NFT Weekly Recap - April Week4

Hello guys,

Hope you all had a great weekend. Welcome to this week's NFT market recap, covering basic stats and notable news with my observations. If there is anything else you'd like to see in the recap, please let me know. DMs are open.

Basic Stats

As usual, let's begin with numbers.

The market was in full beast mode. Total OpenSea trading volume (as measured in ETH) pumped by 46% on a weekly basis. It is very easy to spot the dramatic increase in trading volume from the bar chart. If we only count Monday to Friday's data from the week before last week, that is, ignoring the volume generated by Moonbirds, weekly trading volume is up by 79%.

The number of daily active traders increased by 4% last week. It is also trending up towards the end of the week, breaking 60k on Friday and Sunday.

While Moonbirds slowly attracted new players into the playground, it definitely made existing players much more active.

In terms of floor price, the biggest winners are Moonbirds, the Ape family, and RTFKT - MNLTH. Moonbirds continued its climb to join the 30 ETH club. The Ape family pumped on the news that Otherside, a.k.a., Ape land, is coming May 1st. MNLTH also opened during the weekend. The sneakers were very cool. RKFKT delivered again. Not many smaller projects did well last week, when all attention was drawn to Moonbirds, the Apeverse, and MNLTH opening.

Source: flips.finance

Notable Events

RTFKT - MNLTH and Azuki - BEANZ Reveal

RTFKT revealed what is inside MNLTH last Saturday. Inside the mysterious box was:

1. a pair of Nike sneakers called RTFKT x Nike Dunk Genesis CRYPTOKICKS
2. a sneakers skin vial
3. another box called MNLTH 2

You can equip the base sneakers with the skin vials on the RKFKT website. What is inside MNLTH 2 is not known.

Base Sneakers and Sneakers with Skins, Source: OpenSea

The current floor price of a base pair of sneakers, i.e., without equipped skins, is 2.6 ETH. The current floor price of the skin vial is 0.85 ETH. The current floor price of MNLTH 2 is 4 ETH. That is, a basic MNLTH is worth roughly 7.4 ETH on the secondary market.

However, the current floor price of an unopened MNLTH is 9.94 ETH, because of the lottery premium. You could unbox a rare skin that is worth much more than the floor price of 0.85 ETH. For example, this extremely rare alien skin (0.1%) was sold for 150 ETH on OpenSea.

SKIN VIAL 🧪 EVO ALN, Source: OpenSea

The opening of MNLTH is generally well-received by the community. But Clone X avatars surprisingly did not pump with it.

Azuki, the other top blue-chip NFT project, formally introduced it's own secondary collection, BEANZ, last Tuesday (Apr 19th). BEANZ is said to be "a small species that sprouts from dirt in the garden. Being a sidekick is in their DNA, although some like to kick it alone."

Source: https://twitter.com/AzukiOfficial/status/1516175774843240453

BEANZ will soon be revealed. But an exact date is not set yet.

The quality of both MNLTH and BEANZ is very impressive, once again confirming RTFKT and Azuki among the top teams in the NFT space. It is now very common for NFT projects to release secondary collections, which were pioneered by Larva Labs with Meebits and Yuga Labs with Kennels and Mutants. VeeFriends Series 2 is coming next week, while Doodles seems to be lagging behind for the moment.

Aku Smart Contract Bug

The Aku team held its long-awaited Akutar public mint last weekend, which turned out to be a total disaster. The entire amount raised from the public mint, a total of 11,539.5 ETH, or 34.7 million USD, cannot be withdrawn from the minting contract due to a small bug.

Akutar is a collection of 15,000 3D profile pictures from the team behind Aku in collaboration with some top fashion brands, such as Puma, Billionaire Boys Club, and Paper Planes. Rapper Pusha T and fashion designer Upscale Vandal sit on Aku's creative council.

Source: Aku.world

The Akutar mint was a fair Dutch auction, meaning early bidders would be refunded the difference between their bid price and final auction price. The contract was written in such a way that the team could only withdraw funds after the refunds were processed. There were a total of 5,495 Akutars for sale and there were a total of 3,669 bids, because some bought more than one Akutar in one bid. This is where the bug occured. While the smart contract counted bids instead of actual mints, withdrawal of funds required bids to be greater than or equal to actual mints. As 3,669 can never be greater than or equal to 5,495, the funds (11,539.5 ETH, or 34.7 million USD) are forever stuck in the minting contract.

Some more background. Aku is an African American boy with an oversized astronaunt helmet, a character created by former MLB player turned artist, Micah Johnson, after hearing a young boy ask, “can astronauts be black?” Aku was released to the world on Feb 21, 2021 as an NFT in the form of an animated video. Subsequently, a total of 10 chapters (videos) were released over the period of a year. These videos were sold as collectibles on NiftyGateway for $999 a piece. Due to differences in rarities, these videos are now worth between 0.7 ETH and 25 ETH on OpenSea.

It is very unfortunate that the Aku team made $0 from the public sale of Akutars. This is a $35mm lesson. Solidity is no rocket science. Writing and auditing smart contracts is much easier than sending people to the moon. NFT founders, especially those without a technical background, must not underestimate the importance of a good developer.

Other News

Some other news you might be interested in learning more:

1. Index Coop launches NFT Index JPG.
2. Injective Pro launches BAYC Floor Price Perpetuals
3. Sandbox is trying to raise $400 million at a $4B valuation.
4. Adidas Originals Into the Metaverse NFT holders can claim their physical products starting on April 28.

Closing Thoughts

All blue-chip teams delivered this week, sparking an insane increase in trading activities. Due to a short-term bearish outlook for ETH, because the Merge is delayed, we are going to see a small NFT bull.