Daily NFT News & Drops for August 31 | Lucky Trader

Lucky Trader covers the latest NFT news for Wednesday, August 31. Top stories include Future PROOF's flurry of announcements, the y00ts team Twitter suspension, Jim Cramer saving the crypto markets, and a few new art NFT projects to watch.

Top NFT Projects to Watch Today, August 31

The week in NFT world got off to a blazing fast start, with Monday's DigiDaigaku announcement of a $200M fundraise sending the Digi floor all the way to 16 ETH (it's since retraced) and then Tuesday's marquee event for the PROOF Collective ecosystem in Future PROOF capturing the market's attention.

Trading volume remains up, at least compared to the weekend, with the last two days tallying 11.2K ETH each. This was the second highest two-day stretch in all of August, and several new drops and existing floors have benefitted.

Now there is a bit of a mid-week lull ahead of the big end-of-week action with y00ts and the DigiDaigaku airdrop both coming on Friday. But there are still a few drops to watch today.

Let's get into it.

Top NFT Mints and Reveals Today, August 31

Here are the two primary drops on the radar for today, both art-related:

• Art Blocks Factory: 3 Minute Meditations
• Industrial Melanism by Neil Grayson

Art Blocks Factory: 3 Minute Meditations

Art Blocks is back today, this time with an audio-visual Factory drop from the co-founder of Alchemix @thetechn0cratic. 

"3 Minute Meditations" is the first generative drop aiming to provide a "short, meditative experience" with its unique combination of fundamental frequencies and harmonics on top of them. From the project description, these beats combine "to form an entrancing soundscape that moves through temporary dissonance into climactic harmony. The associated visuals are representative of the sound, and follow a journey that mirrors the sonic meditation."

With a supply of 333, this set is on the larger side for recent Factory drops. Monday's Factory drop "CryptoCountries" did not perform well, minting just 22 of 267 at a 0.15 ETH mint price. And outside of Squiggles and a few of the best collections, most Art Blocks projects are still falling on secondary with a general lack of liquidity.

So it's a tough market to launch in. This is a cool and unique project, but ~$150 is still a lot for a 3-minute meditation audio-visual NFT. If this one does mint out, it will likely struggle on secondary beyond maybe the first hour of trading, as the general influx of new art on a weekly basis has just not been met with requisite demand. But if you like the art, by all means, mint away.

Meditations will launch at 1:00 p.m. ET in an exponential dutch auction, starting at 2 ETH and dropping to 0.1 ETH final resting price.

Doodle Labs "Industrial Melanism"

Today the Doodle Labs team is partnering with traditional artist Neil Grayson for the NFT debut of Industrial Melanism. Grayson launched a series of oil paintings under the same title in 2018, which were featured in New York museums such as the Eykyn Maclean.

The set takes its name and inspiration from Charles Darwin and evolution, specifically focused on an event from the Industrial Revolution where the burning of coal turned a series of moths that were previously light-colored to 98 percent dark within one generation (their dark fathers helped them match the coal-dyed air pollution saving them from predators). He uses this light/dark combo in the oil paintings, which based on the specific precious metals used in his oils, has a way of making "the dark paintings look light and the light paintings look dark".

From a market perspective, this is an interesting drop. On one hand, clearly, Grayson is an accomplished artist and this set has a history in museums. On the other, Doodle Labs has had very little success thus far in its existence, with several launches failing to even mint out.

Given all the PREMINT raffles and allowlist built for this, and the 170K followers on Twitter, this one should have no problem minting out. And at a 0.2 ETH mint price, it likely will have some upside potential, even with the 999 supply. The variety in outputs will be key for this one, along with any degree of rarity. If there is a nice rare lotto, then this one could very well follow the same arc as some of the recent gmDAO drops; but if too similar, this one probably falls back to mint price.

Industrial Melanism is launching today at 3:00 p.m. ET.

NFT News and Announcements

The top story from Tuesday was Kevin Rose and the Proof Collective's Future Proof event, which was full of announcements. The hour-long conference, which was streamed on YouTube, contained a series of announcements related to each of the pillars of the Proof ecosystem.  The biggest announcement of them all was that of a $50M Series A investment round led by a16z, which Kevin described as driven both by the funds as well as access to the a16z team's experience in launching companies and products.

