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From the editor

Nine thousand of the NFTs in this week's lead story say, on the NFT itself, that they're worthless. That's the pitch. It's the oddest bit of marketing I've seen on OpenSea this year, and I think it's clever.

This is the first DeFi Market Journal Briefing. Once a week you'll get what we published and why it's worth ten minutes. No price calls. I've held Bitcoin since 2011 and I've watched a lot of people lose rent money on those.

Feature: NOT THE LIQUID APES, 10,000 free NFTs, 1,000 winners

The team behind Liquid Apes has put 10,000 free NFTs on OpenSea. One per wallet, gas only. Nine thousand are duds and say so. The other thousand each carry a guaranteed whitelist place for the real Liquid Apes mint in late October, at 0.08 ETH. Same supply, same price as Bored Apes in 2021. That's deliberate.

The team calls it "infiltrating OpenSea". Every piece links back to Liquid, so each mint and resale listing is an advert sitting inside the biggest traditional marketplace. A few hours after the mint opened on 25 September, 224 had gone.

Winning gets you the right to buy an ape, not an ape. Register your wallet at LiquidApes.com before 16 October or it's wasted. We'll report the numbers when the whitelist mints.

Read the full story →

Also this week

What Is Liquid NFTs?

A marketplace where half of every mint price stays locked behind the NFT. Any holder can burn theirs and take roughly 80% of that backing back out. So there's a floor you can actually cash out, which most NFTs have never had. The catch is what the floor's held in.

What Is FUSD?

That's the catch. FUSD is backed by USDC and built to creep up rather than sit at a dollar. A 2.5% fee on every transaction, half of it added to the backing, had it at about $1.07 in late September. It isn't pegged. We couldn't find a published audit or reserve figures yet, so the piece lists the four things to check before you lean on it.

The Crypto Due Diligence Checklist

Seven checks before money goes into anything, Liquid included. Team, tokenomics, audits, real usage, treasury, how they talk to holders, and your own way out. An afternoon's work. Cheaper than learning it the other way.

If I've got something wrong, tell me. Get in touch.

Robert Stone
Editor, DeFi Market Journal · X @StoneOnChain