In this issue:

• This Week In Neo Tokyo (by PhoenixxDown)

• Bullish! Kongz Smart, Kongz Strong (by Flower83)

• Bearish! What Can We Learn From CyberKongz’ Genkai NFT Mint? (by @TanyoGochev)

• July Town Hall Preview (by PhoenixxDown)

HELIX Partnership

Following a stack of exciting partnership announcements in last week's issue, we come bearing more of the same news. On Thursday, it was revealed Neo Tokyo has entered a partnership with the decentralized, high-fidelity Metaverse platform, HELIX!

For those who don’t know, HELIX is developed by Hypersonic Labs, a AAA gaming studio who recently raised $3.5 Million in a pre-seed round from investors such as Samsung and Play Ventures. HELIX has been in development for over two years by talents from Rockstar, Ubisoft, and Activision.

As part of this partnership, all citizens will be receiving exclusive in-game assets, along with a dedicated holders HQ within Parallel City. To learn more about what this means for us in The Citadel, make sure to tune in to the scheduled Twitter Space with the HELIX team on Aug 1 at 13:00 EST. Set your reminders here.

CitCap Running HOT!

CitCap have been on a tear lately, from the successful MintDefense raise to the sharp acquisition of Ben Gothard who is now their CMO. And can you believe it? It's nearly been a whole year since CitCap officially became the investment arm of Neo Tokyo!

To celebrate this milestone, CitCap will be hosting an AMA on Twitter on Aug 3 at 16:00 EST. Set your reminders via that link. Not only that, but a shock THIRD raise for the highly sought-after SuperOracles took place yesterday, with the $350K allocation selling out almost instantly.

Citizen Founders Talk Web3 Media

Damon recently hosted a public VC discussion with several founders, focusing on Newsletters and media in Web3. The discussion included Mayham from NiftyNest, along with Tanyo from The Gaming Portal, and of course, Bad Future and PhoenixxDown representing the mighty Neo Tokyo News, and their latest venture with ExtraOrdinals.

If you missed it, you can listen to the recording here.

Ask Angie Goes Public

After a few weeks of testing and fine-tuning based on citizens' questions in Purg and Angies, legendary citizen buildoor, Fauve, has officially launched Neo Tokyo's concierge, "Ask Angie,'' for public use! Check out the AI chat bot here for yourself.

Eric Faust Joins NT

A warm welcome to the CEO & Co-Founder of Realm, Eric Faust, who has joined our esteemed ranks to build the future of crypto gaming and beyond. Give Eric a follow and a big GR here.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of CyberKongz’ NFTs and none of this is financial advice.

Even though we are fighting deep in the trenches of the harshest ever NFT bear market, some ecosystems are still active, building, delivering… and trying to raise money through new mints.

Admittedly, this hasn't been going well for big collections recently. Azuki’s Elementals did mint out in full, but the collection’s floor is now at 33% of its starting price. Ether didn't even manage to mint out, leading to a steep decline in its price as well.

This week, the NFT space was “blessed” with yet another huge mint - the Genkai collection from CyberKongz. Twitter was flooded with fudders raising doubts that they would mint out in full, with many harshly judging the relatively high mint price of 0.25 ETH per NFT.

But in the end, the mint was by a success! They sold out. This remarkable feat was achieved by “reading the room” correctly and adjusting the parameters of their mint mechanism. These changes greatly benefited both the OG’s and new holders alike.

They divided their 20k collection into different pools of NFTs:

• 3k pieces on Ronin

• 1k airdrop for Ronin minters

• 7k free airdrop to OG Kong holders

• 9k were “limitlisted” with 4.5k wallets on the whitelist and around 40k wallets on the waitlist. The remaining supply would be available for anyone during the Public Mint phase.

The 3k Ronin NFTs sold out fairly quickly, within 53 minutes to be precise. This shows the strength of the Ronin chain and its potential future plans. Then they opened the 9k phase, but only 1600 NFTs were minted during this time, and after 5 hours passed, it was time for the public phase mint.

Seeing this, the team adjusted their strategy and reduced the remaining available supply of 9k NFTs to just 3k. Additionally, the Kongz team announced that everyone who minted on Ronin would get one free airdrop, and everyone who minted on the mainnet would also receive one free airdrop.

Effectively, this ensured that everyone would get two NFTs for the price of one, cutting the mint price in half without reducing the supply. It was super effective!

