Around the Blockchain (3/13/22): Dapper Overload?
Welcome to the weekly recap revolving around some of the less popular blockchains. In this week’s edition you will find a P2E first-person shooter game, the never-ending Dapper drops, and an NFT collection by Ukrainian devs for the support of Ukrainian soldiers. But first, as always, the macro crypto market:
The Fungibles
Every time there’s a bit of a positive run, it seems that just about every token hits a resistance and falls right back.
Even $LUNA seems to have finally peaked and is starting to potentially return to Earth. After hitting a new all-time high on Wednesday at $101.59 and being the only cryptocurrency to achieve such a feat in quite some time, it has since fallen over 13.5% back down to the current price (as of this writing) of $87.75.
However, as per coinmarketcap.com, that still represents a one week gain of just over 2%.
Other than $LUNA it was pretty much all red. $ADA dropped 7.3% ($0.79), $SOL 6.64% ($82.51), $AVAX 6.28% ($71.50), and $FLOW 3.45% ($5.58).
November and its highs seem like a very long time ago, and one has to wonder what catalyst might cause the next bull run. Just remember that being a long term investor means not worrying about short term ups and downs, but making sure not to panic during downswings.
This Week in Solana
MetaOps, a first-person shooter game, is currently under development by Open Portal Studios.
The game features PFP-style NFTs that will allow players to earn in-game assets including an upcoming token native to the game. The first 3,000 NFTs were available to be minted starting Saturday at 1 P.M. EST on Fractal by 1,000 whitelisted members of the MetaOps community for 0.5 $SOL.
At the conclusion of the 2-day long whitelist sale, there will be an additional 1,805 NFTs available for 0.9 $SOL to anyone holding a Fractal NFT.
Finally, the public sale will begin 6 hours after the Fractal community sale and will consist of up to 720 NFTs at 1 $SOL each. Learn more about the project and game on the MetaOps website, and mint on Fractal. NFTs will be revealed after the collection has completely sold out.
bracketX Access Passes sold out on Friday at a minting price of 1 $SOL each.
The sports based NFT promises exclusive content for basketball fans of both the NBA and NCAA, beginning with a March Madness tournament.
Each of the 2,500 Access Pass NFTs entitles the holder to an airdrop of a randomly generated bracket that serves as the entry into the contest. The top 100 winners will split the total prize pool evenly, which will consist of 100 $SOL from the team plus 50% of the mint (presumably 1,250 $SOL after the sellout) and 100% of royalties.
In addition to buying and selling the Access Pass NFTs (which will have future tournaments and benefits to holding after this initial one) the actual brackets themselves will be tradeable on Magic Eden. The Pass floor is currently 1.4 $SOL on Magic Eden.
This Week in FLOW
The NBA Top Shot market has been consistently on a downward trend as based upon the total market cap.
However, you wouldn’t know it by looking at the pack drops, which continue to consistently sell out. This past week saw the release 4 of the 2022 NBA All-Star packs, split into parts A for trade tickets and B for the newly normal prices of $19 per Standard and $49 per Elite pack.
This week may be a reprieve for the drop weary. No new packs have been announced. There are several ongoing challenges and a weekend long flash challenge for a Scottie Barnes moment in the works, though, so make sure to take advantage if you own the required moments.
NFL All Day also continued the tradition of weekly pack drops, this time another round of Week 18 standard and premium drops.
Although some calculated the packs as -EV and potentially up to a 96% chance of being unprofitable, the packs still sold out. For those monitoring, it will be interesting to see how many total moments end up minted for All Day’s Series 1, as well as where the market ends up valuing them.
One potential positive is the still-closed Beta for the project allows for the potential of more users coming into the ecosystem having missed out on packs and wanting to immediately spend in the marketplace and possibly drive up prices.
This Week in Avalanche
The Avalanche chain is holding a Summit in Barcelona from March 22-27, 2022. As such, on Monday they tweeted asking for NFT artists to apply to be featured live at the event.
The event features a plethora of events and speakers on a number of interesting topics important to the future of blockchain technology, P2E gaming, NFTs, and more. Submissions for artists are due by this Tuesday, March 15.
In other infrastructure-building news, Avalanche announced this week the launch of a $290m incentive program to encourage developers and projects to build on Avalanche’s new subnets. Subnets on Avalanche are similar to a layer-2 on other blockchains, but with the key difference of being fully integrated into the layer-1 chain, in this case Avalanche.
This provides the best of both worlds, allowing for more growth and greater ability to build on the L1 chain, while maintaining the autonomy of a separate network. As an example, the highly anticipated Crystalvale launch by DeFi Kingdoms will be on an Avalanche subnet specific to the game.
This will allow DeFi Kingdoms to develop its own rules for the subnet, such as having players pay gas fees in $JEWEL. The incentive program will be called Avalanche Multiverse and is being run by the Avalanche Foundation. Read more about the program, which projects are involved, and why subnets are so important in this Medium article.
Other Blockchain News
WeCan, the company behind the P2E Wax game R-Planet, announced and began selling new NFTs directly on AtomicHub.
Ranging in price from $150-$9,000 (in $WAXP), the Ukrainian developers have promised no utility other than utilizing the sales proceeds to “purchase life-saving equipment for Ukrainian soldiers”. As of this writing, approximately $28,500 worth of funds had been raised.
