Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & collectibles
Dear Bankless Nation,
Coinbase announcing its own Optimism-based L2, Base, was definitely this week’s biggest headline.
Right now only a testnet, Base Goerli, is live. Yet that hasn’t stopped eager NFTers from hopping over to the testnet early to learn the ropes.
You know what that means … once the Base mainnet is live, we’re in store for a boom of Base NFT mints. There will be a lot of junk at first, just like we’ve seen with Canto and Ordinals, but the inaugural seeds of a new NFT scene will be planted, too.
We’ll have to see how that scene shakes out from here, but it’ll certainly be a big thread to track through the rest of 2023. In the meantime have a great weekend everyone, and for now let’s get you up to speed on the past week in NFTs ✌️
-WMP
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For the 6th week in a row the cumulative market cap of the NFT space has climbed, this time from 9.36M ETH to 9.46M ETH for a climb of 1% since the previous Friday recap. That’s not a tremendous inflow but growth’s growth, and it’s just our latest reminder that the NFT ecosystem has been steadily expanding all year.
It was a massive volume week for the top blue-chip PFP collections. In the BAYC and MAYC sphere, we saw huge blooms of sell pressure and buy pressure effectively cancel each other out. Moonbirds saw another big 7D volume run, in part propelled by some traders selling their holdings upon the PROOF of Conference cancellation news.
To understand just how dominant Blur is in the NFT trading scene right now, check out these graphs. The left one shows Blur facilitated over 80% of the NFT ecosystem’s trading volume on the week compared to OpenSea’s 14%, while the second shows Blur accounted for over 57% of all trades during that same span. Love it or hate it, Blur’s decidedly the king activity-wise right now.
There’s been a lot of ‘Punks and Apes transactions in the top 3 biggest weekly sales lately, but in recent days we’ve seen more variety up at the top. Namely, the fresh faces this go ‘round were a Ξ390 resale of Fidenza #157 and a Ξ242 resale of FOMO by OG cryptoartist XCOPY.
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fRiENDSiES announced plans to pause the project, leading to community anger and rugpull allegations.
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Pudgy Penguins partnered with Retail Monster for an upcoming Pudgy-themed toyline.
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Yuga Labs introduced Toad Mode, the latest installment in the wider Dookey Dash event.
To commemorate the introduction of its new Base L2 and the Base Goerli testnet launch, Coinbase dropped this celebratory free mint on Zora. 1 mint is allowed per address, and over 115,000 have already been minted so far. At the time of publication there’s still over 48 hours left on the drop so consider snagging one if you feel like joining in on the celebration!
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The Wizard’s Hat — A Nounish animation and the second-ever open edition release from Nouns DAO, this Ξ0.05 premiere mint commemorates the decentralized creation of this fantasy short about a young wizard named Harriett and her mentor Grummelot
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Bold Ones — Created by artist, CC0 remixer, and Nouncil member Greta, the Bold Ones is a collection honoring trailblazers in the NFT space; the allowlist mint begins on Feb. 28th for Ξ0.0099 each with an ensuing public mint priced at Ξ0.0123 a pop
1. Freddie Farmer on how NFT creators can adopt a “Creator-Owned Liquidity” strategy via sudoswap:
2. cygaar, creator of the ERC721A standard, on a suggested “ideal” NFT mint smart contract:
3. K!NGSLEY on why artist Kevin Abosch’s OPEN EDITION series is seeing lots of activity lately:
If you find yourself wanting to clean up the unwanted NFTs from your wallet, consider Harvest.art. This app will buy any NFT from you for 1 gwei each, which is also great for harvesting losses as needed. Use the project at your own risk because the tech is experimental, but I’ve personally tried it before and found the process smooth.
If you’re a builder type or on an NFT project team, chances are you know how much of a pain it can be to simply source gas for testnet transactions. The good news is the Coinbase Wallet Faucet just arrived, so it’s a new avenue to get daily faucet drips across eight different testnets including Ethereum Goerli, Base Goerli, and Polygon Mumbai. Keep it in mind for your onchain experiments going forward!
More than a few people called out the fRiENDSiES project as sketchy from the start. Of course, bagholder interests got in the way of a meaningful community response at the time, which helped the project tread water until its “pause” this week:
William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also recently been contributing content to Bankless, JPG, and beyond!
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
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