Jacob Stein

Sep 11, 2022

Token Project: The MV3 Universe

Before diving in to this project, I feel I should provide some relevant context. The group behind MV3 is known as Metav3rse, which is a Web3 community and news source. You can find then under the tag @metaverse on Instagram. While I am not incredibly immersed within the community and I use it more as a learning tool, I definitely hold some favorable implicit bias. I will try to put it aside and be as objective as possible, but I encourage any reader to perform their own research into the brand. This is also not financial advice.

Art/Brand

At its core, MV3 is essentially tokenized story-telling. The entire brand is premised on a story in a place called Eluna City. Eluna is meant to be a dystopian mix between Gotham City and Silicon Valley. The city is a "dystopian cyberpunk society" with power concentrated in the hands of Trust Corp, a powerful corporation with a fortune built upon androids and sentient humanoid robots. Such conditions warranted the creation of "The Collective" a revolutionary group bent on eroding the power of Trust Corp and rebuilding a societal ideal for everyone.

The political conditions within the city have broken the populace into four majors factions. The Elites are, as the name suggests, the aristocratic class responsible for the creation of the androids. They believe control over both political levers of the city and the androids themselves rightfully belong to them, and will spend significant resources to realize that condition. The Empaths are humans who envision a world where humans and androids live harmoniously. Rather than viewing the androids as subhuman, they see them as equals, and view technology in general as a medium of widespread societal benefit. The A.X. are the class of androids living as servants for humans. They are sentient beings with the hope of one day being viewed as equals. The R.Q are the final faction, a violent class of androids originally built as protectors of the city. There is also a hidden faction known as Travelers, which the team has yet to reveal information about. The differing prerogatives of these groups sets the scene quite well for a tense conflict over the positioning of androids within Eluna, and ultimately spills over into a war. I will not continue to spoil the plot, but it gets good, so I would highly recommend reading it. They also created beautiful banners to support the storyline:

The NFTs themselves are each a character within Eluna. The storyline contains sixteen identifiable core characters, being the rarest in the collection. The remainder of the collection is split between factions in the following ascending order of rarity: Travelers, R.Q., A.X., Empaths, Elites. The project website has a gallery feature where you can scroll through the art if you'd like:

Now for my own analysis. I think the storyline is impeccable. It is complex, engaging, interesting, and deals with very modern and pertinent concepts and subject matter. It also has room to grow, for media to built around it, and it is clear that much thought and detail was put into it. The banner art is also stunning. There is so much detail put into them, and they give a Coruscant-esque vibe to Eluna and do an amazing job formulating all the details into a more tangible setting.

For the character art itself, I have very mixed feelings. Before I give any criticisms, let me just say the artist is extremely talented, and the art is very well done. My only complaint is that the imagery provided by the banners and other related media do not mix well with the character art. The character's seem to be a bit cartoonish, as if made of clay or plastic, whereas other media seems to be going for extreme realism. This is a very slight distinction and for most people makes no difference. But if they intend to create other forms of media, they may need to reconcile these two art styles. I also think the R.Q. are overly complex and the Travelers look a bit goofy, but that is more of a subjective opinion. Either way, the brand itself is impeccable, and the art is by no means weak, so overall A+ rating.

Community

MV3 has a very small, tight-knit community. This is a boon for the project, but also a potential detriment. This situation stems from how MV3 chose to award whitelist spots for minting the project. Remember that this project is run by Metav3rse, so the core team all knows each other from previous projects. Know first off that Metav3rse itself is very exclusive. The Instagram account has over 1.2 million followers, and the Discord is currently capped around 8,000 people. This is 0.1% engagement (by choice). This is because the founders of Metav3rse wanted to add a layer of exclusivity, and also build a very tight community through a slower process. This, of course, happened.

Within the Metav3rse community, the most active members were awarded with ranks indicating their engagement, such as "O.G. Member" or "Engaged Member." This all occurred months before MV3 was released. These ranks were then translated into respective ranks within the MV3 Discord, "The Collective" and "Trust Corps." In short, Metav3rse started off the MV3 community by importing their very nuclear existing community. Access to the MV3 Discord was then highly limited, only through giveaways, perks from holding other NFTs, or links on their story that would be used up in minutes. Once in the Discord, access to the whitelist was then limited again by extreme community engagement, giveaways, art and media contests, and more. To summarize, in order to get access, you needed to undergo the following process: get in Metav3se Discord --> get rank through engagement OR get in MV3 Discord via contest or luck --> get rank through engagement or luck or media creation.

