Top News

• Meta now lets you post your NFTs on both Facebook and Instagram
• Eminem, Snoop Dogg’s BAYC-inspired VMA performance slammed as money grab
• Formula 1 joins metaverse with two trademark filings for Las Vegas circuit
• Telegram Founder Is Consider Using NFTs to Sell Reserved Telegram Addresses
• Netflix is using NFTs to harvest engagement data
• MTV introduces the 'Best Metaverse Performance' award category
• New NFT Utility Platform Launches to Compete for 60M Twitch, YouTube Creators
• Nike is the World’s highest Earning Brand from NFT Sales
• Chingari launches first-ever video NFT marketplace Creator Cuts

Raises

• Animoca Brands’ Japan unit raises $45m at $500m valuation for NFT push
• Limit Break raises $200m
• Tokenproof raises $5m - Seed Round
• NFT Genius raises $10.5m - Series
• Yesports raises $3.8m
• INDEX GAME raises $1.7m
• Proof Collective raises $50m

NFT Market Overview

Volume per week

Transactions per week

Users per week

Main observations:

• Weekly NFT volume measured in ETH has seen a slight uptick since its previous week of ATL YTD. But the overall NFT market continues to trend lower and has dropped to levels previously unseen since Nov 2021
• Transactions and users per week have been trending up slightly indicating that current interest in NFT markets is most likely focused more on cheaper mints and secondary purchases
• The Blue Chip-10 Index is up 11.7% measured in the last 7D but is now down -13% YTD in ETH terms and -63% YTD in USD value.
  • Chromie Squiggle, Doodles, and Meebits have had the largest floor increases in the last 7 days
  • Sandbox LAND and Azuki have suffered -26% and -11% respectively in floor prices in the last 7 days

Marketplaces

LooksRare vs X2Y2 vs SudoSwap

Source: Nansen NFT Trends & Indexes, (as of August 29 2022)

• Sudoswap continues to grow in all metrics whether it be weekly volume, users per week or transactions per week. Despite the protocol being live for a few weeks only, it has overtaken LooksRare by a wide margin.

NFT Index Performance

Main observations

• In the last 7 days, Nansen’s NFT indexes have seen a slight recovery with Art-20 and Blue Chip 10 leading the pack
• All 6 NFT indexes continue to trend down in ETH terms and even the Blue Chip-10 Index is now negative YTD along with its peers
  • Game-50 continues to underperform against its peers and is down 77% YTD

An article on the composition of the indexes and its calculations can be found here

This Week’s Highlights

• The NFT market is starting to pick up after weeks of inactivity and lower volumes.
• Last week, only 5 projects managed to generate more than 2000 ETH in volume. This week, however, we had 9 projects that generated more than 2000 ETH in volume, which is a telling sign of a possible resurgence in the NFT market outlook.

DigiDaigaku

DigiDaigaku by Limit Break is the talk of the town this week. Gabe Leydon’s Limit Break has managed to raise $200mm, led by Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, FTX, and more. Gabe Leydon is betting on the term “free-to-play”, to “reinvent the gaming industry”. The memetic power that Gabe has garnered over the past few days has been quite spectacular and it will be interesting to see how the “free-to-play” and DigiDaigaku thesis plays out.

Holders will receive a free airdrop this Friday. The NFT will be stackable, burnable, and combinable, according to the founder. The snapshot will be taken on Thursday, September 1st.

One address to keep on the lookout for is sadguy.eth, a Smart NFT Sweeper, is currently #4 top holder with 70 DigiDaigaku NFTs. They started accumulating 137 Digi when it was only 0.04 ETH, in which 67 NFTs were transferred 67 to "Uncommon NFT Collector [0x8cab], who is now the #1 Digi holder. Although we cannot confirm the identity of sadguy.eth, their address & transactions are something to keep on the lookout for.

