Market Update

BTC & ETH opened the Asia session with a fair bit of selling leading to a weaker European session. With EIP-1559 going live today, a weak “sell the news” event played out right before the US session. NFTs continue their run. Over 1,700 ETH has been burnt at the time of writing this report.

ETH Options Put Call Ratio At A 3-Month Low

There’s been a notable increase in open interest and volume on ETH options. With the much-anticipated EIP-1559 going live in today’s London hard fork, the most obvious theory is that traders have been using derivatives, such as options, to speculate on the outcome.

The vast majority of ETH option activity came from call buying, implying bullishness. But this bullish sentiment isn’t short-term. Today’s most popular options were ETH calls with strike prices of $50,000 and $40,000 that expire in March 2022. Talk about high-time preference!

Bored Apes Together Strong

The average sale price of Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) avatar NFTs continue to make new highs (most likely due to confirmation of a Christie’s auction). At the same time, the community grows at a steady pace.
The BAYC distribution is relatively widespread with ~70% of holders owning 1 compared to just 80 holders (~1%) holding more than 10. With 5,000+ unique owners and counting, BAYC has proven itself to be the most decentralized (in terms of BAYC concentration) and vibrant Discord community the profile picture (PFP) NFT space has to offer.

OpenSea Volume Set To Break Record

As the NFT season heats up, OpenSea processed 66% of its total volume in July in just 6 short days. OpenSea is definitely set for a record-breaking August! At this pace, OpenSea would be on track for $898m of total volume in August, which would mark a 169% month-over-month increase. It’s far too early to speculate on how the rest of the month will shape up, but it’s hard not to take note of OpenSea’s eye-popping growth as of recent.
Led by significant capital deployment into CryptoPunks, PFP NFTs price floors in general are benefiting heavily from a hype cycle. As usual, we’d like to caution Delphi Daily readers that most of these NFTs are called illiquid JPEGs for a reason. Don’t be caught holding a heavy bag – ape responsibly.

Solana & Terra DeFi At ATHs

As the Ethereum community celebrates EIP-1559 and NFT seasons, the Terra & Solana ecosystems are flourishing behind the scenes with their DeFi TVL breaching & approaching all-time highs respectively.
This surge in TVL is likely contributed by a flourishing DeFi ecosystem with strong ecosystem asset price performance. In the Solana ecosystem, this TVL is primarily contributed by Mercurial Finance. In the Terra ecosystem, most of the growth in TVL came from Spectrum & Lido. Check out DefiLlama’s DeFi Dashboard if you’d like to dive deeper.

Notable Tweets

Punk floor hits 40 ETH.

It costs at least 40 eth to own 1 cryptopunk

— gmoney.eth (@gmoneyNFT) August 5, 2021

NFT influencer diamond hand ratio. Choose wisely!

Diamond hands ratio: Number of NFTs up for sale/total supply@fvckrender, @Micah_Johnson3 & @XCOPYART communities have DIAMOND HANDS. pic.twitter.com/A6kMwumXgB

— The Blockchain Review (@blockreview_) August 5, 2021

EIP-1559 transaction type transactions peaked at 5%.

Peaked at ~5% of transactions being type EIP-1559 so far pic.twitter.com/wegDsMvbz9

— Alex Svanevik ✨ (@ASvanevik) August 5, 2021