NFT Collecting and Investing

The Feeding Frenzy of the MekaVerse

Following an insanely huge NFT drop.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been closely following the MekaVerse NFT drop, and particularly dying to be able to mint a couple of these robots for myself. It’s the most insanely popular NFT drop I’ve seen. Just three days ago, I mentioned in this article that they had 158k Discord members. That’s since exploded to 250k members!

But minting one will not be easy. You first had to get into the raffle by (1) having .2 or .4 ETH in your wallet (depending on whether you planned to buy one or two Mekas), and (2) registering on their site within the 3-hour registration window. I’m sure many thousands got in. The Mekas said they’d report stats on it all later.

So, that was step one. Mission accomplished. Here’s what the site looks like at the moment if you’re registered. Now we just have to wait and see if we won a chance to mint:

While chances are low, you can’t win if you don’t play. And, for THIS drop, winning is, in my estimation, a huge financial opportunity. It was huge enough with 158k fans, and is even more ridiculous with 250k! I’m thinking that anyone minting a Meka could possibly 10-20x their money, if they chose to sell. I’d say 10x is conservative — meaning, if you buy one for .2, you should not sell under 2 ETH. Or, in today’s ETH value of USD, that’s spending $719 and getting $7,191 back. So hey, I put in for TWO. Why not?!

Whether I win the chance to mint or not, I plan to watch the space closely, as there may be opportunities for “sweeping the floor” pre-reveal for anyone not getting in on the mint. What’s my own target? Hmmm, according to my projection above, it’s almost like anything under 1 ETH would be an opportunity to flip profitably and possibly 2x your ETH.

The only trouble, of course, is then you’re playing around with $3.5k for ONE instead of $1.4k for TWO at mint price. So, that changes the dynamic for most people. But, I’m certain that investors will be sweeping that floor all day and, at a minimum, it’s going to be fascinating to watch. So, I’m going to show some highlights here just to record observations.

My suspicion: I’m willing to bet anything that, despite all of the measures taken here to minimize gas, prevent whales, and ensure fair distribution, there will nonetheless be tons of well-funded organized groups around the world profiting from this in major ways. There’s nothing a dev team can do to prevent this. (Trust me; I’m on a dozen different dev teams right now! lol.) What’s going to happen is that you’re going to have NFT buying farms out there with multiple machines, each with multiple browsers and Metamask wallets, all loaded up with the .4 ETH, all registered for this drop. If just one hits the raffle lotto, that’s a $14k win (provided you flip them for 20x). But, at the end of the day, it’s all part of the game. :-)

Just for the record, this was my stated goal strategy:

2pm Update: Sale Started

As promised, here are some updates:

So, once the sale started, you get a screen like this:

Clearly, the minting is going. It says not to refresh, so I suppose the mint button will show up if/when raffle winners show up. Ok, I’m in the cue… will update again if anything happens!

Update: 2:20pm. Still waiting to get picked. But, let’s have a look at Opensea (official link), at the pre-reveal and the floor:

Current floor is 6.1 ETH with 1,500+ minted:

Pretty cool pre-reveal image, eh?

Here’s something crazy, too. At this point, the smart contract is not even verified, likely a strategic move to keep people from messing around with the contract.

Check out some of these “highest last sales” on Opensea at this point — up to 9.5 ETH. That’s $34,500 for ONE Meka!!!

Awwwww, snap. Just saw this:

Bummer. Though, oddly, it says only 3,646 were sold so far:

Based on the rules on their Discord, it seems that they picked all of the raffle winners, and that group has 6 hours left to mint. So, that’s why the mint is unfinished, but people like me (and everyone here at GenerativeNFTs) sees this message.

I may well update again if/when anything interesting happens on the secondary market. Right now Opensea is down, possibly from traffic related to this drop. But, I’ll be checking back in. There could still be some opportunities here.

Evening Update: 7:49pm

Just wanted to hope in and cap off this article for today, as it was a truly crazy day. What began with my publicly touting a possible 2.5 ETH flip was not only possible, as I’d predicted, but was actually SUPER low — embarrassingly low, to be honest! What a learning experience this was.

By now, the secondary market has created 5200 ETH in volume. That’s $18.6 million!

At its height, a Meka could have brought in 8+ ETH (2x the estimate I’d had in mind). That’s basically 40x the mint price. Thus a 2 Meka purchase, as I’d planned, could have potentially brought in 16 ETH at the height of the activity (or, $57,000 for a $1,400 investment). Has your brain exploded here yet? Because mine has. lol.

Even conservatively, though, the floor is still 5.5 ETH. So, a 2-Meka purchase could still have easily brought in 11 ETH, or $39k. I may update once more later on, just to show what some of the final images look like. Everyone sure is curious. Let’s just hope they live up to the hype, as some drops can be let-downs artistically. But, I think the Mekas will indeed live up to their hype.