A simple cost benefit analysis shows that such a system actually deters engagement. The portion of people who actually believe in a projects utility within the NFT space is very small; most people just want to make money. So let's ignore the emotional payoff from getting into the project because its negligble for most people. At its height, getting VERY early access to MV3 would have render a profit of $2000. Because of a fall in Ethereum's price and large dips in the project's price, profit was probably between $200 and $500 for most of the projects lifespan. Now, for early entrants, profit is around $100. For people who minted during the public sale and held, they likely lost money. NFT prices are highly volatile, so no logical investor is going to spend probably days-worth of their life trying to enter a community for a few hundred dollars. The engagement formula for whitelist made commitment a binary: you could not half-ass entry into the project. You either committed probably over 24 hours to getting in, or you just simply would not get in, so there is no point in trying.

Coupling an extremely high time commitment as a barrier of entry with the import of the original Metav3rse group created a very nuclear and tight-knit community for obvious reasons. This is great in some respects because it means there will always be some people who engage with the project for a very long time. I would argue, however, that the cost of a nuclear community outweights its benefits. What sustains a brand, without a doubt, is the community. Whether you like it or not, though, that community needs to be big to last awhile. It also needs to continually attract new members. A biased example I can think of is League of Legends. League has a notably toxic community, yet has still been around for over a decade with one of the worlds largest playerbase. This is for two reasons: League continues to upscale the game and its features, keeping old-timers engaged and attracting new members. League is also entirely free-to-play. Money also provides no objective or strategical advantage, and only can be used for cosmetics. This is a very simple structure, yet still attracts hundreds of millions of players every year. Within MV3, entry was originally an exorbitant amount of time. Now, the entry is at minimum $300, and even more if you want to continue upscaling within the community and the brand. The combination of a nuclear community that is hard to enter socially, coupled with a large financial barrier to both entry and mobility makes their community engagement model unsustainable. Creating alternative entry points would be a huge help for the project. I would also argue that this poor engagement model is the reason for the large drops in the project's price.

Anyways, time for a final community rating. The people are amazing and very much built around the storyline. The nuclear community provides stability at the center of the brand, which is also great. The barriers to entry and mobility, and unnecessary exclusivity, however, bring the rating down, so I would give an overall B.

Team

MV3 is the brainchild of co-founders Roberto Nickson and Jessie Nickson-Lopez. Roberto is a serial entrepreneur and investor, and Jessie is a storyline writer, with her biggest project being a few episodes of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. The remainder of the core team consists of developers, brand managers, the community lead, and the artist, Tomas Vergara. The exteneded and community team then contains pseudonymous developers, community leaders, media producers, and moderators.

In the Web3 space, qualifications are not especially important, and observing deliverables and results is a better indicator of the quality of the team. The MV3 team meticulously planned out their entire project, has developed beautiful websites, media, and applications. The developers, community leaders, and the rest of the extended team have also done an amazing job. I may have some disagreements with some smaller decisions made about the project, but that says absolutely nothing about the talent of the team behind it, they are great.

Importantly, the team has also engaged frequently with the community, been mostly or fully transparent, and built a general sense of trust with the community at-large. This aspect is very important for a successful project, and they have done an impeccable job. Overall rating for the team is without a doubt A+.

Utlity/Vision

MV3 has a long list of 'utilities' and future goals. See below.

Film Project - Nickson-Lopez is writing a script for the first episode of the MV3 story. MV3 apparently has several partnerships with Hollywood entities, and will be working to develop a TV series around the brand.

Partnerships - The MV3 does not have the capabilities to make some of the products they hope to, such as podcasts, comic books, games, a metaverse, etc. They are thus licensing their IP to industry leaders to produce these products for them.

Technology - The team is "exploring" the possibility of creating releveant applications of platforms with perks "actively always reserved for holders."

Media - Metav3rse is the "largest distribution media property native to Web3," so the team will continue to develop that brand into a media empire, and unlock perks for holders.

MV3 Artist Fund - MV3 will reserve a fund for all types of artists within the community to produce their work.

MV3 Creator Fund - MV3 will reserve a fund for entreprenerus and platform builders within the community looking to push the entire Web3 ecosystem forward.

MV3 IRL Fund - A fund for "trusted members" to use to host events in real-life. This is meant to cover venues, food, transportation etc. with the goal of bringing the community together offline.

Physical World Events - Appearances at NFT LA and NFT NYC.

Professional Workshops - Self explanatory, for holders in related industries.

Eluna Generative Art Banners - Matching banners for all characters.

Various Airdrops - Self explanatory, no further information yet.

Fashion and Merchandise - Wearable merchandise to represent the brand, no further information.

