A Failed Hunt

In my last article, I told how I was going to hunt an ape. Apes NFT is the latest NFT project on smartBCH. It was launched yesterday at exactly 00:00 GMT. Even though I hadn't gotten the chance to read the roadmap (if there's any), I made plans to acquire a few. Before then, I have had little sleep in the two days before, and I really needed to sleep, but i knew if I did, even with a thousand alarms, I won't wake up in time to mint any.

I was literally watching the website from say 10mins to minting. The second minting started, I tried to mint two, while the browser was loading on my lagging phone, I was amazed at how fast the minting was going. By the third minute from the beginning of minting, more than 7500 had been minted. My phone was still lagging and as such I couldn't mint any until the whole 10000 was minted,completely and all under 5mins!

While it was a really great feat for 400BCH to have been raised in just under 5mins from the sales, the sales of apes NFT has laid bare some shortcomings or weak spot of smartBCH projects. I've got to give it to the team for an amazingly successful mint. For the website to have been able to handle that much traffic is a feat in itself, they really did well.

Talking about some weak spot that have been laid bare by this sale. On the ethereum blockchain, most people are excluded from participating in such things as a result of high gas fees, hence making it a thing of the rich, which is the opposite of what satoshi envisioned for the blockchain technology. Up until now, BCH in all it diverse form has been fulfilling this dream, but recent whale activities are undermining this.

One of the reason Lawpunk project has attained tremendous success is due to it decentralization, something that's becoming increasingly rare in sBCH projects due to whale activities. The growth of majority of the recent projects on sBCH has been hampered due to this factor. Take example this particular apes NFT, there are a total of just 186 addresses with at least one, but even from the comments on their telegram groups, you can tell there are people who used multiple addresses and most of them are those who fall among the highest buyers. So basically, by the time you eliminate the multiple accounts, we might not have up to 120 owners. Think about that, 120 people holding all the 10000pcs, and in there, one person probably owns a thousand.

The saddest part is that these whale actually do not buy into these projects because they believe in it, they see it as a speculative tool that they can control for their own personal gain. You'll probably disagree, but I know what I'm talking about. We have seen it done with Daiquiri, with tango, with cattos NFT. At the end of the day, they just end up ruining the project for the community.

Using cattos NFT as an example, you can go to oasis and find cattos listed below minting price as of now, almost a month after minting closed. I can tell you categorically that the people listing such are those who bought hundreds or even thousands. Now they have saturated the secondary market and as such are dragging and stagnating the floor price from moving higher, hence stagnating the whole project.

If nothing is done to check the activities of whales on sBCH, they will ultimately make it inaccessible to most and people will lose faith in sBCH. Gradually, sBCH maximalists in the forms of whales are coming up and needs to be checked. Whether you agree with me or not, it's an open secret that these people are just here to manipulate the markets through pumps and dumps for their own benefits and at the end of the day, the multitude of small time investors are the ones who will suffer

Thanks for reading.