NFT Brew #44

Your weekly dose of NFTs, crypto, and web3

Author

Thor Sverrisson
April 25, 2023

Your weekly overview of the NFT space as you enjoy a nice brew, sponsored by QUEEN ADA. To access the Premium Brew, become a CT793 member. Due to its length, the full version of the newsletter can only be read online.

NFT News

Bear Market Emotions & Meme Coin Season

Community friction has been more visible than ever as the Cardano NFT market experiences a difficult bear market. Several projects and many investors have moved to other blockchains and the Cardano leadership, including the Cardano Foundation, has received plenty of criticism for the lack of support for new NFT projects and a suboptimal onboarding experience.

Others, however, are more focused on bringing the community together and adding optimism to the space. Crypto Heaps's "Bullish in the Bear" accomplished this perfectly, bringing countless creators and community members together for an energetic event.

Meme coin season is also upon us, with several new coins with questionable use cases pumping lately, such as $PURR and $DEAN on Cardano and $PEPE on Ethereum.

Mehdi Brings the Bull Back

A single collector brought a lot of excitement and volume to the Cardano NFT market this weekend, helping to push it to its highest levels in almost three weeks. 

ADA Handle Personalization

$Handle, one of Cardano's most beloved NFT tool, announced an exciting upcoming customization feature in collaboration with official vendors. The new features will allow Cardano users to add social profiles and pfp, set a custom background, and add a QR code. 

Fortress Labs

Two of Cardano's most prolific NFT projects, Derp Birds and Mutants, have teamed up to create Fortress Lab. The new company will pool resources to create innovative products in the Web3 space.

Flipr's Smart Contract Issues & Partnerships

Cardano's latest marketplace experienced some issues with its smart contracts last week, causing some users not to be able to take down their listings. See my interview with the Flipr founders last week here. 

Despite this issue, the team made some exciting announcements, including a partnership with The Ape Society and adding World Mobile Token to their marketplace.

NFT Community Parties in New York City

The NFT community appeared to have a great time at last week's NFT NYC conference. For JPG store and many other Cardano people, the event culminated in the Topia party.

The Ape Society

Cardano's largest NFT project began the next chapter of its COTAS initiative, allowing Passport holders to customize their NFTs.

They also released the details of their Factory token distribution for Cabin NFT holders.

Mulgakongs Shines in a Dark Market

The upcoming NFT project has captured the attention of the Cardano NFT community with its unique design and recent Coca-Cola partnership. This is the first project being launched by the KWIC launchpad.

Prime Kings Fall Short

The promising Cardano NFT project launched last week but followed in the footsteps of many recent projects when it could not sell out in the first 24 hours. See more information in the Currently Minting section below. 

Goblintown Rug?

Goblintown, one of the most beloved NFT projects on Ethereum, caused some shock when they updated the artwork and metadata of all of their NFTs with a rather sarcastic message involving a middle finger. Some owner believed that a rug was being pulled.

Truth Labs, the creators of Goblintown, have spoken out against lower creator royalties and are consequently upgrading their smart contract that enforces royalty payments.

Bitcoin Ordinals and BAYC Hit 1M

Bitcoin Ordinals surpassed the 1M inscription mark last week, further highlighting the meteoric rise of NFTs on the most popular decentralized network in the world.

Bored Ape Yacht Club, the largest NFT project in the world, also hit 1M $ETH in secondary market sales last week, which equals over $2B at today's exchange rates.

Trump Sells Out Second NFT Series

Trump broke his social media silence when he introduced his NFT collection's second series, which sold out. The sale raised an estimated $4.6M, but records show that Trump has profited up to $1M from his first series. Not surprisingly, the floor price of the first series has plummeted since the release of the second series, from around 0.2 to 0.137 $ETH.

Bankrupt Hedge Fund Auctions CryptoPunks

The world-renowned auction house Sothebys is hosting an unprecedented NFT auction next month, which they are dubbing "Grails." The collection will include NFTs from the now-defunct Three Arrows Capital hedge fund collection, which features a CryptoPunk, Chromie Squiggle, and other valuable digital collectibles. 

