Market-Wide Selloff, NFT Marketplaces, & Web3 Communities

Chart of The Day: Liquidations Amid Market Selloff

At 10AM EST, Putin officially announced the invasion of Ukraine, which led to a market-wide selloff.
Asia equity indices like HSI (-3.21%), STI (-3.49%), NI225 (-1.81%), and KOSPI (-2.60%) sold off and SPY currently trades at -1.69% during pre-market hours. BTC and ETH are down -8.6% and -12.1% respectively.
The Dollar (+0.47%) and Gold (+2.32%) reacted positively as investors now see them as safer assets.
Crypto leveraged traders were caught in the sell-off, which caused over $450M of liquidations in the past 24hr, 73% of which belongs to Longs. In addition, ETH is now at risk of another 7 Siblings liquidation event if ETH hits ~$2.1K.

X2Y2 Launch, Universe.xyz Progress Update, Upcoming Mints

[Excerpt from our weekly NFT Insights]

Universe.xyz is worth watching more closely now that the launch of their decentralized marketplace is imminent, likely within the next 2 – 3 weeks. This is the culmination of the team’s development efforts since mid-2021. The Universe team is taking a long-term, product-driven approach, building and architecting their marketplace from scratch instead of relying on OpenSea’s backend. I am excited to see it finally go live and anticipate that it will become a viable decentralized alternative to OS in time.
As a DAO, the team engages closely with the community through weekly discord AMAs which contain a lot of useful development updates. The most recent AMA on 16 Feb shed a lot of light on coming developments. According to the Universe team:
Marketplace
- The team has been focused on building a backend system that’s better architected and more scalable than OpenSea. This has been the most complex and time-consuming task that has taken the past 7 months to complete. This week the backend scraper has been completed and next step is to rig up all the API endpoints and make sure SDKs work properly.
- NFT scraper is extremely efficient and fast (“better than any they have ever seen”), built on a micro-services architecture which makes it very scalable. The final bottleneck before launch is the search function, which may take 2 weeks. OpenSea’s search function isn’t great because it’s being load-tested all the time.
- Once launched, new alpha features can be released fairly quickly in 2-week sprints.
- Auctions feature has been deprioritized in favor of the marketplace; plan to launch that after the marketplace is live.
- A DAO proposal outlining go-to-market plans & how they will incentivise users to use the marketplace will be submitted soon. Current thinking is to grow organically and gather user feedback after launch while developing the token strategy.
Polymorphs (NFT collection created by Universe team)
- Working on a new collection inspired by Polymorphs that uses the Universe minting contract. Artwork is aesthetically-pleasing and done by talented (but not well-known) artists from the community. Launch details to be worked out, it may be a timed mint for Polymorph holders.
- Tyler has been working on a self-funded NFT project that will be a gift to the DAO (3D project that includes music from a Grammy-nominated musician).
For more, Delphi members can read our latest NFT Insights.

Web3 Is Community Ownership: Jess Sloss, Co-Creator at Seed Club

[Excerpt from our latest Delphi Podcast)

https://storage.googleapis.com/members-portal-bucket/uploads/2022/02/94bf09f3-final-jess-sloss_audio.mp3

Continuing our Web3 series, we bring on Jess Sloss, Co-creator of Seed Club, a DAO that builds and invests in communities, to talk about how Web3 is centered around community ownership. We dive into some Seed Club incubated projects, how tokens give power to creators and the community, scaling and mentorship in Seed Club, and much more!

Resources:

More:

Notable Tweets

Coinbase Expects Post-Merge ETH Staking Yields to be 9-12% APR

Coinbase：Following the merge of Ethereum’s mainnet with the Beacon Chain expected around June of this year, ETH staking yields increase as rewards will incorporate nettransaction (ex-base) fees currently paid to miners. Staking yields could rise from 4.3-5.4%APR to 9-12%APR.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) February 24, 2022

Crypto Down Bad

The absolute state of the market right now. Most top 100 coins are down more than 75% from ATH

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) February 24, 2022

Bitcoin Still Not Considered a Safe Haven

Safe haven: Gold or Bitcoin? We found out today.

— David Ingles (@DavidInglesTV) February 23, 2022