Is the 50-day “shovel season” coming to an end?
During the last two months of 2023, the "shovel fever" that emerged from the Bitcoin ecosystem showed a surprising wealth effect. MUBI and BSSB brought AUCTION and TURT to new heights, and with the later emergence of BAKE, each "shovel coin" had its glorious moment of doubling in value. In the crypto community, there are many who compare this IDO craze to the history of ICOs and IEOs from 2018 to 2021, seeing it as a powerful booster for a new bull market.
However, from the completion of MultiBit's IDO by Bounce Brand and the sale of MUBI on November 12, 2023, to January 1, 2024, the "Shovel Market" seems to have gone from rising to ending in 50 days.
点石成金
translates to
Pointing Stones into Gold
In early November 2023, the news of Binance launching ORDI 1-50x U perpetual contracts pushed the Bitcoin ecosystem to new heights, and various BRC-20 tokens saw significant gains. The related assets within the Bitcoin ecosystem have accumulated to a considerable scale. Infrastructure protocols that serve these funds have also entered the market's spotlight, with cross-chain protocol MultiBit and DeFi protocol BitStable becoming the focus of community attention upon their release. Naturally, IDO platforms that incubate and participate in the early development of these projects have also come to the forefront.
After two IDOs, Bounce takes off
The first to start was Bounce Brand, a decentralized auction platform on Ethereum founded in 2020. In 2021, Bounce V2 was launched with the initial IDO feature, and its token AUCTION once reached $60 amid the hype. However, for a long time in 2023, AUCTION remained below $10, and Bounce's TVL hovered around $2 million.
In mid-November, AUCTION suddenly took off and rose by over 500% in the following month, with the coin price soaring to the heights of 2021.
On November 12th, the ERC20 and BRC20 cross-chain protocol MultiBit's token MUBI completed an auction on Bounce Brand. The IDO price was 0.00047 USD and 88 ETH was raised.
At that time, the Bitcoin ecosystem was just beginning to heat up, and ORDI had just risen from $5 to $21 in just two weeks. Ordinals' cumulative revenue had just exceeded 88 million US dollars. Capital had just begun to flow in, and token protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem were hot, but the main reason why more new investors had not yet entered was the limitation of asset liquidity.
As the first project to create a cross-chain bridge in the Bitcoin ecosystem, MultiBit provides the possibility of liquidity for funds gathered within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Among the various Bitcoin ecosystem targets, MUBI, which has narrative empowerment, has undoubtedly attracted the attention of investors. MUBI rose fourfold within four days after the IDO.
Bounce started to gain momentum during this period, and AUCTION rose by about 17% in the following two weeks.
On November 27th, Bounce, which tasted the sweetness, announced that BitStable, a Bitcoin-based DeFi protocol, will launch its native token BSSB on Bounce Launchpad two days later. Users can obtain corresponding BSSB shares by pledging Bounce token AUCTION or through auction mechanism. Within two hours after the announcement, AUCTION rose by more than 15%. On the day of IDO on the 29th, AUCTION rose by more than 35%.
Related reading: "How to participate in the BitStable token sale for the upcoming 'Bitcoin DeFi protocol' IDO?"
Entering December, MUBI has grown nearly 50 times in the month following IDO, and BSSB has also created an amazing increase of 45 times in just 20 days. Therefore, the next IDO of Bounce has become a "deterministic wealth effect". On December 11th, Bounce announced the launch of the DID market aggregator GoDID (BDID), and from the announcement to the completion of IDO, AUCTION has risen more than 200%.
Bounce strikes while the iron is hot. On December 19th, Bounce Launchpad announced the launch of a token issuance strategy called "Two Birds, One Stone", in which two projects will issue a single token on Bounce. Users can participate in the issuance by staking AUCTION and BitStable Brand (BSSB)'s stablecoin DAII. At that time, BSSB had already broken through a new high of $8.6, and from the announcement of the news to the completion of the IDO, AUCTION once again proved its "gold content" with a 90% increase.
埋伏半年，TURT 一月 20 倍
Ambush for half a year, TURT increased 20 times in one month.
