NFT Weekly Recap - May Week5

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.

On a weekly basis, trading volume dropped another 14.88%. Daily volume dropped below 30,000 $ETH for six of the seven days last week. The last time the market got this quiet was during early December last year.

This week will be the last where the glorious May 1st is still included in the chart above. We had a daily volume of 217,143 $ETH on May 1st, mostly thanks to the secondary sales of Otherdeed.

We had a daily volume of 27,426 $ETH last Sunday (May 29th). This could be an unfair comparison in some eyes, but the difference between the two is -87.37%. Adding the significant drop in $ETH price, the number looked even worse in USD terms. On May 1st, $ETH price was $2,804; it was $1,779 on May 29th. The USD volume difference between May 1st and May 29th was -91.99%.

The interesting phenomenon of declining volume and rising trader count continues. The number of daily active traders increased by 9.61% last week. It managed to stay above 40,000 on the first two days and recovered to over 50,000 on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. However, as mentioned, more traders actually generated less volume. Trading volume per trader decreased by another 22.34%.

In terms of floor price, most long-standing projects fell once again, while a couple of newcomers stood out. BAYC dropped by 7.9%, while MAYC decreased by 8.11%. Azuki and Moonbirds' losses were in double-digits. Goblintown, which was covered in last week's recap, rose to the top with a weekly gain of 2027.65%. OSF's Rektguy also did well with an increase of 139.01%. The bear-market-themed projects are having their moments.

Source: flips.finance

Notable Events

Writing NFTs

Mirror, the decentralized publishing platform, introduced writing NFTs on Thursday.

Source: Twitter@viamirror

Mirror now allows writers to mint their writing as a digital collectible. Writers can also customize the price and supply. Writing NFTs are completely free for writers to create. The NFTs are created on Optimism, an Ethereum L2.

The article "Introducing Writing NFTs" itself is released as an NFT at 0.01 $ETH a piece and has a total supply of 420 pieces. It is already sold out at the time of writing. The secondary market price for a copy has 10x'ed to about 0.1 $ETH.

Along with writing NFTs, a global leaderboard and collector profile pages are released.

According to Mirror's announcement, "the leaderboard will rank the most popular entries based on the amount of ETH raised and the number of collectors, exposing more writers – and their most resonant ideas – to a wider audience." An innovative way to rank blog posts.

At the moment, "Introducing Writing NFTs" tops the leaderboard. However, only primary sales are included in the ranking. Maybe secondary sales will also be included in the future. The sales number is not looking great after five days. The top 10 collectively have generated 15.56 ETH in sales. That translates to a daily volume of 1.556 $ETH. I'd consider an NFT collection dead if it only has a single-digit $ETH volume every day.

Source: Mirror.xyz

Again from Mirror's announcement, "collector profile pages allow community members to display the Writing NFTs they’ve curated on Mirror. It’s where readers might go to find new writing from trusted sources — the equivalent of perusing an esteemed friend’s bookshelf. In turn, they can build their own reputation as collectors."

But the collector profile page is not well designed. Currently, it is only marginally better than the OpenSea collection page. If a collector owns more than a few pieces, his or her profile page just shows the collection in seemingly random order. There are no ways for collectors to organize the display of their collections or for visitors to filter or search within collections.

Source: Mirror.xyz

On top of the shortcomings mentioned above, there are so few pieces of writing that actually have historical significance. The original Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto definitely stands out. Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum white paper also counts. But what else?

On the demand side, the outlook is not promising either. a handful of individuals may enjoy collecting other people's writings. But a piece of writing is too complicated to be hyped. Poems and novels, maybe. But nobody collects academic papers or news articles.

Writing NFTs is an interesting innovation. But writing NFTs is unlikely to get huge.

Hotel Reservations as NFTs

Dominican Republic resort Casa de Campo signed a deal with Pinktada to convert hotel reservations into NFTs.

Casa de Campo Resort & Villas opened in La Romana almost 50 years ago, as the first resort in the Dominican Republic. It's a luxury resort. According to the website, its rate starts at $439 per room per night.

Source: Casa de Campo

The idea of converting hotel reservations into NFTs and allowing them to be traded is very interesting.

Tickets and reservations are a big untapped opportunity for NFTs. Event ticket revenue alone is estimated to be $72.31 billion in 2022. And there are obvious problems with the existing solution.

Look no further than the chaotic UEFA Champions League Final held in Paris last weekend. It was delayed by a good 35 minutes, because of "industry-scale ticketing fraud" according to French officials. People with fake tickets got into the stadium, while those with real tickets could not. Those who could not get in obviously were not happy. The situation deteriorated rapidly, which ultimately led to French police tear-gassing frustrated fans outside the stadium.

If the tickets are issued as NFTs and traded on OpenSea, not only can scams be avoided, but UEFA could also generate additional income by taking a share in secondary sales as well.

Similarly, for Casa de Campo, this move not only serves as good marketing to attract rich crypto nerds to play golf in the Caribbeans but also helps it manage its bookings. Previously, guests who'd like to cancel their reservations need to contact the hotel. The refund process is not simple either. Now, the hotel takes no part. The guests could simply sell their reservations directly to others. Authenticity is easily ensured because everything on chain is public. The buyer could verify that the reservation was issued by the hotel and check the entire transaction history.

There are many more ways NFTs can shape the world in addition to monkeys as profile pictures. Casa de Campo is experimenting with one of them. I look forward to seeing others. Compared to Steph Curry's using a Bored Ape as his profile picture, this may be the real NFT adoption.

Other News

Some other news you might be interested in learning more:

• Doppel, a real-time, cross-chain monitoring service for detecting NFT fraud and counterfeits, has closed a $5 million seed round led by FTX Ventures.
• FanTiger, a music NFT platform, closed a $5.5 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital.
• NFL will release an NFT-based game in partnership with Mythical Games.
• NFT application Primitives has closed a $4 million seed round led by Redpoint.

Closing Thoughts

Bear market continues and is likely to continue for a while. Just hang in there. Maybe you could consider a couple of nights at Casa de Campo to support the development of reservation NFTs?