In this issue:

• This Week in Neo Tokyo: Your Bloodline Is Counting On You (by PhoenixxDown)

• Meet Your Neo Tokyo Council: Cryptoetheus (by Block Editor)

• This Cycle Is Cooked (by Flower83)

How are we all feeling? The vibes feel better as of late. Only the strongest survive and we’ve seen many capitulate over the summer (some, sadly, with very public mental breakdowns) as they’ve realized they’re not built for this.

But, that wasn’t you. Lock in, citizen. Things are set to heat up. Your bloodline is counting on you.

Firestorm dropped three updates for us this past week:

1. Proposal Process Enhancement: NT will be rolling out an update to the team “codex” / structure. These will better enable Division and Team Leads, making the proposal process more efficient. Once complete, the next round of Council applications will begin.

2. 3 Year Anniversary Event: We are exactly one month away from our 3 Year Anniversary Event in Vegas on August 16th! DM Firestorm if you would like to sponsor the event—there are 1-2 spots left. And don't forget to RSVP via this form if you wish to attend.

3. July Town Hall: The July Town Hall will be this coming Monday. Submit your feedback or questions here.

   

This is how things shaped up with the NT content:

Meet Your Citizens - Block Editor sits with the FUD smasher, the Grift Slayer, the Enforcer of Neo Tokyo, the one and only AtomikSushi for a conversation about his journey into The Citadel and his role in the wider web3 world.

DECIMATED AMA - CEO Stephen Arnold and Community Manager Adam Watts joined NT for a chat about their open-world, post-apocalyptic game built on Solana. Get the lowdown on this exciting prospect while it’s still in closed alpha and get it on your radar to stay ahead of the pack. Listen back here.

Interlinked Episode #38 featured ForeverTipsy.eth, the CEO of The Tipsy Company. Discussions included lessons learned from their Spaceship sale, how to turn ad dollars into players, and the Tipsy/Gin economy, along with an overall deep dive into The Tipsy Company.

Market Monday was not on this week, possibly for the first time ever, as ZeHI is currently deep in the Amazon Rainforest embarking on a spiritual mission. We look forward to his return in the future. However, this coincided with Flower being on a well-deserved vacation— all that bear posting is hard work!

Good news though; the show will be back this Monday with special guests Cryptoetheus and Jeff Treves.

Brush up on your NT laws and don’t get caught slipping! Law #3 has been flouted by a few in the past, with some being excommunicated entirely from The Citadel in the early days. Kale’s public execution was the most memorable example. Don’t make the same mistake as him. Study.

Finally, which seat would you pick if you had an 8-hour journey ahead of you? Usually with these, there's a trade-off with an awful prospect and a good seatmate (like SBF and Satoshi Nakamoto in the same row, for example). But there was no such dilemma when devising this one for our NT community—you're all diamonds. Although including a despised individual might have been WAY more funny, it’s a testament to the community cultivated over these 3 years that there wasn’t a possible candidate.

Cheers to you, citizens. Until next week.

• Discord ID: Cryptoetheus

• Entered Crypto: 2020

• Joined NT: After S1 Mint

• Expertise: Hosting and Producing

• Most Known For: AMA and Interlinked Podcast

• Reason for Joining Leads: Make an impact on $BYTES

• One Word: Curiosity

• Outside Interests: Jiu Jitsu

Shortly after graduation school, Cryptoetheus made the move to Austin, Texas and the Tech Sales space. It didn’t take long for him to realize that wasn’t his path so he took some time off and eventually rolled into cannabis growing and returned to Grad School while still searching for his niche.

He tried stand up comedy, did a stint as a goat farmer, worked in irrigation, then he discovered streaming in 2020. Covid shut-downs forced him inside and he was playing a lot of single player games like Warzone. When Axie Infinity came on his radar, Cryptoetheus realized he could profit from gaming and he fell into a rabbit hole he has yet to escape.

Playing Axie taught Cryptoetheus the basics of crypto and NFTs and eventually led him to discovering Becker and Ellio, and subsequently, Neo Tokyo. The mystery and secret society like vibe really attracted him to the project. He started following the riddles, but with no dev experience the path was difficult:

“So, I took a misstep and clicked on one of the links that Becker posted and it was the blacklist. And so it just took me to a website, it was like, you've been blacklisted. You didn't follow the commands. And I took that on face value,” Cryptoetheus recalled. It wasn’t until much later that he learned the blacklist meant nothing. After the mint, he watched the price soar, and so quickly bought an ID on Day 1 to secure his place in The Citadel.

