Track your wealth with Kubera

Up until recently and even to quite some extent today, the asset portfolio of many retail investors will prevalently consist of a standard range of assets. This would often include property, vehicles, company stocks and bonds, retirement accounts and insurance, term deposits and bank accounts. These portfolios are, more often than not, partly backed by loans from a local legacy bank.

Over the past decade or so, with the onset of P2P lending and domain flipping in synch with the rise of blockchain technology and the evolving space of crypto (including DeFi, DAOs and NFTs), the menu available to retail investors has been growing exponentially. Not only that – this new era has unwrapped a whole raft of opportunities for new investors who are just making their debut, regardless of their walk of life and net worth.

Apart from the traditional investments I mentioned above, as a retail investor, you will concurrently have your fingers in several cryptos on different exchanges, some of which are staked and others stored across a couple of e-wallets. Your interests could perhaps be also vested in a few P2P lending platforms. Moreover, if you haven’t already taken the leap, chances are you will soon start to throw in a couple of NFTs in the mix.

And with this ever-expanding array of investment opportunities, it is inevitably becoming increasingly complex to systematically keep track of one’s scattered investments, not to mention their current market value. Keeping a manual track via a spreadsheet might cut it for some time, but the longer the list of investments, the harder this will become.

Moreover, in the absence of an up-to-date snapshot of your investments, you will not only find it hard to determine the extent of your profits (hopefully more than your losses), but also find yourself scratching your head when trying to budget your way forward.

Enter Kubera – The Modern-Day Holistic Portfolio Tracker

Kubera is the brainchild of 3 friends who had earlier founded Webyog (database tools) and Newton (a popular email app), after which they had moved on along separate paths, only to come back together to develop this new platform.

In developing Kubera, Rohit Nadhani, Manoj Marathayil and Umesh Gopinath took off from the basic spreadsheets which they used to track their own personal investment portfolios and by combining cutting-edge tech with sensible design, transformed them into a modern portfolio tracking platform, which they named Kubera – the lord of wealth, according to Indian mythology.

The team worked towards ensuring Kubera achieved the following utilities:

• Listing your assets, traditional and non-traditional, in simple spreadsheet form.
• Fetching your current asset values automatically whenever possible.
• Supporting multiple currencies (foreign investments) and crypto.
• Allowing you to store important docs in a document vault.
• Purpose-built sharing controls – ensuring the safe transfer of critical info to the person you designate, in case you become incapacitated.
• Being ad-free under a clean subscription model. In this regard, Kubera stresses that it does not spy on you or sell your data.
• Being a simple and lightweight platform.

As at the time of writing, the aggregate amount of assets tracked with Kubera amount to $13.5 billion dollars.

How Does Kubera Work?

1. Connect your bank and brokerage accounts – Connect your accounts to get real-time values of your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, retirement accounts and holdings automatically through Kubera’s multiple aggregators providing connectivity to over 20,000 banks and fintechs around the world. If your brokerage didn’t connect you can simply do a lookup for the stock ticker symbols and add them. Kubera supports all major stock exchanges in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and NZ.
2. Connect crypto wallets and exchanges to get your latest values and holdings. You can otherwise do it manually by looking up your crypto token symbols and adding them. Kubera supports DeFi assets on multiple chains like Ethereum, Polygon, Terra, Avalanche, Solana & Cosmos. With Kubera, you can now also track the value of your NFTs from their respective latest prices.
3. Enter any currency from around the world in the value field and it will convert to your portfolio currency using the latest exchange rates.
4. Enter the address of your real estate or the Zillow URL to get the latest estimated market price of your property (US Only). For non-US, just insert a new row and enter the value manually which you can obtain from the architect of your choice.
5. Enter the VIN number to get the latest estimated market price of your vehicles (US & Canada Only). For non-US/Canada just insert a new row and enter the estimated value manually.
6. Enter your internet domains to get their latest estimated market value.
   
7. Enter the metals you’ve invested in as Kubera tracks the gold, silver, platinum and palladium spot prices.
8. Enter all the assets that can’t be ‘connected’ as manual entries. If possible, enter the cost of your assets as well. If you only know the cost, enter it as the value.

Once you’ve populated all your investments in the given spreadsheet format, Kubera will let you rename or rearrange the sheets and create sections within them.

Kubera will also provide you charts with analytics showing you how your net worth and investments changed over time. Every update to your asset value is kept in history to go back in time to see how you fared. It also allows you to keep an eye on the asset allocation and statistics indicating which asset experienced the highest appreciation or depreciation.

Kubera also calculates accurate rate of returns (IRR) for all your investments based on the multiple contributions & withdrawals and the time invested. It also benchmarks the IRR with the returns from popular indices and tickers (S&P 500, Dow Jones, AAPL, BTC etc.).

Another handy feature of Kubera is the possibility to store important financial or asset documents on the platform.

Through Kubera you will also be able to share a read-only link of your portfolio with others, for example, your Investment Advisor, CPA, or Estate Planner (when applying for loans) or with your household.

In addition, with Kubera’s “Life Beat” feature you can allow portfolio and document access to your beneficiary of choice, however only after extended periods of inactivity. Before Kubera allows automatic access to your beneficiary, you’ll receive multiple prompts to which you can respond with just a click to reset the timer. This feature also comes with a fallback plan – in fact, in addition to your primary beneficiary, you can set a contingent beneficiary (or “Trusted Angel”) who will receive access only in the event that your main beneficiary isn’t able to access your account data.

How Safe is Kubera?

