I promised to keep everyone in the loop as I make the move from WordPress to Ghost, so it’s time for another update. If you missed the backstory here, make sure to read this post to get caught up.

Right now I’m on step one and a half of the process, and I’ve hit a snag. Since I imagine other people moving from WordPress to Ghost could run into the same issue, I’ll share the snag I’ve hit.

The first step in the process is to use the Export to Ghost plugin to, well, like the name says, export everything to Ghost. The plugin config screen looks like this:

What’s supposed to happen is you just click that bright blue button that says “Download Ghost File” and it works. But when I click the button I get this…

So, I emailed Dan who told me that I should probably just ping my hosting provider to see if they can help maybe give a bit more bandwidth. Then, things got super ultra busy for me and I did nothing…but tonight I’ve decided I’m going to do some research and see if I can figure out how to get past this step.

I notice at the bottom of the screen there’s a Ghost Migrator 1.0.3 – Diagnostics section. I see both a memory limit and max execution time there so I’m guessing there’s some config where I can update that. Before I reach out for more help, I want to get my hands a bit dirty and see if I can crack the case myself.

If anyone has run into this and wants to give me a hint, feel free to share, otherwise, expect to hear how this was solved in my next update. One step closer to Ghost, moving slowly, but I’ll get there!

What happens when you combine an all-star dev team with an artist from Bored Ape Yacht club and a cool concept like Vampires? Well, you end up with what I think it’s more than safe to say has been one of the most-anticipated NFT drop to-date.

Over the course of the last week Sneaky Vampire Syndicate has seen their Discord grow from a few thousand users to over 30,000 and with the launch one day away one question has been on everyone’s mind – how will anyone who isn’t an NFT whale going to be able to mint a vampire?

Until today the most common answer I heard was, “well if you spend $10,000 in gas you might get one,” and that honestly might have been a low-end estimate give how much excitement there is for this project. One of the things that has really impressed me about Sneaky Vampires over the last week is their interest in doing everything they can to even the playing field and make this minting as fair as possible.

Two days ago I wrote an article about the slick anti-both technology that Sneaky Vampires is deploying and while this will likely do an awesome job of thwarting those pesky bots, it doesn’t solve the gas problem. Well today, the conversation about gas reached a fever pitch as the SVS Discord was buzzing with questions about how anyone without a boatload of ETH would have a chance to actually mint.

Then, everything changed with this announcement from SVS’s lead developer woof:

A friend of mine (Andrew) sent me a text with this announcement in it and I was so excited to see it. The reality is, this is such a cool project but it would only end up going to whales if a new mechanism for minting wasn’t implemented. I was surprised how quickly the team was able to react but it’s clear they saw what was happening and wanted to even the playing field.

I thought SVS might have been the first to deploy this technique but learned this afternoon that Parallels did something similar – so while they’re not the first, they’re definitely early in deploying a more egalitarian minting process.

For those who want to do a deeper dive to understand exactly what they need to do tomorrow, just read this:

Thanks to woof, topkek and the whole SVS team – I imagine this is a pretty big change to make less than 24-hours before minting! That being said, it’s clear that SVS is doing everything they can to make this a smooth, bot free minting that’s open to everyone and I think that’s going to do amazing things for the community.

So get your ETH ready, tomorrow is going to be one exciting day! 🧛‍♂️🧛‍♂️🧛‍♂️

Disclaimer: The above references an opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

As more and more of my friends are getting interested in NFTs I’m finding that I’ve become a sounding board as many of them try to navigate the space. I’m also starting to spot some common confusion that people have, which is totally understandable since the NFT world does work quite a bit differently from most other things.

While I probably have a blog post or two in me to cover all the confusing things that throw people for a loop when they’re trying to dive into NFTs, there’s one topic that I thought deserved to be covered first and in its own post because it’s just so important.

As you can probably guess from the title, what I’m going to talk about is Discord.

Most of us are wired to look at websites when we want to get information about something. The reality is, this works for most things, if you’re researching a company, finding out information about a conference, etc. usually a website is where you go for all the details.

In the NFT world, this isn’t the case. Instead, NFT Projects share the most detailed up-to-date information in Discord in a channel called #announcements. The handy thing to know is that all NFT projects have this channel and the best ones update it constantly, sometimes two or three times a day.

