Degen Layer 3 just launched and everyone is looking for new tokens to buy. Let’s be honest, there really isn’t a single token yet that is worth buying and holding - these are all basically the same token. What’s different is our various entry prices. PVP.
Using an exponential bonding curve on mint.club, I dropped an ERC1155 with a photo of a cute dog in a top hat.
10,000 tokens max can be minted, and the max price of 1 token is 2,000 DEGEN or $55
Right now, the price is 129.047 Degen per hatwifdog or $3.48 in USD terms. I am not an artist, this NFT is a meme I owe $30 USDC to a friend for photoshopping. I used @bountycaster for that, so its a Farcaster Native NFT project, lol.
When someone buys or mints hatwifdog tokens, the Degen they pay is transferred to a smart contract where it is added to a pool of DEGEN that backs all the tokens that have been minted. As the creator, I earn .5% of every trade, and the platform also gets a small fee. Most of the trade value is locked into the bonding curve, which you can think of as a liquidity pool with fixed pricing intervals.
So far 2,790 hatwifdog NFTs have been minted, giving the entire collection a market cap of $9,734, at DEGEN's current price.
The circulating tokens can be sold back into the bonding curve in exchange for the locked ‘base asset’ or wDEGEN (wrapped Degen). Right now, 113,870 wDEGEN are backing the price of hatwifdog’s circulating supply. As hatwifdog tokens are sold, the bonding curve will retreat back down, and the price will decrease. As tokens are bought, the bonding curve will climb, the price will increase, and more wDEGEN will be locked into the bonding curve with every NFT minted.
Why does this matter? Isn’t this basically how trading always works?
Yes! But the key difference is with mint.club’s bonding curve, I can control the starting and max price for a hatwifdog token before launch. The most a single hatwifdog token can be minted for is 2,000 DEGEN or $55 at current prices. This is an extreme price, at the very top of a sharp, exponential bonding curve - it would mean this day-one Degen L3 NFT was subject to intense speculation and owned by a big percentage of Farcaster DAU.
A more likely scenario is that some friends and members of aligned communities will buy or sell a few tokens, or claim the airdrop they are eligible for, and this meme will remain just a casual, fun mint.
Farcaster has seen an acceleration of minting. Users are minting more, minting more frequently and prices or minting formats reflect this trend. Most mints lately have been Zora Open Editions. Even NFT projects with high prices on secondary markets, like Farcaster OGs or Onchain Gaias, started out as time-bound open editions or were distributed free as airdrops.
To have more mints on the feed, and more tokens launched casually, we’ll need to design our tokens to be cheaper, and to stay cheaper for longer. We'll need to make 'trading' a more casual activity if we're going to be trading so much. Not every asset can have unlimited upside in a world where we are constantly producing more and more assets, individually, collectively and as a way of interacting within the network. We need more tokens, but we also need more variety in our expectations for tokens! To put it simply, lots of memes can be tokens so long as not every tokenized meme is a meme-token.
hatwifdog is a $3 NFT today, on a day when Degen, the base asset ‘backing’ the jpeg is at new ATH, and that is how it should be. Let’s normalize mints that don’t need to go up a huge amount in dollar value, but also let people peoplel buy and sell or even speculate on cheap tokens like hatwifdog. If you want, you can trade this dog is an asset. You definitely don't have to, though. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that every token launched needs to be bid up to a market cap in the millions.
Casual mints are good, cheap mints should be cheaper, and users can still have fun trading them. Stack that 129 DEGEN, airdrop claimers, its free money, just a very small amount of free money.
https://mint.club/nft/degen/HATWIFDOG
