🦍BAYC goes Mutant, Total number of NFTs sold reaches 1 million
Visa buys Punk #7610 as a "historic commerce artifact", Budweiser buys beer.eth🍺
Dear NFTimer,
Congrats to all NFT artists! All together, you have sold 1 million NFT artworks!
CryptoPunk floor price is now at around 92 ETH. (high sales at the end of the newsletter) That is almost $300,000. I’m guessing it’s higher than any other social club, huh?😅 Fidenzas are also pretty hot right now. Fidenza #313 sold for 1,000 ETH, Fidenza #772 for 777 ETH and Fidenza #529 for 500 ETH. That’s almost a total of $6.4 million USD.
Okay, so do you remember Alethea AI, I reported it the last two weeks because it was ~crazy?~ Well apparently, the videos of intelligent NFTs also hit some other eyes as the company raised $16 million to create a metaverse populated by iNFTs. Raise included big-name investors like Mark Cuban, Dapper Labs, LD Capital, Metapurse. They want to improve NFTs into “fully interactive, engaging and autonomous agents that can learn and evolve from the environment.” So AIs in the shape of NFTs would be able to live and interact in this metaverse, and learn from each other. This reminds me of an NFT I saw and really liked this week: NFT Party. It’s fun to imagine such a place with the avatars as people hanging out.
🎨 NFTs
NFTX, where you can mint and trade NFT index tokens, has generated over $1 million in fees for liquidity providers.
Bored Ape Yacht Club sells $96 million USD worth of Mutant Apes in one hour. They sold 10,000 mutants and gave 10,000 serums to existing holders.
There’s a PFP project called Moonshot Bots, and I was shocked to see there is still a supply out of the 303 max. It’s designed to raise money for Gitcoin’s grants for Web3 projects & turns out each NFT costs more to mint than the previous one.😬The first one was 0.0033 ETH ($10) and the final one will be 3,038 ETH ($9.8 million)
Just after 20 days, 20 nouns, 20 sales, there is 2527 ETH (over $8 million) in the NounsDAO treasury.
OpenSea breaks records every week and had a $1.14 billion trading volume this week, up 170% from the previous week.
Yam DAO announces a YAM-themed spaceship NFTs.
SuperRare sold $100 million worth of artwork.
Doodle Labs, a new platform powered by Art Blocks generative minting technology will be bringing established artists and brands to blockchain through NFTs.
Two Cool Cats sold for 69.42 ETH and 50 ETH. I also recently learned that the artist behind Cool Cats (@cloncast) have been drawing blue cats throughout his career. With that kind of background, love and care for the art itself from his side, no wonder the project took off.
The cheapest EtherRock you can buy right now is $1 million.
Arizona Iced Tea announced that it bought a Bored Ape and used it on its branding. BAYC then said their use was not authorized since the owner is allowed to use the NFT as they see fit, but they are not allowed to use the BAYC logo and name, which Arizona did.
Upcoming NFT drop of Lobby Lobsters is raising funds for policy creation and lobbying for crypto! They’re giving 100% of primary sales and secondary fees to lobbying efforts.
Ringer #879 sold for 1,800 ETH ($5.66 million). Wow!! Art Blocks is on fire.
A new NFT project Cacti Club is launching this Thursday at 3pm EST. It has a special place for me because after reading and writing about NFTs for months, I’m launching my own project with some amazing people. The project consists of 9,999 3D rendered, randomly generated, use case-oriented Cacti. We have been working hard on this for a while, and I’m very excited for you all to see the Cacti.*
Bored Ape Yacht Club launched Mutants. You can either get one through Mutation, exposing a Bored Ape to a vial of Mutant Serum, or via public sale. All Mutants will be unrevealed until the sale concludes to ensure randomized distribution.
🔮 Metaverse News
Cryptovoxels minted 50 parcels for auction on MIAMI on August 24th. They will be auctioning 40-50 parcels every week.
I actually laughed when I saw this website… Zillow for the Metaverse! Ha-ha. Meet Parcel. They are hiring too.
🎶 Music
3LAU launches a blockchain music investment company to enable fans to earn money as well as the artists. It aims to democratize access to music by allowing listeners to both invest and own rights to their favorite songs and albums through special digital assets. The project is backed by Paradigm and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and got $16 million in seed funding.
