Who Da Real MVP?

As OpenSea looks to solidify its place at the top for another consecutive week, Magic Eden has quietly crept back to the No.2 spot, albeit having just 13% of OpenSea’s weekly trading volume. 

Source: DappRadar; Snapshot taken 25 July 2022

While the hype for CryptoPunks has somewhat tapered off for now, secondary sales on X2Y2 are still showing impressive figures. Despite all the wash trading, real trading volumes increased by 15% compared to last week, almost 3x the weekly volume on LooksRare.

New Faces, New Marketplaces

As the first month of the second half of 2022 draws to a close, two new exciting marketplaces debuted recently and have quickly made their mark on the NFT community - Sudoswap and Yawww. While both of these platforms function mostly like OpenSea or Magic Eden, they each have their own unique features, for traders, collectors and just about everyone else.

Sudoswap allows users to sell their Ethereum-based NFTs through the SudoAMM, where you can create liquidity pools for NFTs with customizable bonding curves. In short, users can trade their NFTs similar to how they can trade ERC-20 tokens on any DEX. You can even ‘provide liquidity’ by depositing NFTs together with a certain amount of ETH to earn trading fees.

Unlike conventional marketplaces which require users to manually ‘snipe’ an NFT if it reaches their desired price, Sudoswap lets users create trading pools purely for trading NFTs at specific prices, akin to setting a limit order on an exchange. You can even adjust the price change for each subsequent NFT traded, allowing you to set lower prices as the pool purchases more NFTs, or vice versa when more NFTs get sold from the pool.

Sudoswap Pool Parameters (Source: Sudoswap)

On the other hand, Yawww is an OTC platform for Solana NFTs that allows its users to choose the amount of fees to pay to the collection’s creator (and yes, that includes 0%). There is also a subscription service where users can pay $YAW (the protocol’s native token) for reduced platform fees and other benefits. With these fee reductions, it is possible for users to get much better deals on popular collections such as Okay Bears and Degods, as prices will tend to be lower. 

The platform also supports P2P lending using NFTs, allowing users to use their NFTs as collateral for SOL-denominated loans. Anyone can create a loan request with their own customized terms and conditions, which will then be open to the public for funding. If you don’t agree with the terms, you can also make a loan offer, with the adjusted terms, to prospective borrowers.

Yawww NFT Collateralized Loans (Source: Yawww.io)

Within just two weeks of the official release of both protocols, Yawww has claimed to be the 2nd most popular NFT marketplace on Solana, with over $100,000 in daily trading volume, while Sudoswap's AMM has generated over $1.1M in organic trading volume since its inception. While this is a promising start, they are still a far cry away from giving the top marketplaces a run for their money. 

While Yawww has announced an airdrop to incentivize NFT listings on its platform, no such promise has been made for Sudoswap thus far. Of course, if you want to try your luck, it may be worth your time to play around with some of their features, including buying and selling NFTs, as well as creating custom NFT pools, which currently only cost slightly less than $10 to perform.

Top Collections of the Week

Source: OpenSea; Snapshot taken 25 July 2022

Moonbird and Moonbird Oddities have taken flight and they are back on top of the pecking order, with Oddities even landing in the Top 2 spot amongst the most traded collections of the week - but not for a good reason. The highly anticipated reveal of Moonbird Oddities finally took place on 21 July but the results were…not well-received by the community  to say the least.

MoonBirds Oddities 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/3xIzS1mrE1

— ThreadGuy.eth 🧵 (@notthreadguy) July 20, 2022

It would seem that Moonbird had decided to take a leaf out of Goblintown’s ugly-beauty book but instead of hopping aboard a hype train, it flopped, tumbled and crashed in the headwind of angry FUD that ensued post-revelation. Oddities’ floor price took a nosedive immediately after the event, plunging from over 3 ETH to 1.8 ETH (-44%) within the span of just one hour. At the time of writing, Moonbird Oddities is trading at just 1.2 ETH, down 62% since its unveiling.

To add fuel to the already raging fire, Moonbirds announced the tier reward for hodlers who finally reached Silver Nest. For those who are unaware, Moonbirds can be “nested”, which is essentially soft-staking your NFT in return for certain rewards. Do this long enough and your Straw Nest will eventually be upgraded into a Bronze Nest, Silver Nest, and ultimately, a Gold Nest. Having the Nesting mechanism in place meant that Moonbird were incentivized to HODL and with a lower “circulating supply”, the NFT collection managed to fetch eye-watering prices as high as 38.5 ETH at its peak.

