Welcome to NFT Insider for March 17th, 2022 – FREE Edition, brought to you weekly by Alts.
Each week, we give you our analysis of the NFT market and any current IPOs, plus a heads up on cool projects we think are worth checking out.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
NFTs in 2022
NFTs on the fractional marketplace currently stand at a 152% return since they started trading on Otis and Rally. It’s a nice bounce back from last week’s data point of 119% ROI.
According to Nonfungible.com, the chart shows that NFTs have been trading sideways, following a recent downtrend from Jan 31st. There was, however, a spike on March 7th with a recorded $121 million in primary and secondary sales. That spike was short-lived, and the market is generally in the same state it has been for the past three weeks.
NFTs Last Week
NFTs on Fractional Marketplaces
The Art asset class appears as a bright spot, but the data is based on two assets on the Otis platform; Chromie Squiggle #524 and the Grimes NFT Collection. The Squiggle is trading down from $1 last week to $0.63 per share.
The Grimes NFT Collection saw significant positive action last week, getting bids for as high as $2,600 per share. However, offers that go over the lowest ask are matched with the low asks. After reaching a matched high of $24.50 per share, Grimes is now trading at $18 per share.
In the fractional space, CryptoPunks are generally down. Bored Apes are generally down, and XCOPY, which opened trading on Otis this week, is also down. Notice a pattern?
Rally’s “Laser Eyes” Bored Ape #4612 opened for trading this week and is down 70%, down to $2.10 per share from its IPO price of $7 per share. “Leather Jacket” Ape #9159 has been trading between $4.30 and $5 per share. At $5 per share, “Leather Jacket” sits at a $195k market cap.
The good news? If you’re a buyer, “Leather Jacket” Ape has a market cap of $193k – well below the Bored Ape floor price of about $300k. “Laser Eyes” has a market cap of $210k.
“Astronaut” Bored Ape #7359 on Rally continues holding steady at about $14 per share for a market cap of $272k.
NFTs on OpenSea
It’s no surprise that last week’s announcement of Yuga Labs buying the Intellectual Property rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs would pump the Punks and Meebits.
Both the CryptoPunks and the Meebits stood atop the OpenSea rankings for the entire week after the announcement. We’ll look at the Yuga Labs acquisition in-depth in the Industry News section below.
BUT THEN, Yuga Labs announced its release of the ApeCoin ($APE).
$APE drops tomorrow => could it become a top 10 cryptocurrency on day 1?
— azf.eth 🪙 (@azfnft) March 17, 2022
Here’s some math.
🧵👇
The initial wave of coins will be released to Bored Ape and Mutant Ape holders. This means Ape holders will get richer. Naturally, Bored Apes and Mutant Apes have risen to the top with this news.
3Landers, which took the top position three weeks ago, also continues showing strength in the market, with its floor holding steady at about 1.7 ETH.
Doing our weekly Azuki tracking, the floor has dropped slightly from 9.5 one week ago to 9.4 ETH. Bored Apes are also riding the wave from the Yuga Labs news, going up from a floor price of 75 ETH last week to 92 ETH this week. Then yesterday, the announcement for ApeCoin happened and the floor price has skyrocketed even more to 108 ETH.
NFTs This Week
Fractional Marketplaces
There are no NFT IPOs this week. But there is still plenty to talk about.
Projects Minting
Disclaimer: When we highlight minting projects, we are not endorsing the project but highlighting a few reasons why the project has the potential to be successful. How do we define success? We define a successful project as one that you can mint and sell for a profit or one where you hold and benefit from its utility.
Heroes of the Metaverse
Minting Q1 of 2022
Here are some highlights:
- The project’s Discord opens at random times. Turn on your Twitter notifications to get updates on when it opens up.
- This will be a Role-Playing Game with different Series of NFT mints
- The first wave of NFT mints will be Humans; others will focus on Dwarves, Magicians, Elves, and other magical beings.
- The project will have a political system, with Hero NFT holders playing a prominent role.
- The other NFT characters released at later dates will be considered regular citizens.
