X2Y2 Volume Surges Despite Downturn Due To Wash Trading

🌅 Welcome!

In a partnership with Nova Labs, T-Mobile will provide access to its 5G network for the upcoming Helium Mobile service. Now you can get paid to post memes on Twitter.

A top NFT collection plans to raise $30m, volume on X2Y2 surges on account of wash trading and our Research team takes a look at physical fashion NFTs.

This is the Delphi Daily. Let’s dive in.

🚨 In Case You Missed It

Nova Labs and T-Mobile announce a partnership to launch Helium Mobile, a 5G wireless service that will offer crypto rewards to users.
Creators of the Azuki NFT collection plan to raise $30m in Series A funding. The collection’s floor price is up 55% in the last 7 days.
FTX is looking to raise up to $1b at a valuation of $32b.
Kraken’s Jesse Powell will step down as CEO to become Chairman.
Maple Finance is launching a $300m lending pool, managed by Icebreaker Finance, that will offer secured debt to mid-size BTC miners.

📊 X2Y2 Volume Surges Despite Downturn Due To Wash Trading

Prior to the LooksRare and X2Y2 launch in Q1 2022, OpenSea virtually had a monopoly in the NFT marketplace sector. However, transaction volume on X2Y2 has regularly surpassed OpenSea since late July, primarily due to wash trading.
Wash trading occurs when the buyer and seller in a transaction are the same person or two people colluding. These types of transactions lead to inflated volume statistics, and are conducted to earn trading incentives or drive up an NFT collection’s volume or price figures.
Since X2Y2 reimburses trading fees to users in X2Y2 tokens, traders are incentivized to conduct transactions to earn the token incentives. X2Y2 charges 0.5% in trading fees, while OpenSea charges 2.5% and LooksRare charges 2%.
X2Y2 has also made it optional for users to pay royalties on certain NFT purchases. This allows users to trade at lower costs. This also allows X2Y2 to compete against other marketplaces and win market share.
The “Dreadfulz” and “More Loot” NFT collections are notorious for wash trading transactions. These two collections alone comprise 59% of X2Y2’s all-time volume.

⚡ Is Phygital The Future Of Fashion? A Look At Clone X Forging

NFT people love coming up with new words that are difficult to read and pronounce. “Phygital” a combination of “Physical” and “Digital” is the latest buzzword that has been circulating.
This usually refers to NFTs tied to a physical, real-life counterpart that can be redeemed using the NFT. Phygital concepts are actively being explored in collectibles and fashion.
Most notably, RTFKT Clone X launched its Forging SZN 1 earlier this month, closing over $11M in sales in a week. As we covered in a previous Delphi Daily, this is nearly as much revenue as other fashion houses like Adidas and Gucci have earned from their NFT collection lifetimes.

Interesting buyer statistics for Clone X Forging SZN 1: 40,752 paid items were minted, 3,912 paid minters participated, and each paid minter spent $2,899 on average.
During a one-week period, Clone X holders were able to mint genesis Clone X merchandise and items specific to their Clone X’s DNA (9 different DNA-based collections, including Murakami Drip).
A limit was placed on the number of items minted. Each holder can mint 1 of each Genesis collection item and 2 of each item in the corresponding DNA/Drip collection.
All of the items were priced at a significant premium compared to standard apparel — likely a reflection that this is a limited edition collection: Socks (0.03 ETH or ~$40), Caps (0.04 ETH or ~$55), T-shirts (0.08 ETH or ~$110), Pants (0.13 ETH or ~$175), Hoodies (0.19 ETH or ~$255), Air Force One Shoes (0.38 ETH or ~$515).

The most popular items are the T-shirts and the Nike Air Force One shoes, with over 18,000 T-shirts and 12,000 shoes sold.
The shoes were the most significant component, accounting for 64% of all of the revenue generated. Only T-shirts, shoes, and hoodies had over $1m in sales, while the rest of the items had much lower sales — perhaps a reflection of the fashion tastes of the NFT community.
For more on Clone X Forging, Delphi members can read our NFT Insights report here.

🐣 Notable Tweets

What Happened to The Sandbox?

Almost 1yr ago, Facebook rebranded to Meta & virtual land prices flew to the moon.

Fast forward ~11 months & trading vol is down >80%.

Anyone who bought land in Jan has lost money.

But why? Was it all just a dream?

I took a deeper look at @TheSandboxGame to find out.

— JACL (@JACL_e9) Sept 20, 2022

Reward NFT Holders Without Staking

Introducing @BagholderDotUS, an NFT loyalty protocol that lets you reward people for holding NFTs from a collection in their wallets.

e.g. distribute APE to all BAYC holders over a year, without their apes ever leaving their wallets.

— zefram.eth (@boredGenius) Sept 21, 2022