Physical Collectibles - Trading cards, figurines, comic books... no further information.

Coffee Table Book - Self explanatory.

MV3 DAO - Decentralized decision-making capabilities within the brand. Voting power and tokens will be allocated based on amount and rarity of tokens held.

Staking - Train (stake) your NFT to have a higher chance of winning 'battles.' Training also unlocks new perks and benefits within their forthcoming initiatives.

Metaverse Avatars - 3D renderings of every NFT will be airdropped to the holder, and usable in any metaverse supporting interoperability.

MV3 Metaverse - Create a virtual reality rendering and allow people to play as their characters and interact via proximity chats and emotes.

So they have a lot of stuff going on, but let's do a deeper dive. I think we can separate these utilities into three categories: short-term deliverables, long-term deliverables, and social deliverables. To quickly address the social deliverables (meet-ups, tabling at conferences, networking opportunities), I think the proportion of holders that actually care enough to get off their computer and engage with these utilities is so small that I am going to rule them negligible. I am also going to throw in the various funds into the negligible category because, again, that's not why most people are here.

The short-term deliverables are mostly brand-based perks, such as merchandise, banners, airdrops, and miscellaneous physical collectives. In all honesty these are great ideas, and perfect for short term deliverables. I think the effectiveness of these deliverables, however, will be mitigated by the community dynamic. There are very few people within the nuclear community who actually care enough about the brand to be satisfied with only short-term brand deliverables. Only people who have spent enormous amounts of time engaging with the project are going to be temporarily satisfied with such deliverables. The unnecessary and self-sabotaging obsession with exclusivity is also going carry over from the community selection process and damage the spread of the brand. I think the team will need to release larger deliverables sooner rather than later that do not have such an enormous barrier of entry, and are not as brand reliant.

Now to address those larger deliverables. The team is hitting the nail on the head with what they have to deliver. The DAO, Metaverse, avatars, and TV shows are all amazing ideas, and their release will elevate the project to one of the greats. I see a few problems though with the process of their deliverance. We can immediately translate the "partnership" utility to "outsourcing our other larger projects." While there is no issue doing this, something about outsourcing all the work they promise to deliver does not sit right. They have no guarantee on the quality or timeframe of outsourced work, and the product may not align with the vision of the team or the community, so they are playing a risky game. To follow that up, many of their descriptions are extremely vague right now. The "Media" and "Technology" utilities mean virtually nothing, and we are given very little information about next steps for the DAO and Metaverse. I think, however, that the team has the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. By releasing "mid deliverable deliverables" about some of the larger deliverables, they can appease any doubts about the capabilities of the team and the project, and essentially do the job that the small-term deliverables will fail to do, which is keeping the community engaged when no one is particularly excited by figurines. Releasing a demo of the Metaverse, a trailer for the television series, or a model of the 3D avatar would go a very long way for the project.

The deliverables are good, but they fall short of the goal becuase of the systemic issues discussed in the community section. I think the project has an enormous amount of potential, but I remain skeptical of how much will actually be delivered in a timely manner. For that reason, I would rate the utility a B.

Price Analysis

So the price doesn't look too good...

Before you write the project off as bad because of the price, let me do a bit of analysis. Note that the public sale was somewhere in early August of 2022. The project was mintable for whitelist members starting in early April for a price of 0.12 - 0.18 ETH. The project was originalyl extremely profitable (over 10x) because of its high exclusivity. The crypto (and other) markets crashed, and people realized that it was likely highly overvalued. The extremely nuclear community dynamic also started doing damage because people realized that the tokens only really hold value for people who care about the brand. Doubts brought about more doubts until the price cascaded down to around 0.3 before the public sale (2x profit still).

The greatest mistake they made was immediately before the public sale. They decided to reduce the supply from 10,000 to 6,500 a week before the sale was set to go live. They claimed to do this on behalf of the holders to "create more exclusivity for holders" which, in most peoples eyes, looks like "we are afraid we won't sell out because of our price behavior." Even in that scenario its better to just let the sell-out go slow rather than show such insecurity, even if it isn't actually insecurity. On top of that, adding "more exclusivity" is not a desirable goal, as it contributes to the nuclear community problem now plaguing the project. The minting also went poorly, as people who should have been able to weren't, and the website could not handle the traffic. For those who ended up minting for 0.25 ETH, the floor is now 0.2.

I think the price is deservedly at the right spot for now, but is highly undervalued for the future. When the crypto market recovers and this project starts to deliver, I think the price will skyrocket. All in all, I would give the project an A. It is definitely worth keeping an eye on.