NFTs In A Nutshell: A Weekly Review

NFTs shattered records this week as August comes to a close. Dapper Labs is expanding beyond just NBA licensed NFTs. And it feels like it was so long ago that Visa purchased their first CryptoPunk, but it was just early this week. That’s how the world turns in the fast-moving landscape of NFTs. Let’s recap all of this week’s biggest headlines in the space.

This Week’s Non-Fungible Token News

Visa Snags A CryptoPunk

Visa shelled out a cool 49.50 ETH (approximately $150K) for CryptoPunk #7610 this week. Visa sees NFTs as “the intersection of culture and commerce.”

Will every major brand one day own an NFT that represents their company, a la social media? Visa seems to think so and is placing their bet early. We’ll trust their judgement on this one.

OpenSea Shatters NFT Records

August has been booming for OpenSea. According to the good folks over at DappRadar, 30-day user growth and transactions are both up over 200%. Monthly trading volume has come in just shy of $1.7B.

OpenSea continues to be an industry leader for NFT marketplaces.

Dapper Labs Expands NFTs On Top Shot, Partners With LaLiga

Dapper Labs has been seeing substantial wins with it’s Top Shot product, and is looking to build on that success. Announcements this week show more sports IP coming to life. Dapper has already begun implementing WNBA moments into it’s Top Shot product this week, including a WNBA pack drop that took place on Friday.

Also on the docket for Dapper is a partnership with leading soccer league LaLiga, which looks to have it’s own marketplace coming to market in June 2022. To date, Sorare has dominated the soccer NFT market – with some team fan tokens by way of Socios.com and Chiliz seeing success as well.

Related Reading | Comparing Bitcoin And Crypto To The Internet In 1997

NFTs: It’s Not All Bulls…

A new report from Bloomberg this week suggest some signs of potential wash trading, according to analysts at blockchain firm Nansen. The reports state that their is strong, healthy organic growth in the NFT market. However, NFTs still are “spotted by certain profit-seeking practices,” according to the analysts.

Nansen clarified in emails to Bloomberg that this may not explicitly be wash trading. However, despite some bad actors in the markets, Nansen still sees NFTs as “a bright new vertical.”

Marvel’s NFTs Of Legendary Digital Comic Books Go Live

Closing out last week was another NFT launch for Marvel, after quickly selling out of the Spider-Man and Marvel Mightys series’. Marvel’s partnership with VeVe has gone well despite staying somewhat under the radar. Last weekend’s release featured three unique original comic book covers. Much more to come from Marvel and VeVe, it seems.

The Most Expensive NFT Yet?

As our team here reported earlier this week, there’s a new record for most expensive NFT – by way of fractionalized projects. ‘Feisty Doge,’ a tokenized piece of art that had a value of $70M based on token prizes, set a new valuation record. Some in the NFT community are skeptical that the creator removed liquidity from the trading pool of tokens and took profits for themselves.

Dapper Labs FLOW product has a bright future ahead, with growth coming to the Top Shot marketplace, and a new marketplace for LaLiga assets coming to consumers next year. | Source: FLOW-USD on TradingView.com

A (Dis)Respectful Endeavor

Popular video game streamer Dr. Disrespect is rumored to be cooking up his own video game and gaming company. According to reports this week, the creator’s first title will support crypto and NFTs as part of the revenue model for players and producers. In a gaming webcast this week, the doc shared that he sees crypto and NFTs as ways for players and creators to have equity. Play-to-earn titles like Axie Infinity have been absolutely on fire lately – exhibiting the fact that gaming and crypto go hand-in-hand.

Dr. Disrespect has over 3MM YouTube subscribers and will look to leverage his massive audience as his new endeavors take shape.

Intelligent NFTs?

An innovative team working on ‘intelligent NFTs’, going by iNFTs, have combined to form Alethea AI. This week, the team has raised $16MM in funding – backed by Mark Cuban, Dapper Labs, Gemini Frontier Fund, and more.

The team is working on a decentralized platform that runs on Open Ai’s GPT-3 deep learning engine. Additionally, the team envisions intelligent NFTs that can interact with users in real-time. In June, the first iNFT sold on Sotheby’s for just shy of $500K.

If you blink, you probably just got a little bit further behind in the NFT space.

Related Reading | Manifold Co-Founder On How To Keep NFTs Safe From Hackers

Featured image from Pixabay, Charts from TradingView.com