For the Love of the Game (Market Commentary) |
How ya feeling right now, anon? Pretty good I’ll bet, and that’s striking considering how bad of a week
NFTs just had.
That’s right, vibes are high as crypto kicked off “Uptober” early, thanks to the Fed cutting interest rates by 50 basis points last week. This injected optimism throughout the markets, sending Bitcoin to $64K and Ethereum to $2,600. NFTs are starting to feel the impact of rate cuts as well, and collections like NodeMonkes are ripping all the way back up to .2 BTC. But here’s the twist: last week, NFT sales hit their 4th lowest point since May 2021, clocking in at just $69M. Think back to last October, when sales were almost non-existent. It was hard to stay optimistic about NFTs, and personally, I thought we wouldn’t see a rebound for years. Fast forward to today, and while our sales match last year’s darkest stretches, the sentiment couldn’t be more opposite. I’d say it feels like the good old days to a degree, and we saw echoes of the past bull run play out in 2 major Web3 conferences last week.
Token 2049 and Solana Breakpoint were both hosted in Singapore and brought everything you’d expect from top tier conferences. We had technical announcements like Solana’s Firedancer going live on testnet, Coinbase bringing cbBTC to Solana, and Magic Eden
announcing a new token swap product. But it’s the parties that these conferences are really remembered for. Iggy Azalea hosted a wildly controversial party at BreakPoint. I can’t show you or describe what happened there, but Google is your friend. I can just say, you degens are wild.
Back to NFTs, wild sales volume was missing last week while the community was away partying, but
we did see some incredible sales. Top of the list is XCOPY’s Loading New Conflict Redux 2, which sold for 300 ETH ($727K), along with The Doomed for 55 ETH ($145K), and dozens of other editions.
My favorite sale of the week was a 200 ETH sale of a Lost Robbie—Generative Nude Portrait #7—a piece that will go down in NFT history books for its provenance (the first on-chain AI art). Diving into the weekly numbers, and it becomes clear just how drastically NFTs fell last week. Almost across the board, we saw numbers decline, reflecting that traders are stepping away from the market. If history is any indication, traders will return in a flurry as they see the type of gains that are now starting to happen over on Bitcoin. FOMO is a heck of a drug, and as you know, if trading is profitable, projects and traders will look to
re-create that magic.
The banana zone is close, the good times are actually here. The great run of 2024/25 is just beginning to get started. Are you ready? - NodeMonkes are on fire along with the rest of the ordinal ecosystem. Sales are up over 142% with buyers up 73%, and a floor price now at .2 BTC
- Mining Pass is a new mint on Polygon and is a fungible token-generating asset in the Planet IX gaming ecosystem. So far this week this asset alone has seen over $2.2M in primary and secondary
sales.
- Bitcoin Puppets were just .05 BTC just 2 months ago, and now are up over 2x to .122 BTC. This week, sales are up 152% with $2M in sales.
- Taproot Witches were the hottest new mint on Bitcoin this week. Even after fumbling their mint (some with whitelists weren’t included in the pre-sale), this collection did the unthinkable -
saw their floor price increase after their art was revealed. In just 4 days the collection has seen over $1.73M in sales.
- Ethereum claims the #1 spot on the Blockchain Rankings, but change is in the air. In the past 7d, we saw
$23.3M in Ethereum NFT sales, while buyers climbed 21.49%.
- Bitcoin did something we haven’t seen since the spring, it flipped Ethereum in daily sales volume yesterday and today. On the week Bitcoin had $18.36M in sales, with buyers increasing
61.24%.
- Solana NFT sales, unsurprisingly fell last week when its community was at Token 2049 and BreakPoint. Sales fell 19.54% to $13.59M, but buyers actually soared a whopping
87.67%.
- Yuga Labs announced their first dApp is coming from the brand new “The Workshop”, and it’s called Top Trader. The new platform
simulates a leverage trading platform where traders will compete for a prize pool. This might actually cook.
- The Bored Apes had a busy week spent in the gaming world, as Yuga Labs released the 2nd season of Dookie Dash last week. In just days, the game climbed to the top ten on Apple’s App Store, and gamers around the world compete for a $1M prize.
- Larva Labs’ Autoglyphs are reaching interesting new heights as an iconic mint, Autoglyph #30 (minted by Larva Labs) will be auctioned at Far Warning Art. Fair Warning previously orchestrated a $450M Salvador Mundi sale.
- The NFT royalty debate will not go away. Last year Magic Eden pledged to enforce royalties in a combined effort with Yuga Labs and other
partner projects. This week they announced that they will no longer enforce them after pushback from traders. We owe OpenSea an apology.
- Beeple’s first ever EVERYDAYS IN MOTION, an animated small collection from his daily art creations, was sold in a private sale to the iconic
collection Cozomo Medici. The #1 piece in the 67 is titled MARCH INTO THE FUCKING LIGHT, 2018 and now enters a class of grails we don’t see often in NFTs.
The CryptoSlam 500 NFT Index fell -0.30% in the past 7d after spending most of the week in the green. Rate cuts have kept the NFT value stable, if not up, and the index certainly is reflecting that stability. Remember, sales volume isn’t the
sole metric you should be using to gauge the health of NFTs. Instead, it’s the value of the market that really shows the health of the market, and this week, it’s looking rather resilient.
Uptober is just 1 week away, and expectations are almost universally held that we’ll see a red-hot crypto and NFT market. Bitcoin Ordinals sure are getting a head start. Is that a sign of what’s to come?
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 Footies
Date - Sept 25
Blockchain - Solana
Price - .5
SOL Guardians of Ordinals
Date - Sept 25
Blockchain -
Bitcoin
Price - TBA Br8tties
Date - Sept 24 Blockchain - Base
Price - .0075 ETH KOR Protocol - Founders Pass Date - Sept 26
Blockchain - Ethereum
Price - Free NBA Top Shot - WNBA Rookie Revelation
Date - Sept 24
Blockchain - Flow
Price - TBA Marvel - Venom vs Carnage #2
Date - Sept 26
Blockchain -
Immutable
Price - $6.99 USD Disney Animation - Peter
Pan
Date - Sept 28
Blockchain - Immutable
Price - $25 USD MPKOZ - Bokeh
Date - Oct 21
Blockchain - Ethereum
Price - Auction |
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