NFTX Weekly Round-up #10

Welcome to the weekly update of all things NFTX, along with a sprinkling of NFT news as well.

New NFTX Funds

This week we’ve seen a continuation of new funds created on the NFTX platform and adding to the already healthy supply on NFTs in the system. New funds this week include:

• Ether Cards (released last Thursday, read more below)
• Alpaca City
• CryptoArte
• Chubbies

If you’re ready to start your own fund you can get started now by following this tutorial, or alternatively reach out on the NFTX Discord if you'd like us to help you out!

$PLAY: an NFTX and PieDao collaboration

Just before the weekend, we launched a surprise teaser on Twitter leading in a collaboration between PieDAO and NFTX, adding a handful of extra tokens to PieDAOs' $PLAY Index - an index targeting the latest & greatest in the Metaverse.

Aside from the extremely hyped video (really though - hats off to Nico), Chop has worked together with Alexintosh from PieDAO to update their original $PLAY proposal to include an addition of NFT Governance tokens (including NFTX) and a set of NFTX-based index funds (starting off with $MASK and $PUNK-Basic).

For the full proposal, as well as the large positive response by the PieDAO community, make sure to visit the forums!

ETH Global: NFT Hack Results

As talked about previously, NFTX is sponsoring this years’ NFT Hack event by ETH Global.

The free event took place from Thursday March 18th to Sunday March 22nd, attracting the brightest minds from the DeFi & NFT scene to work together in a 4-day event.

Alex gave an overview of NFTX as a primer for the teams battling in the in Hack event, which in itself is a great little tutorial about setting up a fund and some interesting things that you can do with the contracts and the platform.

On the last day of the hackathon, teams have pitched their projects to Alex Gausman. The top 3 projects that were picked as winners have been awarded NFTX prizes:

1 - Bunchy Protocol
2 - MysteryDrop
3 - Ethernaal

NFT News

Ether Cards Released

After two rounds of presales and a huge promotion through the Brave browser, Ether Cards released their new NFTs on Thursday. There was a huge initial push as Gas wars engulfed the sales process, and the Common Cards moved quickly from 0.3ETH to 0.75ETH on the Bonding curve.

A few days later, all of the OG cards have sold out and there are still limited Alpha and Common cards remaining at 5ETH and 1.75ETH respectively. An NFTX fund was set up alongside the launch and currently have 29 cards at the time of writing.

At the moment none of the cards have been provided with their traits, and it is the traits that will add another level of rarity to the cards making some a lot more valuable that others.

There were also 30 CryptoPunks acquired by the Ether Cards team which will be airdropped to some very lucky card owners. What are the chances of landing yourself a Punk this way? Well, OG cards have a 10% chance, and Alpha and Common cards have a 0.2% chance.

Queue the massive rush on the $CARDS fund if one of them contain a Punk trait :) Good luck.

Avastars Next Generation

If you’re a fan of art, beautiful UI, blockchain, and infinite scroll treasure hunting, you need to check out the recent release of Avastars.  In this recent release of the Avastars series, you are tasked with finding the most fit civilians to welcome to the newly discovered world.  Randomly generated attributes increase rarity and subsequent value. This writer personally found himself scrolling for pages looking for the perfect match.

Avastars continues to deliver on their mission to create the ultimate digital collectibles project. In a recent tweet they described their product as, “Avastars is a generative art project, but a big differentiator is that you don't get a randomly generated weird NFT.  YOU sift through those & then generate the perfect one. So every single Avastars on the blockchain is hand selected/created,” Avastars tweeted.

Carbon Drop Art

Last week we spoke a little bit about the environmental impact of NFTs. This is being run by Nifty Gateway and has the support of the leading digital artists including Beeple whose work is currently sitting at $1.5m bid.

All proceeds will go to the Open Earth Foundation, a US-based research and deployment 501c3 nonprofit, raising funds to develop innovative open digital infrastructure for improved management of planet Earth —helping track transparently the global progress on the Paris Agreement to avoid the existential risk of climate change.

Read more about the Carbon Drop Art on their website.

How NFTs reference the media you bought - a twitter thread.

Jonty Wareing annoyed a lot of people this week with this twitter thread about the behind-the-scenes metadata and storage of your NFTs work.

Paraphrasing a lot of the article, Jonty’s point is that the media itself is not stored on the block chain (because that would be too onerous and not the right solution) but instead of IPFS servers which are often maintained by the same person/company that you bought the NFT from (and, who he argues, will go bust one day).

This is a solid problem that needs to be understood and worked on, and it is something that is being dealt with already by those companies that provide the original NFTs.

Take Hashmasks for example. Hashmasks are arguably the best selling NFT in 2021 and are well aware that they’re managing all of the 16,384 images on IPFS servers that they maintain. This is why they contacted NFTX to ask if we would offer a mirror hosting service for these images as well to provide additional redundancy to the longevity of the artwork.

We are at the relative infancy of this industry and a lot of best practices are still being formed, the long term storage of that data is going to be one of those practices that need to be worked through. Perhaps the solution lies with something like the WayBack Machine and funded by the community as a whole, or as part of the original artists minting contribution.

Mentions in media

An exciting development in the NFT scene is the widespread adoption from less traditional markets. Taking one example, trading cards have been “Men Forward” since the rise of professional sports. Now with the availability to access different consumers through NFTs, there has been a rise in women’s sports digital collectibles.

Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, recently shared the following insights with CNBC, “These markets are male-dominated right now. Women are undervalued, just as they are in other markets, despite actually having much more influence on dollars,” Ohanian tweeted.

NFTX is following these trends closely especially as they pertain to CryptoPunks and other funds under management that bring more diverse buyers to the NFT market. This is another interesting way NFT consumers are uniting over collectibles.

Price check

The 7d price for NFTX is down by 28.5% and is holding just above the $200 mark. Along with the price updates each week we’re creating dashboards around the ongoing action on the NFTX platform itself instead of a focus purely on the governance token.

We’ve got some metrics that we’re already working on including total and fund TVL, new fund creations, mint/redeem numbers across funds,

If there are specific reports or data points that would be helpful for you please let us know on discord or at hello (at) nftx.org.

That's all for this week. If you have any questions, come and join in on the discord channel.