Chasm__

The Peak-End Rule and How to Launch Your NFT The Peak-End Rule/Theory says that in an experience, people are most likely to remember two key points in it: 1) The most intense period and 2) How it ends Usually that peak experience occurs in the middle somewhere: the climax of a movie, your wedding day in your relationship, a day trip in the middle of your vacation to a spot you've been waiting to see. Other times it occurs near the beginning – your 30 minute wait turns into a 2 hour one. Or near the end – there was a huge fight just as you were leaving the bar. Those sour notes stick. That's what causes people leave bad reviews or it's what they tell their friends offline. --- In the bull market of 2021-22, NFTs compressed their Peak and End largely into one moment in the very beginning – the mint – without even realizing it. As we know from many charts on OpenSea, most projects went 📉 only after the initial excitement wore off. The team got a nice payday for a few weeks of work putting together a launch with a little bit of hype. They promised you all kinds of things were coming and then as the price slowly bled out and most of the community was down money, the vibes turned bad, the attacks on the team started, "wen marketing" was shouted a bunch, a few brave souls tried to put together a community takeover but attention moved on and the project was dead. Was it a rug or just shifting attention in an ADHD market? --- I've talked before about a few projects – Punks, Squiggles, Checks and Opepen as examples of the power of cheap or free mints. But let's talk about it in the context of the Peak-End Rule: In 2017, Punks were a free claim. NFTs weren't a thing yet and LarvaLabs just made an art project between client projects and anyone who know about them and had some ETH could claim them. Their price peaked in mid-late 2021 but for four years people were just collecting them, vibing in discord, discussing traits, building community. Squiggles were a ~$20 mint in the beginning and the mint was open for some time. Snowfro didn't launch them to get rich. It wasn't a planned, orchestrated scheme. It was just a fun algorithm that existed for about two years before Art Blocks launched and it was AB's first project. The phenomenon that Squiggles became, I'd argue, happened because they were visually and technically compelling and cheap. Mint 5 for $100? Sure! In January 2023, in the middle of the bear market and a brief open edition meta coming from the rise of Manifold, Jack Butcher released what would become Checks Editions: a 24-hour open edition that cost $8 to mint. ~16,000 were minted. It was only after that did he improv with Twitter to figure out an actual project: Checks Originals, where you could burn your Checks to combine them, ultimately in pursuit of the Black Check or a single Check. Shortly thereafter, he did another 24-hour open edition, this time it was free: Opepen. Opepen played off of Matt Furie's Pepe and name of open editions themselves. Close to 16k were minted IIRC which Jack bumped up to match the same number as Checks. From that, he played with AI image generation tools around the Opepen shape and the idea of changing the metadata on the contract that started with Checks. Opepen then "found the game" and became a set of ~200, 80 piece sub-sets all playing off a similar shape and silhouette. --- We're still in a deep NFT bear market with the best prices behind us but I think what each of these projects did well was by doing a cheap or free release, it allowed people to join in with low risk and enjoy the upside as a community as people caught wind of the project and bought in, rather than the other way where everyone finds out about something purely because it's expensive, buys in and immediately loses money. You can't build culture around pure upwards price action. Crypto has shown us that time and time again. If you lost $8 on your Checks mint, you're most likely fine. It was a pint at a bar or a cup of nice coffee. If you lost $400 on some other mint, $400 is a lot of money to a lot of people. That might be rent or a mortgage payment. --- There are always going to be people who bought at the top and lost money. There are plenty of free mints that never went anywhere or peaked and crashed. I'm cherry picking with survivorship bias here to make a point: How you launch matters. Supply matters. Price matters. --- By doing a cheap or free mint, making money off of either royalties or held back supply to be sold later, you're essentially saying that if the project wins, so do you, rather than making $10m right off the bat literally at the expense of everyone who bought in who immediately lost money. Delaying money and gratification can have profound impact on the cultural relevance and longevity of a project. If you do a successful paid mint up front, you should treat that like a fundraise, not a slush fund. Of course plenty of NFT founders showed up, did a launch, made a bag, LARPed with their project and dipped. That was their intention. I'm not talking about them. --- In this market, I think the best way to launch is either a 24 hour open edition at a cheap price or at a reasonable price with a supply that lessens over time. You can't sell 5,000 NFTs at .05 right now, most likely. --- The best plan is to get out there. Get a base of people who hold your token and are interested in your intentions and build together. Find your 1,000 True Fans that way. Delay the Peak, keep pushing out the End. Don't compress them all into mint day.

NEWS: @vaneck_us announced their ETH price targets for 2030 Base case is $22K, bull is $154K and bear is $360