Here’s an example of the #announcements channel from Bored Ape Yacht Club:

What I think you’ll find pretty quickly is that Discord is actually a lot better than a website, it’s quick and easy for the people running the project to update, and easy for you, as an NFT investor/collector to quickly check on your computer, phone, or tablet. If you go to the website for a project, you’ll end up missing a lot of the action, it’s all on Discord, and the good stuff is in the #announcements channel.

Last but not least, there is no cost to join a Discord for a given project and there’s no special process to apply. Simply go to the project’s website or Twitter account and you’ll find a link to their Discord, click that and poof – you’re in. If you want to get started with one of the most active Discord’s out there, I’d recommend joining the Bored Ape Yacht Club Discord and taking a look around, you can hop on instantly here –> https://www.discord.gg/bayc

It’s been hard to ignore the growth in popularity of .ETH domain names, and for good reason. Just like domain names replaced IP addresses for websites, .ETH domain names have been seen as a potential replacement for wallet addresses which are exceptionally long and difficult to remember.

While I personally have seen a lot of people make the move to .ETH, I’ve been skeptical myself because these are the early days and well, things can and do go wrong, and in the world of blockchain, if a wallet address is wrong, you can lose whatever you’re sending to it…and there’s nobody to help you get it back.

It might just be the one big gotcha when it comes to crypto and NFTs in general. Decentralized means that you’re on your own. It’s up to you to decide how to to transfer and protect your assets, and when to embrace new ways of doing things.

Unfortunately, this week, a bug at the world’s most popular NFT Marketplace, OpenSea.io caused users of .ETH domains to end up literally sending their NFTs into the ether…here’s the scoop from Decrypt:

He encountered the bug while transferring the first ENS name ever registered, rilxxlir.eth. Johnson tried to transfer that NFT representing the ENS name into his personal wallet (nick.eth), but OpenSea sent the NFT to an incorrect wallet address instead. He wrote that OpenSea’s interface failed to resolve the ENS name attached to his wallet, and “instead [populated] the ‘to’ address with some nonsense.”

In other words, the NFT was sent into the void. Due to the immutability of blockchain networks, the NFT representing the ENS name is now apparently lost forever, and cannot be transferred back to him. “Ownership of rilxxlir.eth is now permanently burned,” he tweeted.

(Source – Decrypt)

So what does all this say about .ETH domains? Well I don’t think it says anything new. The reality is, we do need something to replace those epically long wallet addresses and .ETH makes a lot of sense. That being said, right now if you’re using one, you’re part of a “test group” so you’ll need to know there are risks involved.

I know Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is probably not too happy today, and this bug wasn’t a problem with them, it was an OpenSea bug, but their customers were impacted so it’s just as painful. These are the early days, there will be growing pains, stay safe out there.

The buzz in the NFT world today was around a new project that dropped today called The Sevens. The project features 7,000 unique NFT collectibles with references from pop culture, anime, games, memes, movies and more. I think the art looks pretty slick myself and it reminds me quite a bit of 0N1 Force which also features a side profile character, here’s an example of what one of The Sevens’ NFTs looks like:

Also just to be clear, I’m not saying that The Sevens copied 0N1 Force, so I don’t want to start any scandals there. The two projects certainly do look different enough but there are similarities, just for comparison, below is an example from 0N1 Force:

Owning a The Sevens NFT gives you access to a treasure hunt their launching in the metaverse (which sounds pretty darn cool) along with exclusive access to merch drops. Today was the launch and the cost to mint was 0.07 ETH plus gas.

As we’ve now seen happen over and over again, when a hot new project drops, gas gets high, ridiculously high, and Twitter starts to fill up with Tweets about the ensuing gas wars. In the case of The Sevens though, along with gas wars a whole different problem emerged.

Before mint The Sevens made it clear, only one NFT was allowed to be minted per transaction. Sounds simple enough right? Well, someone minted over 1,000 The Sevens NFTs and paid very little in gas.

How did they do it? That’s what this post is about – read on if you want to know.

So I’m not going to go too deep into smart contracts and how they work but I think that is probably a good topic for a future blog post. For now I’ll keep it simple – here’s what happened in bullet point form.