Moonbirds

PROOF Collective announced their $50M raise yesterday, led by a16z. After the announcement, there was a surge in inflow for Moonbirds and Moonbirds Oddities. The team also announced that a new 20k collection called Mythics will be launching soon. Some high-level info so far:

• 25 eggs will hatch every day
• Eggs will hatch randomly
• The expansion will be slow and thoughtful

The announcement was also jam-packed with other alpha leaks. Although the Mythics rollout is still unclear at the current time of writing, many suspects that the Moonbird Oddities will be burned in exchange for a Mythic. If this falls within the expectations of the community, the Moonbird Oddities collection will garner attention closer to the Mythics launch and we can observe a supply crunch incoming. For Moonbird holders, Kevin Rose has clarified on Discord that Moonbird holders will be guaranteed a Mythics airdrop. The team also announced that a DAO utility token will be released in Q1 2023. This news that supposedly was the key factor to induce price rallying for the Moonbirds collection caused a pull-back for short-term buyers. Although this utility token was teased beforehand, there hasn’t been an announcement that laid out concrete plans for the token.

Black Box by Renga

Black Box by Renga is a collection of mysterious boxes on Ethereum. Each Renga Black Box was airdropped to The Art of the Seasons NFT holders. Although the utility of the black boxes has not been confirmed by the team, there are speculations that the boxes will play an important role in their upcoming mint. According to the team, “The boxes contain the information pertinent to the past, present, and future of RENGA Factory. Each box opens a portal to a random archetype from worlds unknown in the RENGA universe.”

Smart Money Movements

As highlighted in the Market Overview section above, the weekly volume has been in a downward trend but has started to plateau out, hovering around yearly lows once again. Despite that, Art Party topped this week's Smart Mints chart, with 16 different Smart Minters picking up 17 ETH in volume. Art Party is a generative art project with a total supply of 1533 NFTs created by artist Todd James, which displays different artistic themes that appear in his exhibit work. James has designed iconic logos for celebrities such as Pharell and Eminem and collaborated with world-renowned brands like Adidas, Nike, and Billionaire Boys Club. The collection has amassed 259 ETH in total trading volume and is currently sitting at a 0.63 ETH floor price.

Zooming in on Smart Money activity on the collection, the dashboard above shows the balance and changes of holders, filtered by the Smart Money label. Since its inception, Smart Money buyers, including jayg_nft, Jimmy McNelis, Pranksy, and more, have not sold any NFTs yet. In fact, many of these addresses bought their first NFT from the collection within the past 48 hours.

Other collections picked up by Smart Minters this week include The Eye (for Adventurers), THREEFACE, Lasogette NFT, ENS, Black Box, Daydreamers, and JINGOU PASS. Particularly, ENS domains continue to be minted by Smart Minters, reflected by the retained volume and price action of ENS as a whole.

As for Smart Money activity on the secondary market, CryptoSimeji topped this week's chart with 22 unique Smart Buyers picking up an aggregate of 38 ETH worth of the project. CryptoSimeji is a collection of 10k mushroom PFPs created by Simeji, Japan's most popular keyboard app targeting Gen-Z. The project was minted on August 30th and has since accumulated ~1.1k ETH in trading volume and currently sits at a 0.17 ETH floor price.

Looking at top Smart Money balances, 🍄mario.eth holds the most amount of NFTs from the collection with over 128 in total. This wallet is also the second largest holder of the collection behind simejidao.eth. While we have not seen Smart Money selling activity yet, the volume has been rather muted after the first day. Although, there has been some selling coming from non-Smart Money addresses.

Other collections being bought up by Smart Money on the secondary market include Lasogette NFT, Commoners by Commonopoly, and Phoenixes.

On the sell side, Digidaigaku tops this week's chart when sorted by volume. 10 different Smart Sellers realized a total of 223 ETH worth of profits from the collection, which is to be expected from a free mint that quickly skyrocketed in value. Azukis, Chromie Squiggles, Black Box, and Moonbirds Oddities also saw some Smart Sellers realizing gains this week.

