L2 NFTs Please 🙏

Dear Bankless Nation,

Right now the average number of daily NFT mints is way down while the average price of gas costs are way up.

That said, while most NFT activity still takes place on the Ethereum L1 these days, the current gas pains are pricing out many users from using mainnet.

If there was ever a time for NFT projects to start doubling down on or integrating with layer-two (L2) scaling solutions, it’s now. Buying and minting NFTs should cost cents more often than not!

Anyways, let’s hope we see a big L2 migration in the months head. For the time being, though, let’s cover the intrigues from the past week in NFTs. Have a great weekend everyone ✌️

-WMP

📊 The big picture

This week the market cap of NFTs dropped from 7.86 million ETH to 7.68 million ETH, or $13.64B USD, for a decline of 2.3%. It was another week where memecoins dominated the cryptoeconomy’s trading action, so the slight shrinkage here is no surprise.

🔝 7D top collections by volume

📰 General news

• Bonfire added token gating and rewards functionalities.
• Limit Break introduced ERC-721C, a new standard for NFT royalties.
• Nouns DAO minted 5,000 of Coinbase’s “Stand With Crypto” NFTs.
• OpenSea Pro added support for PEPE payments.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Cool Cats teamed with Ledger on a bespoke Ledger Nano S Plus series.
• Elon Musk tweeted out a Milady meme, leading to a temporary floor price surge for the collection.
• Pudgy Penguins raised a new $9M seed round.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Alpha Centauri Kid raised 631 ETH in auctions via his latest The Broken Keys series.
• Escher, a digital art editions platform, is shuttering its operations.
• Holograph released a free multichain open edition by the artist spacebrat.
• Prohibition, a new generative art platform powered by Art Blocks Engine, is preparing to launch.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity launched Origins Season 4.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Webaverse introduced moemate, an AI-powered companion.

🪙 NFTfi

• Baton released its NFT Yield Farming product on testnet.
• Ronin released new ronanchain.com analytics features.

🎆 Mint spotlight: Reflect and Ponder

Zora, the hyperstructure NFT protocol that’s helping to “bring imagination onchain,” just released a silverish-chrome open edition of one of its signature Zorbs to commemorate web3 publishing platform Mirror’s new feature that supports embedding Zora mints directly into Mirror posts. There’s now 5 days left on the drop, and minting from it will subscribe you to Zora’s Mirror account. This “mint to subscribe” playbook is one all web3 creatives should be considering right now, in my opinion.

🙇 New insightful threads to level up your web3 knowledge!

1. ChainLinkGod.eth on the weirdness of BRC-20s.

2. Lamboland on Disney’s new Star Wars NFT collection.

3. Nick White on the difference between data availability and data storage.

4. S4mmy.eth on NFT Worlds’s rebrand to TOPIA.

5. Sound on preparing to open to all musicians.

✨ My NFT tool of the week: Flashbots Protect

Are you surfing the current crypto meta, trading shitcoins to try and increase your ETH and NFT stacks? Then one resource you should know about is Flashbots Protect, which offers you an RPC you can connect to so that your memecoin transactions don’t get frontrun by sandwich attackers. Such an attack can cost you a decent chunk of change, so don’t sleep on Flashbots if you want to stay vigilant here.

😜 The meta dilemma…