The Mutant Cartel - Will You Take The Pledge?

I'm a big fan of NFT investor Zeneca. He has one of my favourite podcasts called Two Bored Apes, has a thriving Discord with over 10K members in it, and has a free substack publication.

Rather than offer paid access to his web2 substack, he's going to be offering a web3 token-gated VIP area of his Discord. You can bet I'll be buying that NFT.

Zeneca has a 1 ETH challenge, seeing how quickly he can grow a reasonable sized bankroll my minting and flipping NFTs. I was doing similar, but after minting a bunch of Degens, buying a couple of Bulls and seeing their floors slide, I decided to ape into the Mutant Ape Yacht Club instead.

I came fairly late to NFTs.

I've been in crypto since 2016/17 but lost all interest during the bear market. I didn't give it my attention again until March / April of this year when I got the Bankless DAO airdrop for being a paid substack subscriber.

I then spent the next 4 months 100% focussed on contributing to and earning from media DAOs such as Forefront.

I finally found my way into NFTs at the end of August.

This was just after the Mutant Ape launch and obviously way after the Bored Ape Yacht Club launched back in April where you could mint an ape for just 0.08 ETH.

As such I missed out on the huge appreciation in value of the OG apes to the current 36 ETH.

Fortunately I see way more upside in buying a floor mutant for 3.6ETH:

patey.eth @RichardPatey

There are/will be ~ twice the number of Mutant Apes vs Bored Apes Bored Apes get 500 wristbands for the yacht party, Mutant Apes get 250 Makes sense that with forthcoming BAYC token mutants also get half the amount as OG apes BAYC floor 36 ETH MAYC floor 3.6 ETH I see value

I also bought as there's a mutant merch drop happening this week and because I came across the coolest community I’ve seen to date, the Mutant Cartel.

First up the artwork is out of this world - it’s as good / better than the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s own art. It immediately drew me into the story of Mutants working together for financial gain.

Their community has gone from 0 mutants to over 700 within the last 3 weeks which is already over 8% the 9.4K mutant holders.

The community, as described by The Duke and Blaksoot, is grouping into five founding Clans you can contribute your skills to, has an amazing roadmap with NFT releases, IRL meetups, a comic series documenting the Cartel, their own merch and eventually transitioning into a full DAO with treasury and token.

To be honest, when joining the BAYC discord as a mutant, I was underwhelmed by the members-only section. There are only 3 channels available and only 1 is active. There is a dedicated 4th channel for OG apes but no dedicated channel for mutants to connect with each other.

There is a forthcoming DAO on the BAYC roadmap 2.0 but it's possible the Mutant DAO could become the community for mutants, which (will) make up 2/3 of the 30K members of BAYC.

You can learn more about why mutant apes are so valuable in the awesome Rise of the Mutant Apes medium post by DoctorC.eth.

And I’ll be speaking at the Flippa Own Your Future conference next Wednesday about NFTs and the value of crypto communities.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Cheers!

Richard