M○C△ Confessional: The Bull Market is a Lie

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Ya’ll seemed to like last week’s column, so let’s just keep riding high, huh? Welcome, welcome, everyone, to another sultry, seductive, seditious edition of:

I’ve received some flak for doing this before, what I’m about to do, but I assure you, it brings me no joy. I generally like to talk about art and aesthetics and conceptuality, but there’s really no space to talk about any of that stuff right now because of what I am sadly forced to talk about today, which is: 

Money.

Well, not money exactly, but the culture of money that has returned so suddenly, full foul in its fury, all the ghosts of the past we thought were sealed away: Shitcoins, sycophantic influencers, sending money to random address in the hope of a 1000x. We spent two years in a dour bear market, indulging time and again in so much desperate behavior, and here we are in what looks like an entirely different landscape, but it’s exactly like what came before. 

Somehow, we’ve entered a version of our timeline with both maximum degeneracy and minimum interest in art. Look, I get the humor component, I hear the arguments about “cultural value,” but the fact that the dogwifhat picture (cute dog, cute hat, bad price) just sold for 4.3 million dollars, while crypto artists not named XCOPY can hardly grab a scrap from the table, that’s just indicative of something being amiss. Something worthy of analysis. 

One cute god damn dog.

As the thinking goes, people who make bank off memecoins-and-such will ultimately seek to trade their financial gains for cultural influence, which has only been done, can only be currently done, using NFTs, be that PFPs or crypto art. And yet art sales are almost nonexistent. Some Chromie Squiggles have moved. A Botto piece here or there, little more. And on the PFP side, well take it from me —Conductor of the Shithead Solana PFP Train— that there is no energy in that ecosystem either. I wake up to texts from friends everyday asking me “Are nfts ded?” 

And I’m not sure how to respond.

Perhaps I’m simply expecting a massive, slow-moving cultural organism to move quicker than it otherwise can, but with the shitcoin boom of $BOME and $COQ and $NICK making big financial winners, those big financial winners should have already sought to codify their influence with NFT assets. They should have already begun scooping up new works by em0tionull, eecertrey, WGMeets. Hell, the only NFTs that seem to be selling with volume are Bitcoin Ordinal projects, which I assure you, nobody new to crypto understands how to acquire. Hell, I spend my entire life in crypto, and Ordinals even confound me. If I’m not going to install a Bitcoin wallet, then who the hell honestly is?

Which leads to my weekly confession. Forgive me, but it is my legitimate, real, actual belief that:

We are not actually in a bull market.

And I think that this actually explains a lot of what we see going on around us. 

I know that Bitcoin hit an all-time high. Wooo! “Price go up!”, yes, I am aware. Institutional money is verifiably flowing into the crypto ecosystem via the inroads of Bitcoin ETFs and giant hedge funds. But this is not at all equivalent to how funds entered crypto during the last bull market, which I caught the tail-end of in 2021 and into 2022.

That market was characterized not just by insane amounts of money, it was insane amounts of new money. So-called “retail money.” Outside of firms like a16z (are they even collecting art anymore?) and their spawn (StarryNightCapital anyone?), large institutions are not interested in collecting NFTs. To them, maximum liquidity is preferable at all costs. And if they do decide to dabble with illiquid JPEG assets, it’ll only likely be Cryptopunks or other certifiably-valuable artworks, like the aforementioned XCOPY’s 1/1s. This is not the type of money that’s going to be trying to find or value smaller-time artists, become interested in provenance, or gamble on NFT mints. 

When Airdrop? ( 2019), by XCOPY. Sold from Kevin Rose to Cozomo de’Medici last week.

Nor are the people in the Bitcoin Ordinals world indicative of a changing paradigm. They are the same people who’ve been here this whole time. Maybe some have more money than they had previously, but this is no different than what we saw all through the bear market, with $PEPE or Rarepass, where money isn’t actually growing, just moving around, this time out of things like BAYC and Moonbirds and into NodeMonkeys or whatever they’re called. 

The same principle applies to all these Solana shitcoins. Maybe things will change in the wake of the insane $BOME success, but I just don’t think your average Joe Schmo, looking to make a big buck in crypto, is going to become indoctrinated into crypto culture via the the workflow of:

“Buy Solana on Coinbase → download Phantom wallet → transfer coins → navigate Birdeye.so or Dexscanner → watch charts literally all day and all night → try to catch the falling knife → probably lose all their money → repeat” 

None of us would recommend that to friends or family. We wouldn’t recommend it to ourselves!

Real value in crypto art always comes from the bottom up. New things that grab cultural attention. New art that is somehow different or elevated from the rest. New pieces of iconography. Individuals ascending into different stratospheres of influence and using that influence in new and interesting ways. Newly minted money attempting to precede the next wave.

Yet we have seen none of this. 

Dune.xyz tracker of unique active wallets across chains from December until now, brought to us by Petertherock. Not much has changed since last year, huh? Well, I guess Binance had a couple of good days.

The same chart without Binance’s chain is slightly more encouraging. That purple is Polygon; neon green is Solana; Ethereum (black) has remained surprisingly stagnant.

What we have seen is cryptocurrency prices rise, mostly on the back of institutional investment. The same crypto and crypto art personalities we’ve journeyed alongside in the bear have suddenly come into money, but just as that money was mostly stashed away during the bear, it’s being mostly stashed away now. That, or it’s being converted into the Fiat that was for so long so scarce; with it ample, folks can actually, you know, buy the things they need to survive or want to indulge in. 

Through this lens, the NFT ecosystem at-large feels actually like a solid barometer of where we are in any larger crypto cycle. NFTs will be the things most feverishly purchased when a bull market occurs —they strike a balance between speculative madness and not needing to check a chart once every 40 seconds— and the last things sold at a bull market’s end, that final capitulation of “Damn, this is really happening isn’t it, have to get rid of my beloved ultra-rare Corporal Frogfucker PFP.” 

I’ve come to this realization literally in the course of writing today’s column, so I apologize if it’s a little bit scatterbrained or unpersuasive. But every word I write here only bolsters my conviction. 

We have entered into a new era of cryptocurrency, that much is certain, and I am so thankful that the people in my orbit seem to be a bit more hopeful, a bit more financially flexible, a bit energetic than this time last year. But a bull market this is not. 

This might be an inflection point. 

This might lead to a bull market.

If narrative follows price, then the hoards might be arriving imminently. But we would be foolish to believe that this bull thing is already in full swing. Normies are definitely having exploratory conversations, they’re texting their friends “Hey, what do you know about Slerf Coin?” (which is real and obtained a 500mm market cap, fwiw), but they haven’t ventured far enough down the rabbit hole that they know what an Artblocks is, or what an Opensea is, or what it means to farm a Discord for Whitelist. 

That’s what we’ll see in a bull market. Frenzy, and frenzy everywhere, unpredictably so. It is not just massive liquidity and speculation, it is massive liquidity and speculation coming from countless distinct sources. NFTs are markers of cultural value, but there are no new players here for whom culture yet means anything. If prices stay going up, then undoubtedly there will be, but for now, we’re in the same place we’ve been for the last two years, just perhaps wearing nicer shoes, socks without holes in the toes, a tasteful scarf. 

In a bull market, there’s euphoria, right? So where’s the euphoria? Where’s any of the god damn euphoria we were god damn promised?

Let me know if you can find any. 

-Your friendly neighborhood Art Writer,

Max