His first place inside the walls was in the Research Division. Citizens did deep dives into different projects, but they were never able to figure out a way to make it sustainable. At one point, Cryptoetheus realized the AMAs that he had enjoyed had fizzled out, and Felix had moved from AMAs to the dev team. He hit up Firestorm and let him know he’d like to bring them back.

Coincidentally, Ben Gothard had the same idea so they joined forces to get the AMA division back up and running. Cryptoetheus handles the hosting and operations, and Ben co-hosts and handles the sponsorships and guest flow. The duo then tackled the Interlinked podcast and revived that as well. If citizens have questions on hosting AMAs or podcasts, Cryptoetheus is the man to hit up!

Outside the Citadel, Cryptoetheus still wears many hats. He produces the national Pickleball League podcast. It is the 50+ premier league and they’re in their second season. He also trades crypto, dabbles in real estate with some rental properties, and has a range of focuses to pay the bills including treasuries, equity, and of course the early stage deals through CitCap.

Cryptoetheus joined the council with the goal of making an impact. He believes BYTES have a lot of potential with what can be done with them and he hopes to spur that on by improving the narrative.

Outside of The Citadel and his investing career, Cryptoetheus spends his free time practicing Jiu Jitsu. “I've always been attracted to really tight feedback loops, which is a parallel between investing and Jiu Jitsu. If you fuck up in investing, you know, pretty quickly, and the same thing in Jiu Jitsu,” Cryptoetheus said.

Follow @cryptoetheus on X to stay up to date.

Yes, the bearishness has been taking over my soul lately. I am truly getting a bit disillusioned with crypto overall. When we send past ATH’s I will probably start gigabull posting, but until then, enjoy my doomsday rants.

Here is another one:

This cycle is absolutely cooked.

Again, I do believe it is possible, likely even, that we will have another leg up into euphoria going into 2025 before the dust settles for good. However, I must say, so far I am NOT impressed. Furthermore, I do not think the average market participant will even make those life-changing gains everyone thinks they deserve.

It is getting increasingly harder to do so with each cycle. Recently I came about a tweet that inspired the article:

And it got me thinking, reminiscing of the good old days. Now all those things that made crypto great are gone, most of the twitter content is grossly unappealing (mostly cringe), the narratives are not at all clear (or short lived and we end up buying tops), and there are more than 30 alts to choose from(dilution), thus, they do not go up 20% everyday for weeks.

It’s safe to say that, this time around, things are not at all so easy. Many people struggle a lot this cycle. If you are not allocated (and locked in daily) to extremely niche sections of the crypto space you are probably not making any decent ROI. Furthermore, the oversaturation of everything in the web3 space is becoming so clear. I thought this only applied to airdrop farming, but looking at it more objectively, it's industry-wide. Airdrops are just a reflection of what has overall been going on.

What we have is a lot of grifters, mixed with some (scarce) legitimate builders in the space, battling over for our attention and liquidity. The founders deluded themselves into thinking such high valuations that they raise money at are justified, but in reality a lot of their metrics are artificially increased by bots and airdrop farmers, yet VC’s still pour a lot of money their way when it comes to raises. The issue is that it's not only the teams that are greedy, but we - the average market participants as well. Everyone expects an instance 3-5x at TGE, but this hardly ever happened this cycle (actually, I can't think of a non-meme coin that did that), mostly there was no upside left after tokens launched. The recent drawdowns on some newly launched coins in the past two months also confirm this.

In short: we have too many L2’s, too many L1’s, too many launchpad projects, too many NFT communities…too many jeets and ruggish devs, and too many VC’s looking to insta dump on their unlock day.

It is no wonder why so many people turn to memecoins instead of doing “real” fundamental research on “serious” coins. But there is just too much stuff going on over there as well. If you catch a 20x, you are most likely an insider, a dev, have bad risk management, or just lucky that day.

I am long term bullish, don't get me wrong. Lol.

All I am saying is we probably need to lower expectations when/if BTC breaks new ATH’s. The era of easy weekly 10-25x with reasonably calculated risk is over, due to tougher conditions in the overall crypto markets.

Have a nice day 💙

All content from Neo Tokyo News is for entertainment purposes only, and not financial advice.

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