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Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks regained their $1 billion valuations
The NFT market is known for its volatility, and this bear market has been no different. But October showed some reprieve — a select few NFT projects bucked the trend, at least in the short term.
It was a month that saw Apple stir the pot by cracking down on NFT functionality within their App Store, prohibiting apps such as OpenSea from including external links or buttons that take customers away from the App Store to facilitate purchases or auctions.
It was an apparent move to capture potentially lost NFT revenues —- something these NFT projects seem to have little trouble with.
New NFT project Art Gobblers generated $24 million in ether (ETH) in its first 24 hours after launching on Oct. 31.
Venture capital firm Paradigm and Justin Roiland, co-creator of popular animated show Rick and Morty, are behind the NFTs, described as an “experimental decentralized art factory.”
The project launched on the Blur NFT marketplace, which is also backed by Paradigm, and has reported 26,759 ETH ($41.8 million) in trade volume so far, with an average NFT price of 18 ETH ($28,000) that keeps on climbing.
Thanks to Art Gobblers, Blur has surpassed OpenSea and other major NFT marketplaces for the first time in terms of ETH volume in the past 24 hours, per Dune Analytics data.
It was a free mint for those on the whitelist, similar to Goblintown, a collection of similarly crude NFTs which also saw rapid initial success. However, the significant sums on the secondary market have drawn some skepticism from market watchers.
In any case, a list of prominent NFT influencers and content creators acquired Gobblers, including Rug Radio co-founder Farokh Sarmad, NFT influencer Andrew Wang and content creator Zeneca.
The Art Gobblers ecosystem currently holds fewer than 2,000 NFTs, which means a few trades can really affect floor prices. The cheapest Art Gobbler NFT is now 15.9 ETH ($25,000), just two days after its launch.
Art Gobblers boasts a peculiar minting mechanism – Gradual Ownership Optimization — which secretes goo, an ERC-20 token. Holders spend goo to create blank pages on a specialized drawing tool, on which they can create and sell their own art.
According to a Paradigm overview about their tokenomics, Art Gobblers squirt out goo at a rate proportional to the square root of the goo already in their tanks. In other words, the more goo a Gobbler has, the faster it generates more goo (the token is already trading on Uniswap).
The more Gobblers are minted the higher the total goo supply and the almost exponential earning potential. About 290 goo holders currently exist. Notably, the project offers a 6.9% royalty rate – a higher than average rate issued at a time when most NFT marketplaces are going royalty optional.
Art Gobblers arrived amid a months-long tumbling of crypto prices, as well as declining valuations among the most popular NFT projects and Web3 brands – including Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks.
As of Nov. 1, however, DappRadar has assessed that both Yuga Labs collections have regained their $1 billion valuation status, calculated by their market capitalization.
While volume, number sales and number of traders were all down in the past 30 days, the market cap increased nearly 6% to a $1.09 billion market cap at the time of publication.
Similarly, CryptoPunks saw a 14% decline in volume during October but marked a 30% increase in market cap closing in at a $1.05 billion valuation at the time of writing, as per DappRadar data.
Parent-company Yuga Labs’ valuation once stood at a $4 billion post-money valuation after a $450 million funding round in March. This amount has not been re-evaluated since.
The company also holds Meebits and Otherside projects as subsidiaries.
Another collection that performed very well over the past few months — and especially during October — is the curated Art Blocks collection Gazers by Matt Kane.
According to OpenSea analytics, the numbers are up across the board over the past 30 days. At the time of writing, trading volume was at 414 ETH ($644,057) with a 74% increase; 23 sales meant 10% more sales than the month before; and the floor price was up 46% at a steeping 25 ETH ($38,892).
Similar to Art Gobblers, Gazers only has 1,000 NFTs within its collection, so the increased number of sales and trades resulted in the sharp rise in floor price.
The most ether paid for a Gazer during October was 25 ETH ($39,077) on Oct. 31.
Meanwhile, another popular Art Blocks collection, Chromie Squiggle project by Snowfro, sold an NFT for 34 ETH ($45,000) on Oct. 4.
Chromie Squiggle, a collection of 9,700, registered a 93% increase in trading volume and sales, 2,345 ETH ($3.6 million) and 164 ($256,000), respectively, over the past 30 days on OpenSea. The floor price is currently at 15.9 ETH ($24,700), up 41%.
While asset markets have collapsed, Art Blocks has been on fire.
Below is an equal-weighted basket of Fidenzas, Squiggles, Gazers, and Ringers.
Up 3x since May 1st. pic.twitter.com/U9aWNtsdJ8
The popularity of Reddit’s Avatar NFTs surged dramatically towards the end of October, peaking at a $2 million daily transaction volume, a 14x increase from September, and reaching a $100 million market cap.
Since then, however, the daily transaction volume has fallen back to September levels, and the market cap is just under $70 million.
The impact that the Redditfloor NFT marketplace had on Web3 was significant for two main reasons. It showed that the quickest way to onboard news users into the Web3 space — nearly 3 million in four months — is to use familiar language and not blockchain jargon.
It also proved that NFT profile pictures (PFPs) are still the best NFT use case up until now for onboarding those users.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop a scammer from creating fraudulent Reddit NFTs and listing them to an official Reddit collectibles page on OpenSea.
The same weekend as Reddit’s success, the Azuki NFT project set a record for the most expensive skateboards — digital and physical — sales in history.
Nine “Golden Skateboard” NFTs sold under auction for a cumulative total of $2.5 million.
The most expensive in the set — the Azuki Golden Skateboard NFT — sold for 309 ETH ($482,000). Winners can redeem their digital golden skateboards for physical skateboards plated with 24-karat gold starting this month.
A month-long boom may mean that NFT sentiment is looking up, but at least in Art Gobblers’ case, the market seems ready to reward innovative (and kooky) projects.
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DATE
Tuesday, November 8, 2022 12:00 pm
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