NFT Weekly Recap - June Week2
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.
Trading volume is trending downwards. Daily volume was nearly $600 million on May 1st. None of the past 30 days saw it break $90 million. During the past weekend, daily volume was only a little above $30 million. On a weekly basis, trading volume is down 24.71%. Goblintown's meteoric rise attracted some attention and revived the market a bit the week before last week. But Goblintown's fall could very well be the final nail in the coffin for NFTs.
The number of daily active traders dropped by 10.66% last week. The downward trend is as obvious as the decreasing volume in the chart above. Given the overall sentiment around the crypto market, the daily trader count is likely to drop below 40,000 soon.
In terms of floor price, there are no winners. The biggest losers are the meme projects such as Goblintown and We Are All Going to Die. They fell as fast as they rose the week before. It's a 10% to 30% drop in floor prices across the board. Watch out for the projects that hold up relatively well. They are the ones that will survive the winter and bounce back when spring comes.
Notable Events
Sartoshi Quit
On June 9, Sartoshi, founder and artist of the mfers, announced that he would hand over the mfers contract to the community and permanently vanish.
It was always kind of expected that Sartoshi would leave at some point. After releasing the mfers, Sartoshi himself always took a hands-off approach. There was no official Twitter or Discord for the mfers. The community built "official" unofficial ones. There was also no roadmap or marketing efforts. Everything moved organically. Sartoshi himself screenshot some predictions and put them at the beginning of his final Mirror article.
While the community was not too surprised by his leaving, Sartoshi did irritate some members by his two actions.
First, while ownership of the mfers smart contract is transferred to the unofficial mfers multi-sig wallet, which has 7 og mfer signers, Sartoshi is only giving the multi-sig 50% of mfers royalties going forward. 25% goes to other mfers devs, including westcoastnft. But Sartoshi himself, after leaving the project, is still keeping 25%. This is questionable, but it is what Sartoshi decides to do. One of Sartoshi's earlier tweets perfectly explains it.
Second, Sartoshi released a collection called "end of sartoshi" and confirmed that "sartoshi will vanish forever sometime during the mint." About 17k pieces were minted for 0.069 ETH each. Sartoshi made around $2 million from the sale of this collection. This collection now trades at about 0.02 ETH on OpenSea. This feels more like a classic cash grab. Sartoshi projected a very bad image on himself by rugging his fans on his way out.
Mfers may or may not be remembered when the next bull market comes around. But Sartoshi's actions would only lower people's confidence in anonymous founders again, who could just vanish if things are going sideways.
Illuvium Land Sale
Despite the overall market conditions, Illuvium sold 20,000 pieces of land via its own marketplace. There will be 100,000 pieces of land in total, so this is just the first batch. The utility of such land is that owners can extract fuel that can be sold to other players for a potential profit.
As reported by Decrypt, among the first 20,000 pieces, 19,969 plots were sold via Dutch auction. Prices started at 2 ETH for Tier 1 plots, 6 ETH for Tier 2, 20 ETH for Tier 3, and 80 ETH for Tier 4.
Illuvium took in more than $72 million during the sale. Among the proceeds, 4,018 ETH will be redistributed to stakers of the game's ILV token, while 239,388 of the game’s sILV2 token will be burned.
While projects such as Otherside and Ember Sword raised much more from their land sale, it is remarkable for Illuvium to achieve over $72 million in current market conditions. With new capital in hand, will we be able to see a playable Illuvium soon?
Other News
Some other news you might be interested in learning more:
- Gala Games’ GRIT, a Wild West-themed battle royale game, will be the first Web3 game on the Epic Games Store.
- Coinbase Wallet announces support for Polygon NFT.
- Parcel, a real estate NFT marketplace, closed a $4 million seed round led by Framework Ventures.
- PartyDAO, the parent of NFT bidding platform PartyBid, has closed a $16.4 million round of funding led by a16z.
Closing Thoughts
The market is certainly crashing. It could crash even harder, like Bitcoin at the end of 2013. Holding is never easy. And watch out for the projects that hold up relatively well. They are the ones that will survive the winter and bounce back when spring comes.
NFT