When you think of online security the first thing that comes to your mind is encryption. You may have also heard of ‘end-to-end encryption’ as the gold standard for security. End-to-end encryption makes the data encrypted or unreadable by the very service or the app you used to create it, because the app simply doesn’t hold the keys to decrypt it. It’s only readable by the user who holds the key to decrypt it and no one else.

Given the nature of Kubera’s service, your data in Kubera is not end-to-end encrypted, because it will otherwise not allow the platform to deliver several fundamental features of its service, e.g. background syncing, ensuring safe transfer of your data to your beneficiary as simple Excel and Zip files and many more. Nevertheless, your data in Kubera is indeed encrypted at-rest and in-transit.

At-rest encryption: All Kubera’s databases and files are stored in Amazon (AWS) servers and have their content encrypted while sitting idle and when they’re backed up. This protects against unauthorized copying, transfer or retrieval of user data from the servers. This means that even if someone was somehow able to get hold of a backup of the database, it would be useless, because they wouldn’t have the key to decrypt it.

In-transit encryption: Your data when in transit from Kubera’s servers to your browser requires HTTPS on all pages, and uses HSTS to ensure browsers only ever connect to Kubera over a secure connection.

From a read through Kubera’s website, it seems that sensitivity of its customers data is top of mind and in this respect, Kubera ensures it has Bank Grade security in place to protect this data. Kubera also stresses that it doesn’t sell your data to show ads, nor do they peek at it to offer you financial products.

A further layer of security is Google ID sign-ins which incorporates Two-factor authentication.

Subscription Fees

Kubera never sells your data and in fact is only funded by your subscription fee. The tariff scheme is pretty straightforward, with a $150 per annum fee for personal accounts and bespoke tariffs for customers who manage a pool of portfolios for other private clients. While this may seem a little expensive, I believe that given the valuable utility of Kubera’s service in terms of serving as a one-stop-shop for wealth management, the said fee is a reasonable one.

Customer Support

Kubera offers personalized customer support via email. Their website also contains a help center with an extensive FAQ section. The platform is available both in desktop and app mode (both Apple and Android).

What I found particularly good is the blog on Kubera’s website which is regularly updated with relevant articles relating to investments. To me this indicates that Kubera is not only keen on being there for its users but is also proactive at educating their investment decisions.

A quick scan through Reviews.io relays a wide consensus that Kubera’s service is going down exceptionally well with its clientbase. Common traits that I picked from the comments related to the platform’s user-friendliness and vast integration. On the other hand some users indicated that they found the annual fee a bit pricey.

Kubera’s Edge Over Traditional Wealth-Tracking Platforms

A modern portfolio tracker that’s able to keep up with all of your financial accounts is key to successful wealth management. It will go a step further by enabling you to integrate your various digital assets stored across different wallets and exchanges and automating conversions so you can view the value of such investments in real-time.

As such, Kubera will empower you to work with up-to-the-moment financial data from all of your accounts to generate effective reports, forecasts, and plans for moving your financial goals forward.

This is where Kubera has an edge. It’s not that all of the big portfolio trackers and dashboards on the market are inherently bad. The problem is that most of them have a fatal flaw — or a combination of several — that makes them ill-prepared for the digital asset reality toward which most modern investors are moving.

Some of the main flaws which traditional big portfolio trackers carry include:

a) Poor crypto integration capabilities – The problem with many of the popular portfolio trackers today is that they typically only partner with one or maybe two financial app aggregators. These aggregators are typically built to work in certain countries with specific currencies and financial institutions. That is why the more aggregators a portfolio tracker works with, the more diverse account and asset types the tracker will be able to help you monitor and manage.

b) Inability to view crypto and other digital assets as part of your net worth (or in your preferred currency) – It is pretty hard to keep track of the value of crypto at any given time if you’re using technology that was developed well before the idea of digital currency. And as a result, it’s also hard for these more traditional tools to display the real-time value of your crypto investment in your preferred currency.

c) Outdated security measures – crypto has been set up in a way to promote more democratic and failure-proof usage compared to traditional currency and other assets. However, it also means crypto transactions are almost impossible to stop once they are actioned. Hence, financial management apps need to make sure their security is up to par to protect users who are after integrating their crypto accounts. In addition to security measures such as encryption and two-factor authentication, the same aforementioned third-party aggregators that Kubera works with are helpful for preventing hacks by processing user credentials, rather than Kubera itself accessing and storing these credentials.

Concluding Thoughts

Kubera helps you to organize all your wealth in one place and keep regular track of your net worth in a very simple intuitive way. Security-wise it also ensures safe transfer of this information to your chosen beneficiary.

Through its user-friendly dashboard Kubera will empower you to work with real time financial data from all of your accounts to generate effective reports, forecasts, and plans for moving your financial goals forward.

In the meantime the team at Kubera remain up-to-date so as to keep their platform as comprehensive as possible in terms of swiftly incorporating any up and coming alternative assets.

From a number of customer reviews, Kubera seems to be a good bet, which albeit comes at a somewhat above-par subscription of $150 per year, lives up to the claim of being the modern-day holistic portfolio tracker.

Track your wealth with Kubera

 

Invest With Nexo

When faced with the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, investors have an ongoing dilemma – exit the position or ‘HODL’. Those investors in it for the long run, will simply look to hold on to their cryptocurrencies with the hope that in the not too distant future they will appreciate and be worth significantly more.

Until then, the coins would typically remain idle in a private wallet – resulting in opportunity costs along the way. After all – and much like gold, Bitcoin and many other cryptos do not yield any income.

