DeGods: Season III. Tf happened? 🤔
Season III launched. FP dropped by half. What now? 🤨
After months of waiting and several expected DeLays, Season III is finally here.
Here are my thoughts.
The Context: How it all went down in the bg
Sharing the bg here. You can skip this part if you don’t want the contextual drama behind what led to the dump in floor price.
A whale had a personal issue (a family medical emergency), and she dumped 200 gods and a bunch of $dust. We’re friends, and I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, although admittedly the timing is funny.
We had the Bangkok dinner, hosted by Jet, a Director of X+. The dinner lasted 5 ½ hours, and it was fantastic. Kevin and I were sat next to each other and we spoke at length, about how the team works, their history, corporate structure and operations, etc. (Bullish af 🤝).
Kevin: "There’s gonna be a psyop” (jk)
The Director exited a couple days later, again, partially due to irl stuff. (He called me, and we talked.) I’m sharing it here b/c it’s public already; he and his wife have both tweeted about it.
I won't share the tweets here, but he apparently lost half a milly in revenue as CEO of his irl biz, and his wife tweeted that his son needs his father. (You get the message.)
Part of it was due to toxicity. Some gods were attacking him for various reasons, people calling him a snake in chats, etc. Afterward, his wife asked him, “Why did we host a dinner for a community that treats us like this?” Fair.
Why am I mentioning this? ‘Cause sell shaming is loser shit. Yeah, I get it. If you want to sell, sell via OTC, especially if you’re a major whale. Think of your community too. As a whale, you have a responsibility to your community. (I agree w/ this to an extent.)
Also: Don’t gloat about selling the project on Twitter, b/c obviously there will be some community backlash. But going off at members who have actually contributed makes me wonder what you’ve done for the community.
To those who have left, especially those of you who’ve made valuable contributions, I salute you. 🐐
And now, w/ that out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff.
Art Refresh: The Downgrade
OG “Psyop” art
The original rollout of the art refresh was underwhelming af. People spotted mistakes. The messaging was, “Flat. Muted.” What fell flat was the messaging; it was muted.
There was also talk of a psyop: Was all this—the art, the poor rollout, etc.—was all of it planned to lower expectations? I bought into the idea. In fact, although the team still denies it, I’m hesitant to take this tin foil hat off.
Why?
There was this tweet from Frank:
Then there was the Johnny video. Johnny never does videos. All of a sudden, he’s on a video explaining the art. Btw, it looks like someone’s forcing him to read off a script b/c he looks like he’s struggling to hold back the laughter. Either he’s a bad actor, or he’s incredibly camera-shy. ❤
Anyway, the example he shows in the video is of a DeGod w/ one arm, and he says they’re not changing anything. That’s one reason why everyone thought it was a psyop, except… the new art reveal still has the missing arm dude! So… no psyop? 🤔
About the art itself. I love most of the art. A few pieces are rugs, like the cleanest ones. I had one that I thought would look amazing, but ended up looking like a human peen. See below:
From clean to peen
However, some of the messier, rugged combos got banger makeovers. I feel like I won the lottery w/ this one, my current pfp:
What I love most about the Art Refresh is this: It’s a combination of extremely muted vs. incredibly loud tones. The contrast works, and that’s why the colors really pop.
Also: As you can see from the ex. above, the art isn’t necessarily simplified; it’s cleaner. The bg is equally complex, but still, cleaner. Same w/ the robe and the beard. See, even here, it’s the strong contrast between simplified x complex that still produces a cleaner god, and these complementary dichotomies, when they work, come to work together like a mfer.
DeGrade: 9/10 🔥, but only until they fix the peens, and a couple other issues w/ the art. Then it’s 10/10, easy. Still, probably the best art in the jpeg game. I know. Art is subjective, but DeGods art fucks. iykyk
Points Parlor v.1: Underwhelming?
Points Parlor is a “game” where you win prizes by opening packs. You purchase the packs using your points, earned from staking your gods.
Only 15 min after the launch, the complaints started flooding in. It was almost as if holders were upset that a perfect product wasn’t up for grabs on Day 1. Yeah, the team fucked up big time by overhyping expectations. Frank even said we were going to break the internet, then tweeted that the internet broke us 💀
But I believe some of the complaints are unfair, mainly aimed at the prizes: Yes, there’s soap and there’s a pair of crocs in there too. (Worst prizes ever ngl) But there are also amazing prizes. There’s a Tesla, a 65” Samsung Frame TV, there are iPhones, MacBooks, etc. You always win something, and for most of the prizes, you win $dust.
To activate the game, and thus, gain access to your Art Refresh + Points Parlor, you need to fork out 333 $dust. Since most of the winnings are in $dust anyway, I really just see this as a form of security deposit/advanced payment, where you take your $dust and lock it in, and it unlocks slowly every day, based on your winnings. (Currently, $dust is floating a little under $1.)