• The Sevens contract had a limiter in it that prevented anyone minting on the website or directly from the contract to only be able to mint one NFT per transaction
• Someone, or some group of people was able to go around this limiter by not minting on the website, and not minting through The Sevens contract – instead they minted through their own contract
• The contract that this person (or group of people) used did call a function from The Sevens contract – a mint executor function that, like it sounds, mints an NFT
• Essentially, this person (or people) just called that function over, and over, and over again, over 1,000 times – and manages to do it all in one transaction, and at a lower gas fee than everyone else

Now I know what you’re thinking – how can we stop this from happening in the future? Well there’s one project that’s already one step ahead, Sneaky Vampire Syndicate (SVS) who I wrote about this morning on NFTInvesting.io. SVS has was thinking ahead even before all of this funkiness broke out today by building a system to prevent bots from buying from the contract period. A lot of devs have been pretty impressed with what SVS is doing and I think they might end up setting a new standard for mintings going forward.

Okay, now you know the basics of what happened today, if you want to do a deeper dive and look at the code, I highly recommend giving this thread from @0xBender a read. Today is a good reminder that these are still the early days, as with anything in life, it’s all about learning and improving over time. This was a good lesson for all NFT creators today and I think the industry will be better because of it.

Last weekend Bored Ape Yacht Club made NFT history announcing Mutants, and along with adding an incredibly cool new mechanic to the project, they also opened the door for new members to join our little swamp club. It’s been awesome to see all the mutants on Twitter this week, people love them, the project is buzzing more than ever, and I think the whole concept is just so damn creative.

I haven’t mutated any of my apes yet, I probably will end up doing it but for now I’m just enjoying seeing other mutants and watching how things play out. A couple of days ago I wrote about article for NFTInvesting.io discussing the impact mutating an ape has on its value, and I think the jury’s still out on this one.

But this weekend, the focus shifts from the swamp to the gutter as Gutter Cats announced a new species that will come out tomorrow, here’s the scoop from the GCG Discord:

If you don’t know much about Gutter Cats, I can explain this pretty quickly. Gutter Cats held their minting back in June – I liked the concept a lot and the art reminded me a lot of the apes, especially the background art they did. It was also pretty clear early on that the team was incredibly organized and the Discord had great energy.

What was a bit different about Gutter Cats is rather than following the 10,000 NFT train that everyone was one, they decided to go with 3,000 cats. People loved the cats, the team did a stellar job executing on their roadmap, did super interesting things like launching the Gutter Cat Gang Dao, and then, just like Bored Apes added dogs, Gutter Cats added rats.

Given how good the Gutter Cat Gang team has been at executing, there’s always been the thought of them giving some real utility to the cat/rat combos, and some hints along the way.

Tomorrow, that all comes to life as they said in the Discord announcement above – “Gutter Cat & Gutter Rat pairs (matching ID’s do not matter) will be freely rewarded. And for those who remember last Saturday, (which feels like months ago – doesn’t it?) Bored Apes allowed new people into the club by allowing people to mint mutants. Tomorrow it sounds like Gutter Cats will be doing something similar.

The reality is, the floor prices on a lot of these projects has gone above what most people want to spend on an NFT, and has made it harder to get into awesome projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club or Gutter Cat Gang. I think it’s awesome that these projects are finding ways to get new people involved and tomorrow will likely be the last chance to get into Gutter Cat Gang through a minting process, so if you want in, and you don’t want to spend 7ETH (the floor today) tomorrow’s your day.

I’m excited, last Saturday was a blast and this Saturday should be a lot of fun. NFTs are bringing people together from all over the world and creating a new asset class in front of our eyes. Let’s gooooooooo 🕺

It’s been a long process of doing research, getting advice from people who know a lot more than I do, and just sitting and thinking about it. In total, it’s been a one year process to get to where I am now which is actively moving my blog from WordPress to Ghost.

My journey to Ghost started on September 27th of last year so if I can make this all happen before the end of this month I can say I made the move in under a year 🕺

Fast forward to today and I’m getting ready to officially kick off the process. I know quite a few people have been interested in making the move to Ghost so I wanted to share more details on how I’m making the move.

First things first, I know what I know and I know what I don’t know. I know very little about the backend details of blogging platforms. Don’t know much about tinkering with WordPress, and the same goes for Ghost, so I know I need to bring in an expert.