With this in mind, Nexo has created an online platform that allows you to earn interest by depositing your digital currencies. In turn, this will then be loaned out to those that wish to engage with crypto-loans.  Today, the company presents itself as a crypto-fiat finance service that offers a variety of distinct features to meet the needs of both investors and borrowers.

In my Nexo review, I explore the ins and outs of how the platform works. This will include a breakdown of the interest-yielding service and an analysis of a number of other key features found on the platform.

[Read more…]

I’m very bullish on the metaverse as an investment class, and I believe that we are still very early and therefore lots of possibilities to build riches are there for the taking. On the other hand, it is still not clear to me what the winning plays are, so I’ll be working my way down this rabbit hole and trying to understand how I can best invest.

Hanging around other interested people and experts is always key in order to be in early on something, and that is why I will be spending time in the Metaverse Land Club, a metaverse-focused membership club run by Robin Copernicus, who I interviewed on my podcast. Holding assets such as Meebits and being in groups like the MeebitsDAO that are building an open metaverse is also key. Again, you should listen to my interview with Danny Greene, general manager of the Meebits DAO for more information about how they are helping build that open metaverse.

As of right now, if you’re looking to make significant investments, you should be looking at two platforms in particular:

• Decentraland – the top open metaverse
• The Sandbox – the leading commercial metaverse

Apart from land, you can buy the tokens of these metaverses, $MANA and $SAND, both of which are available on some of my favorite exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken.

Buy Metaverse tokens on Coinbase

Now one thing we should keep in mind is that the term metaverse has different meanings to many people, and there is not yet any official definition that we all have consensus about. This reminds me of the early nineties when the internet was still in its commercial infancy, and we always heard about the information superhighway. Now, this information superhighway was supposed to revolutionize our world and bring online shopping, on-demand movies and other things we take for granted on the internet today, but here’s the deal – it was supposed to all happen through our TVs.

Personal computers were deemed to be more suitable for text-based tasks and it was taken for granted that the higher bandwidth (at the time) available through the TV cable network would enable things to happen much faster on our TV sets rather than on our computers. At the time, computer screens were very rudimentary as well compared to TV screens. To cut a long story short, the real internet revolution happened on personal computers and not through television sets, and this paved the way for what we now call the world wide web. Nobody talks about the information superhighway anymore.

If we think about the Metaverse as being a virtual 3D full-immersion world that we access through special goggles and haptic sensor suits, worlds that can render a close-to-real-life experience, then we probably are around a decade early. The idea that we might spend way more time in this kind of metaverse than in “meatspace” is one that is bandied around but might or might not happen.

I personally think of the metaverse as being already something that exists and has existed for a while. We can talk about degrees of enhancement, but go any means of public transport or just any busy areas, and tell me whether all the people glued to their phone screens are already living in a virtual world or not. In my view, the mobile revolution and smartphones brought made this dual-life we lead absolutely real.

Having said that, there’s a world of potential lying ahead of us that will also be part of this metaverse experience.

In my opinion, the metaverse in its full form will be a massive equalizer for humanity. Once you’ve got the equipment to experience the metaverse, it will matter less and less where you are in the world physically, and many opportunities that are currently still limited by geographical location will be freed up to everyone who has access to the metaverse. We will see a similar shift as we saw when the internet became ubiquitous, especially through the use of smartphones, which were the real driver of internet penetration in developing nations.

The Metaverse will enhance our sense of meaningful human connection, not only by allowing us to connect with our tribe of people wherever they are in the world, but also by enabling us to stay closer to our family and friends should we so choose. For many at present, this is not an option, as they are forced to move and be closer to work hubs such as the big cities and most developed countries. For many, this, unfortunately, means that husband and wife live far from each other, and kids see less of their parents.

Now, as I hinted at earlier, I’ve been lucky to experience several shifts in our human experience

• pre and post PC world (the age where I started dreaming big)
• pre and post-internet (the world’s information at my fingertips)
• pre and post smartphone (always connected to everyone)

These were huge shifts for me, but the metaverse has the potential to bring something that has been missing so far – a rich human connection. While Zoom meetings have revolutionized the way we communicate and work, it doesn’t really come close to sitting down with someone over lunch or over a few drinks. It is unquestionable that even an office environment (love it or hate it) cannot currently be properly recreated online. The metaverse can make this possible when the right ingredients all gel together.

Ultimately, it will change the way we think about physical location, and create opportunity and connection for people, no matter where they are.

And from an investment standpoint, this means there is huge money to be made and incredible growth to be achieved by the winners of this game. As always, the key will be to bet on the right horses. And that is what I will be exploring myself over the coming months. Let’s start by discussing the major players I see.

Decentraland

Decentraland is probably the most well-known metaverse platform, and it’s where most events happen. To get exposure to Decentraland, you can either buy land or else buy the token $MANA on all the major crypto exchanges such as Kraken, Binance or Coinbase.

Buy $MANA on Coinbase

Decentraland is the OG of the metaverse niche. It was the first successful open metaverse and it has managed to cultivate a very healthy market of land sales. You can buy land and develop on it right away, and we have seen a number of big brands buy up land and build some sort of metaverse headquarters within Decentraland. Some have used it to launch new products, others for concerts and others just as a cost-effective way to get extra attention from the press.

It is fully open-source and is the most decentralized metaverse option. While it places very few limits on what you can build, it is harder for newcomers to build since you actually need to be good with 3D tools like Blender to build the detailed building models that work in Decentraland. Sandbox, on the other hand, is more beginner-friendly on the builder side. I like Decentraland though because it is the most similar to real-life in this sense. And that is one of the main reasons why big companies opt to open their first headquarters in the metaverse on this platform. They have the money to burn and can hire architects to build amazing buildings, showcasing the possibilities of the platform and the metaverse in general.

