What kind of office is this anyway?
#MoonPay is a cryptocurrency wallet that simplifies the integration of ordinary people into the world of web 3.0 technologies. And speaking of mass adoption, you can simply cite Moonpay as an example.
In fact, the average user is separated from integration into web 3.0 by 7 steps:
1. Registration on a cryptocurrency exchange;
2. Top up your account by card / via P2P;
3. Interaction with the market, purchasing coins;
4. Creating your own cryptocurrency wallet in Metamask, Phantom, etc.;
5. Withdrawal of funds from the exchange;
6. User interaction with blockchain, dApps, etc.;
7. Transactions on the network, use of the mint function and others.
Moonpay eliminates all these steps and reduces them to 2 simple steps:
1. Link your debit/credit card;
2. Buy the NFT or crypto you are interested in.
ALL! And no more unnecessary movements.
And, as you can imagine, this opened the way for enormous liquidity, which entered the market during the NFT boom.
A small lyrical digression
What exactly is an NFT? is digital art, by owning which you receive full rights to use the image. But, in fact, you only receive a link to the image that is stored on the hosting and you only own this link. And if NFT is truly proof of ownership, then in this case you can shove anything here, which is what we saw throughout 2022.
The saddest thing is that during the creation of #NFT the main fundamental idea of the technology was violated, because a solution was created, but the problem that this technology solved was looked for after the fact.
So, let's figure it out.
There is such a CAA office
CAA - Creative Artist Agency is a company that helps movie stars, musicians, actors, athletes and generally popular personalities sign contracts, build their media image and promotion strategy. It is quite difficult to contact this agency, since it is kind of “exclusive”. In June 2020, CAA and NEA (a $24 billion VC fund) merged to create a VC division called Connect.
Let's record this information and move on.
OpenSea
#OpenSea is the most famous platform for buying/selling NFT collections.
At the moment, the project has conducted more than 5 rounds of attracting investments, namely Seed, Seria A-C and so on, we are interested in series A and B.
On March 18, 2021, the project closes its Series A investment round for $23,000,000, among the investors are Mark Cuban + a couple of media-oriented VCs.
In July 2021, the marketplace raises another $100,000,000, with a valuation of $1,500,000,000, and investors include Ashton Kutcher (a famous actor and, in addition, a VC investor - SOUND) and Connect! (VC subsidiary of CAA and NEA), as well as Coatue.
COAT
These guys invested in Moonpay in a seed round together with TigerGlobal of $400,000,000 in October 2021, and in November 2021 Moonpay raised another $555,000,000, but already in the Series A round, where there are more VCs.
In OpenSea, they invested in Series B, which I wrote about above + in January 2022, they, together with Paradigm, invested another $300,000,000.
OpenSea's valuation at that time was already $13.3 billion!
That is, literally in less than a year, investors in Series A & B rounds made more than 10 X!!! But how did they do it?
Moonpay, NFT hype and the BAYC collection will help us figure this out.
Why BAYC?
Bored Ape Yacht Club (#BAYC ) - the project was launched on Open Sea in April 2021 and began slowly but surely its path to the top of the NFT market.
I think you have seen that almost all the news related to celebrities and NFTs (if they are not their own scam collections) have always been dedicated to the purchase of monkeys. This is a flagship collection that, without the help of third parties, was able to enter the mainstream and the organizers did not need to make an instrument from scratch, which made their work much easier.
A guess
It seems to me that the idea of the people who organized all this was this:
Seeing the emergence of the NFT trend, and how easily people part with money, buying unknown jeeps for thousands of dollars, they realized that having a base of the most influential opinion leaders, they can make money on this and earn a lot, very much by involving them in promoting NFTs and BAYC in particular. Plus, being investors in the largest marketplace and wallet that will be used for native promotion of the trend.
NFT bullrun, 2021 - 2022
1. Post Malone, BAYC, Moonpay.
On November 16, Post Malone releases a video for a joint track with The Weekend "One Right Now". At the beginning of the clip from 12 to 19 seconds, Post buys BAYC using the Moonpay application. Luckily, his wallet is public and we can see what the transactions are like.
On October 29, for 75 $ETH, Post Malone buys BAYC #961, but before that, Moonpay sends him 75.1 $ETH to buy this NFT, after which, on October 31, moonpay sends another 100 $ETH.
In total, Post Malone received ~$750,000 for the 7 second integration in the video.
2. Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton.
Yes, not the names you'd want to hear here, but these are some of the most influential people on the American TV scene. If you watch an excerpt of their conversation in the Tonight Show video, from about the third minute, you will notice that they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, but at the same time, again - BAYC. It is important to note that at that time OpenSea had virtually no competitors and all trading was done through NFTs; the Moonpay application also used OpenSea for NFT transactions.
3. Who else has “acquired” NFTs?
LaMelo Ball, Stefan Curry, Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Jimi Fallon, Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban are all CAA signees.
At the time of the massive promotion of NFTs by stars, and in particular monkeys, Floor was in the region of $100 ETH (~$280,000), but none of them paid more than $10,000 for the backing. The same Mark Cuban simply received his NFT from a person who minted it and sent it to his wallet.
Thus, through the SSA agency, having acquaintances among high stars to whom NFTs were “sold” and using the influence of the mass media, they created hype collections and played on the crowd’s fomo.
Here we should return to Sound Ventures.
The Co-Founder of this VC is Guy Osear, and he, in turn, is directly related to the popularity of BAYC.
Remember the World of Woman collection from Reese Witherspoon? - Well, Guy Oseary also had a hand in their popularity, and Reese is signed by CAA and married to a CAA employee.
Conclusion
The people behind the projects can use major artists and stars, promoting the trend and services in order to “ride” it, having previously become investors in the market leaders or founded the services needed for their ideas. They earn money from every action you take.
Therefore, be as careful and vigilant as possible. Behind the simple and good idea of licensing rights to jeeps are corporations and mass media that manage mass trends.
To fully understand the article, you need links that the system blocks, but which can be found in our TG channel News WEB 3.0 or Teletype "Satoshi Analytics".
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