After doing tons of research the same name kept coming up, Dan Rowden (@dr), so I did some research, chatted with him on Twitter and decided to move forward with him on all fronts, from making the move to theme to customizations to hosting.

So here’s a quick overview of how this is all coming together:

• For hosting I’ll be Gloat, a hosting service Dan runs specifically for Ghost sites
• Dan has sent me detailed instructions on making the move, and it’s pretty seamless, essentially, install a plugin that runs an export, then upload it onto my new Ghost site and send Dan the zip files and he takes care of the media
• After this I’ll be moving over to a Ghost theme and Dan will be helping to customize it so I can bring my awesome sponsor banners over with me

One thing I’m really digging about the process so far is that I’m dealing directly with a person, and as I said above, someone who knows a lot more about Ghost than I do.

I’ll continue to update everyone as I move forward. Tonight I’m installing the plugin and running the export so the process is officially kicking off 🚀

This weekend was a wild one in the NFT space. I cleared my calendar for the entire weekend, and I’m glad I did because while it was a blast, there was also a lot of information to take in and strategic moves to think about. On top of all that, and probably the highlight of it all was celebrating with my fellow apes on what I think we’ll all look back on as a historic weekend in the NFT world.

Over the course of the weekend, friends and family were texting me asking what the heck this “mutant thing” is that they keep hearing about. Unable to explain over text I hopped on the phone with a few people but quickly realized it would be a pretty complex conversation to have, especially if you aren’t already familiar with Bored Ape Yacht Club.

That being said, I did my best and through the process started to develop a bit of a rhythm around how to explain Mutant Ape Yacht Club to people who are still trying to understand the NFT space in general. I personally think that just like crypto was mystifying to people five years ago, five years from now (and probably sooner) NFTs will be a normal asset class in our lives.

So if you, like me, are already struggling to explain to friends and family why you love you ape JPEGs so much, and now have to explain the whole mutant thing, maybe this will make life a bit easier for all of us. With that, let’s dive in and start from the beginning.

To understand Mutant Ape Yacht Club, you’ll need to know the basics of Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT project with 10,000 unique NFTs in it. Each NFT is an ape with a different set of traits, some more rare than the others. Typically, the more rare the trait, the higher the value, but there are also plenty of examples of traits that just look great so end up increasing the value of the NFT more.

Most Bored Ape investors use a site called Rarity.Tools to easily look at rarity traits of their apes and to see how the floor prices for certain traits change over time. The floor price of a trait is simply the lowest priced ape with that trait. Here’s an example of an ape on Rarity.Tools:

If you want to do a deeper dive into traits and rarity, I recommend giving this article a read.

The important takeaway here that we’re going to carry into the next section is that apes have a wide range of traits, some that are more valuable than others. A good example of a rare valuable trait is “Bored Unshaven Pizza” as you’ll see in this beautiful ape below:

In the example above you can see that under “Mouth” – “Bored Unshaven Pizza” has a floor of 138.889ETH (that green number above the trait). This means that the lowest priced ape with this trait is 138.889ETH. The number 26 to the right means that 26 apes out of 10,000 have this trait, so you can understand why it’s so valuable, it’s incredibly rare.

If this person were to list their ape for 137ETH, the floor for “Bored Unshaven Pizza” would drop to 137ETH since they would be the new floor. Make sense? Good. This is the data you need to have jammed into your head for mutants to make sense. Now let’s move on.

Mutant Ape Yacht Club Basics

So you know enough about Bored Ape Yacht Club to be dangerous, but last weekend Mutant Ape Yacht Club was announced and now everything confusing again. Well, not as confusing as you might think – just give me two minutes and I’ll explain.

Mutant Ape Yacht Club was a highly anticipated release from Bored Ape Yacht Club and was released this past Saturday. The mechanics behind it were pretty simple at a high level. For every ape in your wallet you would get a Mutant Serum.

There are three different mutants serums but honestly, you really only need to know about two so I’ll focus on those, one is called M1, the other is called M2, they look like this:

Both of these serums mutate your ape by changing the traits, which in turn changes the way the ape looks. The difference between M1 and M2 serums is pretty simple at a high level. M1 creates mutated traits that are expected to be less valuable than M2. Now the dynamics of how all this will play out could change over time and there’s absolutely a real chance that some M1 traits end up selling for more than the same trait in M2 because people like them more.