Also benefiting from the "MUBI dividend" is TurtSat, which was founded in May 2023 and is positioned as a "donation platform focused on the Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem". At that time, the Ordinals protocol had just emerged, and the potential of the Bitcoin ecosystem was just beginning to show. Prior to MultiBit, TurtSat had only IDOed one project, Chamcha, a programmable Ordinals asset liquidity developer.
TurtSat conducted its IDO for MultiBit on the same day as Bounce, raising 4.64 BTC. Since then, TurtSat has gained attention from the community for its exceptional IDO speed and projects closely tied to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
On November 24th, NxHub, the aggregated market of Ordinals, conducted an IDO on TurtSat, and its token NHUB increased 20 times in two weeks. Three days later, TurtSat announced a new project: Dova Liquidity Protocol, a Bitcoin ecosystem LSD protocol integrated with MultiBit Bridge. Dova completed its IDO on December 1st, and its token DOVA increased 15 times in two weeks.
Although the basic infrastructure is still far from being completed, the game concept of the Bitcoin ecosystem has emerged. Rabbitgames, a project IDOed by TurtSat on December 8th, is a "revolutionary Bitcoin ecosystem game platform". Although RAIT quickly fell by 50% shortly after its launch, it still saw a five-fold increase after hovering at a low point for three days.
For investors, not every new project target can have the sustained climbing power like MUBI. Therefore, in order to obtain certainty of profit in the shovel race track, besides holding the platform's own tokens and waiting for growth, staking tokens and participating in the platform's new projects are more attractive ways to profit. On December 6th, TurtSat announced the launch of the staking system TURT POOL. Users who stake TURT will receive "EGG", a new asset issued by TurtSat. The application scenarios of EGG include but are not limited to project launch voting and direct exchange for cooperation token gift packages.
According to official information from TurtSat, this will be a new way for users to participate in project launches on the TurtSat platform, balancing fairness and efficiency, while effectively preventing the behavior of robots using scripts to plunder large amounts of donation shares, allowing TURT holders to participate and obtain their rightful benefits.
After lurking for half a year, TurtSat concentrated its efforts and its positioning advantage attracted market attention and funds. The most direct manifestation is the price of TURT, which rose 20 times in one month.
In the Bitcoin ecosystem boom, Bounce Brand and TurtSat have emerged with unique positioning, and the success of the "double shovel combination" has demonstrated the development potential of IDO platforms to the market, pushing new concepts to the forefront and introducing liquidity to the new ecosystem. In the new bull market, the constantly changing landscape will give birth to more emerging projects, and IDO platforms may be the most efficient role in connecting the market with project parties.
It seems like anyone can win
In the continuously emerging Bitcoin ecosystem, people are constantly buying into new narratives, even if they haven't fully materialized yet. The rise of TURT and AUCTION has attracted more and more investors and project parties to the "shovel race track". Under the frenzy, no one wants to fall behind, and the crypto market seems to be ushering in an IDO Summer.
From Inscriptions to "Solana Shovel"
On December 14th, TurtSat completed the IDO for its new project, Svarga. According to reports, Svarga aims to reshape the NFT world on the Bitcoin network by transforming traditional PFP NFTs into dynamic, interactive Avatar assets. Compared to previous projects that showed 5x or 10x growth, SAGA doubled in value in just three days before starting to decline.
After launching Svarga, TurtSat announced on social media that it had received IDO applications from 28 projects, which will be released on the platform one after another. At that time, the number of Bitcoin ecosystem projects IDOed on TurtSat was more than the total number of projects on Bounce Brand and BakerySwap. However, the subsequent development of these projects was not satisfactory. The token of the project ZOOA, which was released on December 19th after SAGA, did not double in value. QUIQ, which was released on the 28th, took the "initial peak" route. According to OKX data, its trading volume on the day of release was 2.9 BTC, but three days later, QUIQ only attracted a trading volume of 0.03 BTC.
Related reading: "Can "Golden Shovel" TurtSat withstand the test as prices drop nearly 50%?"
