Last Week’s Top 5 in DeFi/NFT News — February 7, 2022
Published in
7 min readFeb 7, 2022
Weekly DeFi/NFT news is a collection of major weekly events/announcements brought from the most trustworthy data sources, such as The Defiant, Spencer Noon, Week in Ethereum News etc. with comments and extra insight from the Bulldax DeFi labs.
Axie Infinity Sidechain Token RON Slides 35% in Debut Week — The Defiant
- Sky Mavis, the company behind the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, launched the RON governance token for its Ronin sidechain on Jan. 27.
- RON traded around $4 at launch and has since fallen 35% to $2.70 as liquidity providers on the Ronin chain’s Katana DEX continue to cash in their newly unlocked rewards.
- According to the litepaper, the RON token has a total supply of one billion, of which 30% are allocated to Sky Mavis, 30% to community initiatives including liquidity mining, 25% for RON staking rewards and the remaining 15% to an ecosystem fund.
- Users were able to farm RON tokens by providing liquidity to the AXS-WETH and SLP-WETH pairs on Katana since it launched last November.
- However, the tokens earned by liquidity providers were only available to claim when RON was launched last week, with 10% of the RON supply allocated to the initial liquidity mining program that lasts 90 days.
- Axie Infinity was originally launched on Ethereum, but high gas fees and slow transaction times impeded growth. In response, Sky Mavis launched Ronin, its bespoke sidechain that’s optimized for gaming, in Feb. 2021.
- According to Nansen, the number of daily active addresses on Ronin peaked at 1.1M in November, coinciding with the launch of the Katana DEX.
- Similarly, network activity was over five times that of Ethereum in November but has since cooled off.
- RON is currently trading at $401M market cap and $2,7B fully diluted market cap.
Sources: 1. https://thedefiant.io/ronin-slide-token-debut-axie-infinity/
2. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ronin
Decoupling of NFTs and Crypto Spurs Debate About Future of New Asset Class — The Defiant
- Why are NFTs soaring while digital assets plunge into bear territory?
- NFTs and tokens have definitely decoupled. Monthly volume on OpenSea hit an all-time high of nearly $5B last week and the floor price of leading collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) jumped 50% in January, according to CoinGecko. NFT sales continue to make gaudy headlines — on Jan. 31, a BAYC NFT sold for $2.7M.
- “Investors and collectors of NFTs seem to be a different breed than regular crypto investors,” Yohann Calpu, the chief marketing officer of NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam, told The Defiant.
- “They are in it not just for profits alone, but for identity, community, belonging, and an emotional connection with the art — this is why we are seeing a pullback in general crypto but an increase in sales on the NFT side.”
- CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong told The Defiant that the recent strength of NFTs suggests there are many “NFT holders who may not overlap with the core crypto community, which sold off assets during the recent downturn.”
- Pedro Herrera, a senior blockchain analyst at DappRadar, added that “the boost provided by the involvement of celebrities and big brands in the space is important, the social reach and influence power of these individuals cannot be taken lightly.
- Strong demand for freshly launched avatar collections including CloneX, Azuki, and Doodles “show that the avatar market is still hot and will continue to be hot as more collectors enter the scene.”
Source: https://thedefiant.io/nfts-decouple-crypto-market/
The next big trend in NFTs: Music NFTs — Bankless
- Music NFTs offer a new medium to curate your taste with exposure to the underlying creative work and its creator. In the traditional world, music collectibles represent north of a $5B market. In the digital world, the sky’s the limit.
- At its core, Music NFTs are simply digital collectibles. They carry no inherent ownership rights and merely exist as an asset that can be bought and sold by a collector.
- Music NFTs offer artists leverage by building a community of superfans eager to collect scarce digital representations of the work. There are platforms like Royal exploring Music NFTs with royalty rights.
- Collectibles offer the most direct and simple monetization mechanism given the lack of regulatory hurdles incurred when the artists own 100% of their rights.
- Music NFTs allow you to maximize your earnings potential with only a few dedicated fans. They are the bedrock of Creator DAOs and the first step towards music micro-economies.
- There are a couple of platforms currently leading the Music NFT charge.
- Catalog is a 1/1 Music NFT marketplace. Similar to SuperRare or Foundation, all NFTs are minted as 1/1 works — meaning no other copy of that song will ever be minted (in theory). Built on the Zora protocol, Catalog was the first marketplace to be designed specifically for collecting audio. To date, Catalog has had over $2M+ in sales volume, with an average sale price of $3,707.
- On average, top web3 artists have earned 7.5x more from selling Music NFTs than their estimated earnings from a year’s worth of Spotify streams. This makes the case clear: independent artists can earn substantially more through Music NFTs than streaming.
- Sound is a Music NFT marketplace that offers editions rather than 1/1s. Each release features a Listening Party in which collectors listen to the full track, and then proceed to collect an NFT with the ability to leave a comment on the track.
- With 30 consecutive sellouts, all Sound NFTs have been priced at a base rate of 0.1 ETH. This translates to each Sound NFT representing 75,000 Spotify streams and each sellout worth over 1.8M total streams at the standard 25 editions.
- There’s a great research report on Music NFTs here and a recap of the top moments in Music NFTs from 2021 here.
Source: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/the-next-big-trend-in-nfts
Cyber is a gateway to the metaverse: immersive 3D showrooms for NFT collectors reaches $26M in volume — Spenser Noon
- Cyber is a gateway to the metaverse, starting with immersive 3D showrooms for NFT collectors.
- The showrooms themselves are also NFTs. Total volume on OpenSea for factory showrooms reached 8.7k ETH or ~$25.6m, with their floor price currently tracking at ~1.4 ETH. Their average price jumped ~3.2x over the past week to 2.8 ETH. Digital art featured on the platform is worth over $100m, including the collection of Vincent Van Dough.
- Along with an uptick in price, total purchases saw a ~2x increase from the beginning of January, totaling about 2k or ~1/5th of purchases since the project’s launch. While most of the Cyber’s activity is on Ethereum mainnet, the factory collection is also live on Polygon and has seen 93 total transactions.
Source: https://ournetwork.substack.com/p/ournetwork-issue-107
Brantly, ENS Director Cancelled for his Comments on Homosexuality and Abortion — NFT Evening
- The current ENS Director of Operations at Ethereum Name Service, Brantly Millegan has been cancelled by the NFT Twitter community after his comments on homosexuality and abortion have resurfaced from 2016. After the resurfacing, he continued to back up his views, including going onto Twitter Spaces to reaffirm his controversial beliefs.
- Since this Tweet came out again, Brantly has constantly reinforced his ideas and original statement. In response to the backlash he received, Brantly said: “looks like I’ve got my first mob. nice to see some ppl finally read the first word of my bio (Catholic). I love you all, I’m gonna keep working on web3”
- This was responded to by Adam Cochran who quoted some Bible verses which promote loving others and not speaking unwholesomely. Brantly replied: “not really interested in debating theology right now, but what I believe is the mainstream traditional Christian positions held by the world’s largest religion. it’s not exactly fringe”. Finally, he added that there’s “not really anything to address”.
- Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains are a decentralised domain naming service for wallets, websites and more. They allow for users in the Web3 and NFT space to get a personalised username and store an avatar and other profile data. Holders own an NFT for each of their domains, which can be bought and sold on Ethereum based marketplaces.