If you get lucky, you get something like this guy:
@frankdegods@DeGodsNFT@kevindegods Look what points parlor gave me today ❓❓❓❓#SIII#pointsparlor DeGods just paid for my Uber rides Thank you @KrakenNFT
Someone won the Samsung TV ytd. I saw a couple others win the DeGods-branded Ledger, as well as an Apple TV. (Congrats. Happy for you. Nice. 😒)
The Design. Folks have been raving about the design, but I’ll be the odd one out here: It’s weak in terms of brand direction, and I’d also love a bit more agency w/ the UX.
Let me elaborate.
For brand direction, the feel of Points Parlor has nothing to do w/ DeGods. I was expecting some old school social media vibes, combined w/ the pleasing sounds of opening those crispy card packs, be they FIFA or the NBA, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh… you get the idea. Also: Despite being a fan of AI, I’m not loving the AI-style design. (And is it purple b/c of Kraken’s branding?)
Crispy card packs: Muted, but you can still hear them being torn open
For the UX, I was expecting a bit more involvement. I open 40+ to 60+ packs per day, and sitting here passively while the repetitive animations run through the motions gets redundant and boring quick. Get me in there, chief, and lemme click on each pack.
My girl had a different idea: Turn it into a wheel of some sort, so you can see all the different prizes, and how close you came to winning them. Slot machine vibes. 🎰
The Strategy. There are 3 types of packs, all of which have the same base prize, but contain different prizes. So my strategy is currently 2×2×2, but on some days I’ll run 3×3×3. This is b/c of the Halvening, where the base price of each pack doubles every 30 days. (Here’s the manual if you want to take a look.)
Quick Verdict. Tbf to the team, it’s early days. I think we’re on Week 2 now. The prizes will improve. (More prizes coming this week, Kevin says.) Points Parlor has only one major sponsor rn—Kraken—which is providing most of the prizes. The only other sponsor is Ledger, which is offering a DeGods-branded Ledger. That’s it.
Early days.
Frank announced a few days ago on Leap’s space that the team would be adding the remaining 30-odd BTC gods to the Parlor, yanno, the ones that were meant to be raffled off a few months ago 🐂
Looking forward to v1.1 🤑
Vibes in X+ rn
At X+, we’re staying super positive. Yes, we’ve lost a few members, a couple of them good friends, but many of them were traders, some of whom were overleveraged. In other words, they weren’t collectors or holders w/ long-term conviction in the project. The way I see it, their faith wavered as soon as the team botched the Season 3 rollout.
Oops. 🤷♂️
In the meantime, X+ voted on an Approval Committee, which passed via majority vote. This move was done to ensure that we continue to build the most elite community in jpegs, by vetting individual members prior to entry.
Onward.
DeGods Season 3.33
A lot’s happened in the past week. DeGods price crashed. Machi came in w/ roughly 400 gods and dumped them. (Last I checked, he was still holding 28, but they are grails.)
Then came the whales to the rescue. Kicked off by none other than zk-🦈, founder of OMB and former DeGods Alpha team member, the god whales rallied on Twitter, declaring that they would purchase DeGods OTC from Machi direct. FLC, Pokee, and a couple others raised their hands. The deal never materialized, but it did help turn the sentiment for a positive one.
One thing I wish Frank had done different: Instead of trying to placate to Machi, it would’ve been smarter if he had rounded up the whales in X+ first and had a group chat.
Another issue pointed out by another DeGod, and one I noticed affects jpeg collections at large, is when a single whale holds a huge percentage of the collection. It would be best if communities could figure out how to grow their mid-tier whale holdings. For DeGods, this figure would range between 10 and 30.
The biggest gap rn. The most obvious gap at present is the $dust sink. If holders keep winning $dust as the base prize, other than the gas fees preventing us from dumping it all at once on the market, what’s stopping the dump?
Nada! (Maybe speculative future utility, but that’s it.)
So the sell pressure is strong, which is why the most critical task at hand for the team rn is to figure out how to make all that $dust sell pressure disappear. A few folks have told me that $dust DAO is the most obvious solution to this challenge, although I fail to recognize the incentive for a DAO to accumulate $dust.
(Would the whole point be just to accumulate $dust as a sink? I get that it would enable CEX listings due to legal reasons, but I’m dumb. Would love for someone to explain this to me 😂)
Happy to revisit this part once I understand it better.
Anyway. Early days. And like the team says, no easy days. Iterations. Feedback. Reiterations. Cycles of improvement. All that noise.
Yeah, the whole jpeg market’s down. Madmen are shouting from the corners of marketplaces that NFTs are dead. But should they make a comeback, this is the team to do it. Some say, the comeback will be a movie.
Let’s see 🤝