Reddit Launches Gen 3 Avatars

Reddit continues to drive mass adoption of digital collectibles with their NFT avatar collections. The website receives approx. 1.7 billion unique visitors per month and has onboarded more people into the NFT space than any other platform, including OpenSea.

Prominent Players Exploring NFTs

Companies, athletes, artists, and celebrities entering the NFT space is becoming a daily occurrence. The most recent and notable highlights include Canon, Starbucks, Gucci, and the rights holders of the Wolf of Wall Street movie.

BAYC Ripoff Found Guilty

RR/BAYC creators were found guilty of violating Yuga Labs' copyright in a landmark case that could become an important precedent in the NFT industry. 

ZestyZebras Wins Twitter

On Cardano, Zesty Zebras received the most amount of mentions on Twitter, closely followed by The Mallard Order and Club Mars.

Cardano NFT Project Updates

Clay Nation celebrated their 2 year anniversary last week. They also revealed sneak peeks at The Stand, plan for triple farming on Minswap, and started a pants design competition.

JPG Store added analytics to their platform, a highly requested feature. The new tab currently shows the history of sales, listings, holder count, floor price, and holder statistics.

They also released more information about their upcoming XP system and $JPG tokens.

Poki, the popular Cardano NFT portfolio management app, now offers push notifications.

NEWM, a new music marketplace on Cardano, surpassed ₳20K in revenue with The Record Store and is most likely well past that number when this is written.

Book.io partnered with Algorand to give out 10K eBooks at Consensus 2023

Raccoon Syndicate announced Royal Chess Club and ADA Inmates as their two newest partners in their H2E game.

Paima Studios was the topic of discussion at an event co-hosted by the team and a major Japanese news outlet. The event covered Web3 innovation and Paima's Web3 engine. 

Unbothered Wolves are working on a minting platform called XForge and gave a progress update last week.

Lending Pond has launched its "Buy Now, Pay Later" feature.

Mocossi Planet released its encyclopedia 2.0, which allows users to find information on any asset in the ecosystem. They also recently teased wallet integration with Metamask.

Chilled Kongs gets ready for transformations and Ordinals mint.

Club Mars has successfully built momentum and excitement among the community after transitioning to a free mint earlier this month. Last week, they revealed a 1:1 NFT.

The Spark Lab, a Cardano NFT video platform created by the popular YouTuber BlakeCNFT, announced the details for their upcoming mint.

Cornucopias are gearing up to launch their racing game, originally estimated to be released at the end of this month.

NMKR released the first-ever NMKR quarterly report - a first of its kind in the Cardano NFT ecosystem. 

Mutants are nearing their burn event. Last week, they released more information about the collection's rarity. The team was on my NFT Friday Show to answer more detailed questions about the drop and other aspects of the project.

Nemonium gave a sneak peek at their upcoming website UI upgrade, which looks incredibly unique.

Poetonic, a popular artist on Cardano, has been building a unique pfp collection with his community called Sloppy Poes. 

Boss Cat Rocket Club released a collection on Bitcoin Ordinals.

Bad Fox Motorcycle Club dropped their 3D Fox metaverse avatars last week. The NFT includes files that make it compatible with augmented reality, games, and other virtual applications.

Chain Lobby will drop its pioneer tokens on April 27th in preparation for its beta launch. All DigiVerse holders will receive the token, but the snapshot will be taken on the 26th. 

Ore Ore Ore has had a good week, recording a ₳30k sale, hitting ₳10M in secondary market sales, and starting a YouTube channel.

Stag Alliance's Discord was compromised via a hacked moderator account but was quickly dealt with. They also opened their snapshot period for their Portal Pass airdrop recently, although the window has now closed.

We Are Boomers (currently minting) are teaming up with the talented Netanel Cohen for their upcoming comic release. Netanel will create the cover of the rarest tier of their first comic.

Crypto Boutique has officially rebranded to Nexus Labs.

