Blockchain chronicles

Part 1: NFT summer

I have an incredibly poor track record flipping/deriving profit from selling NFTs . My first NFT experience was during the glorious sol summer. Solana, a new L1 had just reached its epitome of fame, propelled by venture capital and prop trading firms like Jump and Alameda. Proponents of the new chain argued that its astoundingly scalability[speed of transaction verification, measured in transactions per second] at Visa like levels would herald a new wave of mass utility of blockchain products by mainstream applications.

Aside from the VCs, early adopters, the OG users benefited from a near vertical price appreciation of the native token Sol. With the NFT bullrun, degens[crypto risk gamblers] made even more. To sell an NFT, you must first mint it. Most top tier collections usually mint out in a few minutes. In most cases bot operators mint majority of these. Collections promising anti-bot mints is just a marketing ploy.

To the depth of my current understanding, all smart contract transactions are bottable since the ledger is publicly available and current iterations of virtual machines are deterministic. To thwart automation devs would have to introduce centralized throttling which is basically blockchain sacrilege as it undermines the fundamental principle of decentralization from which the whole blockchain idea, at least the first chain, Bitcoin and its founder(s) Nakamoto envisioned.

As a result nearly 70% of eventual NFT owners purchase it from a marketplace. Dominant NFT market places vary from chain to chain although some marketplaces are chain agnostic, i.e they have cross chain integration. After minting out, especially during the initial frenzy of FOMO, NFT prices in secondary markets are usually double or even triple that of the mint price. The cheapest price of an NFT is its floor price. Most NFTs have tiered ranking systems based on attributes possessed by individual NFTs. Consequently these NFTs with rare attributes are more expensive, sometimes by ridiculous amounts of prices on secondary. During most mints prices for all NFTs, regardless of attributes is always the same.tThe minting is also nod deterministic. The smart contract program bestows attributes randomly based on given set points. The attributes are then revealed after one has minted. Due to this raffle style minting, one can land on a rare NFT for the same price as a mutt. The lottery style attribute distribution also spurs a gambling frenzy; mint more to amplify your odds of landing on a rare. Those with ample capital allocations have higher chances of minting the exotic attributes. Because of this quantitative summative probability, botting a mint is always non-zero sum.

NFT summer/bullrun

Statistically my poor NFT history stems from the fact that i have participated in fewer mints. My relationship with the whole NFT idea is not all rosy. Sometimes i think of them as outright scams. The skepticism stems from the fact that most DEFI users don't really care about the art. Most of them, me included only care on how quick and by what margin we can turn a profit from the ownership. This is partly inspired by the absurdly vertical price acceleration that happened to NFTs in the summer of 2021. Regardless of the chain, social sentiment on NFTs was astronomically high, with engagement from both native and mainstream media. This ushered in new money which invigorated the liquid thin NFT market. As a result of the illiquidity, measly amounts of capital sparked an NFT bull run. The famed Bored Ape Yatch Club [BAYC] , Doodles, Murakami Flowers from Eth were among those that gained from the celebrity indoctrination. On Solana, the Solana Monkey Business [SMB] and Degenerate Apes were the benefactors. NFT activity on Avalanche was almost non-existent. Seeing dudes post their Ws in near hours of minting a collection baited me and other fellow plebians into this new domain christened a new frontier in digital ownership.... soon to be gateway to the metaverse. Basically a window into the future of mindless abstraction