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Monthly NFT sales fall below US$1 billion for first time in 12 months

Monthly NFT sales fall below US$1 billion for first time in 12 months

Crypto industry sales are slumping, but it’s not just hedge funds and lenders that have been hit hard by the crypto winter. The NFT industry has also begun to feel the chill.

The troubles at crypto hedge funds and lenders were a center of attention in June, but business in the non-fungible token (NFT) market also got hit, with monthly sales dipping below US$1 billion for the first time in 12 months, according to NFT data aggregators CryptoSlam.

For context, June last year was the same month that Axie Infinity exploded in popularity, putting NFTs and play-to-earn gaming on the map in the process.

Plummeting crypto prices share some of the blame for the poor NFT sales, but unique monthly buyers in June also fell almost 50% from a high of more than 1 million in January and now stand at less than 600,000 for the first time since July 2021.

In another telling sign, the floor price for a Bored Ape Yacht Club — one of the biggest NFT collections — fell below US$100,000 for the first time in over a year in mid-June to a low of US$86,277. That’s almost an 80% plunge from a high of more than US$400,000 in late May.

“The NFT market has not been immune to the crypto market (and business) turbulence and when coupled with [traditional finance] downturn — in particular the tech stocks crash — it is a perfect storm for loss of confidence,” Jonathon Miller, Australian managing director of crypto exchange Kraken, told Forkast in shared written commentary.

The 70% drop this year in the price of Ether, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, also influenced NFT trading, as it’s the native token of Ethereum, the most popular blockchain for hosting NFTs. Ether prices traded around US$1,055 on Monday in Asia.

However, after a volatile few weeks, crypto prices held relatively steady over the weekend, with all major coins fluctuating no more than 1% in the 24 hours through Monday afternoon in Asia.

Bitcoin held steady around US$19,300 over the weekend after dropping below US$19,000 for the first time since December 2020 on Friday to change hands at US$19,133 at press time. Amid this NFT market downturn, Kraken is set to join the likes of Binance and Coinbase by opening the waitlist for its own NFT marketplace set for full release in the next few months.

“The seeming collapse of closed book lending businesses may be viewed in the long run as a reminder that open transparent infrastructure is ultimately the foundation upon which a new wave of digital financial tools will be built,” Miller said.

“The projects and businesses that stay as true to this as possible are the ones that can weather the storm,” he said.

Another way NFT marketplaces or exchanges can stand out from the crowd is by specializing and offering unique services, for instance by focusing on sports-based NFTs, according to Anndy Lian, Chief Digital Advisor, Mongolian Productivity Organization, and a blockchain author.

“I think the NFT market could recover faster than the crypto original market,” said Lian, highlighting partnership deals between Binance and Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo as a sign of what’s to come.

“All these moves, which cost perhaps hundreds of millions, are telling us that this will be a big strategy,” he added. “We cannot just depend on what you see in crypto native; you need to bring in new blood.”

Original Source: https://forkast.news/monthly-nft-sales-below-1billion-12-months/

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j

Yahoo: How Yuga Labs’ NFT sale failed to put its community first

Yahoo: How Yuga Labs’ NFT sale failed to put its community first

The largest and perhaps most highly anticipated NFT sale so far this year took place recently when Yuga Labs launched their sale of virtual land to ApeCoin holders for around US$5,800 (the clearing price was set at 305 ApeCoin). The huge level of demand for the hugely popular Otherdeed NFT mint, which raised about US$320 million, created a two-fold problem for the Ethereum-based sale. Firstly, the steep rise in the volume of transactions led to a spike in the price of Ethereum gas fees, requiring people to spend around two ETH (approximately US$6,000) in fees to mint. Secondly, many of the participants in the sale, due to the bottleneck in demand, both missed out on the minting and lost their Ethereum in the process.

 

 

Original Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yuga-labs-nft-sale-failed-030400730.html

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j

Opinion Article on Forkast : How Yuga Labs’ NFT sale failed to put its community first

Opinion Article on Forkast : How Yuga Labs’ NFT sale failed to put its community first

The ‘virtual land’ sale that broke Ethereum was also a fiasco for buyers. Should Yuga Labs have seen it coming and taken preventative action?