Cardano News

Latest Cardano updates and developments

Messari released a great overview of the state of Cardano in its quarterly report released last week.

Aiken launched its alpha phase last week. The open-source smart-contract language and toolchain, aims to simplify and improve the development of smart contracts on Cardano.

anetaBTC launched their public testnet. They are offering a non-custodial wrapped Bitcoin on Ergo and Cardano.

DeFi continues to perform well on Cardano, with Minswap, Liqwid, and Aada announcing record numbers.

Wingriders celebrated their first anniversary.

FlacFinance has been in V2 beta testing since the beginning of April, rewarding community testers with their $FLAC token.

Meld announced that the launch of their MELDapp and MELD L1 is scheduled for May 3rd. They also made their smart contracts open source. MELD is a non-custodial DeFi protocol for lending and borrowing for both fiat and crypto and their MELDapp will offer multichain functionality, Cardano NFT support, and native ADA staking.

Metera Protocol is a new protocol offering tokenized portfolio investing. They launched their demo last week.

Iagon is getting closer to launching its shared storage economy product and was recently nominated as one of Norway's most exciting startups. 

SundaeSwap's v2 UI is now live on mainnet

Cardano Foundation description

Charli3 Oracles announced its first oracle integration on Cardano with Liqwid. The company will provide continuous decentralized price data to be used in the Liqwid protocol.

Pi Lanningham wrote a Cardano outage post-mortem, analyzing the significant outage event from earlier this year. IOG asked Pi to give his perspective, which he did in the below article.

It is important to highlight the swift response from IOG and the community, as well as the resilience of the network. The task force’s efforts led to a timely fix, and the incident serves as a reminder of the importance of collaboration and transparent communication in the world of blockchain technology.

Pi Lanningham

Summon Platform announced its launch date: April 26th. Summon is an advanced and intuitive DAO platform, allowing communities to "summon" a DAO without knowing anything about the technical aspects. 

Maestro released their Dapp platform, which aims to streamline dApp development on Cardano.

Crypto News

Consensus 2023 is Here

One of crypto's largest events starts tomorrow. 

Is Coinbase Leaving the US?

Crypto exchange Coinbase has recently been scrutinized by US lawmakers and is now considering moving its operations elsewhere. They recently received a license to operate in Bermuda and are still looking at other countries.

SEC Chairman Struggles at House Committee Hearing

Gary Gensler, current SEC Chairman, was grilled on the definition of cryptocurrencies, among other things, and appeared incapable of providing good answers regarding the assets that fall under his agency.

Ethereum Successfully Launches Shapella

Holders of ETH were finally able to unstake their ETH, and the Shapella upgrade was ultimately considered a success within the crypto community. Although some rushed to withdraw their ETH from centralized staking platforms, the empowering upgrade has had a net positive on the network, with the price spiking to $2.1 following the hard fork.

Uniswap Launches Mobile Wallet

Uniswap's mobile wallet was finally approved by Apple and is now available in most countries.

Solana Goes Mobile

Solana had some exciting developments last week. First, they introduced Saga, a Web3 mobile device that will become available starting May 8th. 

They also completed the migration of Helium, which abandoned its blockchain in favor of Solana. Helium, the Web3 mobile network, is minting an NFT to represent each network hot spot, which totals almost 1M NFTs. This is the first real test case for Solana's new state compression feature, significantly reducing the cost of minting NFTs on the blockchain. The total mint cost is approximately $113 compared to the previous $250K price tag.

SEC Charges Bittrex

The SEC is going after another exchange, Bittrex Inc. They are alleging that they operated an unregistered exchange, broker, and clearing agency.

The UN Approves Crypto Regulations

The European Union approved a new crypto regulatory framework, which could be pivotal in reducing uncertainty and giving investors more confidence. 

Minting

These projects are personally curated by CardanoThor or other trusted NFT Vikings. However, this is not investment advice, and we always encourage you to do your own research. For CardanoThor's personal opinions and insights into how much he will mint, read the Premium Brew. *All times are shown in Eastern Time.

