May I have your attention, please?

If you follow rap at all, that’s the opener to Eminem’s 2000 hit single “The Real Slim Shady.” It was his first song to hit number one in the UK and his biggest hit up to that point.

Crypto and music share a lot in common. Memes like music can spread like wildfire for reasons that are hard to predict. Moreover, cults commonly form around rappers and K-pop artists.

It’s the same in crypto. Rather than investing, many people choose to indoctrinate themselves into a community once they’re bought-in.

If you can identify the coins that have the pull to create that “cult-factor,” then you can make (and lose) astronomical amounts of money.

In today’s newsletter, I will discuss some projects shared in our SIMETRI Radar Discord chat this weekend. If you invested at the time I first highlighted this meme-coin, you could have made up to 5x at the top, and about 50% now.

Now I believe this project can potentially become a new cult meme, growing substantially in value over the long-run.

Cult of Crypto

I’ve made bets in crypto for over four years. The most important lesson I learned is that, much like what Eminem orates in his raps, “common sense” doesn’t always result in good decision-making⁠—at least in this industry.

Once again, this bull run emphasizes that a project doesn’t necessarily need to be fundamentally strong. Solid tech and a reasonable go-to-market strategy aren’t always the reasons coins go parabolic.

Just look at the rise of Dogecoin. Thanks to Elon Musk, it has come back from the brink of irrelevance.

Understand that only two years ago it was an abandoned project. No one believed it would amount to anything meaningful. Even its founders sold their Doge for pennies and discontinued development of the project.

Another interesting case is EtherRocks. Lazily-rendered rocks are one of the most valuable NFT projects to-date. As Arthur Hayes said eloquently, “the more obviously worthless and expensive the NFT, the greater the Flex.”

I guess nothing says “I’m an obnoxiously rich crypto-cowboy” like buying a million-dollar rock.

EtherRocks
Source: etherrock.com

So what the heck is happening here?

When you’re buying into a coin or NFT, ask yourself are you really “investing” or joining a cult? Many of these meme-vestments are like a sect, rapidly gaining new evangelists as more people buy-in.

When I’m not searching for SIMETRI picks I like searching for these kinds of cryptos. Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose. But this isn’t necessarily bad. In contrast to our strategy of long-term investing in fundamentally strong projects, picking memes early is a reasonable short-term strategy in a bull market.

Although I don’t like Dogecoin, I personally have nothing against people who believed in it and held it through the bear market of 2018. They were right and I was wrong, even though Dogecoin as a project has no substance behind it.

“Do you want to be right or do you want to make money?” is one of the common phrases passed around the research team. So when I make short-term investments, I try to account for the “cult factor.”

In the next section I’m going to examine a freshly-forming cult.

Won’t the real Dogecoin please stand up?

This Saturday during my daily research routine, I came across a project called Feisty Doge NFT (NFD).

The project was promoted by a few large crypto Twitter influencers, such as cobie(400,000 Twitter followers). The founder of the project was also a popular NFT collector, @Cryptopathic, with around 150,000 followers.

In June of this year, at auction Cryptopathic acquired the original picture of the Japanese Shiba Inu, named Kabosu, which rose to internet fame and created the Doge meme. The NFT sold for $43,279 at the time.

Feisty Doge NFT
Source: fractional.art

Then, by using the Fractional platform, Cryptopathic fractionalized the Doge NFT into 100 billion NFD tokens, allowing anyone to buy part-ownership.

The idea is genius. Cryptopathic combined the hype behind Dogecoin with the hype behind NFTs. Some are even calling it the “real Dogecoin.”

I was not alone. The number of holders of NFD tokens quickly grew to over 5,000 and the token skyrocketed in price. At some point, this fractionalized NFT has become the world’s highest-valued NFT at over $85 million.

However, a few days after the price retraced, and now the project is trading at around $24 million.

It’s either a Lambo or food stamps

Although I hold NFD, I do not recommend buying it. Unless, of course, you’re willing to lose your entire investment as a degenerate speculator. As I mentioned earlier, with meme coins you cannot rely on fundamental analysis or common sense.

Understandably, some influencers are strictly opposed to the idea of fractionalized art. For example, Andre Cronje thinks that all fractionalized art projects are ponzi schemes.

Cryptopathic isn’t helping dispel this label, either. He is already cashing out, creating a schism in the newly-created NFD community. Nevertheless, you have to remember that this is a meme. If NFD can grow itself to cult-status then it will live on.

Investing in these projects is like playing the lottery with better odds.You either win big or lose everything. With research and a good pulse on social media, you can tip the odds in your favor. Without it, you may as well go to Vegas.

Marshall Bruce Mathers won 15 Grammys in his career while breaking all of the rules of the music industry. Likewise, buying meme-coins defies all of the rules of sensible investing.

It took eight years for Dogecoin to reach its $35 billion valuation. Ask yourself, do you have that kind of risk appetite?