Things have been a touch quiet on the crowdsale front for CoinList over summer, before summer there was a huge flurry of sales and most of them are starting to drop into wallets over these coming months... time will tell if any of them will end up being another Solana or Flow! I'm hoping so... but like all of these early crowdsales, it is a bit of a gamble! That said, CoinList has had a nice track record of picking good projects to bring to community sales. Of course, there is always more projects out on the actual blockchain DEXs... but the risk there is just too high for me, and I'm not a fan of trying to take part in the gas and transaction race to secure a funding spot.

CoinList did have some pretty terrible experiences in the beginning of the year, when there were so many multi-accounts taking up purchase spots and being sold on the OTC market. However, with their priority queues, this has pretty much fixed this up... well, at least for me! I've not missed out on any purchase spot in any of the sales that implemented this loyalty perk, and the recent dips have let me purchase the ones that I did miss out on at prices that were not much above the initial sales price anyway!

Immutable X (IMX) might already sound familiar to some readers... and it is, as it is a project that is very closely linked with Gods Unchained! Speaking of which, I hope you all remembered to sync your Ethereum wallet that you used to play Gods Unchained with Immutable X, as that will score you an airdrop!

Anyway, what is the point of Immutable X, well... it is a zk-rollup Layer 2 for Ethereum, but built with NFTs as the priority use case. This was made necessary by Gods Unchained running quickly into scalability constraints on the Ethereum mainnet. As a zk-rollup, Immutable X will be a true layer 2 for Ethereum, and will inherit the security of the mainnet.

Now, just as a quick refresher as to why this is important. Scalability for Ethereum has had several solutions. Polygon (MATIC) has gone down the route of constructing a sidechain (not a true Layer 2, although they did recently acquire a Layer 2 project...), this means that they have opted to have a POA/POS model with fewer validators, this trades off security for scalability in a similar fashion to what Binance Smart Chain did. However, Polygon commits checkpointing to the Ethereum mainnet.

zk-rollups and Optimism are true layer 2s, and they are batching transactions and writing them direct to the Ethereum blockchain, thus there is the inherited security of the mainnet. The two differ in that zk-rollups are true upon commit to mainnet, whilst Optimism are assumed true but have a challenge window. The two solutions have different advantages and disadvantages for smart contracts vs token transfers.

So, Immutable X (IMX) is an Australian project (yeah Australia!) which curiously doesn't allow for Australian investors to take part in their crowdsale! Thankfully, I'm still a Dutch tax resident for a few more months, so that is no problem!

Anyway, this has been a familiar layout for most of the recent CoinList sales... a low minimum and maximum limit and a pretty nice 1700 UTC start time... although that second one at 2300 UTC is a bit of a pain in the bum for me! Interestingly enough, they have gone for a pretty near release window... I'm guessing it is in part to get some usage going on-chain? Normally the release window is around half a year, with a 6-24 month lockup... so, this is one token sale that is going be liquid pretty damn fast!

Okay... remember a few screens back. Zero gas fees??... well, I hate marketers... yes, there are zero ETH gas fees, but there are transaction fees, of which 20% must be in IMX. So, I'm not completely sure where they got the zero gas fee part from... zero mainnet fees I guess?

Staking pool is always a good thing... for many of the chains that I've been playing around on, the most critical thing to do early is to find a way to continually fund your transactions. That has been easy enough on every chain except for the Ethereum mainnet, where I'm still penny-pinching and waiting for the right moment to push transactions as my liquid ETH gas budget is tight!

Interestingly, the crowdsale is just 5% of the max supply. Very little has been sold yet... but at 10/15 USD per token, IMX is starting out quite high in comparison to other crowdsales. However, the starting price is not really that big an indicator of anything... just a way of possibly succumbing to unit bias!

Now, this is what gives me hope... some quality projects that are already in part or completely on board with Immutable X! Open Sea and ECOMI are huge NFT platforms, Open Sea is consistently in the top 3 of the biggest gas guzzlers on the mainnet, so I'm going to be happy if the bulk of their transactions move over to a Layer 2!

Meanwhile, Gods Unchained and Illuvium (ILV) are two huge games that are going to be fully onboard with Immutable X! I've played Gods Unchained before in the past, and it is pretty nice... just not my thing, but I'm happy to get an airdrop of IMX from that... and Illuvium (ILV) was a lucky investment from a while back... I have no complaints there!

So, quite happy to see all these familiar names here!

Well... it appears that to be one of the Co-founders, you need to be on Forbes 30 under 30! Ah, it doesn't matter.... looks like a solid team there!

So, look at that solid list of backers... well, Immutable X is one of the hotly anticipated Layer 2s that are launching to scale Ethereum, so it isn't any big surprise to see many of the names here... all of them hoping to get a nice ROI if this project pays out! And, scaling NFTs on Ethereum would be a real killer application!

However, there is one little thing that had gotten me confused... who the hell are the initial and early user sales? As far as I know, the CoinList was the first public sale... and I'm not sure that I would consider VC backers to be "users"! Hmmm... did I miss something?

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Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
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CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
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