The current floor (0.2 ETH) is above the mint price - something no other huge collection has been able to accomplish in this current market.

The fluidity displayed by the CyberKongz team was quite impressive. They had contingency plans in place, quickly deploying new contracts an hour after the mint started, and adapted well when it became clear that reaching the original number of mints might be a challenge. With this move, they put their community’s well being over profits.

It is evident that CyberKongz are positioning themselves well in the NFT space, and despite having been around for quite some time, they are still somewhat underrated. Their partnership with Axie Infinity and Ronin could indicate that the Genkai collection might have more ambitious plans than just being another boring profile picture extension for the current Kongz ecosystem.

Even with the current climate in the NFT space, their well-executed plan demonstrates that with careful consideration and innovative thinking, it is possible to thrive even in the bearish times of the NFT space.

CyberKongz, one of the OG NFT projects, launched a new gaming-related NFT collection (Genkai.)

The collection was minted on two blockchains - Ethereum and Sky Mavis’ Ronin network. As part of their partnership with Ronin, CyberKongs will develop a game with them that will feature the new collection.

However, I can’t say the mint was a success.

The initial plans were to mint 9,000 NFTs on Ethereum and 4,000 on the Ronin network. The price? 0.25 ETH per NFT, which is over $450. The CT community didn’t like that idea, so the Kongz made a change.

They slashed the supply of ETH NFTs to 3,000 and promised to airdrop 1 Genkai for everyone who locks their NFT for 180 days. I guess Luca Netz was right:

While the mint performed badly, it’s still sold out. Here are a few lessons we can learn from it:

Build a Project With the Community

The Kongz announced a new highly-priced NFT drop without talking with their community, which is why they had to slash their NFT supply. If they talked with them and created a collection with them in mind, they would get a ton of goodwill (and free marketing) from their current holders.

A huge missed opportunity here.

The Axie Community is the Most Underrated IP in Web3 Gaming

The Genkai collection on Ronin minted faster even though it was at the same price as the one on ETH. We can’t underestimate Axie’s influence here, given that it’s the most recognizable web3 gaming IP in the world (and on the Ronin network.)

Leverage More Than One High-Impact Partner at a Time

If the Kongz found 1-3 similar partners to Ronin, we wouldn’t be having this convo. They would have sold out the initial mint without slashing the supply.

However, this partnership is a huge W for the Ronin network, giving them a chance to expand beyond Axie.

Join hundreds of gaming founders, investors, and players who get the most important news and insights from the world of web3 gaming here.

The upcoming Town Hall is just around the corner! These gatherings are always valuable opportunities to uncover the developments and activities taking place behind the scenes in NT, or to catch up on anything you might have missed if you've been less active in the Discord.

Firestorm has shared a couple of points that will be discussed during the call. Firstly, there will be a reorganization of the Community Leads Team. It's been some time since the initial selection of Leads, and over time, some members have pursued their own projects, understandably becoming less involved in the day-to-day operations of Neo Tokyo as a result. It looks as though to remedy this, a new application process is being introduced to bring high-value community members into NT Leadership. Undoubtedly, we'll receive the full details on this during the Town Hall.

Next on the agenda: BYTES 2.0 might be up and running, but in the spirit of tradition, we can’t have a Town Hall without them being mentioned now, could we! To be specific, questions have been raised by citizens in Purgatory Club and the Bytes Price Talk channels of when the minting of Citizens, Item Caches and Land will be turned back on.

The prevailing concern seems to have shifted from “wen?” to “how?” $BYTES have taken a bit of a tumble since yield has been back, which has raised worries about the longstanding issue of our token having too much influence over the floor price of Citizens on the secondary market.

Becker addressed this in Purgatory, stating: “Yes [in response to being asked if minting will be turned back on] but it's gonna be a bit different though, as we don’t want citizen prices attached to bytes price. AKA if bytes go down people can skip buying a citizen and mint, we want the values to be detached to a certain extent.”

Adding to this, Firestorm reassured Purg: “We've got it covered don't ya worry. We'll share more at the Town Hall Monday.”

Aside from this, expect the usual department updates and Q&A segments. If you have a question you'd like addressed during the Town Hall, get those submitted via this form.

The VC is set to kick off later today at 16:00 EST. Set your reminders here.

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

That’s it for our 7th edition of the Neo Tokyo Newsletter. Be sure to subscribe and share with your friends so you don’t miss out on future content.

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