Around 75% of the serum distributed to apes was M1, 25% M2. The serum was distributed randomly so some people got very lucky, but it’s important to remember, this was a completely free drop so everyone wins, it was a completely free bonus for owning an ape. As you can see above, the serums themselves have real value with M1’s currently selling for 5.5ETH and M2s for 15.8ETH.

That being said, by design the idea is, an ape mutated with M2 gets more valuable version of the traits than an M1 ape. The resulting mutated apes are completely separate NFTs so they can be bought and sold just like a normal ape. Below is an example of an original ape (on the left) with the mutated version on the right:

Earlier on I told you I was going to focus on M1 and M2 serums, I’ll just note at the end here there were 8 M3 serums randomly given to apes, those made some seriously valuable apes with only one trait, each one completely unique. These are absolutely insane and worth millions, and in the future, probably tens of millions…

The finer points about Mutant Apes and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club

Okay, so if you’re still reading then you’re really ready to geek out about Mutant Apes and I’ve got a few more nuggets to share with you.

First – the big question on everyone’s mind was – are the resulting Mutant Apes also part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The answer is, yes, but they don’t have the exact same status as the original apes. Here’s the skinny from Bored Ape Yacht Club themselves:

The second question that people usually ask is, “can you use the serum multiple times on the same ape?” Here’s the scoop. Each serum type can only be used once on an ape. So you can use an M1 on an ape and then an M2 on the same ape. This will generate two new mutant apes, one with all M1 traits, the other with all M2 traits. You cannot however apply an M1 twice or an M2 twice to the same ape.

The Mutant Arcade

One of the my favorite little bonus features of the mutant drop was the Mutant Arcade, a retro game that was pretty darn hard and involved making your way through five levels each with the goal of defeating a giant ape by pelting it with bananas.

The game was available for three days and anyone who beat it got a special NFT proving they did it. Personally, I just kept playing and playing, and playing some more until I got in the groove with each level. It was a blast, I love retro games, and I think the Bored Ape team did an awesome job with this game from the game mechanics to the awesome music that I can’t seem to get out of my head.

If you made it to the end, you saw this awesomely satisfying screen:

Want to do an ever deeper dive into Mutant Apes?

Okay, I’ve covered some solid ground here but nobody can really do this project justice like the Bored Ape Yacht Club team. They put together an awesome explainer on the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, you can read it here.

Thanks for reading and hello to all my new mutant sisters and brothers! 👋

Hello, happy Sunday, and welcome to what used to be called Flippa Friday but I moved to Sunday because who’s reading blogs on a Friday night? 🤷‍♂️ As usual I’ve gone through Flippa and found two online businesses that caught my eye this week.

I know I’ve had a lot of new readers come onboard recently so if you haven’t read this series before, here’s a quick primer. First – Flippa is the go-to place to buy existing, operating, online businesses. Second – like anything you need to do your homework and make sure you’re buying what you think you’re buying.

Luckily, Flippa introduced a pretty awesome due diligence service that can help you really cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Okay – enough from me, let’s get to the good stuff! Below are two online businesses that caught my eye on Flippa this week – enjoy 🕺

The first business up is a pretty fun one – it’s called Tasty Tie and it’s a product along with the patent and trademark. The product itself is a tie that as you can see from the image above is for teething babies. This is a fun idea and the site is doing $1,601/mo in profit.

What I think makes this business so interesting is that it seems like in the right hands there could be a lot of growth potential. I don’t have any kids so I’m not the right person to analyze it, but if you have kids, and know about teething, and also know about how parents discover products like this, there could be a great opportunity here.

You don’t see too many online businesses that come with trademarked and patented products so this has a lot to sink your teeth into, so to speak!

If you’ve been reading this series for a while you know I have a thing for businesses that have been around for a while. What I really like about this business is it’s been around for five years and the seller has done 102 transactions totaling over $1.7M with 100% feedback.

Having both site age, along with a trusted seller, that’s a great combo. This is an interesting site since it’s in the men’s grooming category which has been a niche that’s been growing like crazy online. Also, as an Amazon Affiliate site that means the new owner gets to play curator which sounds like fun.

While the site is only doing $629/mo in profit, it has already hit reserve at $1,850 so this could be a great deal for someone.

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Okay, that’s it for this week, thanks for reading and here’s to a great week ahead 🙌