While Decentraland can be said to be as truly decentralized as the current legal frameworks allow, this also means there is no corporate backing, hence less advertising and media attention.

Decentraland still feels like a lonely place if you visit, there is little activity if you just wander about. There is no compelling content or game element but it is indeed just an open and free world. The main use cases so far remain casionas, festivals and museums, apart from the previously mentioned corporate metaverse headquarters.

There is also no play-to-earn element in Decentraland, and the main way to invest at the moment is to buy land and hope that it appreciates over time. You could also rent it out although I haven’t seen much demand for that so far. Of course, you could also earn money by building stuff for others if you have the technical abilities to do so.

Visit Decentraland

The Sandbox

The Sandbox is another big player in the metaverse space so far. To get exposure to The Sandbox, you can either buy land or else buy the token $SAND on all the major crypto exchanges such as Kraken, Binance or Coinbase.

Buy $SAND on Coinbase

Sandbox by comparison is predominantly run by a centralized company out of Hong Kong, is not currently live (has a limited beta going for some lucky land holders) and is more ‘limited’ in the regards that it is more in line with games such as minecraft or roblox. It is not open source and you will have to use voxels and any other ‘building blocks’ they give you to build to fit in their ecosystem. This builder is more user-friendly and you will see a consistent theme across the entire space. It’s leading company has helped make connections like Adidas, BAYC, etc, and will continue to do so. Not out, visually limited, but more of a ‘game’ that will appeal to several audiences. That being said, both totally have their place and both will be things in the future of this.

Visit The Sandbox

Cryptovoxels

I wasn’t impressed by this world. This might be meaningless to the future of this metaverse, but such lonely metaverses with blocky graphics really make me appreciate the real world more and make me go take a walk outdoors rather than engage me in spending more time on them.

Visit Cryptovoxels

Somnium Space

This is the most realistic crypto metaverse application, and is best experienced in VR with the right VR headset. It is open-source software that is also cross-platform. Users can purchase digital land, build homes and buildings, play hyper-realistic video games, start businesses, offer concerts and live events. Artur Sychov, the founder and CEO of Somnium Space, launched the platform in 2017 and opened it to the public in September 2018.

While there is a company behind it, the idea is to decentralize things as much as possible: “By tokenizing Somnium In-Game assets and Land Parcels, we are forever decoupling Somnium Space as a company from owning and operating database of parcels and all in-game items by giving this power to our users”.

I’m not a big fan of this one myself as most of the action I’ve seen is around weird disco parties with a bunch of young users joking around.

Visit Somnium Space

Meta

Mark Zuckerberg delivered quite a surprise in November 2021 when he announced out of the blues that Facebook will change its name to Meta. As a consequence to the announcement, the tokens $MANA and $SAND skyrocketed. This was an extremely good trade for those who anticipated it.

It’s one of those trades that look obvious in hindsight, and I was quite disappointed at not having gotten in on $MANA and $SAND in time for the big pump, especially since I had already been digging deep into the metaverse for a few months before that. But anyway, the metaverse space is so early that there will be undoubtedly many great entry points to $MANA, $SAND and other related tokens going forward.

According to his plan, Meta will become a major player in the metaverse. There is a lot of controversy around Zuck’s plan, as Facebook has not exactly been a much-loved company during its lifetime. Mark Zuckerberg himself is one of the most hated tech founders/CEOs at present, due to his seemingly cold outlook and proven track record of treading on people’s privacy.

However, the fact is that he has been insanely successful, and the Facebook+Instagram+Whatsapp trio is one hell of a beast in the Web2 space. Will the company successfully transition to Web3 and become a major player there? Only time will tell, but if you want to take a bet, the best way is to own some Meta stock.

On eToro, you can buy $FB or other stocks and pay ZERO commission! You can read my full review of eToro for more information about this broker.

You might also want to listen to this long interview with Mark Zuckerberg on the Lex Fridman Podcast. In it he shares his vision for the metaverse and comes across as a fairly decent person.

Buy Meta on eToro

Worldwide Webb

Worldwide Webb is an interoperable pixel art MMORPG metaverse game giving utility to popular NFT projects. The game uses NFTs for in-game NFT Avatars, pets, lands, NFT Items, and quests. Deployed with a build-first mentality by a group of crypto-native game developers, artists, coders, and marketers; rapidly pushing out new technologies and applications.

This game has a retro vibe which I like since I grew up playing games with these sorts of 2D graphics. There is a general consensus in the space that this is the number one 2D metaverse environment that all collections want to integrate with, so it makes sense to own some land here. At the time of writing, the apartments are in the hands of more than 60 NFT communities & numerous influential figures.

I like what the team has been putting out, including the amazing apartment builder, with which you can totally customize your own apartment including hanging up pictures of your own NFTs.

The one thing I really dislike is the name, but I’ll have to get used to it I guess. It’s a play on the founder’s surname Webb. He’s quite a character, so I think it makes sense to spend some time familiarising yourself with his ideas and work before you invest in this project. Beyond his outlandish fashion sense, I think he is brilliant and amazingly creative, so I have no problem backing this collection for the long term.

Webb metaverse game

NFT Worlds

My first purchase of virtual land was in NFT Worlds. It was my first immersion into owning and developing land, since I hadn’t played any other similar games like Roblox or Minecraft either.

