For the Love of the Game (Market Commentary) |
Last week was one of the most exciting weeks for Web3 we’ve seen in 2024. No, the market wasn’t
ripping, though it was up. Instead, we hit some major milestones in some of the biggest native Web3 brands (Doodles, Azuki, Claynosaurz, DeGods), saw a wild CryptoPunk sale which will be part of the collection’s lore, and got to see people finally having fun with crypto tech again. I’d sum this all up as “we’re back” vibes.
Let’s kick it off with the NFT project updates - Doodles released their Dullsville and the Doodleverse movie on their DoodlesTv platform, Azuki dropped a new anime.com site, and
Claynosuarz announced a major gaming partnership (details for each below).
DeGods did what they do best - flipped everything about their project on its head as they migrated their collection to a 404 standard. This means they now have a fungible token in their ecosystem that can be bought to mint an NFT, while their Y00ts collection and old $dust token are being burned for this new $degods fungible token. It’s a huge shake-up, but many people
still believe the 404 token standard could be a main player in the next NFT cycle. Maybe it starts with the DeGods?
The biggest “back” vibes for me is seeing people having fun exploring on-chain. Last week a person named bigbrainchad.eth was found to be putting vanity addresses on his transaction hashes, making their identifier begin with 0xbeef. The reaction from the technical community has me appreciating the skill here, comparing it
to “lapping The Flash, because you’re bored”.
The best example of people exploring and playing with tech had a major payoff at the end. This story actually started 2 weeks before, when a trader realized that an extremely rare Ape CrytoPunk was fractionalized on a now depreciated site called Nftex.com. While the site was up, anyone could make an offer to buy the
fractionalized asset, and the holders would have 14 days to accept or decline the offer. With no front end, this clever trader assumed (correctly) that the notification of their offer would be hard to find.
Fast forward to last week, and this person’s offer of 10 ETH was not rejected, the 14d timer ran out, and they walked away with an asset that last saw a comparable sale just 2 weeks ago for $1.46M. It pays to play, eh?
There are great signs of life in NFTs everywhere you look right now, including the Donald Trump x Rug Radio spaces yesterday, where Trump explained that crypto only clicked for him thanks to NFTs.
We’re maybe beginning to see life in the market too.
The NFT market was green almost across the board last week, with sales coming in at a 3-week high at $80.15M. Sellers, buyers, transactions, and profits are
all headed in a positive direction as well, and while the core community is out in Singapore for the Token 2049 and Solana Breakpoint conferences, it feels like the momentum is starting to build.
Now we await rate cuts tomorrow to see where this market really wants to head. Will Uptober start a few weeks early, and is the banana zone already here, or will this be another head fake? We won’t have to wait long to find
out.
- DMarket saw massive sales volume this week thanks to a weekend promo for their AAA gaming skins. Saturday in particular was a monster day of sales with over $4.1M in
sales.
- Guild of Guardian Heroes has seen consistent sales across the last 2 weeks, as the hit Web3 game registered another $3.13M in sales this week.
- DeGods Solana and Ethereum collections saw a combined $2.6M in sales volume after their major announcement of migrating to a 404 standard (both fungible tokens and NFTs).
- Ethereum continues to dominate the NFT ecosystem, this week with $25.26M in sales. Buyers saw a 47.48%
increase, in a sign that traders are back to shopping for deals.
- Solana sales climbed 44.43% to $17.1M, while buyers were up a whopping 496% on the week.
- Bitcoin is slowly gaining traction with its top NFT collections and new mints all seeing action this week. Sales were up 12.14% to $13.93M on the week, while buyers saw a 260.11%
increase.
- Claynosaurz announced a major new partnership, as they joined forces with Gameloft to announce a new game. Gameloft has multiple major game franchises like Modern Combat and Asphalt, along with
publishing games from Disney and more. Sales are up 7.95% on the week to $386K
- Azuki launched anime.com, a new website that shows what the future of NFTs has actually arrived now. That future looks like NFT mints with no wallet popups, no gas for transactions, free NFTs, and highly stylized art that appeals to anime fans around the world. 7d sales are currently up 118% to $1.07M.
- Elite is the latest new NFT mint to find success on secondary and so far this week has seen over $1.16M in sales volume in just 5 days.
- Major NFT sales this week include XCOPY’s MORTAL, selling for 220 ETH ($520K), Boogle 025 for 1,100 SOL ($143K), and ENS (trump.eth) for 48.40
WETH
The CryptoSlam 500 NFT Index is back in the green this week, up 0.45%, and hopefully signaling the start of what’s to come. Cryptos have rebounded in the past 7d and helped NFT prices recover along with them, but it’s strong narratives in some
of the top NFT collections that have collectors excited.
We’re on the precipice of the first interest rate cuts since covid, which could really kick-start a major bull run in the crypto and NFT markets. Right now, there’s very cautious excitement in the air.
Be smart and keep your finger on the pulse of this market, by keeping your eyes on CryptoSlam and the indexes. You can stay plugged in by fixing
your vision on our new daily Web3 live show called Chain Reactor.
Have a MEGA GM! — Yehudah Petscher
Doodles - Rubiks Packs Date - Sept 17 Blockchain -
Base Price - $4.99 USD NBA Top Shot - Run it
Back: Quick Rips September Date - Sept 17 Blockchain - Flow Price - $5 USD Mutable Trees
- Airdrop Pass Date -Sept 17 Blockchain - Bitcoin Price - 200k $Decentralized ($35 USD)
Snowfro
- heart + craft Date - Sept 17 Blockchain - Arbitrum Price .01 ETH Maserati - Maserati GT2 Date - Sept 21 Blockchain -
Immutable Price - $40 USD |
One of the most important features of NFTs is their utility of preserving a full record of a digital item. I’m talking about its birth on the blockchain, its transaction history, who created it, who held it, and how long it was held each step of
the way. This provenance matters much more than people realize, especially in the upcoming age of AI, deep fakes, misinfo, and scams. Dive in to learn more about provenance, and level up your understanding of why blockchain tech is so game-changing. Happy researching!
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