A Look Into This Weekend's NFT Action

Market Update

Price action for majors has been awful as of late, but there’s a ray of hope with flows starting to pick up in the last couple of hours. Avalanche ecosystem coins took a beating after Fantom and Celo both announced liquidity mining programs.

The Endless Open Sea

OpenSea continues to dominate the NFT market, accounting for over 95% of total volume. Daily volume hit an all-time high this Sunday with a $300M turnover.
Since June, the number of unique users that have interacted with OpenSea has more than doubled thanks to the NFT mania.
OpenSea recorded sales of over 1.5M NFTs in August, and the company grossed $215M in fees so far this month.

Punks Keep Climbing Higher

Over the weekend, news that Chinese billionaires are scooping punks circulated on Crypto Twitter. This induced peak FOMO that drove CryptoPunk’s floor price up to as high as ~140 ETH from ~90 ETH within just 2 short days.
As NFTs gain traction among the mainstream, the flex and provenance value from owning scarce, blue-chip NFTs such as CryptoPunks should increase over time.
Delphi’s very own gmoney also talked about the paradigm shift in marketing that NFTs bring forth with Visa’s CryptoPunk purchase. Instead of marketing with expenses (Facebook/YouTube/Google Ads), owning a CryptoPunk as a brand also allows brands to reach crypto communities while having a marketing asset sit on the balance sheet.

Mutant Ape Launch

On top of Stephen Curry’s BAYC purchase over the weekend, the long-awaited final stage of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s roadmap 1.0 ends with a bang with the Mutant Ape Yacht Club airdrop.
BAYC is a project with an extremely vibrant community and one of the most decentralized PFP communities. With the hype that has garnered and a fresh novelty factor, MAYC floor price outperformed BAYC and is up by nearly 2x since launch. Apes together very strong!

Explosive Week for Art Blocks

Art Blocks had an explosive week with ~80,000 ETH of volume coming through. This anomaly mostly stems from several high-profile purchases of Curated Art Blocks such as Fidenzas, Ringers, and Squiggles.
Art Blocks has several different series of art under the same umbrella. Curated projects are selected by the Art Blocks curation board and are typically the most desirable collections. Upon launching a curated project, the artist can launch one project of their choice on the Art Blocks Playground. An example of this would be ZeBlocks – their successful Unigrids Curated drop (currently 32 ETH floor) has allowed them to launch another project called Beatboxes (currently 4.4 ETH floor) on the Art Blocks Playground. Art Blocks Factory admission requirements on the other hand are a lot more relaxed and projects launched here typically have a lower floor price.
While Curated drops remain the most attractive for collectors and speculators, Factory and Playground drops have been garnering more attention too. If you’re interested in learning more about Art Blocks, keep your eyes peeled for content dropping this week — exclusively for Delphi Digital Institutional subscribers. Subscribe now if you don’t want to miss it!

Notable Tweets

Fantom follows Polygon and Avalanche with ecosystem-wide liquidity mining

Announcing a 370 million FTM incentive program for builders!

If you’re a protocol team, we’ll reward you for sustaining and increasing your TVL on Fantom.

Start building today! #buildonfantom https://t.co/AFvAayhsEe

— Fantom Foundation (@FantomFDN) August 30, 2021

Alameda joins the JPEG frenzy

Alameda just bought the 326 ETH Fidenza, 220 ETH Ringer, and 68 ETH Subscape.

0x84d34f4f83a87596cd3fb6887cff8f17bf5a7b83@nansen_ai

— JPicL (@JPicL) August 30, 2021

A detailed write-up on Fractional

Over $450 million has traded on @fractional_art since it started 2 months ago.

This protocol allows NFT owners to fractionalize value with others via fungible ERC20 tokens.

This weekend I read all of their code, and made some notes about how it works ?https://t.co/5oSMd26yzW

— g.mirror.xyz (@strangechances) August 30, 2021