Investing in NFT’s as a meta seems to be dead, which is why i think finding winners could be easier here.

While evaluating NFT’s, one of the biggest considerations is that inherently way more illiquid than tokens. Therefore, investing in them has to be looked in a way that there are ways to get liquidity out of these NFT’s without selling them.

Captainz from MemeLand ($MEME) fits the bill on many accounts. This is the OG collection from the $MEME land team and has one of the strongest communities in the space.

To understand this bet, I will break my rationale into the following parts:

1. Financially Underpriced

2. Team and Project Quality

3. Free lotteries

Financially Underpriced.

As of now, each Captainz NFT holds around 685,616 $MEME, which translates at current price to around $16,000, compared to the floor of Capitanz, which usually hovers in the range of $10,000- $12,000.

It's obvious that the market discounts the value of the tokens because of the locked-in nature of tokens. Also, the tokens held in the NFT’s are now getting unlocked on a daily basis which means the discount ideally should reduce with each day, but that is not happening.

The table above explains the flows of the token in a simple manner.

The second factor, which is more forward-looking, is that market is discounting the token on its present value. I think that is a faulty approach and rather it should be a probabilistic one with weights assigned to all future outcomes.

By doing a simple simulation, the expected value of tokens locked in the NFT could be around this is when I have assigned low probability weights to higher returns. This shows that even in the worst case, probabilistically, this is a great bet with some lotteries, which I will talk about later.

• Number of Meme tokens unlocked per captain: 685,816

• # Define the probabilities and corresponding prices

  • probabilities = [0.05, 0.25, 0.4, 0.15, 0.10, 0.05, 0.05]

  • prices = [0.005, 0.01, 0.02, 0.04, 0.08, 0.1, 0.2]

• # Calculate expected price

  • expected_price = sum(p * price for p, price in zip(probabilities, prices))

  • Expected Price = 0.05*0.005 + 0.25*0.01 + 0.4*0.02 + 0.15*0.04+ 0.1*0.08+ 0.05*0.1

  • Expected Price= $0.029

• Calculate the expected value

  • expected_value = tokens_per_captain * expected_price

  • expected_value= 685516*0.029

  • expected_value= $20,403

Team and Project Quality.

For the above calculations to hold, we need to think and evaluate the team quality behind memeland. Here is the evaluation on some key parameters.

Team: The founder of the project is Ray Chan, the guy behind 9gag.com and is one of the most reputed builders across web2 and web3.
Fun Fact: Ray and Brian Armstrong were part of the same YC batch.

He is supported by an OG dev team which understands scale (it's probably the only project whose website has not crashed on launches).

On the business side, they have 0xchar and nftstats. Both of them have been in the space for more than 5 years and have impeccable web3 creds. I like that they are brutally honest. Team —> Very few teams are upfront about what they are building. I loved the way they said there is no utility of token at the start :) & when things went supposedly wrong like PFP art not being liked, they accepted it and are trying to fix it.

Community: Build a tribe. I witnessed it firsthand at the memeland events in Hong Kong and Singapore. In most of the events, community members will be building merchandise for the project, boasting how long they have been hoding and how to get new folks into the community.

X link: https://x.com/Memeland

Treasury: Lesson learned from the past few years: always consider the project’s treasury. Adequate funding is crucial for survival and growth. Memeland is in an envious position as it has a solid financial foundation and the ability to experiment and innovate. While it's hard to put an actual number on treasury considering the token and NFT sales done in the past, the treasury number is well beyond 50Mn.

Free Lotteries .

StakeLand: The FAAS ( Farming as a service) model via stakeland is already in full drive with this large & tribal community. They have already launched MON, RUNES, and YOLO games in the last 2-3 months, and have tons of consumers plays in the pipeline. By launch, stakeland asks for a token supply from the project (around 2-3%), which is then distributed as rewards for people who do various activities on stakeland. Because of $MEME token community, they hit some incredible numbers. For runes, for example, they created around 800,000 xverse wallets on BTC.

In the future, I expect the top NFT and Token projects to leverage products like FAAS.

Alpha: It is expected that captianz holders if they stake the NFT’s will get additional boosts on stakeland

WL & Deal Access: It will be a cardinal sin for projects launching NFTs and tokens not to give WL access to our community. And we all know the value of these early accesses. However, this is available elsewhere also, but to me another way to profit.

MemeFund: this is something the team is planning. They can launch a fund/incubator especially focused on consumer plays.

The flywheel below summarizes this nicely

Summary:

Memeland have effectively established a system where community involvement and token utility create a self-sustaining ecosystem. This dynamic encourages more engagement and innovation from the community, thereby solidifying the project's foundation and expanding its reach. Moreover, their strategic partnerships and transparent communication foster trust and long-term commitment among investors and users.

And Captainz is the best proxy way to play this