The NFT Crossroads 🛣

Dear Bankless Nation,

The world of NFTs stands at a fascinating crossroads, with passionate advocates and skeptics locked in ongoing debates about NFTs’ potential and longevity.

That said, as we delve into the current market landscape we find ourselves caught between bullish excitement on the one hand and bearish apprehension on the other.

Me? I’m definitely on the bullish side. I’ve been here long enough to confidently presume just how crazy things will get from here.

For today’s post, then, it’s business as usual. Let’s dive into the bullish happenings and biggest news from the past week in NFTs!

-WMP

🧠 The big picture

This week the market cap of NFTs rose from 8.04 million ETH to 8.09 million ETH for a gain of around 0.6%. The slight climb here is slightly ironic, considering how OpenSea trading volume levels are at a 20-month low and sentiments in the NFT space in non-art circles is quite bearish in recent days. That said, sentiments here are about as volatile as crypto and floor prices are, so I wouldn’t read too much into them at any given time. Just keep exploring what you like to explore!

📊 This week by the numbers:

With regard to 7D volume stats, this week the usual faces — MAYC, BAYC, Azuki, and ‘Punks — topped the charts. What’s really interesting were the surprising 5th- and 6th-placed projects this week, Miladies and DeGods. The Milady surge comes as the project’s memetic powers have never seemingly been higher, and DeGods is showing out with strong action after having recently migrated from Solana.

🔝 7D top collections by volume

📰 General news

• EIP-6551 is proposing to make all NFTs into a smart contract account, i.e. capable of holding other NFTs.
• Lens introduced a new optimistic L3 scaling solution.
• OpenSea Pro now fully supports ERC1155 collections.
• Warpcast, a client of web3 social media app Farcaster, added support for Manifold and Zora links.
• Zora introduced a Profiles system.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• finiliar rebranded to fini.
• Proof unveiled the Proof x Moonbirds Community Council.
• Yuga Labs explained how Environment tiers will work in the context of the Otherside metaverse.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Sound introduced a new homepage interface.
• Sound also just saw its biggest music NFT sale to date for a Snoop Dogg “golden egg” track.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Parallel is prototyping with the Unreal Engine game designer.
• Pirate Nation launched its Voxelizer tool.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Phi, a web3 social world, unveiled new Bankless and Bankless DAO quests.

🪙 NFTfi

• Backed added Fini and Froggy Friends as supported collateral types this week.
• NFTfi.com is introducing a loyalty program ahead of what looks like a native token launch.

🎆 Mint spotlight: Stand with Crypto

The Coinbase "Stand with Crypto" NFT mint is a commemorative symbol of unity for the crypto community, featuring a blue shield to represent collective support for sensible crypto policies and a belief in the potential of cryptocurrency. This open mint NFT has no intended utility or value, but serves as a means to demonstrate support and join the growing crypto activism community. To participate, individuals can mint a free NFT, add a shield emoji to their Twitter display name, and sign up as a Crypto435 advocate at https://actnow.io/z31xN5P. Any mint fees associated with the collection will be donated to vetted organizations via a Crypto Advocacy Round with Gitcoin.

🙇 3 insightful threads weekly to level up your NFT knowledge!

1. dr3a.eth on the new notable additions to the optimized ENS Manager App.

2. Legendary on the Moonbirds Diamond Exhibition rebound:

3. Teng Yan on NFT distribution models.

✨ My NFT tool of the week: Gandalf

Gandalf is a new platform that lets you easily token-gate web2 content through web3 means. Examples of the types of content that are gateable right now include Gitbook docs, Google docs, Medium posts, Notion publications, and so forth. For NFT projects, this can be a resource for customizing community experiences.

😜 Can Nouns DAO take the top spot…

There’s currently a proposal before Nouns DAO to mint 5,000 “Stand with Crypto” Coinbase NFTs. The problem? That 5k was meant to top the leaderboard, but Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong has already chad’ed himself up to 7,999 mints. We’ll see what Nouns DAO does from here…