Around the Blockchain: What's New on SOL, WAX, and FLOW
Welcome back to the weekly ETH-less recap. Every week we recap the top NFT news from other competing layer one blockchains, including Solana, Flow, and WAX. Want to get started on these blockchains, refer to our introductions to Solana and WAX!
Now to the recap!
The Fungibles
Last week’s recovery is looking like a dead cat bounce now. The vast majority of tokens have corrected massively over the past seven days. As of this writing CoinMarketCap indicates major drops for Solana’s $SOL (15.54%), Avalanche’s $AVAX (16.41%), Tezos’ $XTZ (14.80%), and Harmony’s $ONE (30.97%). If the fungible cryptocurrency market continues to enter bear territory it will be interesting to see how that impacts NFTs.
This Week in FLOW
Dapper Labs takes the front seat position this week, as they bombarded us with announcement after announcement over the past few days. Before we can even get into that, though, congratulations are in order. In case you missed it, Lucky Trader co-founder Jonathan Bales celebrated the anniversary of his infamous Lucky Maverick article by hosting a giveaway of a $35,000 LeBron James Series 1 moment on Tuesday’s episode of Club Top Shot. Congrats to Tricky8181 and all the winners of the other prizes! You can rewatch the incredible CTS birthday episode here.
On NBA Top Shot itself, things have remained very active with continuing flash challenges and another 160,000 base pack sell out on Tuesday with the Series 3, Release 7 drop. However, the site added more excitement with the announcement of a new marketing push. For a limited time new users can get a special Kevin Durant Starter Pack, coinciding with the new KD-featured TV ad. Additionally, NBA Top Shot announced the second round of Series 3 Rare Premium and Legendary Holo Icon packs, both dropping on Tuesday, January 25.
If you thought that was a lot, hang on tight. Dapper Lab’s CEO Roham Gharegozlou cryptically tweeted out on Tuesday night “big day tomorrow” and the next day the Durant ad and packs dropped. He followed it up with a similar tweet Wednesday and did not disappoint. On Thursday news broke with regards to the long-awaited UFC/Dapper Labs NFT project. The name, UFC Strike, was announced, along with information on the initial pack drop on Sunday, January 23 at 2:00 pm EST. Check out the brand-new UFC Strike website to learn more about the newest NFTs from Dapper.
This Week in WAX
The previously announced Street Fighter Classic drop sold out its 1,000 packs on Thursday. Funko released a new project, Retro Comics X Funko, this week as well and sold out its 32,000 Series 1 packs. Keeping up with their past drops, these contain extremely rare Legendary and Grail NFTs, each of which can be redeemed for a matching physical Funko Digital Pop! collectible.
WarSpace, another P2E game previously discussed in this column, had another round of pack drops on Tuesday. Just last week the game launched with their initial standard and premium packs, which sold out and quickly vaulted WarSpace into the number one spot for 24-hour sales volume on the WAX blockchain. This next round helped to release the initial resource tokens into the ecosystem, as the pack sale was for each of the 4 resources that will become a vital part of the gameplay upon launch.
In upcoming event news, stay tuned for the launch of Cosmic Clash, the first in a planned series of P2E arcade-style games by mobile game developer Lucrative Gaming. Although no packs or NFTs have been sold yet, the cross-game token inherent to the entire Lucrative Gaming ecosystem, $FGL, is already live to be purchased on Alcor Exchange for anyone looking to stock up. As of this writing, the exchange rate is just over 17 $FGL per 1 $WAXP.
WAX announced this week that a major milestone has been crossed. There are now 10 million accounts on the WAX blockchain, making it the largest blockchain in the world. To celebrate this, WAX will be airdropping one of ten pin NFTs to every single account holder. WAX has also decided to aidrop the pins in chronological order based upon account setup date. This means that the original, first one million WAX accounts will receive “WAX Mainnet Launch” NFT stickers, the newest users will receive the last NFT pin (“Cinema Spotlight” commemorating the recent Spider-Man themed NFT drop by AMC) in the collection. Other users will be dropped one of the versions between these two. Although the drops began on Thursday at 2 PM, it is hard to gauge how long until completion, as the undertaking is the largest in blockchain NFT history.
This Week in Solana
The biggest news of the week for Solana is the upcoming Horror Fellas drop. Horror Fellas will drop 10,000 NFTs for the price of 0.7 $SOL at 1:00 PM EST on January 22. The collection promises to be the first NFT fully integrated with augmented reality (AR). The drop information is a bit misleading though, as the AR technology indication is labeled in Phase 3 of their roadmap, after minting (Phase 1).
SolSand, an ambitious project aiming to be the equivalent of Decentraland for the Solana blockchain, split their drop into two halves. Each plot of land cost 1 $SOL during the first mint’s pre-sale, 1.5 $SOL in the first mint’s public sale, and will increase to 1.5 $SOL for pre-sale and 2 $SOL for public sale for the second drop. The first drop sold out incredibly quickly last Saturday, January 15. If you don’t want to bother with the mint, the floor on Magic Eden currently sits at 3.15 $SOL. Some of the future benefits for SolSand holders include the promise of $VERSE airdrops, whitelist opportunities for future projects, and for holders of 10 or more NFTs - an extra plot of land as well as a share of 4% of SolSand’s royalties.
Other Blockchain News
Tezos has been working hard to help educate developers and others interested in web3 technology to help grow the metaverse. As such, this week saw the promotion o a new initiative, the Tezos 101 2-hour online course in conjunction with The Blockchain School. You can find out more and enroll in the course here. Additionally, Tezos announced back on January 13th a partnership with Encode Club. This joint venture will start with a once weekly educational program covering 8 topics in 8 weeks and beginning on Thursday, January 27th. It is not too late to sign up, as the first two courses will be Intro to Blockchain and Intro to Tezos.
