The last Cup

Just one final brew.

Hello, it’s Elle.

This is probably a very surprise announcement, but yeah, we’re ending Cup at Issue 50.

A quick rundown of what will happen next:

• The cupofnft.com domain will expire on March 25, 2022

• This Substack archive will still be around at cupofnft.substack.com

To explain why we’re ending Cup, it helps to go back to the reason why I started it.

In 2021, I said I wanted to just try and write regularly to sharpen my skills. New Year’s resolution and all.

I was fascinated by NFTs, mostly because it was something that I could actually access, as someone with very little capital and no finance knowledge. Writing about them felt like a good idea.

When I started, I immediately said I wasn’t going to try to do a roundup of everything. That was just gonna be impossible, and way too tiring for one person. I’ll just filter for quality and be thoughtful about it, and carry on.

Well . . . being thoughtful was also really a lot of fucking work. 😅 Seriously, trying to write assuming that the reader didn’t know anything was a lot of extra work.

So after getting burnt out in the middle of last year, I reached out to Gian to try and tap him to cover some of the other sections, like the artists.

And we’ve just been chugging ever since. We’ve been pretty good about updating this newsletter—but the Twitter woefully fell behind, and ideas of somehow creating a Discord to figure out which artists to feature was always shot down.

Basically: we had enough to keep pushing issues out, but not enough to do more to grow the newsletter.

And that was always weird, living a half-life. Either we quit or we go all the way, somehow (without finding staff that would want to work without pay 🙃). We were going to figure it out before the arbitrary deadline of the domain renewal.

But then: Issue 49.

Gian ran into a mishap, and I had to scramble to put the issue together, alone. Not only was it a stressful experience, but after it was done, I didn’t think the issue was any good—I thought it was hilariously empty.

And y’know, do people even think this is useful? There’s so many NFT publications now that cover more valuable things, like the market or mints, or just more news than what we were both capable of covering.

So sitting there, I just knew that my initial goal for the project had been achieved. I had improved my writing, and I was happy with that. There wasn’t any new goal or drive to take this any further.

This was really hard to acknowledge. It’s hard to just end it when our subscriber list was somehow growing (despite our dead silent Twitter)! And our last few issues even had people clicking the heart button, and goddamnit, was it a boost of dopamine.

But all in all, it was time to stop.

So, what’s next?

Gian has been juggling finding artists to spotlight on Cup with being the community manager for Coinvise, a platform for social tokens. But he recently got hired as the community manager for Tezos APAC. Go congratulate him on Twitter!

As for me (Elle), I’m just yield farming at the moment. You can also find me on Twitter, especially if you liked the little rundowns at the beginning of each newsletter (typos and all). I’d also love the opportunity to advise more projects and blockchain games.

So yeah, please don’t hesitate to reach out! We know you folks read the emails, which was always a one-sided conversation. We’d truly love to hear from you.

Please don’t be a stranger, and thank you so much for supporting Cup. 🍵