Weekend NFT News Round-Up
NFT news from my perspective
Hope everybody’s having a great weekend! From my perspective, this was a relatively quiet week in NFT’s, presumably because a lot of people were either hung over from NFT LA or trying to scrape up the cash for next week’s event in Miami. Or both.
If you fall into those categories or are just tired, then hopefully you’ll find these brief news items helpful and concise.
Trends
Azuki exploded this weekend (in a good way) with its price flipping the Mutant Ape Yacht Club on Friday (nope, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. For those new to NFT’s, this means that the Azuki project / brand is now trading for a higher price than the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. Azuki is currently ranked #6 in all-time trading volume on OpenSea. Even if you are a peasant like me and do not hold any of these bluest-of-blue-chip projects, this shift has ramifications for the rest of the NFT market: For the past several days, even long-dead derivative collections that had ripped off Azuki’s style have spiked in volume. Even Bobu, a project that fractionalized an Azuki character, was trading at .4 or so for a while on Saturday after having languished (I grew impatient and sold mine a week or so ago, basically breaking even. Oops). The shift away from “ape / mutant all the things” and towards “anime all the things” is already underway. What that means for you depends on your perspective, tastes, and goals, and whether you’re sicker of ape derivatives, mutant derivatives, or anime derivatives.
I would not be surprised if NFT tools becomes a bigger trend, particularly if tools start to offer more ways to connect the interests of creators with the interests of collectors. This week’s case in point: Premint.xyz, which has become the standard tool for whitelist and raffle management, introduced their own NFT this week (n=10,000). The “Collector Pass” description and roadmap suggest that the utility is a collector-facing tool, in contrast to Premint’s existing creator-facing tools. The idea is that the Pass will provide NFT holders with access to (presumably) curated opportunities so they can get in on new projects before everybody else, which is the NFT trader dream. The Pass is currently trading at .384 (Disclosures: I do not own a pass, nor am I involved with this project).
Another emerging trend I is what I would call NFT investigation, fact-checking, or auditing. This is something I want to cover in a longer form later. For now, I’ll note that two resources that are growing in stature and importance are the Twitter accounts @Rugpullfinder (RPF has other links and accounts) and @NFTethics. They both largely do a great job of researching, auditing, and starting discussion about projects and what the NFT space is or should be, but they haven’t been without their controversies. Some perceive them as being biased or overly confident in their assessments; I often wish the accounts used a less confrontational and more professional voice. RugPullFinder’s “Elite Club NFT” with exclusive access and the opportunity to “nominate” projects for research strikes me as a problematic model that could easily be abused by bad actors. As the accounts grow, I can easily see backlash growing, as well as the emergence of bad actors trying copycat tactics. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for both accounts and what they contribute, and I largely trust their assessments. But if NFT’s are supposed to represent decentralized authority, I wonder if it will be beneficial in the long run to invest so much community trust in just one or two authorities. What do you think?
Security and Safety
Scams and hacks seemed to dominate the NFT news narrative this week more than most other weeks. Axie Infinity, the internationally popular Pokemon-esque play-to-earn blockchain game, suffered a hack of its Ronin Netowrk. The hack was estimated to cost $625 million USD (~173,000 ETH and $25 million in USDC) and occurred moments before Axie’s co-founder, Jeff Zirlin, went on stage at NFT LA to give a keynote address ironically titled “State of the NFT Union.” Ouch. Talk about public speaking nightmares.
But scams and hacks weren’t just limited to this high-profile exploit. Numerous controversies dominated NFT discourse this week. Whether it was skepticism about an announced TMNT mint (largely quashed), skepticism about an announced Kanye-related or adjacent mint or Kanye-esque trolling project (largely justified), or a large number of high-profile NFT discord servers being hacked resulting in the theft of yet more Bored Apes (has anybody stopped to wonder if maybe the apes are just so bored they’re running away?), all of these stories feed into the overwhelming outsider perception that the NFT world is a minefield of hacks and scams.
Take a minute and change any passwords you’ve used for a while, ensure that you have 2FA (two-factor authentication) turned on for social media accounts such as Twitter and Discord, and remember that “surprise” or “stealth” mints from projects with established Discords are almost always a scam; Discord DM’s announcing that you won a whitelist spot are always scams.
In case you thought you were safe because you owned a hardware wallet, today I learned of a security issue with Trezor (more details in this article). There has been a phishing scam related to Trezor’s Mailchimp-hosted newsletter in which scammers send out emails on the newsletter stating that the Trezor Suite desktop app was hacked and instruct recipients to download a new app, which, needless to say, is not safe. If you own a Trezor, or are on that mail list anyway, don’t open any emails from the address noreply@trezor.us – and until the company communicates otherwise, they will not be using email newsletters to communicate.
Project Updates and News
I’m looking forward to minting the Not Today Club this week. Their discord has been a lot of fun. Can their grim reaper-esque collection succeed? I sure hope so.
I’m keeping my eye on Kreepy Club, which mints on April 9th (n=10,000, .069 ETH). I don’t have WL there, but there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the project and I think the art is incredibly cool. However, 10k projects haven’t been doing well. What do you all think?
I’m pretty psyched that I got whitelist for The Heist (n=10,000, mint price and cost TBD), a forthcoming PVPblockchain game that looks promising. There’s a pretty good amount of documentation about the game and how it will be played. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other, but I have heard some positive things about this game and as of right now, I will probably mint when it launches.
That’s about it for the Weekend Edition (should I call it that?)! Thanks so much for reading. Was this helpful? What content would you like to see? Some topics I’ve got in mind are non-speculative / art use cases for NFT’s, what “researching” NFT’s means, the stages of an NFT project, my favorite ridiculous projects, and mistakes I’ve made that you hopefully will not. Got any other ideas? Get in touch!