I had a light bulb moment when I first opened up my purchased square of land and started to explore it, comparable to the feeling I got when I purchased my first NFT. With these kinds of innovations, there is a transition you can only make when you become an owner of the innovation in question.

The main criticism of NFT worlds is that it is just a hosted Minecraft server, but it has seen a very nice price appreciation curve.

Apart from buying a world, you can also buy the $WRLD token.

NFT Worlds

Metaverse Tools

• WeMeta – Metaverse marketplace
• Parcel – Discover and list virtual real estate across the metaverse
• Landworks – Rent or lend metaverse assets

Further Reading

• The Generalist – Metaverse
• 30000 Feet – Ownership is Everything
• 30000 Feet – Metaverse

What are your thoughts on the metaverse? Let me know in the comments section below.

As with any other investment, it’s impossible to get everything right with NFT investments, especially in the early days when you’re learning the ropes. What is more important is to maintain a growth mindset and not be too hard on yourself.

The NFT space can be brutal for newcomers, with tons of poor projects, rug pulls, scams and all kinds of sneaky ways to make people lose their ETH.

In the interest of being able to look back and try to see why I got things wrong, I’ll be delving into my non-performing projects in this post.

I’ll start off by saying that I have not experienced any rug pull projects, meaning that I’ve done well in at least analysing the integrity of the teams behind the projects I invested in. The projects I bought into that didn’t perform well were simply the result of current market trends, or deficiencies in the projects themselves, but not a result of bad intensions from the founders.

Read more: How to evaluate NFT projects

I’ll also preface this by saying that this has been a painful post to write. It’s not easy facing failure after failure and seeing the now-obvious mistakes that I’ve done. On the other hand, it’s essential for traders in any industry to keep a diary of all their trades and review them periodically in order to refine their strategies.

NFT trading is no different. And while I don’t consider myself an NFT trader but rather a collector, as I invest for the long-term, it was important for me to look back on what I’ve done so far in the space with a critical eye and learn some important lessons.

So let’s get things going.

Winter Bears

Let’s start with Winter Bears.

The collection launched in September 2021 with a mint price of 0.03 ETH ($100 at the time of mint) and sold out within hours. I bought on the secondary market, meaning I paid a significantly higher price than mint and already started out at a disadvantage.

Here was my original analysis posted elsewhere on this site when I bought into it:

Winter Bears is a collection of 10,000 adorable polar bear NFTs available on the Ethereum blockchain.

Each bear is completely unique, created using over 150 individual features.

Winter Bears was created with the ambition of raising awareness for the endangered polar bear, an animal so beautiful and majestic whose habitat is quite literally melting away. Therefore charitable work and contributions is also part of the uses of the treasury (although there will be no DAO for now). The team has also donated $40,000 to @shesthefirst and committed another $40,000 to Polar Bears International, while noting that they continue to be charitable in the future.

This is another feel-good project. I feel that the artwork is adorable and among the best I’ve seen in PFP  projects. There is a wide range of easily distinguishable traits. There is already one major airdrop to look forward to; all Winter Bear holders will also receive a Summer Bear. Moreover, all gas fees will be covered by the project.

A merch store will also be made available for those who want to proudly wear their bears.  The license is non-restrictive, so you are free to do anything you want with them under a non-exclusive license.

Winter Bears was created by a team of DeFi builders who’ve been contributing to the Ethereum community since 2016.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the project for me from a learning perspective, is that Winter Bears is partnered with PieDAO to potentially have the Winter Bears featured in an NFT index, and there is also a bears vault on NFTX. You can stake your Winter Bear to earn with $BEAR, sell your bear w/o a buyer, own a fraction of a bear, or swap your Winter Bear for another Winter Bear in the vault.

There are some notable holders in this project. @punk2476 is the biggest holder of Winter Bears. She hangs out in the discord and brings a ton of positive energy to the community! Another one is @TheShamdoo, the creator of HeadDAO.

The roadmap is a bit weak in my opinion, animations could work but that’s a bit of a moonshot in terms of driving monetary value. I’m looking forward to the airdrops announced so far though (Summer Bears and Pixel Bears).

Turns out that I was quite right about the roadmap, and the DeFi part wasn’t really a high-value proposition. The steam for cute animal PFPs also ran out towards the end of 2021, so there really was no room for this project to grow.

The most expensive Winter Bear that ever sold was Winter Bear #1178, which sold for 15 ETH. I pity the person who spent that much on one of these bears. While it is ranked #1, there is practically zero chance he will even remotely get close to breaking even on this, let alone profiting. That’s the huge risk you take when you go big on the rare items in a collection. If the collection does well, you have an incredibly valued asset, but if not, you’re left holding some very heavy bags. On the other hand, it’s also interesting to see who makes these kinds of buys in the market. In this case, it was an OG punk owner that had already become rich by holding punks, so he can very easily brush off such a loss.

The Winter Bears team did keep to their promise of launching Summer Bears, which I also minted, but that didn’t really affect the project value much.

I ended up taking a loss on this one. I bought my bear for 0.378 ETH shortly after mint ended and sold the summer bear and winter bear for a combined 0.14 ETH. The same bear I sold ended up being traded a few more times, with the last sale being for 0.25 ETH. That was a nice sale compared to what I let it go for, although it doesn’t even come close to what I originally paid for it. The floor price as I write this is slightly below 0.1 ETH, so holding the bear wouldn’t really have helped either.

The real winners in this project are clearly those who minted. They had the opportunity to sell for 10x+ right after mint, and even if they rode all the price fluctuations and diamond-handed, they would still be able to sell for 3x at the time of writing.