OneOf Mints
Available Mints for Free Ends on Thursday, March 17 @ 3 PM ET
This is a good way to start an NFT collection or to add to your collection.
- OneOf is offering a free NFT (completely free, no gas) commemorating the 64th Annual GRAMMY Awards.
- The Free NFT also includes a chance to win a pair of flyaway tickets to this year’s GRAMMY’s on April 3rd in Las Vegas.
- The Breakfast Club, an NYC-based talk show (“The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show”), also released a free NFT.
- The Breakfast Club is one of the most influential, if not the most, influential hip-hop morning shows in the world.
- A winner will be chosen from the Free Mint for a trip for two to NYC and a Breakfast Club Studio visit.
Industry News
On March 11th, the big news was Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, acquiring the Intellectual Property rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs.
What does this mean for Yuga? It means that Yuga Labs now owns the brands, copyright in the art, and other IP rights for the Punks and Meebits. They also purchased 423 Punks and 1,711 Meebits from Larva Labs.
What does this mean for CryptoPunk and Meebit owners? It (presumably) means that they will enjoy the same IP rights as owners of the Bored Apes. While Larva Labs held their NFT owners to stringent IP rights, Yuga Labs had given its Bored Ape NFT holders wide-ranging commercial and brand rights.
In essence, Bored Ape owners truly owned their Apes. CryptoPunk and Meebit owners did not have full commercial rights to their NFTs. Now they do.
This disparate approach to commercial rights between Yuga and Larva Labs is often credited as the catalyst for the Bored Apes becoming a more valuable project than their counterpart Punks.
Now that the Punks are under the Yuga umbrella, will they benefit from the innovative marketing and brand-building approach that has helped the Bored Ape franchise? Think of what a Mutant CryptoPunk Club type-NFT would do, or an official three-dimensional Punk collection…
The acquisition has had a positive effect on floor prices in the short term. The floor price for Punks was 60 ETH for most of the week before the purchase but is now at 62 ETH with an appreciated Ether. Meebits was at a floor price of 2.58 ETH and now sits at 4.48 ETH.
But the big winners were the Bored Apes. Last week the Apes floor price was sitting at 75 ETH, and then went to 92 ETH. As we said before, the ApeCoin announcement now has the Apes at 108 ETH.
Yuga Labs opened its mint of Bored Apes on May 1, 2021 – less than one year ago, with Apes available for $200 about 24 hours after the release. In that time, Yuga Labs has transformed from a fun start-up to a true NFT empire. The combined market cap for the Apes and CryptoPunks is about $3.6 billion. Before it acquired the Punks and Meebits, Yuga Labs’s valuation stood at $5 billion.
Bored Apes are the kings of the NFT space, capturing the throne from the CryptoPunks. But if there were ever a project that could overtake the Apes again, it would be the Punks. It’s a win-win for Yuga.
From a market standpoint, one could see the floor values for Meebits and Bored Apes rise before the announcement. The run-up in prices led to speculation that word of the sale had leaked, allowing some to take advantage of the buying opportunities.
Before the announcement on March 11, the Meebits floor price was treading water at about 2.8 ETH for about two weeks. Then, on March 4, the price started shooting up, getting to 5 ETH by late in the evening on March 10th – one day before the announcement.
Bored Apes had reached a floor of 68 ETH (!) and then slowly started rising to about 74 ETH the day before the announcement.
In the end, both Yuga and Larva Labs won. Yuga Labs scored the OG “collection of collections” in the Punks. They also acquired the first 3D NFT collection in the Meebits. Now they’ll use their marketing abilities to elevate the brands of each project.
To get an idea of what Yuga Labs is planning, read here.
The Larva Labs creators became exponentially richer, retained the Autoglyphs collection, and now get to go back to their studios and create the next wave of pioneering NFTs like the Punks and Meebits.
If you’re looking for another project that is pumping, look no further than Cryptoadz by Gremplin, which hit a 1.5 ETH floor a week ago and has now reached as high as a 3.2 ETH floor. There are some positive vibes going on in that project.