Solana NFTs

NFT Market Overview

Main observations:

• Volume for Solana NFTs sales has seen an uptick from the previous weeks, with Magic Eden’s volume increasing by over 75% from the past week
  • Increased activity could be brought about by better sentiments in the ecosystem, predominantly from the y00ts NFT project.
• Interestingly, users per week have been decreasing - which suggests that not many new users are being onboarded.
• Overall, the number of transactions has also dropped significantly - mostly brought about by the sharp drop in mint volume.
  • The number of transactions on Magic Eden has actually increased slightly from the past week, corresponding with the increase in volume - which suggests that users in the ecosystem are slowly starting to trade again.

Top Projects by 7D Volume

• Overall, volume is centered around more established projects such as DeGods, Okay Bears, and Blocksmith Labs.
• The top project for the week in terms of volume would be DeGods. The project has seen a sharp increase in floor price in the past 3 days, reaching an ATH of ~590 SOL.
  • The project gained traction from y00ts, a second project by the DeGods team which has taken over Twitter with y00tlist.

• ABC is the NFT project of HGESOL, a well-known whale in the Solana NFT ecosystem. The project was announced and minted out quickly at 1.23 SOL, despite the lack of socials or details about it.

  • Despite being a very new project, the team has quickly delivered by offering utility in the form of discounts on shopping.io for NFT holders.
  • He has also tweeted about (possible) future utility with the NFT project being intertwined with Hadeswap
    • an AMM NFT marketplace that allows users to trade/swap NFTs using liquidity pools.
  • Overall, the project has managed to gain a community in a short period of time with holders keeping their faith with HGESOL to bring about more utility for the project in the future.

  This Week’s Highlights

DeGods/y00ts

y00ts is the long-awaited second project of DeGods and has been gaining a lot of traction on Twitter with its unique application-based “scholarship”. Acceptance criteria is based on how the team views the individual can benefit the y00ts community. Besides DeGods holders, only individuals who receive the scholarship are able to mint y00ts, which increased the FOMO levels surrounding it.

y00tlist is used to publicly announce individuals that have been accepted into the community. This brought a lot of attention especially when prominent individuals such as cobie, farokh, zachxbt, and other celebrities were announced through Twitter. The traction it gained probably helped to onboard new users to the Solana NFT ecosystem as well, as seen in such tweets.

As a result, the floor price of DeGods increased to hit an ATH of around 590 SOL. It was also the first time in 3 months that there were significant increases in average price and volume, showing the effectiveness of y00ts’ marketing on the price action of DeGods. The sharp increase in average price on 31 August was attributed to a 7033.3 SOL sale of DeadGod #270, which is the 2nd highest sale recorded in Solana NFTs in terms of SOL.

DUST - the token of DeGods, will be the currency used to mint y00ts. The token has also seen a 2.5x rise in the past few days, possibly due to late entries for the scholarship applications as well as FOMO.

The project is due to launch on September 2, with a mint price of 375 DUST and a supply of 15,000 NFTs. As one of the most anticipated projects at the moment, it will be interesting to see how the initial price action will be and how it may hold up.

Tools for further research

NFT aggregators

• Gem
  • Gem recently launched on January 20.
  • Gem allows users to explore and collect NFTs across all the marketplaces on a single interface, giving you a birds-eye view of the market - ensuring you never miss out on a good deal.
• Genie
  • Batch buy & list NFTs across all major marketplaces in a single transaction. Save time & gas.
  • Genie was technically the first NFT aggregator in the NFT space.
• Hyperspace (Solana)
  • Hyperspace allow users to explore and collect NFTs across all the marketplaces on a single interface
  • Hyperspace allows users to track floor prices and volumes of NFT projects

Due diligence for minting

• Nansen’s guide here

Wallet management + tracking

• NFTBank.ai
  • This platform is a leading platform for tracking your NFT inventory
• Zapper
  • Zapper is a good tool for tracking an overview of your NFT portfolio
• Solsniper.xyz (Solana)
  • This platform allows you to track floor prices, volumes and an overview of your NFT portfolio

NFT Marketplaces

• Opensea
• LooksRare
• Rarible
• Mintable
• Mintbase
• Zora
• SuperRare
• Magic Eden (Solana)
• Solanart (Solana)
• Coral Cube (Solana)
• Yawww (Solana)