For the Love of the Game (Market Commentary) |
Royalties, platform fees, and advanced trading tools. We thought these would be the deciding factors in determining the winner of the battle for NFT traders, and their sweet, sweet liquidity. What we didn’t see coming was brand new protocols and tech that would steal those same traders away, and pull their attention away from NFTs. SoFi platforms like FriendTech, Stars Arena, and New Bitcoin City are trying their best to take traders to the cutting edge of finance and technology. Make no mistake, while these young platforms look and feel
like a beta today, they just may end up reshaping the future of social media. Wash trading has drastically fallen over the year since its 2023 high of $1.4b in February. As the Blur marketplace’s $BLUR token price declined, and opportunities to earn the
platform’s points increased, traders began looking elsewhere for rewards on the blockchain. FriendTech was primed to win over these traders when it launched on August 10, giving users shared fees each time traders bought and
sold access keys to chat with them. The platform is also promising future rewards early next year in the form of $ETH. This was all NFT degens needed to hear to dive in. Wash trading has fallen 68.6% since the first full week of FriendTech’s life, from $53.9m to a 44-week low of $16.9m two weeks ago.
Blur is now attempting to attract traders back with an announcement of the end date for Season 2 farming on Nov 20. More importantly, a proposal was submitted to the Blur Foundation from one of their investors, suggesting a 1% fee is added to all trades on blur.io. Fees may sound counterproductive, but the ultimate goal will be to buy $BLUR with those earnings, and burn the token. As the supply decreases, this should drive up the price of $BLUR. That is, if traders haven’t already felt burned themselves, and decided to leave for better
opportunities.
Initial reaction to the proposal was positive, leading to a drastic 85% increase in wash trading last week, and over $31.3m in wash sales volume. Wash transactions saw a similar increase from 28,208 in the first week of October, climbing 75% to 132,281 last week. Blur has more competition than just the new SoFi platforms to contend with now. A new disruptive marketplace called Flooring Protocol is making a serious run on farmers with their fractionalied NFTs. Just yesterday, Flooring Protocol saw over 489 ETH traded in and out of fractionalized Azuki Elementals, y00ts, and Pudgy Penguins NFTs. While these are fungible tokens being traded, and not NFTs, they offer traders a new way to get liquidity, and collectors a chance for exposure to some of the world’s
most expensive NFTs for just pennies. For now, the ship full of traders may have already sailed past Blur, and OpenSea, as SoFi and fractionalized assets look to become the new meta. That doesn’t mean it won’t come back around again, though. Remember, even though the market is ever evolving, there are some constants
you can count on. Degens just want action, and they want gains. Ultimately they don’t care where they get them from. - DMarket again dominates the Top Collection Rankings on CryptoSlam with $8.9m in sales, while new NFT mints climbed 21%, and trade profits rose 9% to $308,177 on the week.
- Gods Unchained saw $4.3m in sales as players excitement ramps up for the long awaited Season 2 gameplay.
- Winds of Yawanawa by Refik Anadol has seen its average sales prices climb to as high as $20k yesterday, following the full reveal of the collection’s art last week. The MoMA welcomed
Refik’s Unsupervised Machine Learning NFT into their permanent collection as well, becoming their first ever NFT.
- Pudgy Penguins have a major new investor, Spencer Ventures bought 48 Pudgy Penguins last week from a Sotheby’s sale of prior 3AC assets.
- Ethereum NFTs saw a 67% increase in wash sales in the past 7 days, driven
by positive sentiment around a proposal for a 1% marketplace fee that will ultimately burn $BLUR tokens.
- Mythos Chain again is seeing 99% of their sales volume come from CounterStrike skins on the DMarket marketplace.
- Solana got a bump from its #1 collection, a new project called KING Royal which saw $604k in sales volume.
- Polygon still is seeing a majority of its volume coming from DraftKings. While y00ts was its #3 collection last week, its sales volume will soon fall off, when a 33.3% royalty will be imposed by the DeLabs team next week.
- Yuga Labs announced their HV-MTL Forge game’s rewards of 89k $APE, and after huge
community backlash, they buffed those rewards to over 200k $APE. The player who finishes first on the leaderboard will win 63,500 $APE or around $64,000 USD.
- The Y00ts are on the move, with their migration from Polygon to Ethereum now live.
- Pokemon cards are being sold on Polygon again from Courtyard.io. These are physical cards in a Brinks vault that are backed by NFTs. There are hints that Magic The Gathering may be coming soon.
- A rare zombie CryptoPunk was sold on Saturday, with Punk #6704 selling for 400 ETH ($618,715). This was a gain of 20 ETH, but a loss of $170k in value.
The Forkast 500 NFT Index as expected is showing the NFT market’s continued loss of value, down -3.61% in the past seven days. Broken down by blockchain we see that Cardano is down -0.22%, Ethereum -0.64%, Solana -3.32%, and Polygon -6.26%. As NFT traders ramp up their adoption of SoFi platforms and fractionalized assets, expect to see them liquidate their NFT assets in favor of greener pastures elsewhere. Have a MEGA
GMs! |
SoFi stands for social finance, and refers to a way of incentivizing social
output with tangible financial rewards. Whether it’s paying for access to chat with friends, celebrities, reporters, etc or receiving currency as tips for your content, the future of content and media is looking like SoFi. This concept is relatively new, but most are sure of how big social finance will grow. Dive in to learn about how social finance started, where it lives now, and why people expect it to grow so much. Happy researching! Received this from a friend? Sign up for this twice-a-week CryptoSlam VIP newsletter. |
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