This post is a bit different, I have no information about this project at all, literally nothing.
So why did I buy it? To put it simply, FOMO.
The infamous "Fear Of Missing Out" is an incredible thing, it can really cloud your judgment and lead you to some hasty decisions, as the days go by I feel like this could be one of them.
Sometimes as part of my research I will look through the wallets of notable people in the NFT community and see what they are buying, it puts me on to projects I have never heard about and sometimes I find a hidden gem.
One day while browsing through Gary Vee's wallet I noticed he had minted multiple NFTs from the Illuminati NFTs collection, as a guy that likes a conspiracy theory it got my attention straight away, if Gary Vee had minted 4 or 5 then surely he knew something? I checked through the sales of this collection and was impressed, there were a few blue tick accounts and some big collectors in there, I was convinced they all knew something and I was lucky enough to discover it. The mint was 0.08 with a total collection of 2500, although at the higher end of my minting budget I decided it was a risk worth taking, how could all these big collectors be wrong?
I minted one and sat back and watched the mint count over the course of a few days, it barely moved, it was stuck on 93 for ages and I was hoping to go back and get #100 when the time came, I justified the slow mint by the lack of attention and marketing, of course it was going to go slowly how would anyone know about this, I had only discovered it by chance.
One day I woke up and checked the mint count, it had shot up to around 310, FINALLY the people were waking up to this hidden gem, I thought it would sell out within the next 24 hours, I even considered buying a couple more as the floor price had fallen below the mint price. One thing I have learned is this is rarely a good sign, if the floor price drops below mint then something is usually wrong.
Instead of an influx of minters the total available barely moved, at last count it was 339. This is where the situation went from bad to worse, the only piece of information about this whole project was the website www.illuminatinft.club, the website itself was just a minting page, initially I thought this was all part of the mystery and after mint the real site would reveal itself and an impressive roadmap. This never happened.
The website disappeared and hasn't returned, normally I would accept this as a rugpull, admit I've been an idiot and move on but this doesn't feel right. Fair enough the images are all identical, in the style of a placeholder, so there was minimal effort on that part but why would they go to the trouble of registering a domain, building a relatively simple site, paying to list these NFTs, and then running off after only 339 had been minted?
Ok, the money is not a small amount, around 27 ETH before you take away OpenSea royalties but if this truly was a scam then why did they shutdown the site and leave when they did? Big wallets had just minted, people were still minting slowly, they could have left the site up for another week and potentially sold all 2500, giving them 200 ETH!
As of today the website is still non existent, there hasn't been any update to the images and if there were an update I don't know where it would come from. I will continue to hold incase it does turn out to be something special however as each day passes my optimism falls.
This is a difficult one for me, I jumped in to an unknown project on the actions of other people, I knew nothing about it yet I was willing to commit 0.08 ETH + gas to join in, my motivation was purely profit, how could I say anything else when I had no other information? Greed and FOMO are dangerous when it comes to NFTs, we are all hoping to be part of the next BAYC or Cryptopunks but in reality for every Bored Ape there are thousands of dead projects.
The lesson has been learned and I don't think I'll be jumping in to anymore projects like this one, although who knows, if the website returns with new information or the metadata is updated this could turn out to be a real gem... then I'll have to come back and edit this post and pretend I knew the whole time.
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