Currently Minting

Not selling out has become the new trend in the current market conditions. The following projects were launched recently and are still available to mint:

Prime Kings

FudHeadz

Fractal Oasis

Drippyz

Skynz

Dead Rabbits Resurrection Society

Adaki

Upcoming Mints

Ad Astrium

Ad Astrium postponed their mint and updated their price and supply to match current market conditions. The project 

📆 Date: April 27th💸 Price: ₳44📦 Supply: 2,000🐦 Twitter

Mutants

Mutants are one of the most prolific Cardano NFT projects and are about to launch its burn event for its Mutant collection. See my interview with the team last week here.

📆 Date: Month Day💸 Price: 2NFTs + 500 $MUTANT📦 Supply: 8,000🐦 Twitter

BlockOwls Jabi-Z

BlockOwls is undoubtedly the biggest animated NFT project on Cardano. They are releasing 6,400 unique 3D animated NFTs, which is unprecedented. However, they recently decided to split the mint into 2 phases, bringing this mint supply to 3,200 NFTs. See my interview with the team here.

📆 Date: April 29th💸 Price: $100 (WL) / $111 (public)📦 Supply: 3,200/6,400🐦 Twitter

The Spark Lab

Created by BlakeCNFT, a popular CNFT YouTuber, this Cardano NFT video platform will mint its unlimited access tokens on May 1st. 

📆 Date: May 1st💸 Price: ₳450📦 Supply: 250🐦 Twitter

Market Update

NFT Markets

The NFT markets continue to struggle in this bear market, although Cardano has seen a nice increase for the past 48 hours. For the second week in a row, only BNB recorded impressive numbers (+24%) for the past 7 days.

Forkast 500 NFT: -8%

  • Ethereum: $116M (-8%)

  • Solana: $29M (+1%)

  • Polygon: $11M (-20%)

  • ImmutableX: $6M (-7%)

  • BNB: $5.5M (+24%)

  • Arbitrum: $3M (+3%)

  • Cardano: $2M (-4%)

  • Flow: $1M (-18%)

Top Projects - All

1️⃣ BAYC (ETH) - Volume: $32M (+5%) - FP: $94K (-5%)2️⃣ MAYC (ETH) - Volume: $27M (-61%) - FP: $21K (-2%)3️⃣ Azuki (ETH) - Volume: $20M (-8%) - FP: $27.5K (-7%)4️⃣ CryptoPunks (ETH) - Volume: $16M (-45%) - FP: $91K (-)5️⃣ The Captainz (ETH) - Volume: $6M (+14%) - FP 14.6K (+16%)

Top Projects - Cardano

1️⃣ The Ape Society- Volume: $154K (+120%) - FP: $1.7K (-4%)2️⃣ Goofy Gophers - Volume: $121K (+286%) - FP: $250 (+44%)3️⃣ SpaceBudz - Volume: $113K (+108%) - FP: $1.2K (+15%)4️⃣ Clay Nation - Volume: $111K (+147%) - FP: $840 (+12%)5️⃣ Cornucopias Land - Volume: $42.5K (+106%) - FP 240$ (+9%)

Top Sales - All

1️⃣ BAYC#7090 - $1.3M2️⃣ CryptoPunks#2886 - $456K3️⃣ Otherside - $277K4️⃣ PartyBear#8422 - $274K5️⃣ CryptoPunks#5381 - $239K

Top Sales - Cardano

1️⃣ SpaceBud#159 - $61K2️⃣ The Ape Society: $38K3️⃣ ClayNation#3233: $25.5K4️⃣ The Ape Society - $13K5️⃣ ClayNation#6557: $9.6K

Crypto Markets

The general crypto markets continue to correct, with Bitcoin approaching $27K and ADA approaching $0.37. There can be many macro and technical explanations for this move, but the disappointing earning reports from many large corporations certainly didn't help.  

Weekly Dose of Charles

Tweet of the Week

Pic of the Week

Meme of the Week

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