NFT Weekly Recap - June Week3
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 once again. OpenSea total transactions were below $20 million for the last four days in a row. On a weekly basis, volume is down 23.56%. The exact number may not be accurate, because OpenSea's migration to the Seaport protocol has not been fully supported by most NFT data sites. But the trend is clear. Bear market continues.
The weekly average number of active traders fell 15.89% week over week. One can see from the gray line chart that trader numbers have been increasing since last Monday. But that was not enough to result in an increasing weekly average. Trader count decreased too much the week before.
In terms of floor price, most projects bounced back following the major NFT sell-off the week before last week. Yuga Labs' collections such as BAYC and MAYC remain the jewel in the crown. Goblintown is holding up pretty well after the team revealed their identities. Art projects such as Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro and Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs decreased by a fair amount. When major PFPs were going down in May, art projects went up. Now the reverse is happening. It is interesting to monitor if this divergence continues.
Notable Events
OpenSea Seaport Migration
OpenSea announced on June 14 that they officially moved from the Wyvern protocol to the Seaport protocol.
According to OpenSea's announcement, Seaport protocol comes with four primary upgrades.
Seaport lowers transaction gas fees significantly. OpenSea estimates that gas savings could be around 35%, with ERC-1155 transactions being a little cheaper than ERC-721 ones.
- Seaport allows traders to make collection offers, which was already available on other marketplaces such as LooksRare. But Seaport also enables a unique new feature called trait offer. One can make offers on items with a specific attribute within a collection. Good news for people looking for particular traits such as a golden fur bored ape.
- New OpenSea users will no longer have to pay an account initialization fee, which never made sense in the first place.
- Signatures to confirm actions in wallets will be much easier to read and understand. This is great because traders at the moment need to sign multiple messages in order to transact. For example, approving a collection and then listing a specific item require two separate signatures. More user-friendly process is good for mass adoption.
OpenSea first introduced Seaport on May 20, claiming that the core smart contract is open source and inherently decentralized. Everyone in the NFT community is welcome to building on top of it. So far, no other NFT marketplaces have shown any interest in adopting Seaport. Seaport is likely to remain OpenSea-specific in the near future.
Interestingly, most of the NFT analytics websites have not yet integrated the Seaport protocol. Data on those sites is missing about 70% of OpenSea transactions. This shows that the NFT analytics space is still early. In a mature market, OpenSea should have communicated their upgrade in advance so that various sites can plan ahead to maintain an accurate account of NFT transaction data.
CryptoPunks as Fine Art
Garga, co-founder of Yuga Labs, published a thread on CryptoPunks on June 19.
In the long thread, Garga first made clear that new commercial rights to CryptoPunks holders will be rolling out in the next couple of weeks. This was promised when Yuga Labs made the acquisition announcement. It's nice to see it finally getting carried out.
Second, Garga declared that Yuga Labs sees CryptoPunks as fine art. This is obviously different from Yuga Labs vision for Bored Ape Yacht Club. Bored apes are always marketed as membership passes that provide various utilities. As a result, there will be no brand deals or TV shows about CryptoPunks in the short term. Yuga Labs plans to take "a slow and thoughtful approach."
Yuga Labs hired Noah Davis from Christie's to lead CryptoPunks. Noah, a veteran in fine art, was responsible for bringing Beeple’s The First 5,000 Days to auction at Christie’s, along with the NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT auction which featured CryptoPunks and Bored Apes.
NFTs that belong to the art category did not perform well this year. Even top projects such as Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs' floor price decreased dramatically. Let's see what Noah plans for CryptoPunks down the road and how the market will react.
Surprisingly, Meebits is not mentioned at all in this thread. Noah seems to be in charge of CryptoPunks only. Does this signal that Yuga Labs will treat CryptoPunks and Meebits separately going forward? This is contrary to the popular impression that Meebits are a secondary collection to CryptoPunks as Mutant Apes are a secondary collection to Bored Apes. This distinction has not been reflected in price actions yet. But I would expect the CryptoPunks/Meebits price ratio to become greater.
Other News
Some other news you might be interested in learning more:
- NFT smart wallet Castle has closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round led by Dragonfly Capital.
- Immutable, a provider of Ethereum Layer2 scaling solutions, announced the launch of a $500 million venture capital fund to promote Web3 game adoption.
- The 8-week Arbitrum Odyssey program will officially start on June 21.
Closing Thoughts
The NFT market continues falling. NFT NYC takes place next week. May it provide some morale boost?
NFT