NFT Update - June 26, 2022 (Patreon)

Opensea recently migrated to the Seaport protocol, it is highly welcomed by the community as it allows for cheaper transactions (~35% reduction in gas fees), estimated to save ~138k in ETH (~$460M) annually. NFT traders can also make collection offer in Opensea and can even select traits for this.

One of the biggest events in the NFT world - NFT.NYC kicked off officially on 20 June. This year’s reported attendance reached 15,000 people from just 5,000 last year. A lot of parties and events are organized despite the downtrend in both the crypto and NFT market.

Apefest - this is one of the most highly anticipated events during NFT.NYC. Yugalab kicked off Apefest with the revelation of Mega Mutant #30006, leaving only 1 Mega Mutant unrevealed.

Day 1 of the event opened with famous people such as Amy Schumer and LCD Soundsystem, but the community were left disappointed as expectations were set high. Noted by Twitter user @punk9059, 65% of BAYC trades have been sellers accepting WETH bids, which shows a sign of more impatient sellers than buyers.

It was yesterday when Enimem and Snoop Dogg appeared at the closing event for Apefest and introduced their new collaboration song “From Detroit To The LBC” that gave the event the strong ending they needed.

Next mention would be Doodles;  their event came with a couple of powerful announcements. Musician Pharrel Williams is named Chief Brand Officer and will also produce a music album called “Doodles Records: Volume 1”. It is said to be available to stream via various platforms, but will only be sold via NFTs (this can be an upcoming trend). VC firm Seven Seven Six is also said to have led a funding round (amount undisclosed), accumulating more capital to scale Doodles. Lastly, a trailer of Doodles 2 was teased and it was said that this collection will not be on Ethereum. The floor price of Doodles has raised steadily throughout NFT NYC, from under 10E to now above 14E.

Outside of NFT NYC, one interesting event to note is the alleged insider trading for CryptoPunks. A lot of twitter users noticed the sudden surge of trading volume in Punks on 18 June, with trading volume up by nearly 8x right before the announcement of Noah Davis joining CryptoPunks as brand lead. For people unfamiliar with Noah Davis - he was Christie’s Head of Digital Sales and the one that sold Beeple’s $69M “Everydays: The First 5000 days”. You can see in the CryptoPunk trading activity chart above for the spike of volume. The highest sale during this period is a Zombie Punk that sold for 825E (~$870K).

Azuki’s “Enter the Alley” event was deemed one of the best. They transformed the whole setting into an Asian night market with tattoo parlour, Taiwanese night market and even got a murder mystery going on. No announcement was made however on any new drops, but observant people at the event picked up possible hints. “Black Jade Mahjong Club” #BJMC is printed on a jacket repped by Zagabond (Azuki founder) himself, and the chinese name of BJMC is in the official poster of the Azuki event. During a cinematic video at the event, we can see hints of mahjong in the storyline. A faint chinese calendar was shown, although you can't see clearly from videos, but there is rumor that two dates were highlighted - 23 Jun and 22 Jul.

video link 

There are also some notable events worth highlighting:

• eBay acquired NFT marketplace Known Origin - the acquisition price is unknown but it shows eBay’s continued push into digital collectables (positive long term)
• Uniswap acquired genie.xyz - Uniswap said it had acquired NFT marketplace aggregator as a push to support trading of NFTs soon. An airdrop of USDC is also said to be made for genie.xyz’s historical users.
• Magic Eden raises $130M - At $1.6B valuation, Magic Eden, the largest Solana NFT marketplace, raised $130M at a Series B round. This came just 3 months after it raised $27M at a series A round. 
• Starry Night Capital (3ac backed NFT fund) going dark - It was noticed on 15 Jun that Starry Night Capital’s entire NFT collection is on SuperRare is removed and this sparked speculation that the fund will need to be sold to cover losses incurred by Three Arrow Capital (negative)