicious-looking contracts (no blue tick on OS, no green tick on Etherscan). Stay safe!
-By Alina Brnadic
I’m long Amazon now that markets are open!
Amazon has not wicked below the lower BB20 (on the monthly) since the 2008 GFC, indicating it is two standard deviations oversold and prices are low on a relative basis. Bollinger bands are not intended to be used on their own, so on to point 2.
Similarly, it has not wicked below the MA50 and EMA50 since 2008.
As an exponential growth stock, it has traded above EMA20 for the majority of months in the last 14 years. It will do so again.
Looking at some of the worst selloffs over the last 14 years, the GFC stands out @~-65% from peak to trough. Do I think the price will reach ~$1,308? No. Am I worried if it does? No.
Has their business model changed? No. It’s a long term investment, and long term there hasn’t been a better time to buy in years!
@aswathdamodaran, the father of valuation recently indicated that $AMZN was ~9.7% undervalued at $3068 (valuation @ $3,398). Current price is $2,226 indicating ~-34% undervalued.
He also added it to his portfolio. He tweeted on Feb 13 (not sure of the purchase date or if still holding).
Assuming he purchased on 24th Jan when prices were at their lowest, means I enter my trade 16% lower
This is not a metric, but another indicator in my arsenal to support my thesis – someone I look up to tremendously has the same idea.
@RaoulGMI recently started the macro masterclass series on @RealVision– I recommend everyone watch it if you want to understand the current macro climate from some of the greatest minds of our time.
There he also points out that $AMZN is two standard deviations oversold and that you should be a buyer. I tend to agree. The upside we’ve been given from sellers is a gift and I thank the paper hands for it.
-By Filip Brnadic