The largest and perhaps most highly anticipated NFT sale so far this year took place recently when Yuga Labs launched their sale of virtual land to ApeCoin holders for around US$5,800 (the clearing price was set at 305 ApeCoin). The huge level of demand for the hugely popular Otherdeed NFT mint, which raised about US$320 million, created a two-fold problem for the Ethereum-based sale. Firstly, the steep rise in the volume of transactions led to a spike in the price of Ethereum gas fees, requiring people to spend around two ETH (approximately US$6,000) in fees to mint. Secondly, many of the participants in the sale, due to the bottleneck in demand, both missed out on the minting and lost their Ethereum in the process.

Such was the chaos that soon after the sale, Yuga Labs tweeted: “We are aware that some users had failed transactions due to the incredible demand being forced through Ethereum’s bottleneck.” While YugaLabs promised “we’ve got your back” and that they would be “refunding your gas,” there was considerable pushback from the NFT (non-fungible tokens) community. Considering the stature of the sale, it is worth examining what happened in greater detail to understand what this means both for the NFT market going forward, not to mention its implications for the ideal of the core importance of the Web 3.0 community to the future of NFTs and the metaverse.

After Yuga Labs acquired CryptoPunks earlier this year, which put the VC-backed company valued at US$4 billion in the spotlight, this latest event certainly raises the stakes. Yuga Labs admitted the scale of the minting event not only crashed Etherscan but also seriously impacted Ethereum. “It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction,” they added. But clearly with all the resources at their disposal, the chaotic result only created more skepticism on crypto Twitter.

But before diving into the organizational aspects, the upset among NFT newbies should not be ignored when crypto is so keen to gain mass adoption. That upset was voiced by NFT influencer ap3father.eth, who pointed out that he’d brought many friends into the space for the drop: “My friends said things like, ‘who would ever use Ethereum?’ ‘NFTs are only for rich people’ … and to be honest I agreed with them … although my initial reactions were filled with emotion … I agreed … How was this going to prove we are ‘innovating.’” It’s worth noting that Yuga Labs raised around US$320 million through the minting, with 55,000 tokens sold out in under three hours.

The key problem is that it’s not only an issue with scaling the number of transactions but also the number of smart contracts (“trustless computation”) — an issue also faced by so-called Ethereum killers like Polygon, Avalanche and Solana. While these chains may boast of a fast transaction per second (TPS) performance, only a small percentage is available for smart contract operations. It is interesting that in the example from U.K.-based Radix DLT that they’ve done away with the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and instead built their own engine, which meant “a transaction is a transaction, it doesn’t matter if that is minting NFTs, swapping on DEXs or taking out a crypto loan,” tweeted Radix Works CEO Piers Rudyard in response to the Yuga Labs mint bottleneck and proposed scaling solutions. “That means that TPS performance and DeFi performance on Radix are basically the same thing,” Now, while I appreciate Rudyard is using this opportunity to plug his solution, the Yuga Labs mint controversy is also highlighting the significant blockchain bottleneck challenges ahead for mass adoption.

Putting that high-level critique of Ethereum smart contract functionality aside, using optimized smart contracts, such as ERC-721A, could have made the mint more equitable by reducing gas fees to the bare minimum. As Will Papper, co-founder of SyndicateDAO, tweeted: “Modifying a few words would have saved $80M+.”

Furthermore, limiting the number of KYC (know-your-customer)-approved wallets to only those required for the mint would have helped avoid gas wars and provided a positive minting experience for all parties involved. But for some, such as @DrNickA of FactoryDAO, this was missing the point because the fact that the number of NFTs outstripped KYC’d wallets was intentional. After all, Yuga had the KYC information in advance for all the prospective buyers, they could have created a whitelist to manage demand.

While Yuga Labs has since confirmed it would refund the fees for transactions that failed due to the problems, it’s clear that lessons need to be learned from its minting debacle. While the likes of Yuga’s VC backers, a16z, point to the core importance of “community ownership” to Web3, including NFTs and the metaverse, surely how that ownership is delivered is important?

Particularly coming so closely after its purchase of CryptoPunks, it’s worrying — and not helpful to the cause of mass adoption — when the leading NFT company is so careless with its community. It’s certainly my hope that ApeCoinDAO, which styles itself as independent of BAYC and community-led, lives up to its responsibilities and shows that Web3 is more than a business model for the metaverse, but also a way for people to engage in this new (virtual) world.

 

Original Source: https://forkast.news/how-yuga-labs-otherdeed-nft-mint-failed-put-community-first/

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j