In 2004, when I graduated college, I saw that Facebook was hiring for someone to be a "customer service representative."

Facebook had blown up at Stanford where I had just graduated, so I emailed the "jobs" address and got an email back from Dustin Moscovitz, founder of FB.

After a couple emails, he stopped responding, so instead I took a job as a first-year analyst at Goldman Sachs.

(9-post thread, old-school style) I knew that a Facebook job was a better opportunity, so when he suddenly responded 6 weeks later, my gut sunk.

He pinged me and said "I know this is way late... but let me know if you could come do an interview in Mountain View this weekend."

Because I was new to my role at Goldman Sachs, and still very nervous pretty much every moment, I didn't do an interview. I felt locked into the job and couldn't imagine leaving a month into the role.

Wallet 8BC110 is #3 on the Blur leaderboard, earning nearly 3000 bid points per day. But he hasn't bought an NFT in 6 days.

How does he do it?

Massive bids that are more than 60 NFTs below the top. Because sellers can only sell 60 at once, his bot can remove the bids when he sees that someone sold.

Single blocks can only fit 180 sales as well, so even sales coordinated by a bot from many wallets wouldn't hit bids that are 181+ deep.

A 🧵 on one of the biggest farmers in the game.

Yesterday I said a pump & dump artist had bought 54 Doodles.

He's now up to 341 as other airdrop farmers dumped on him last night.

Of the 478 Doodles which have traded in the past 3 days, he owns 71% of them.

(1/7) He has done the same thing on CloneX over the past few weeks, currently long 210 between many wallets.

As you can see, he's patient. He's had this CloneX position on for a while.

(2/7)

One of the interesting things about collectibles and is that as price goes down, supply often increases & and demand often decreases.

The past week, we've seen new NFTs come for sale as prices fall. This chart looks at BAYC sales of NFTs that hadn't traded for 180 days. The trend has been pretty similar on Azuki, even though prices have been more steady. People are taking advantage of market-maker liquidity.

NFTs are momentum assets:

Nearly every project is more likely to go up today IF it went up yesterday.

Otherdeed, for example, has gone up 59% of the days when it went up the day before and only 32% of the days when it did not.

Chart below shows this is true across projects: Magnitude is impacted too.

Otherdeed has on average gone UP 1.3% on days after up days, and DOWN 1.3% on days after down days.

Chart below shows it's true across collections.

'@k2_nft wrote a great thread on floor prices & sweeping:

The only way floors go up in the Blur era is when NFTs leave the hands of airdrop farmers and enter the hands of long-term holders.

In this era, that sweeping floors isn't as impactful as it once was. Why? 👇

1/4 Airdrop farmers don't list near floor, if they list at all.

They need to give the illusion of a thin floor, to lure in bidders at higher prices. So they list high or don't list.

Then they stealth dump when peeps get comfy w bids.

@k2_nft's suggestion? 👇

2/4

Some crazy charts on Cryptopunks & thoughts on this move to @blur_io:

1) Over the 18 months, there's never been a week where more than 10% of punk sales were off the Larva Labs site.

Already this week, 42% of sales are. 2) 96.8% of punks haven't sold once in 2023 this year, the lowest of major projects, by far.

But 18 punks traded for the first time in 2023 today.

The end of frozen assets?

I spent a lot of time lobbying OpenSea to change their frozen asset policy. Too many people bought NFTs innocently which were later frozen.

When victims of this would talk to me, I'd say "either take a loss, or wait for OS to lose relevance" I feel like that's starting to happen.

Blur went ahead and made the OS flag less visible and less than 12 hours later, the price differential between frozen and not-frozen has disappeared.

It's been a week since the full existing ETH ecosystem has gone optional royalty. A 🧵 on how Art Blocks buyers/sellers have responded.

1) Over the past week there has been 29Ξ of royalties on the 3 main Art Blocks contracts. This is the lowest 7-day amount since June, 2021. 2) There are two reasons for this:

(a) Art Blocks volume has gone down as attention has shifted to PFP projects & airdrop farming.

(b) 68% of Art Blocks trades have opted to pay the absolute minimum royalty.

More thoughts on the move.

1. The average royalty across ETH marketplaces had gone from 5% to 2.3% since the summer. Got as low as 1.7% and the only reason it was brought higher was Sewer Passes blocking Blur. With Blur's work-around, the the average went back lower. 2) The real move in royalty rate happened when Blur launched. To me that was really when this move happened. OS tried to use their exchange block to protect royalties but when Blur got around it, OS lost all leverage in protecting royalties.

Quick thoughts on the OS move:

1. This was necessary for them. They had 10% share in most big collections. No chance at success. Market made this move for them.

2. Most art projects had not made the move to optional royalty yet but eventually would. This will sting for them. 3. This is a positive for new projects who want to have royalties enforced. They can now have royalties enforced on OpenSea and Blur. Yesterday they had to be optional royalty.

