TokenSmart NFT Humpday Report #2: The NFT Boom
Welcome to the 2nd issue of the NFT Humpday Report, a weekly column covering and providing embedded analysis on the NFT economy’s biggest topics du jour. Brought to you by WIP meetup collaborators and nft42 community hub TokenSmart.
All-time NFT trading volume is quickly approaching $150 million, and last week daily NFT trading volume cleared $1 million for the first time ever. Combine this growth with new record-setting sales and major mainstream inroads, and we have the makings of an NFT boom.
CryptoPunk 4513 - image via Larva Labs
Why It Matters: In the cryptoeconomy proper, awareness around NFTs spiked and peaked late last month. That’s because 1) high-profile firms BlockTower Capital and Morgan Creek Digital announced they were ramping up their NFT investments, and 2) projects like Aavegotchi and Meme Protocol built new bridges between the NFT and DeFi communities.
Those announcements and developments led to a surge of new interest in NFTs and validated the hard work of NFT projects who have been chipping away impressively yet outside of the limelight in recent months.
However, before this September buzz had even started to cool, skeptics and the more fickle of crypto’s maximalist types decried the NFT ecosystem as being overblown, pointless, and in the middle of a market bubble.
The vast majority of these naysayers have only seen the iceberg’s tip — they haven’t tracked the NFT ecosystem’s growth in the trenches as users and minters, so their perspectives are limited to say the least. Win ‘em or lose ‘em, the good news is the proof’s in the pudding. And we had a lot of pudding this week.
What to Watch: Among the biggest stories in NFT Land these week were these blockbuster developments …
NFT OG project CryptoPunks set a 185 ETH sales record
NFT OG project CryptoKitties set a 200 ETH offer record
Major art auction house Christie’s auctioned its first NFT
NBA TopShots Pack Drops picked up heat 🔥
All Hail CryptoPunks
Big Sale: On Oct. 3rd, CryptoPunk 4513 sold on NFT marketplace OpenSea for 185 ETH, the highest price a CryptoPunk has ever sold for to date. This Punk bears the extremely coveted zombie and beanie traits, and its latest price tag reflects that.
The Bottom Line: Created by Larva Labs, the CryptoPunks project is among 2017’s class of OG NFT Ethereum efforts. As such, Punks now command respect from both casual onlookers and serious collectors. Their collectability is heightened by rarity (e.g. zombie Punks), trends (e.g. masked Punks amid COVID-19), and scarcity (i.e. there are only 10,000 Punks).
Amid the 2020 NFT boom, investors have been turning to CryptoPunks as a form of blue-chip stake in the NFT ecosystem.
That’s a Wrap: CryptoPunks are non-standard NFTs, so the ARK Gallery project recently released the Wrapped PUNKS tool. It lets users “wrap” CryptoPunks into standard ERC-721 NFTs that are tradable on marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible. The innovation has led to an acute surge of CryptoPunks volume and contributed to the recent rise of the CryptoPunks price floor (~4.4 ETH each at the time of writing).
CryptoKitties #1 Major Offer
What’s Up: Players of Dapper Labs’s digital cats game CryptoKitties took the Ethereum blockchain by storm in late 2017, leading to one of the first historic bouts of congestion for Ethereum. After that activity surge, the project fell from the cryptoeconomy’s limelight, leading some to mistakenly conclude the game had washed up. Yet reports of CryptoKitties’ death have been greatly exaggerated …
Big Offer: On Sept. 30th, collector Nate Alex made an offer on supremely collectable Kitty #1, “Genesis,” for a whopping 200 ETH.
The Takeaway: The high-profile offer, along with the 185 ETH sale of CryptoPunk 4513, shows the 1) NFT market is heating up, and 2) investors are increasingly looking at OG NFT projects as blue-chip investments. Look for CryptoKitties to heat up that much further if wrapped CryptoKitties start taking off again, too.
Christie’s Auctions 1st NFT
Big Deal: Premier British auction house Christie’s has traditionally dealt in markets like fine art, antiques, jewelry, and beyond. Now, the prestigious mainstream institution is making its first foray into NFTs.
What’s Happening: Artist Robert Alice is auctioning the Bitcoin-themed piece Block 21 as an NFT powered by programmable Ethereum art platform Async Art. The auction starts today, Oct. 7th. In anticipation of the event, the physical version of Block 21 was exhibited at Christie’s New York between Oct. 1st and Oct. 7th.
Image via Async Art, The Defiant
It Means: A major early breakthrough for the NFT ecosystem into the heart of the mainstream. The move comes not only as Async Art has been catching fire in recent months, but also as crypto-native fine art marketplaces like SuperRare and OpenSea just respectively broke their own monthly volume records last month. Christie’s is dipping its toes in the water now, which paves the way for the auction house and other mainstream institutions to wade in deeper.
NBA Top Shot Trading Heats Up
What’s Up: Dapper Labs’s latest flagship product is NBA Top Shot, an officially-licensed digital collectibles project based on signature NBA moments and players. The game is notably built on Dapper’s new app- and game-centric Flow blockchain.
Game (and Collect) On: The Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat are currently squaring off in the NBA Finals. The excitement around the matchup has translated into a surge of recent activity around NBA Top Shot packs. According to tracker site CryptoSlam, NBA Top Shots currently has the second-most 24-hr and 30-day sales among its listed crypto collectibles projects.
The Bottom Line: NBA Top Shots has the potential to be a breakthrough project in winning more mainstream users over to NFTs. The effort’s recent success shows it has the early magic to go the distance.
Looking Ahead …
The NFT boom is beginning to gain traction, whether naysayers want to believe it or not. Almost everywhere you look around the ecosystem, major developments are racking up. It’s this growth and these bets that are paving the way for what the NFT economy will look like in 10 years, 20 years, and beyond.
It’s all happening right in front of us, too. For example, the Untitled NFT Hackathon is starting tomorrow, Oct. 8th. Extremely bright minds are teaming up to do amazing collaborations at this event, so the NFT economy’s next hits are now just around the corner.