Financially this was the biggest realized loss I’ve taken so far.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Perseverance

Upon purchase, here’s what I had written:

Perseverance is a generative art project made up of 500 unique pieces by the artist Giorgio Balbi. There are 4 different types of variations in their algorithms, each type is randomly distributed and the amounts are not equal. The “perseverance” arises from the idea of ​​creating a generative art model that combines multiple variations in its strokes, colors, density and angles, generating different visual textures.

This was my first purchase of a generative art piece, and I bought it because I liked it. There is no utility planned for these artworks beyond owning and displaying it wherever you want. This is the kind of artwork I’d like to have in my house, so I’m happy to own it long-term.

The one downside I see is that not all items in the collection are hi-res, meaning many of them will not be that suitable for printing and hanging on your wall, which is a shame as that is the main purpose for them in my opinion.

I was pretty aware of the fact that there was no utility attached and that I could need to hold this long-term as generative art projects sometimes have low liquidity. I would still put it in my list of failures as I again bought on the secondary market during the highest day of hype, when the project was featured on the frontpage of OpenSea. I believe that was how I came across the project in the first place.

I’ve learned to completely ignore the OpenSea frontpage since then. As a beginner, I used to think they would curate what they post and only include big projects, but that wasn’t the case. I’m not sure to this day what algorithm they use for that. These days, I use my own tools to understand what’s happening on the market and to know what’s hot or not, apart from being able to make a qualitative analysis of projects based on my experience.

As you can see, the volume chart is an absolute disaster. Secondary sales dried out a few days after the project launched, with the floor price several times lower than what I paid for my piece. I’m pretty much stuck with this artwork forever unless I basically give it away for free, and that’s not what I was planning for.

Even though I was prepared to hold for the long term, I wanted the possibility to put it up for sale at some point and be able to sell for a decent price, even if I’d have to wait a few days or even weeks. This isn’t the case as things stand today, and I don’t see it changing since the artist doesn’t produce much and is not well-known.

To make it worse, a few other projects were released that used a similar generative art algorithm (Wavelength being the main one), further diluting the value of this collection.

This piece ends up taking the throne as the biggest unrealized loss for me. I bought for my piece for 0.8 ETH which was quite expensive, considering the price of ETH was around $4,000 at the time. With the experience I have now, I wouldn’t have paid that kind of money in dollar terms for a piece of generative art from a fairly unknown artist.

The winners here are again the guys who minted at a mint price of 0.077 ETH. Total including gas price was around 0.1 ETH, and the current floor is more than double that, so they can sell at an easy profit anytime they want. In fact, several of those selling at low prices at the moment are those who minted, not those who bought high on secondary like myself.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Bushidos

This was a project I invested in with high hopes, but looking back, I should have considered the risks more seriously than I did, given that I had already flagged them in my initial review:

The Bushidos are a clan of 8,888 Samurai warriors established to “preserve the decentralization of the blockchain and protect against FUD”. Bushidos is meant to be a cultural movement, not a one-and-done NFT project. The founding team’s goal is to grow an active creative community around the theme of samurai lore and culture.

The project aims to have several seasons in its roadmap. The first Season sets the foundations, including the minting and setting up of the community.

Season One is dedicated to:

• Building partnerships, community, and foundational story
• Launching an eternal mint pass
• Launching the Bushidos
• Launching the Katanas airdrop
• Preparing the story for Season two

Season Two will be dedicated to telling the story of the Bushidos.

That will look like:

• A virtual comic book with physical implications
• Start working on a plan for 3D skins for the Bushido (for use in the metaverse)
• Download high-res images of your Bushido
• An ERC20 token
• And at least 2 new NFT collections

The four project founders all work at Coinbase, and this led a lot of credibility to the project. Jeremy Booth is the illustrator for the Bushidos. I like his art a lot and this was one of the reasons I got into Bushidos.

As for the risks for this project, I would say that it’s hard for the untrained eye to distinguish between different Bushidos, and I don’t see them catching on as a PFP either due to their niche style and lack of distinguishibility. This is why it will be very important for the story to be sustained over time by a strong team and community participation and interest.

From my perspective, the biggest doubt I have is whether the project can sustain interest long enough for value to accrue to the tokens. Time will tell, but again, Bushidos gives me exposure to one more niche of the NFT space, so I’m happy to be part of it as a learning experience, and I like the artwork. I like the idea of learning more about samurai culture as well.

So basically, here I invested because I like Japanese-themed art and I wanted to learn more about the Samurai history (should have just read a book or watched a documentary for that), and because the founders work at Coinbase. I liked the art but as I flagged initially, each NFT does not stand out from the rest and they don’t really make great PFPs, hence little value in the current NFT space.

The fact that the founders work at Coinbase does not really mean much. At the time when I invested, Coinbase was hyping up its move into NFTs with a marketplace that never materialized (hopefully sometime in 2022), and that swayed my emotions into giving this fact too much importance than it deserved.

To make things worse, I bought on the secondary market (yes, I did finally learn my lesson about buying high on secondary after reveal), and have been holding my bags ever since, with little hope of recouping the cost.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Galaxy Eggs

Here are my notes when I invested:

There is a solid team of three in place. Two guys come from the bored ape community and they are backed by the fantastic artwork of renowned artist Gal Barkan, who serves as art director.

The 3D artwork is quite breathtaking, and the sneak peeks from the upcoming Galaxy Metaverse are amazing. I’m looking forward to both the promised airdrop and the launch of the Galaxy Warriors, which is the second phase for this project.

