NFT Market Update — Week Ending July 22nd, 2022
State of the Market, Minecraft Bans NFTs, Crypto Insider Trading Case, DALL-E Beta Opens, 100 ETH ENS Fumble, and more!
Curated by the WHALE Market Strategy team: Ekaitza, Frank, and Song 📊
To get the full report and discuss market activity with the team, Join WHALE
📈State of the Market📉
Market activity for the past 7 days:
The readings from the last 7 days are mixed. While some measures went up, others dropped mildly. It looks like the NFT cool down period is still not finished yet. (source)
- WHALE MEMBERS Market Strategy Team
⚖ NFT Fear and Greed Index ⚖
The NFT Fear and Greed Index (NFGI) reached 39 (Thurs. Jul 21st, 2022), near flat to the readings of the previous two weeks (38, 39).
Readings for the NFGI are as follows: 0–20 = Extreme Fear, 20–40 = Fear, 40–60 = Neutral, 60–80 = Greed, 80–100 = Extreme Greed.🥇 Top 3 Sales 🥇
Top sales in USD for the past 7 days.
- Cryptopunks #4156 2691 ETH (US $3 M)
- Cryptopunks #6137 350 ETH (US $472 K)
- Cryptopunks #7360 313 ETH (US $425 K)
Suspected wash trading transactions have been removed.
This week’s top 10 list is purely PFPs. Punks, BAYC and Goblintown showed up on the list. Punks got the upper hand, took all the top 3 positions. Like last week, we removed Loot NFT due to the wash trading concerns.
Recent Events
⚖ Ex-Coinbase Manager Arrested in Insider Trading Case ⚖
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan brought their first ever case for insider-trading in digital coins, charging a former Coinbase Global Inc. product manager with leaking information to help his brother and a friend buy tokens just before they were listed on the exchange. The arrest of Ishan Wahi, who helped oversee listings for a Coinbase unit focused on investment products, follows a sweeping probe involving the Southern District of New York and the SEC, who also allege that Wahi violated the agency’s anti-fraud rules.
❌⛏ Minecraft “Bans” NFTs ⛏❌
Mojang released a statement declaring that they will not be integrating blockchain technology into their gaming infrastructure and will not align with Web3 developments going forward. Refusing to create gaming assets as NFTs will deny gamers the real possibility of having true ownership over assets that can be transacted on a network like ethereum. This decision will split the camp as some gamers or potential users of the company’s games want the assets as NFTs while others have cried foul of the blockchain technology and do not want it disrupting the centralized model that is currently used.
Mojang owns the hugely successful Minecraft and they announced, to the detriment of NFT Worlds, that they will ban anything related to blockchain in Minecraft. The floor price for plots for NFT Worlds fell substantially to 1.11 ETH on the day of the announcement, whereas only 6 months ago they were selling for 10 ETH. Daily sales volume surged to an all-time high of 555 units with over 587 ETH being transacted on the day. NFT Worlds’ developers derided the decision as being “out of nowhere” and said that they were trying to get in touch with Microsoft to discuss the decision, find out “what the true internal motivators may have been,” and find an “alternative outcome.” If this is fruitless, the developers said, “we pivot.” As to what the project could pivot to, they floated essentially building their own version of Minecraft, or developing a “GameFi as a service” platform. We saw some price recovery after the NFT World announcement.
The CEO for Epic Games followed up with a tweet stating that “We definitely won’t ban NFTs or force our views onto developers and players”.
Are Mojang failing to adapt or placating the current gaming community sentiment?
🤢 BAYC Whale Loses 100 ETH on ENS Joke Bid 🤢
Franklin Caldwell, or “franklinisbored” as he is known on Twitter lost 100 ETH in the ENS name he minted. Some ENS domain names have been receiving high bids lately, and users in the space have called out the fact that these bids were being placed by the owners of the domain names themselves to pump up the price. Franklin minted stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth name and put it on sale then in another account, he put a 100 ETH bid on it. This joke gained traction and soon this name was sold for 1.9 ETH. Unfortunately, Frank forgot to cancel the 100 ETH bid, the buyer quickly sold the name to Frank himself for a 97.5 ETH profit (after fees). This added some fun to this week’s crypto news.
🤖 DALL·E Now Available in Beta 🤖
DALL·E is now available in beta. The AI system, that creates realistic images and art from a description in natural language, began the process of inviting 1 million people from their waitlist. Every DALL·E user will receive 50 free credits during their first month of use and 15 free credits every subsequent month. Each credit can be used for one original DALL·E prompt generation , returning four images , or an edit or variation prompt, which returns three images. Users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise. This includes images they generated during the research preview. Users have told us that they are planning to use DALL·E images for commercial projects, like illustrations for children’s books, art for newsletters, concept art and characters for games, moodboards for design consulting, and storyboards for movies.
💰 Optic raised $11M to build NFT Anti fraud solutions 💰
Optic, a startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to authenticate non-fungible tokens (NFTs), unveiled its business on Wednesday and raised $11 million in a seed round led by Kleiner Perkins and crypto-native investment giant Pantera Capital. The company will use the funds toward building out the cost-intensive infrastructure and hiring engineering talent.
🟢🟣🔴 Choose Your Currency — Only 5 Days Remain! 🟢🟣🔴
The Currency by Damien Hirst. There are less than 5 days remaining for those who want to burn their NFT by Hirst. The deadline is on July 27th at 10am EDT. Of the 10,000 NFTs that were created, currently 3,500+ have been burned and redeemed for a physical. Any of the NFTs that are not burned will result in the destruction of the physical piece once an exhibition has been held. This is perhaps one of the most interesting experiments to-date regarding the desire to own a physical piece or a NFT and will surely draw media attention once again to the space.
🎯 Notable Drops 🎯
- NessGraphics returned to Nifty Gateway with B34RM4RK3T on Saturday July 22nd.
- RTFKT x Nike Phygital AR Hoodie launched its AR Genesis Hoodie NFT, which comes paired with the physical item from July 21st to July 28th.
- MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ released THE HERO 25FPS on the tezos network on July 25th.
📚 Weekly Reading 📚
- AN INTERVIEW WITH SNOWFRO by Alex Estorick
- History of Crypto Art by Martin Lukas Ostachowski
- [Generative] Art is Crime in Latvia by Shvembldr
- The Metaverse Will Reshape Our Lives. Let’s Make Sure It’s for the Better by Matthew Ball
- Framing the Future of Web3.0 Metaverse Edition by Goldman Sachs
- Metaverse and Money: Decrypting the Future by Citi GPS
- Time’s new cover features Aku
🐳 The Tao of WhaleShark 🦈
On (Mis)Fortune -
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