Around the Blockchain: WAX Art Week
New day, same concept. The weekly non-ETH recap will start to drop on Sunday mornings, letting us truly recap the entire prior week. If you’re new, this is where we recap news and some curated drops, mostly focusing on the WAX, Solana, and FLOW blockchains. However, we will also touch on Harmony, Tezos, and any others as news comes up. If it’s not Ethereum or an Ethereum-based L2, it is fair game for Around the Blockchain. Here’s what you may have missed this week.
The Fungibles
The market continues to trade somewhat sideways. We went from down only to a rebound to a massive drop but now, depending on which network you look at, it’s either up or relatively flat. Over the past 7 days, according to CoinMarketCap, SOL has dropped 1.82 percent and remains under $100, whereas the all-time high (ATH), back in November, was closing in on $260. The Avalanche blockchain’s native token $AVAX is up 16.11 percent this week, but also still down over 50 percent from its all-time high. Despite those losses, those two chains at least remain up on a 1-year lookback. Flow ($FLOW) has not been so lucky, and Tezos ($XTZ) is not so far behind. $FLOW, despite jumping up 36 percent on a rolling 7-day basis, at $6.89 has not only lost over 82% of its peak value ($39.04), it is also down roughly 30 percent from where it was exactly 1 year ago, when it traded at $9.70. Lastly, XTZ, relatively flat on a rolling year basis, at $3.25 has also mostly benefited from an up week of 9.74 percent. The ATH of $8.70 on October 3, 2021, seems a long way away. Will this bear market turn around? Is it even a true bear market right now? Those are good questions that can only be answered in hindsight. If you’re unsure what to do or have concerns, check out this article and consider staying medium bored.
This Week in Solana
Cyber Wave touts itself as the “best on-chain game on Solana." The collection features 8,888 “Survivors” of the zombie apocalypse. There are six levels of rarity (classes), each one looking less human and more robotic than the class before and each featuring boosted stats for the eventual game. The pre-sale and public sale were extremely popular, over-selling on lottery “tickets” in order to earn one of the coveted Survivor NFTs. The first phase of the game, staking to earn experience points is live. The next phase, fighting against zombies in units along with other players to earn $CYBER will be forthcoming. $CYBER will be used in a variety of fashions, including in the Cyber Wave marketplace. As of this writing, the floor on Magic Eden is 0.86 SOL and there are several Aries (one class up from Normal, the lowest class) at or near the floor.
Another game that looked like it had potential but did not do quite as well was Galactic Fight League. As the name suggests, the project consists of 4,000 fighter NFTs to be utilized in a forthcoming game, expected to be released in late 2022. In the interim, a digital comic airdrop featuring the NFT characters is planned, and eventually irl MMA events will be planned, exclusive to NFT holders. However, the project, minting on Magic Eden’s Launchpad, has yet to mint out after dropping on Saturday evening. As of this writing, 2,185 tokens remain at a mint price of 1.75 $SOL. Secondary market sales will be initiated once the mint has ended.
This Week in WAX
This week was WAX Art Week. Although the WAX blockchain is mostly known for its huge array and easy usability as a P2E gaming platform, this week focused on some of the indie artists creating art based NFTs exclusively on WAX. Each day featured a new artist and also included giveaways of both $WAXP and exclusive NFTs. Some of the artists featured were bohnart, SEÑORLUPE, jonezy.art, Oliver Morpher, and Disguised Pigeon.
You can read about all the featured artists on the Medium article posted by the official WAX account. Expect more weeks like this, including giveaways, to come from the WAX team in the future.
Not to stray too far from the gaming roots, Cosmic Clash and Fightland were both launched this week, neither to much fanfare. However, a good team and plan can sometimes salvage a project that looks destined to fail. These two provide a case study, with the former proving the winner. Both games looked like they had potential; both are intended to be both staking and fighting games, and both had some originality to them. Cosmic Clash features spaceship NFTs earning $FGL by being sent on missions, with $FGL being the currency used to send your fleet into battle against other fleets, along with more, future gameplay potential. Fightland features fighters and promoters, with fighters earning “Fightanium” tokens by staking (much larger amounts if “contracted” to a promoter to fight) and “FightKreds” used to enter matches. Both held their initial pack sales this week and neither did particularly well. However, Fightland continues to be listed and packs can still be bought at the initial price on NeftyBlocks. Cosmic Clash, on the other hand, prior to launch announced a 24-hour maximum sale. Despite only 1,080 packs being sold at 500 $WAXP each, they stuck to their plan and ended the sale at 1,080 (out of a max of 2,500). What happened was after the drop ended prices immediately began to rise and healthy market activity pushed the price to 650 $WAXP the same day that the drop ended. As of this writing, the pack floor on AtomicHub sits at 953 $WAXP. For someone interested in getting started at a (much) lower investment, a floor starship currently sits at 63 $WAXP.
This Week in FLOW
After the most exciting weekend of NFL football possibly all season, Dapper let in a big new wave of beta testers to the NFL All Day platform, just in time for the Divisional Round Playoff pack drop. 32,500 packs sold out (after a few delays) and after news of Tom Brady’s impending retirement dropped on Saturday, suddenly the 705/1,200 rare moments of Brady’s final NFL touchdown pass became the potentially most coveted moment; the only possible competition being the 20/59 legendary Kansas City Chiefs “melt” of their 13 second drive to tie up the game in their epic win over the Buffalo Bills.
Not to be outdone, NBA Top Shot had its days in the spotlight this past week, too. On Tuesday, the site sold out both its second release of 9,001 rare Premium Packs and its first release of 1,485 legendary Holo Icon packs for series 3. To top this off, Thursday saw the return of the locker packs. The site sold 350 more series 1 packs to those who qualified by having at least 500 tickets to trade for the pack. Still ongoing, for anyone who somehow follows NFTs but isn’t yet on the NBA Top Shot site, is the Kevin Durant starter challenge. Sign up for the platform, buy the special starter pack including an exclusive KD-narrated moment of the star himself, and then complete the starter-only challenge to earn a series 2 pack.
Other Blockchain News
DeFi Kingdoms, the popular Harmony-based gamified-DeFi platform, made some waves this week. Although the native $JEWEL token has finally been caught by the bear market, dropping from an ATH on January 5th of $23.36 to its current (as of this writing) price of $7.59, the game itself continues to move forward with its greater plans of being a P2E game and more than just a DEX, as well as expanding to more networks. The sale of land began this week, and the beta version of the site has been updated to reflect that. Currently all plots of land show a simple outline and a number, but if one clicks on any plot they can see the owner and the level (all are 1 as of now). Snapshots continue to occur for the upcoming airdrop of $CRYSTAL, the in-game token associated with Crystalvale, the upcoming branch of the game to the Avalanche blockchain. Additionally, the team announced on Thursday that over the coming weeks there will be several more ways to earn entries to win additional items, equipment, Gen 0 heroes, and more for the launch of Crystalvale. With the current price of $JEWEL being much closer to its low than high, now is as good of a time as any to get started in the game. If you’re interested but not sure how, find out everything you need to know to get started from Lucky Trader’s own Lou Sherman.