Similar to the Bushidos, this is a long-term project so hopefully, people will not lose interest along the way.

I spent 1.38 ETH for Galaxy Eggs and 0.21 for minting the Galaxy Warriors, whilst I recovered 0.719 ETH from Galaxy Warriors sales. Gas fees were high when I was buying these so I spent a good chunk on that as well.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure that this project was really suitable for being an NFT; it’s still unclear to me what is the overall goal. It seems that most collectors also feel this way. I sense that most invested just because the 3D art looked amazing and there were a lot of big promises, but things got too complex or took too long and people lost interest and flipped these to get into simpler projects.

At the time I invested, projects were being given a lot of weight when people from Crypto Punks or Bored Apes were involved (the OG effect), but it turned out to be very irrelevant in this project. I kind of liked the art but didn’t really understand the end goals, so I should have avoided it rather than speculated. And again, buying on the secondary market made it exponentially riskier.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Surreals

I invested in this one to experience how a project that was focused 100% on the art would perform. While I’m happy with the community and the founder’s initiatives to sustain the project, the price has not done terribly well. Here are my initial notes:

Surreals are a collection of 10,000 generative portraits with a surreal, vintage naturalist aesthetic.

I like the quirky artwork and the founder is definitely doing his best to drive value forward. The artist who launched this project promised nothing in return apart from the art itself and was very open about his limitations.

However, he is very open to suggestions and this has been reflected in the way that the community has taken ownership and taken the lead in moving things forward. The Discord channel is a fun place to hang out, so there is a strong community aspect for my incentive to own pieces from this collection, quite apart from the artwork itself.

As usual, my biggest mistake is to have bought on secondary rather than mint. I did receive an airdrop but it’s basically not worth anything either.

I don’t see how the price will ever come close to its all-time highs of around 0.3 ETH. I bought very high at 0.237 ETH and I didn’t even manage to grab a rare one, so I got destroyed by the price action. Right now I could sell it at floor for around 0.055 ETH, which is even less than the original mint price of 0.06 ETH.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

HeadDAO

I made several mistakes on this one. First of all, the founder should have been an immediate red flag. He’s not doxxed and says he is 16 years old. His Twitter is a constant stream of babble; he seems to spend more time on Twitter shitposting than building anything.

Second, part of why I bought these is because I loved the Nouns project but couldn’t afford one of those. This project uses the Nouns artwork, and it sounds stupid now but it did influence me in buying these. Even worse, I went for the rarer items even though rarity played no part in this project from the very start. The fact that I bought on the secondary market didn’t help – I paid too much because I was buying on secondary, and I paid extra because I went for the rare ones.

Thirdly, it wasn’t clear to me what the project actually did. I understood the basics but not the roadmap to this project’s potential eventual success. Here’s how I had described it:

This is actually a DAO and the artwork itself is borrowed from the Nouns collection, which is open source. The idea here is to buy blue-chip NFTs and fractionalize them. Thus every Head NFT holder will accrue part of the value of those blue-chip NFTs.

You can also stake your NFTs in a vault and earn $HEAD. This is done on the project’s website. When you stake the head NFTs they will disappear from your wallet and go into the community wallet but you still own them and can unstake them anytime.

The fractionalized vault’s reserve price will always be adjusted to be at least double the current price of the NFTs in it. So the likelihood of the vault being bought out is next to zero. That being said, as a HeadDAO holder that automatically makes you part of the DAO, gives you voting rights in what the DAO does, and makes you eligible to redeem and offers of utility that the team put out.

However, you will need $HEAD in order to redeem any utility, so it’s best to stake in order to earn $HEAD to get access to the utility offers and that is where the real value is/will be. A small example is a collaboration between HeadDAO and an upcoming project, where those who have their heads staked will be in with a chance to make the whitelist of the other project.

After spending a week in OpenSea’s top volume charts and duping me into thinking it was a great project, it quickly tapered off into oblivion, as so many of those 1-week chart-toppers do. I wasn’t experienced enough back then to know that I should not look at OpenSea’s charts (as I mentioned earlier).

I also ended up wasting some ETH in the staking process and game that was released as part of this project. A ranking tool that was supposed to be the best in the industry ended up being a complete sham; at least I didn’t put money in that as well.

This project’s discord is extremely noisy, which made it impossible to follow what was already quite a nebulous roadmap. Ultimately, I staked all my tokens and hoped for the best, but I doubt I will ever recoup my investment. I’ve written it off in my head.

I spent around 5 ETH on this and although I haven’t sold anything yet it would practically be a total loss if I were to sell now with the floor below 0.1 ETH. I would classify this as my worst investment of all.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

The Diamond Hands

Here’s another one that didn’t pan out as I planned. You can see from what I had originally written about this collection that I knew I was in for a rough ride:

This is another project where the artwork itself is not the main thing you’re paying for. It’s a DeFi + NFTs concept. The idea here is to buy and fractionalize blue-chip NFTs and then hold onto them with diamond hands.

The concept of Diamond Hands stems from the cultural significance of someone who doesn’t “cave under pressure” and has unwavering conviction in the asset they own. The team is solid, including some punk owners, and the designer is Yanis Georges, a well-known designer on SuperRare. The one thing I’ll say is that the website is quite simplistic with grammar mistakes and a lack of refinement in the writing. I know people don’t pay much attention to these things, but to me it always suggests a lack of polish and rigor in the person/team.

