Why I am Betting on Whale
I’m very bullish on NBA Top Shot and feel like we haven’t even scratched the surface of where this platform can grow. Josh Hart is just the beginning, UFC will be arriving shortly with the NFL and MLB knocking on the doorstep. It’s clear to me that NBA Top Shot is a just a smaller part of the revolutionary adoption of NFTs. If this is news to you, you’re either living under a rock or don’t have a pulse. If you have been under a rock since the new year turned over, check out Mark Cuban’s article on the subject here.
My NBA Top Shot account has jumped roughly 30x and I have this burning FOMO that I am not getting enough exposure in this exploding NFT climate. Getting a handle on how to navigate in the DeFi space takes time and you can expect to screw up along the way. For the past month now, I have been waiting on a transaction on my Metamask wallet to pass. I didn’t realize that subsequent transaction I enacted would be placed behind the queued transaction and be stuck until that previous transaction passed. It took me 5 weeks to figure that out and cost me $50 in eth to clean up. I have no one to blame but myself and am officially hesitant about moving any more money around in this DeFi space.
That being said, I will only have myself to blame 6–12 months from now when NFT breaches early adoption and becomes mainstream. There are so many opportunities in the NFT world and the time is now to invest. My problem is I really can’t say with any certainty which projects are more sustainable from others.
Everyone is a genius in a bull run like this and I thought why can’t I capitalize on this growth myself. I thought why not start your own shit coin? In fact, why not collateralize my most valuable moment and monetize it with my own token “$burncoin”? I read about ICO marketing strategies and I was really excited about this idea. I wrote a proposal of how it would work with the only issue and ask was help with getting the moment off chain onto the eth network. If you care to read the proposal you can find it here.
Haha, needless to say it was not received well or rather maybe at all. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference and that’s what I got. The one thing I will say is Flow did tweet out their intention of Mass Adoption and for that adoption to occur on their blockchain. Pretty obvious getting a moment off the flow blockchain isn’t in their best interest. See that tweet here.
https://twitter.com/flow_blockchain/status/1360301921005940739
Nor is it in their best interest to partner with someone who-let’s be honest here- doesn’t quite know what the fuck he is doing. Sure, cool idea. But, there’s a hundreds of thousands of shitcoins and most of them have no future. I could maybe sell the idea of tokenizing a LBJ Cosmic valued at 250k but a Zion DTH moment at maybe 8k just isn’t going to do it.
The reason I got to this juncture of collateralizing a moment is that it makes perfect fiscal sense. It never made much sense to me on a service like Robinhood in which you leverage purchasing power with deposited money. You’re just saying here’s money so I can gamble with more it. That’s freaking crazy. But, collateralizing an asset is different, or at least for responsible actors. When you hold an asset that you believe will grow in value, you should be able to lock it away and borrow against it. That’s what I wanted to do with Zion. He’s going to be worth more, I don’t want to sell it and I want to be able borrow against it to bolster my collection. Offering exposure to a legendary moment to new users unwilling to fork over large sums for sole possession, I thought was really interesting.
As is the case with everything in the ever developing digitized world, someone has already thought of any idea you make think is novel. Further, somebody had this idea and is executing it at a much higher level. Introducing the “Whale Community”. I won’t do a disservice to the Whale Community and try to explain it in my own words. I had to read their whitepaper twice to get a grasp of what they are trying to do exactly. But, I was stunned at the last line in said white paper and knew I had to invest.
“By creating $WHALE, anyone and everyone can be apart of this exciting financial journey as NFTs become mainstream and disrupt the traditional “Collector” industries.”
Zorro, one of the Discord Moderators, posted in the info section of the Whale Discord this brief overview explaining what $whale is all about.
“$WHALE is a social currency (Ethereum ERC20 crypto-currency created via ROLL infrastructure https://app.tryroll.com/token/WHALE) that is backed by tangible and rare Non-Fungible Token (NFT) assets, while embodying scarcity through definitive limited issuance. There will only ever be a maximum of 10 million $WHALE ever created, with the launch value of each $WHALE being underpinned by a basket of some of the rarest and sought after NFT’s in the industry — held in “The Vault”.”
Read the full whitepaper here.
Watch their YouTube Intro here.
After reading the Whitepaper for the second time, it hit me. This community knows more about this space than I do and I should probably listen to them. According to evaluate.market, there are 2 whale vaults on NBA Top Shot valued together over 28 million dollars. This does not include the additional plethora of other NFT assets sitting in their vault.
It is my opinion that NBA Top Shot and NFTs at large are not done growing. Particularly, the higher end legendary moments to which have already recorded 6 digit sales. To those that have been involved in CryptoPunks or Hashmasks, 6 digit sales are common. The January evaluation of all of the Whale Assets was 6.8 Million. For reference, the NBA Top Shot collection was valued at just under 3 million. Back of the napkin math (assuming that the whole industry experienced a 10x jump in February-which maybe totally unfair to assume) has the vault value close to 70 million. Considering there will only be 10 Million $whale, you can totally see how collateralizing this monstrous collection makes total sense.
I’m a skeptic and I don’t trust easily. I watched their most recent townhall discussion on YouTube and any concern I had went out the window. See that Town Hall discussion here.
Long story short, I believe this is the best way for me to gain exposure to the explosive NFT growth without exposing my lack of experience on my investment. Today, I purchased 18 additional $whale instead of sinking that cash into a couple of Series 2 Ja Morant Dunk 1500 LEs. I won’t be surprised when this token jumps from its current $14.50 price to $50 and maybe beyond.
The Burn Podcast Franchise is not a registered investment, legal advisor or broker/dealer. All investment/financial opinions expressed by The Burn Podcast Franchise are from the personal research and experience of the owner of the site and are intended as educational material. Although best efforts are made to ensure that all information is accurate and up to date, occasionally unintended errors and misprints may occur.