Now back to the Silver Nest rewards. To reward the loyalty of its diamond hand members, Moonbirds rolled out the following for hodlers that achieved Silver Nest tier:-

The underwhelming nesting rewards (at least relative to hodlers’ expectations)  triggered massive outrage amongst hodlers, and caused Moonbird’s floor price to suffer a similar fate to the Oddities collection, plummeting from 26.8 ETH to just 19 ETH (-29%) within the same time frame. But despite all these, a large majority of the Moonbird NFTs still remain nested. A whopping 97% of the 10,000 supply was staked before the week, and even after all the criticisms, over 96% are still staking for that next tier of Nest. 

While hodlers may quibble about the measly rewards for their Silver nesting, it’s important to remember that holding a Moonbird by itself already functions as an exclusive pass into Proof’s much desired private Discord. At the beginning of the project, the founders which includes Kevin Rose had also committed to various benefits (which might include airdrops), and also the most ambitious promise - a new media company. These commitments understandably take time to deliver, and for now hodlers still seem to be willing to be patient and trust in the founders.   

NFT collections are more than just being pretty JPEGs. The team and community matter too and based on what we’ve seen so far, these two driving forces (plus hopium) are more than enough to keep the Moonbird collections afloat. In the grand scheme of things, 2 months is still too short a time to label a project as a ‘bust’ but time will tell if Proof can indeed deliver, eventually. 

Meanwhile, the Yuga collections (BAYC, Cryptopunks, MAYC, Otherdeed) still dominate the upper echelons of the weekly volume chart, but both their volume AND floor price continue to slip. This was more than enough room for The Potatoz worm their way in to steal the top spotlight for the week. Information is sparse for now but future utility has been teased, with The Potatoz being only the first of the many free mint perks that comes with owning You the Real MVP. 

What else are we paying attention to

Minecraft Marks NFT Worlds for Death

This week, Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, made an official announcement last week that NFTs, put simply, were “not welcome” in Minecraft, and one project, in particular, paid the price.

NFT Worlds daily floor price (Source: CoinGecko)

NFT Worlds, a play-to-earn gaming hub built on top of Minecraft, saw the price of its land NFTs plunge by 67%, from 3 ETH to just over 1 ETH when the announcement was published. Similarly, the price of its native token, WRLD, also dropped sharply. In a nutshell, the platform allows various groups and projects to build their own decentralized metaverses on top of the various land NFTs, while players can earn WRLD through in-game events and contests. 

However, the creators of NFT Worlds have since fired back, declaring their intent to create a new game to supersede Minecraft, which will be familiar to older players and free for all to enjoy. Since they released their bold statement, the floor price of NFT Worlds experienced a slight recovery back to 1.5 ETH, but this may not last for long.

Given the particularly choppy market we’re facing right now, there could be more forced sellers as the broader crypto market continues to go lower. And to state the obvious, creating a game from scratch isn’t something you can do overnight. Transitioning away from Minecraft will be a relatively huge undertaking, especially when so many crypto communities have built their servers on NFT Worlds using their infrastructure.

As NFT Worlds begins its development journey, one cannot help but think of what could go wrong. Technical challenges, delays, and worst of all, failing to meet the promises and expectations of players. However, if they pull it off, the hype behind a ‘P2E Minecraft’ narrative could catapult the project and its NFTs / tokens to greater heights. 

Trident DAO

While it may have initially started as another Olympus fork, Trident DAO is looking to make waves in the GameFi space through their PvE campaigns and free-to-play PvP arenas. Originally conceptualized in 2021, the Trident DAO protocol was launched on the Harmony network earlier this year, together with its native token, PSI. Players had the opportunity to face off against the first boss, also known as the Kraken. The fastest players to come out victorious against the Kraken and future bosses will be provided with rewards such as NFTs, in-game skins, and weapons.

The Kraken (Source: Trident)

As of the team’s latest update, the protocol will soon migrate to Avalanche, before the release of Trident V2 and their native DEX, OasisSwap. Besides that, the next boss, The Goblins, is also coming soon, along with the full release of Trident DAO’s PvP mode. in the meantime, you can start practicing your skills by taking a shot at the Kraken. Don’t worry, it’s free-to-play, but be warned, it’s more difficult than it seems!

This article was produced in collaboration with Dillon Yap. You can follow him on Twitter here.