As we enter the back half of 2022, the NFT market is adjacent to the broader crypto market: embarking down Bear St., with no real signs of redirection in sight yet. Daily sales volumes have dipped, Solana’s low gas fees and emerging community is positioning as a major threat, and OpenSea’s challenges continue – down a co-founder and up on suspicious flags on major collectibles.
It sets up an interesting storyline for the remainder of the year, and it’s hard to envision things getting too much worse than what we’ve seen so far into the year. Let’s take a moment to review all of the past week’s activity and action around NFTs.
This Week’s Non-Fungible Token News
OpenSea Co-Founder Steps Down
OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah announced his resignation from the platform this week, sharing on Twitter that he was leaving OpenSea to “focus on new ventures.” Atallah will remain on the board for OpenSea but expressed in a blog post his desire to shift back to his “primary passion: building something from zero to one.”
3AC’s NFT Holdings
The downfall of Three Arrows Capital, the massive crypto hedge fund, over the past couple months has been no quiet matter across the crypto community. This week, a new Dune Analytics dashboard outlines what’s believed to be a number of Ethereum-based NFTs that are in 3AC’s wallet, including a dozen CryptoPunks, roughly $2.5M worth of ArtBlocksCurated, and a variety of ArtBlocks, Autoglyphs, Chromie Squiggles and Mutant Apes and a lone Bored Ape.
Yuga Labs With ‘The Otherside’ Metaverse Test Run
We’re roughly a week away from the anticipated release of Yuga Labs formal Otherside Metaverse, but this past week we were able to get a sneak peak as load tests began to roll out. The Otherside has served as the primary extension of the developer’s flagship NFT, Bored Ape Yacht Club, which included ‘The Otherside’ metaverse land NFTs and now an incoming ‘video game’ esque metaverse for BAYC holders to virtually connect. Audio-visual effects on this past week’s load tests seemingly ran with little issues, but some users reported that they couldn’t access the platform, which was capped at 3,000 users.
What did everyone think of the otherside test today, smooth? Better without fog? #OthersideMeta #Metaverse pic.twitter.com/J5qln4IsCc
— Herman Narula (@HermanNarula) July 9, 2022
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Polygon (MATIC) will be the blockchain of choice for Reddit's latest project, Collectible Avatars. Short-term charts have boded well for MATIC despite mid-term pains through this year's bear market. | Source: MATIC-USD on TradingView.com
Bagners & Bots
‘Bagners’ have been the latest talk of the town among those watching the most meme-ifiable collections. It spread like wildfire, and there’s been some speculation around it’s true origins. Some have said it started with a simple misspelling in a group chat, others said it came from someone who bought the ENS domain ‘bagner.eth’ on accident (rather than ‘banger.eth’).
Regardless, it got hot quickly and it went to free mint within days of spreading. The mint was botted and sold out within seconds, turning to the resale market where results have been mild. At time of publishing, the Bagner floor is around 0.04 ETH. Critics have argued that it felt too inorganic and ‘influencer pump and dump’ esque. Either way, it seems with the free mint results that we’re hitting an NFT market that feels like sneaker resale with a higher difficulty level in spotting gems.
Reddit & Polygon’s New NFT Marketplace
Reddit has been no stranger and blockchain engagement. It’s been one of the leading social media platforms and firms to engage with the space, and it’s back again with a new NFT collection, titled Collectible Avatars. The collection will include unique items from independent artists, and Reddit elected to turn to the Polygon blockchain because of “low-cost transactions and sustainability commitments”. A new ‘Collectible Avatars’ subreddit has been created and the avatars can be expected to roll out over the coming weeks.
OpenSea Accidentally Blacklists Major NFTs
Nearly $30M worth of NFTs – totaling around 24,000 ETH, including a variety of BAYC, MAYC, Azukis, Doodles and more – are marked as ‘suspicious’ and blacklisted on the NFT market’s biggest marketplace, OpenSea, according to a widely reported Dune Analytics dashboard. Leading the way is Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs, which total in at nearly 270 flagged NFTs.
OpenSea critics have argued that the marketplace doesn’t thoroughly review flagged submissions enough, and others have said that OpenSea’s broader security processes are simply not up to par.
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Featured image from Pexels, Charts from TradingView.com
The writer of this content is not associated or affiliated with any of the parties mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.