State of the Market

NFT trading volumes have continued to dip, with weekly OpenSea volumes breaking below $100M for the 2nd time this year. The 1st time was in mid-June, during the period when ETH fell below $1,000. SudoSwap, however, is defying this trend, rising slightly to ~$8M traded last week — the equivalent to 8.7% of OpenSea’s volume.

SudoSwap has outlined its distribution for $SUDO, the governance token for SudoSwap. 41.9% of the token supply will go to $XMON holders via a 3-month lockdrop, although the start date has not been announced yet.

The number of unique wallets that purchased an NFT on a monthly basis has been on a slow downward trend, at just under 250,000 wallets in August, which is almost 50% down from the peak in January. This parallels the fall in NFT trading volumes and indicates a net loss of participants in the NFT space (people leaving > new entrants). The average transaction value remains steady at $258 (~0.15E).

This year, there have been several large VC-led fundraises for teams with publicly-traded NFT collections. Last week, DigiDaigaku/Limit Break announced that it had raised $200M in funding, while Moonbirds said it raised $50M. Most NFT collections saw a price rise of 10 – 20% in the first few days after a big fundraising announcement. However, by Day 7 after the announcement, three of the six collections I looked at (Moonbirds, Doodles, Jadu Jetpacks) were back to their pre-announcement floor prices.

DigiDaigaku is an outlier, with a >100% price change. Some reasons for this could be:

Surprisingly large fundraise, second only to Yuga Labs
Small collection size (2,022)
Outspoken CEO heavily pushing a new narrative (Free-to-Own)

Top NFT Collections This Week

The talk of the town this week is y00ts (which we covered in detail last week). Despite several hiccups during the mint (timing delays, failed transactions, last-minute changes to allowlists) that left many people unhappy, it has become the top traded NFT collection this week. A pretty impressive feat considering it’s been out for barely a day. Coinciding with the mint, Dust Labs (creators of DeGods and y00ts) announced that it raised a $7M seed round from investors, including FTX & Chapter One.

$DUST was used as the minting currency for y00ts (1 y00t = 375 $DUST). This was known weeks in advance. There was a significant run-up in the price of $DUST before the mint as people acc