👾 NFT Games
Axie Infinity has one of the biggest Discords… Capping at 800,000, being tied with likes of Minecraft and Fortnite.
Yield Guild Open happened between August 28th and 29th and distributed $35,000 in prizes.
Dark Horse DAO, a DAO for digital racehorses on the @zed_run platform, is now live.
Remember Supdrive - the NFT game we talked about last week? Some more clarification came over the week. Check it out here👇🏼
And the head of Youtube Gaming says he’s bullish on NFTs. OKKK!
⚽️ Sports
The winner of this contest wins a Crypto Punk. Post the top lineup in the NFL Pass by DraftKings. High stakes!
NBA Top Shot will launch its first Women’s NBA moments this week.
Previously unseen early career photographs of Kobe Bryant from 1999 will be sold via an NFT auction. All the proceeds will go to the Mamba & Mambacita Sports Foundation.
🎥 Movies
Producer of hit series like Entourage and Ballers, Rob Weiss will make a 10 episode series about crypto titled “Hold On for Dear Life,” a backronym for HODL. The show minted its own ERC-20 token so token holders can get a share of the profits, and also the token sales will be used to fund the series as well.
🔥 What else is hot?
CryptoPunks become the second project to cross the $1 billion USD trading volume mark after Axie Infinity. Who will be the next?
Budweiser buys beer.eth domain for 30 ETH (almost $100,000 USD), thus decentralized domain name sales jump 300%.
Project Galaxy announces an NFT pack with $300 million worth of perks which is a ‘hacker survival toolkit.’ It’s called “Shadowy Super Coder” as a nod to the joke that was trending after U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren said “crypto puts financial system in the hands of ‘shadowy super-coders.’ The pack has made lots of partnerships that end up being in the pack, such as 1 month developer plan from Tenderly, 1 Month API Growth Plan from Ankr, $500 developer credit from Torus, and more.
Facebook is ‘definitely thinking about’ supporting NFTs on Novi, the new digital wallet they are building.
Mirror is updating to ‘Editor 2.0’ that will make the writing experience much better. You can now weave multimedia content and economic participation into a cohesive narrative.
If we learned anything from Ether Rock, CryptoPunks and other older projects’ prices going through the roof, being the firsts matter. So here I present you a map of the first projects by @LeonidasNFT.
Deloitte’s annual global blockchain survey showed 76% of finance professionals think that digital assets/cryptocurrencies “will serve as a strong alternative to, or outright replacement for, fiat currencies in the next 5–10 years.” The challenges they saw were 1) 65% said existing financial infrastructure 2) 63% said cybersecurity and 3) 60% saw regulatory obstacles.
Visa, the global payments company, bought a Punk to add to their “collection of historic commerce artifacts.”
📖 Reading List
Thoughts on mechanism design for sales of limited-supply items like NFTs, tokens by Vitalik.
How does Christie’s see Punks? We can get a glimpse through their post “10 things to know about CryptoPunks”
🤪 Cool fun beans
Punk 7252 bought for 1,600 ETH ($5,332,000.00 USD)
Punk 6965 has a new bid of 1,700 ETH ($5,615,695.17 USD)
Punk 3831 has a new bid of 1,500 ETH ($4,671,659.91 USD)
Punk 2066 bought for 1,890 ETH ($6,079,052.70 USD)
You can have your NFT in real life on a plexiglass plate with Nifty Plate now for just $40!
Stephen Curry joins Bored Ape Yacht Club with a 55 ETH ($180,000 USD) purchase of an Ape. Then he sends a selfie to the Discord chat.😂
Did you know when CryptoPunks was first released, you could just claim one, for free🙃 Yeah, I know… The floor right now is at 76 ETH.
A meme any NFT buyer will relate to…
Tell me what you’re working on in the discussion thread! I’ll make sure to check it out, and maybe you’ll get a feature in the next NFTimes edition!
If you like this newsletter, please share it with your friends or whoever you think might like this. Meanwhile, follow timely news on Twitter. See you next week.
Aleyna
Disclaimer: Investing in NFTs comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. This newsletter is strictly educational and nothing we offer is financial advice. We are not professionals or licensed advisors.
*the writer has an investment in the Cacti Club project mentioned above.