The problem of insufficient development momentum is not only happening on TurtSat. On the other hand, although 1Cat performed strongly after opening, its subsequent development was somewhat weak. In the three days after its launch, 1Cat only had an increase of less than 20%. On December 25th, with the announcement of the "1CAT Golden Shovel Plan", 1Cat, as a shovel token, participated in the project IDO of BakerySwap for the next two phases, and its price was able to climb. It increased by more than 150% in two days, and this is probably its peak.
The rise of project tokens is only the most direct signal, after all, the growth time of these projects is less than a month. Whether there can be targets that can coalesce consensus and continue to provide returns to investors still needs to be considered from more perspectives. So, what is the development potential of these platforms?
"Growth flywheel" is an endless pie
IDO platform needs to showcase its development space to users from two aspects. Firstly, the follow-up development of the projects launched is the most direct signal, but not the only evidence. The development history of the project itself, team experience, and business performance will also be included in the scope of user consideration. However, this issue has already emerged in this regard, and not just one platform has similar situations.
On December 15th, Bounce Brand was affected by the controversy surrounding its Launchpad project BDID, where the "tokens that were supposed to be airdropped were used for pre-sale". As a result, AUCTION, which was originally on the rise, temporarily retreated by over 20%.
On December 21st, TurtSat released a new IDO project called Copycat Dex. According to their introduction, Copycat Dex is an innovative P2P derivative protocol based on PVPAMM, which supports the BRC20 ecosystem and Bitcat DEX. It comes from Copycat Finance, which is supported by BinanceLabs.
However, the community quickly pointed out that the delivery capability of the Copycat Dex team was unsatisfactory, and its 21-year project is currently priced at less than 3% of its issuance price. This has raised questions about TurtSat's "selection ability". 12 hours later, TurtSat announced on social media that the release of Copycat Dex token BICA would be postponed.
The positioning of BitcoinCats, which brings BakerySwap into the shovel racing track, in its introduction is a GameFi platform in the Bitcoin ecosystem. "By mapping Bitcoin assets (BRC20, Ordinals NFT, etc.) to the Ethereum (and other Layer2) network, it brings new gameplay including but not limited to Play2Earn, staking, farming, SocialFi, etc. to Bitcoin assets."
At the beginning of the release of BitcoinCats, some members of the community pointed out that the art style of BitcoinCats is very similar to a blockchain game called Worldwide Webb. The latter is a pixelated metaverse MMORPG game that is well-known in the NFT community and has received millions of dollars in funding. Others have also noticed that the design of BitcoinCats is extremely similar to a previous NFT series called Hello Pets by BakerySwap, with the only difference being that BitcoinCats uses a pixelated art style.
Currently, BitcoinCats has not responded to its relationship with Hello Pets, but the Hello Pets website lists an NFT series called "Bitcoin Cats" and provides navigation to the BitcoinCats homepage. According to BlockBeats, Hello Pets was formerly known as Battle Pets, a combat pet breeding game similar to Axie Infinity and modeled after CryptoKitties. In January of this year, Battle Pets changed its name to Hello Pets and shifted its focus to "globally renowned cute brands in the digital and real worlds."
The development of the project is focused on attracting users' attention to the platform, while the platform's participation mechanism affects user retention.
Unlike Bounce, TurtSat sells its project through a whitelist, which includes members who have contributed to the community and holders of a certain amount of TURT. On December 7th, TurtSat launched a new staking mechanism where staking TURT earns EGG, and a portion of the whitelist for the new project will be available for exchange with EGG.
"Production egg mechanism" has no cost, allowing TurtSat to have over 300 million TURT staked. If they are able to obtain the whitelist, the returns from staking TURT will be substantial. Taking the example of the project token QUIQ from the IDO on December 28th, according to OKX data, the average trading price of QUIQ on the day of sale was 232 sats, and the value of QUIQ obtained from a whitelist is nearly 2000U.
However, the requirements for EGG vary depending on each project. In addition to the Christmas special sale brought by the partnership, TurtSat's recent project whitelist qualification requires at least 25,000 EGG to be exchanged, and GWGW, which was released on January 2nd, has risen to 30,000 EGG.