4. This is not the move OS wanted to make. But I think they were forced to. See chart.

What actually happens when a punk sells for 9 ETH and then sells shortly after for 59 ETH? 🧵

1) It starts with a punk holder likely trying to sell themself a punk, either to transfer the wallet or to take a tax loss or who knows what.

2) They bid on the punk and accept it. 3) At this point, anyone can bid on the punk at the same price or more. If they offer more gas to validators, they will win the punk ("snipe" it).

4) There is a defi platform called NFTX that has a permanent bid/ask for punks. Currently the vault will bid 57.25 for *any* punk.

A 🧵on OpenSea's royalty decision:

1) This was a huge surprise & brave move. OS is risking market share which is already down (see chart) to defend royalties

Every other marketplace in ETH AND SOL has shown they care more about market share than defending creators

1/7 👇 2) Other marketplaces claim to be pro-creator but have cut out creators almost completely

Blur has not yet succeeded in promoting royalties

Most x2y2 trades pay no royalties

LooksRare maxes out at 0.5% and Sudo is at 0%

Paradigm is shifting:

@blur_io is the first exchange to both (a) cut out creators & (b) get substantial liquidity

This week, for the first time, there were more trades that paid creators 0% than trades that paid any royalty at all

(1/5 🧵👇) The vast majority of volume on x2y2 and blur are 0% royalty, even though both teams make royalties optional and suggest they promote royalties.

(2/5)

A BendDAO update: things are calming down

1) With MAYC/CloneX floors up, count of NFTs for auction has gone down
2) Majority of the NFTs that are up for auction are getting bids
3) Most of the BAYC nearing liquidation are not floor apes. My guess is they will easily find bidders 4) The proposal by @CodeInCoffee will likely pass (97% have voted in favor, needs 75%) which means NFTs will default earlier & NFTs that default will more easily get bids
5) The BendDAO wallet has 2000 WETH, which has sent interest rates on borrowed NFTs lower to 60-70% APR

Follow-up 🧵on BendDAO:

1) BendDAO wallet now has 550 WETH in it, vs. 5 WETH when I wrote a thread yesterday (see link below for their wallet, the front-end of website is off)

etherscan.io/token/0xc02aaa…

(1/6) 2) Where did the ETH come from? With rates for borrowers at 100% and lenders at 72%, some NFTs borrowers paid off debts.

7/256 MAYC
5/230 BAYC
5/133 CloneX
3/127 Azuki
2/61 Doodles
1/28 Punks

👆 # of NFT loans paid off/total loans outstanding 12 hours ago

(2/6)

Ok. Long thread on the BendDAO situation:

1) They've run out of ETH. There is just 12.5 WETH in the contract.
2) What does this mean? People who lent money to others via BendDAO to buy NFTs on leverage can't pull their money out. About 15,000 ETH was lent.

(1/9) 3) It also means NFT borrowers must pay 100% interest on their borrowed ETH
4) The "debt" against these NFTs is rising quickly now

(2/9)

Quick 🧵: my BendDAO views

1) BendDAO shoulda required more collateral as floors fell. They instead made it binary: if your loan value is 90% of floor, then auction. Otherwise, you're golden

2) If they did this once, so what. But they issued 100s of loans on these terms

(1/3) 3) NFT owners got a put option. They only paid a % for the NFT, and if the floor goes down more than (1- that %), the DAO is stuck w the bag

4) The DAO does not allow auction bidders to bid at a price less than 5% below OS floor. If no bids, the DAO likely ends up owning NFTs

Thoughts on the @opensea thread:

1) It is very good that they said something. Thank you.
2) Making it harder to freeze assets and easier to unfreeze assets is a step in the right direction

There are still many problems though (🧵👇) 1) The idea that their policy makes users safer is untrue. It does nothing to prevent hacks and does almost nothing to prevent thieves from selling NFTs. It just lowers the value of the NFTs innocent buyers buy by 10-20%. If the goal is to make users safer, this is failing.

I’m excited to say today's my first day at @proof_xyz as Director of Research

I’ve seen a gap in NFTs for research combining analytics & on-the-ground narrative. I built this Twitter w that in mind & see PROOF as the best platform to extend the work to a wider audience

(1/5 🧵) From first hearing @kevinrose’s podcasts, I could tell he has a deep respect for the artists in this industry and unique knowledge of the utility NFT space

The conversions I had w @eli_schein, @akastevey_, @wardaddycapital, @JustinMezzell furthered my belief in the PROOF team

4 things I've learned about how NFT floor prices move:

1) NFTs are momentum assets. Floor prices are more likely to go up today if they went up yesterday.

(1/4) 2) NFT floors go down most days, even on collections that go up over time....

(see next tweet for an explanation of how this works)

(2/4)