Airdrop Arrivals 🪂
Featuring the SVB Collapse, 3x FREE packs of NFTs, the latest airdrop on Top Shot, and more drama in the Sorare streets.
Good morning.
There is no easy way to say this, but crypto may be totally screwed yet again.
In fact, its actually the entire banking system. If you’ve been following the news, the 16th largest bank in the US went under this week, taking $160B in assets along with it. It is the 2nd biggest bank failure in history.
The bank - SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) - was home to the funds of many tech startups, and the effects are projected to be cataclysmic.
The effects are already being felt in crypto:
PROOF, parent company of Moonbirds, is a client of SVB and held an undisclosed amount of their $50M funding round there.
Circle, parent company of the stablecoin USDC, held $3.3B of their $40B reserve at SVB. As of this writing late Friday night, USDC has depegged from $1, all the way down to $0.88.
Many crypto startups were likely holding cash at SVB, as its predicted that nearly 50% of all US-based startups were banking there. Yikes!
Not great you guys! The future from here is uncertain, but many are predicting a horrific week for the markets starting Monday.
It’s in times like these that I’m thankful for sports.
They are constant. They care not for banking collapses.
Even when the pandemic hit and sports were actually halted, we still found ways to enjoy them, be it via watching The Last Dance, or betting on simulated NBA2K games.
And wouldn’t you know it, in our little corner of sports (web3), it’s actually been a pretty good week!
Top Shot got hit with an airdrop, and we’ve got FOUR different FREE NFTs featured in today’s Making Moves⚡ (below).
So let’s put those worries aside and get into all the action from this past week.
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Every week, we cover the best EASY and sometimes FREE moves to make in web3 sports. And this week is loaded!
📦 Mint a FREE La Liga Golazos Pack | 30 seconds
From the Dapper streets, the team at Golazos is giving away a free pack to anyone that wants it, whether you’ve used the platform before or not.
👑 Open a FREE Draft Kings PGA Pack | 30 seconds
To celebrate its launch of the PGA product, Reignmakers has a free pack available right now with NFTs that can be used towards upcoming tournaments.
🎯 FREE Entry to March Madness on OTM | 30 seconds
Our old pals at Own The Moment are running a March Madness tournament with a very unique twist on the way you pick your seeds. It’s free!
📸 Mint a FREE Getty Images NFT | 30 seconds
The team at Candy - the platform that makes Baseball NFTs - is handing out a FREE NFT to celebrate its launch of Getty Images.
🫂 Support Team Hold!
Our friends at Team Hold are raising funds to expand their content offering, and they’re turning to the community for support! Mike Zakarian is as good a content creator as they come in our community, and TH deserves every inch of support for making endless hours of FREE content every week.
🪂 Airdrop Hits on Top Shot
A long anticipated airdrop hit NBA Top Shot collectors yesterday, as Locked Set Rewards hit accounts. Here is the original blog about locked set rewards for reference.
Top Shot also announced a variety of other updates to their plans for the remainder of this season, including:
Legendary Rookie Packs: This drop has been delayed to the month of May, and will cost $499 per pack with various gated and early access privileges. Each player will only be minted to /75.
Burned Challenge Moments: They also announced that over 317,000 Moment has been burned thus far this year in Challenges, although the net negative here was only about 129,000 as many new Moments were created.
Challenge Rewards Incoming: And last, TS announced a merch claim for those who finish the highest tier set of challenge rewards this season:
🔥 Draft Kings NFL Boasts 113,000 Users
It has been incredibly hard to pull numbers on Draft Kings Reignmakers, the DFS giant’s flagship product in partnership with the NFLPA.
But finally, we have the data for their first season of play!
Not too bad!
The impressive part for me is the $22M payout to users, which is far more than any other NFT platform is dolling out regularly in terms of hard cash (save maybe for Sorare Soccer).
And the total users - 113,092 - is actually more than NFL ALL DAY’s lifetime Buyers of 102,093. However, keep in mind that DK’s actual user base is roughly 2M per month and they were able to tap into that.
🦅 Another Project Leaves Flow
This one is kind of personal.
A week ago, Blocklete Golf announced their move from FLOW to Immutable X, marking the second project to leave FLOW this past month.
The move comes as Blocklete’s parent company, media giant Warner Brothers, expands its partnership with Immutable. As you may recall, two of our recent promotional partners - B/R Watch-2-Earn and Hro - are both on Immutable and part of (or associated) with WB.
The personal part: this project is very close to my NFT journey.
Way back in November 2020, two months before The First Mint was born, I actually hosted a few Discord chats in the Blocklete discord. I pitched them on the idea, totally out of the blue, and they went for it. That’s right - they gave me my start in crypto!
Now is this actually BAD for FLOW? Nah I don’t think so. This departure is clearly part of a larger deal. As for the other project that left (Chainmonsters), I have no idea what happened there. Let’s just put it this way: if it keeps happening, then we can worry for Flow.
Read the full story here on Crypto Slate.
👾 Sorare Calls Next on Text-Only AMA
Ah, it seems like just yesterday that our dear friend Roham, the CEO of Dapper Labs, caused pure chaos on a Friday afternoon by participating in a text-only AMA royal rumble in the Dapper discord.
And now, it looks like Sorare’s executive team has taken notice, and will be facing the community next week in a similar format.
And the community is not satisfied.
Things have not been pretty on the fantasy platform of late.
Although the Soccer product continues to thrive and grow, adding various new forms of payouts and rewards, values on the NBA side have taken a dramatic turn (as in prices are down). And the sentiment is beginning to dip.
Earlier this week, I went in-depth on MLB NFTs, and how both Sorare and Candy Digital have failed to drum up excitement for baseball’s premiere web3 products.
From the World Baseball Classic exhibition games, here’s Ohtani hitting 3-run while DOWN ON ONE KNEE.
From Tuesday night, where Kyle Kuzma put on his best Steph Curry impression, only to fail incredibly hard.
And this fun one, a flubbed dunk with an incredible finish.
Watch Steve Ballmer here. Need more of this energy in my life.
**This is not financial advice. Nothing in this newsletter, podcast, or publication should be considered financial or trading advice of any kind. Please do your own thorough research and make your own trading decisions. This is not advice.”
About The First Mint
A web3 sports community. Collectibles, NFTs, and Metaverse.
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Brutal SVB & Circle/USDC news. So true - there will always be sports. Historically true through many big crises, including war.