According to community feedback, pledging 10,000 TURT tokens will yield approximately 80 EGG tokens. To meet the demand of 50,000 EGG tokens per week, users need to pledge nearly 900,000 TURT tokens to ensure their participation in each whitelist round. However, obtaining whitelist participation does not guarantee allocation of tokens. Even if one had deposited TURT at the price of $0.025 on the day the mechanism was launched on December 8th, it would still require $20,000. As the price of TURT rose to $0.08, the threshold for successful participation in the token sale also increased.
What are the profits of big players? The staking period for TURT is one month, and if TURT is withdrawn early, a "handling fee" of 5000 TURT will be deducted. As of the time of writing, the price of TURT has fallen to $0.04, which is equivalent to the price on December 14th. Users who stake TURT to participate in new projects after the 14th need to bear the loss of asset shrinkage while waiting to be selected for the whitelist.
For BakerySwap, it is urgent to prove whether it can meet the expectations of incoming investors. The first project, Bitcoin Cats, had a Launchpad with a total of 37,383 ETH and 73 million BAKE tokens participating, with a total value of 106 million US dollars, oversubscribed by 150 times. BakerySwap's first attempt was successful, and there are many willing buyers.
After attracting enough attention, the community is now more concerned about the participation experience of Launchpad in BakerySwap. On December 28th, BakerySwap announced the successful launch of the second Launchpad project, BitLand IDO, receiving 116 million $BAKE (worth about $80.5 million) and 1.9 billion 1Cat (worth about $23 million), with a total of USDT reaching $103.5 million. The oversubscription of up to 360 times means that the share obtained by participants may be very small. Indeed, many participants in BitLand IDO have expressed disappointment with their results.
When BitLand was announced, BAKE rose by more than 50%, but after the completion of IDO, it fell by 20%.
It is not difficult to understand that the new way of pledging mechanism around makes every IDO platform face the controversy of "only large holders participate". On December 21st, Bounce announced that NFT AMM liquidity protocol Ladder Protocol and Bitcoin ecosystem BRC20 cross-chain trading platform Bitswap will cooperate to launch the "killing two birds with one stone" token AMMX on Bounce Launchpad. According to community member @ai_9684xtpa's observation, in this Launchpad, 15 whales collectively invested 709,000 AUCTION to participate in the new token sale, and collectively obtained 122 million AMMX, accounting for 25.8% of the total amount of the staking pool distribution.
After the IDO, a total of 9 addresses deposited 394,000 tokens into Binance, worth $14.23 million, causing a short-term 32% drop in AUCTION. If retail players were unable to withdraw their staked AUCTION in time after the IDO, they may be forced to buy the sell-off behavior of large holders after successful new listings.
On the other hand, Analysoor, which is characterized by "fairness," also has its own difficulties. On December 27th, Analysoor apologized to the community for issues that arose during its first community meme coin WHEN minting event. According to the company, Analysoor faced several technical challenges, including Backpack malfunctions that caused the wallet receiving funds to stop working, requiring a 20-minute redeployment; RPC issues affecting transaction sending on the website; and Jupiter swap API stopping working during LP creation, rendering the Swap function unusable.
Before WHEN, the casting of ZERO and ONE was delayed. When casting ONE, the project party also mistakenly sent funds that should have been deposited into the liquidity pool to the address of the mint participants. This "unexpected malfunction" in the casting process of WHEN was "expected" by the community.
Despite the questioning voices, the platform continues to operate and the projects it launches each have their own strengths. On December 29th, BakerySwap released the introduction of the third Launchpad project, which is CopycatFinance that was postponed for sale on TurtSat a week ago. Following that is BendDAO, an NFT lending and liquidity protocol founded in 2022 with a TVL that has exceeded 300 million US dollars, which recently announced its expansion into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Related reading: "Get 2 airdrops by owning 1 BAYC? Exploring BendDAO, the "NFT Bank"".
Can a new shovel just set out drink soup?
There are still new platforms being attracted, but they can no longer reap certain returns. From December 25th to 27th, three platforms successively announced the launch of Launchpad platform. On December 25th, NFT+DEFI aggregator Dego Brand announced the completion of its BRC20 Launchpad BETA version test. In the following week, its token DEGO first rose by more than 100%, and then fell sharply from its high point. Dego Brand announced the details of the Launchpad project during this period, but it was unable to save the disappointment of the rise.
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