Unfortunately, the project is off to a rough start with a big decline in value, but I’m still hoping that the next purchases and subsequent fractionalizations will bring some attention back to the project, and hence take the price back up.

I like original use cases like this so I want to be involved as a learning experience. If I don’t buy I’m not incentivized to keep in the loop on the team’s Discord, check prices, etc. So I buy to learn.

At around the time when I bought, there were quite a few projects trying to do some sort of DeFi+NFT play, and the concept was trending. Eventually, the trend fizzled out and none of those projects ended up doing well. HeadDAO is another example of this trend.

I thought this would be a good project, given that top collectors like Pranksy had bought an insane amount of them. Of course, what I had not checked was whether they had minted or bought on the secondary market. Seems like we’re seeing a recurring theme here huh?

So Pransky minted 250 of these at a cost of 0.09 ETH per token, while I paid 0.028 ETH. However, this is misleading. This project bought and fractionalized a crypto punk, then airdropped DHCP tokens to holders. These DHCP tokens represent the value of the crypto punk fractions corresponding to each holder. So what happened here is that the guy who sold to me had collected his DHCP tokens (which are obviously still valuable as Crypto Punks are still a blue-chip) then dumped his Diamond Hand token on me. The lesson here is that before you invest you need to do your research and understand what the utility for the token is and how it works. I just got caught in the hype and didn’t even realize that the crypto punk fractions had already been airdropped to holders before I bought my token, hence making it pretty useless.

Luckily, I still managed to sell off the token at 0.04 ETH, more or less breaking even when costs are factored in. Still, it definitely wasn’t a great investment and there were a few important lessons I learned from this one. As I type this, the project is still alive but there are few secondary market sales, with a floor price of 0.02 ETH, basically being handed out for free.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Cosmic Cowgirls

One of the founders is the girlfriend of scammer Colethereum, but I didn’t know that when I first bought in. Looking back, this project had little substance and I would have easily dismissed it now that I know more about the NFT space. The relationship of the founder would have been an immediate red flag, let alone the project art and the roadmap.

For some reason, I liked the art at the time and bought two rare items. The floor price got so bad that it wasn’t even worth minting the follow-up to Cosmic Cowgirls, the very imaginatively named Cosmic Cowboys.

I caught a lucky break during a week of hype about women-led projects, where this collection pumped along with all the other projects that had women founders, and I got out at that point. I put in 0.18 ETH and sold for 0.26 ETH, so considering fees and commissions it’s more or less break even. It could have been worse.

I consider it a bad investment because I didn’t do my research properly and that goes against my investing principles. Since I usually aim to hold long-term it pains me to hold projects like this one.

Noodles

Here the project itself is good but I paper-handed too early on. I minted them based on my doodle holdings (1 mint per wallet + 3 mints via whitelist), then sold my 4 Noodles for a combined 0.175 ETH, with the floor price now sitting at 0.3 ETH, so I missed out on an easy 10X on each of my tokens (several of them eventually sold for more than 10X what I let them go for).

I’m not sure there’s much to learn from this for me, beyond not selling below my own mint price. I should have had more conviction before minting, allowing me to wait until the price settled before selling, or just holding long-term.

At the time, I didn’t really vibe that much with the art, but the team have been absolutely killing it, so kudos to them for underpromising and overdelivering. It’s not usual to see a derivative project doing so well not only price-wise but especially in terms of delivery.

Lessons Learned

Looking back at my journey, I can see that even though I’m a very skeptical person and like to analyse things very thoroughly, I did get swept up by the hype on some projects. I also definitely overtraded. I should have bided my time and held my ETH tight rather than constantly going all in and running out of ETH.

The best investors in this space always keep a healthy store of ETH ready to pounce on the next big opportunity. If you check Pranksy’s wallet, for example, you’ll see that he always keeps a minimum of 1,000 ETH ready to go at any point in time. That’s massive firepower that he can use to influence the market or take a great position in a project early on.

Timing purchases and sales remains a very tricky business. 

For example, I sold a Doodle for 5 ETH only to see it being resold 2 days later for 10 ETH. I sold it to a friend of mine so at least I was happy for his gains, but it was a terrible trade for me. I couldn’t really have predicted that floor price move though, so it’s just a matter of understanding that prices move dramatically and quickly in the NFT space, and you’ll be caught either holding bags or paper handing quite often if you do many trades.

From the projects above and their price evolution, we can easily conclude that minting a project gives you a massive advantage compared to those who buy on secondary. For most projects that don’t do as well as expected, the floor price trends back to the mint price, allowing a minter to exit without any losses. This is how many big names in the NFT space got rich in the first place. Pranksy is a great example. Just to cite one example of his OG purchases, he minted 250 Bored Apes. Mind-blowing stuff.

Even the idea of sticking to blue-chip projects is not really 100% reliable. For example, I bought into Cool Cats and Creatures because I think they are great projects, and they had been doing well and very stable, but they both tanked for different reasons. I didn’t include them above as I don’t consider them failures so far; I love the art and community in both cases, and am very convinced that in the long run they will do well price-wise. But again, I might be proven wrong and have to revisit this article in a few months’ time to jot down another lesson learned.

That’s why these days I prefer building very strong conviction in a project and going in heavily for the long-term. I will then only sell when I have at the very least done a 2x on my initial position, and even then, it would only be to let go of a small percentage of my tokens.

Going forward I’m going to be very choosy in the projects I go into, and I’ll either be going in at mint time or at a much later stage when the price has consolidated. I’m sure there will be exceptions to be made, but that is the general rule I’ll be adopting.

What are the best lessons you’ve learned while trading NFTs?