Other key announcements included:

• PROOF: There will be 4 segments to the art curation of PROOF, including Grails (3x per year), PROOF Collabs, a new product Curated which aims to discover new emerging artists and provide access to PROOF members, and Genesis which has the goal of onboarding, traditional artists, into launching their first NFTs
• PROOF DAO: a DAO for PROOF and Moonbirds holders which empowers holders to build creative projects alongside the PROOF team; the DAO will control trademark decisions as well as a treasury to fund projects that forward the mission, receives ongoing funds from Moonbird royalties
• Moonbirds: Moonbirds secondary collection "Mythicals" was unveiled, with some prelim sketches and renderings shared, along with their mint mechanic of 25 "hatchings" per day for nested Moonbirds (planned for early 2023)
• Oddities: Oddities will also be able to access Mythicals via a burn mechanic, with a 25/day limit (also starting in early 2023)
• Project Highrise: a token-gated gallery platform, backed by analytics that will also allow gallery creators to use writing and leave audio recordings to tell their story (a brief demo was shown)
• PROOF token: a token drop was teased for early 2023, with very little other detail

Overall, sentiment around the event seemed bullish, especially for the long-term potential of the brand. But given how short-term focused the NFT space is right now, price action did dump a bit after the event, with Moonbirds falling from 17 ETH to as low as 13 ETH before recovering to 15 ETH this morning, and Oddities falling below 1.5 ETH.

Piggybacking off its massive momentum from Monday, the DigiDaigaku team released a bit more information for its upcoming airdrop this Friday. While not much is known yet about what this NFT will be (a new character, a dragon, a tool/weapon?), we now know it will be stackable, burnable, and combinable. So it does seem like this drop will help move the set forward into revealing what this game they're building may entail. The Digi floor fell 10% on the day to 13 ETH, in the wake of its massive run on Monday.

y00ts was back in headlines Tuesday, as Frank DeGods and all of the main Twitter accounts were suspended Tuesday morning. This sent $DUST off a cliff, as it fell from an overnight peak of $3.80 all the way below $3 before recovering a bit to $3.19 at the time of writing. The team was able to recover their accounts within a few hours, and as of now, the highly anticipated y00ts mint is still on for Friday.

Here is a quick round-up of the rest of the main headlines from Tuesday:

• CloneX forging went live this morning at 6:00 a.m. ET, allowing CloneX holders to purchase digital items corresponding to their clone traits which can also be exchanged for physicals 
• Cool Cats teased a partnership with Arc8 by GAMEE, which would indicate potential for a new play-to-earn game on the horizon
• LinksDAO opened up voting Monday evening for potential course selection 
• Metaverse HQ released new details for its 2023 access pass NFT mint, with an emphasis on whale holders (5+ NFTs) and soul-bound tokens

NFT Market Action Data, August 31

While NFT trading volume has been up for the past two days, the floors at the top of the leaderboard are not really reflecting it.

The Proof ecosystem dominated trading Tuesday, with Moonbirds, Oddities, and PROOF Pass combining for ~1,750 ETH volume. The Moonbirds fell hard post-event but rallied overnight back to 15.4 ETH. The Oddities ran to 2.5 ETH during the event but fell back to 1.5, likely due to Mythicals not being released until 2023 and traders opting for later entry. The PROOF Pass floor is at 60 ETH, by far the highest entry for any group access pass in the NFT market, which has to be considered a win coming out of the event.

Yuga was next in line, with BAYC/MAYC combining for 500 ETH as their floor held steady at 77 ETH / 14 ETH.

Recent rocket DigiDaigaku fell back 14 percent to 13.4 ETH, as trading volume dropped 90 percent from the surge on Monday. 

A few notable winners on the day featured three new projects, Phoenixes debuted and reached 0.15 ETH, CryptoSimeji's jumped 30 percent to 0.26 ETH and GODA Pass project Art Party ran 27 percent to 0.72 ETH.

One notable loser on the day was Renga, down ~20 percent to 0.62 ETH from recent highs near 0.8 ETH, as details of their pending reveal have still not been released and the market is losing patience.

NFT Market Analysis

The crypto markets were turning bearish Tuesday until late afternoon when infamous commentator Jim Cramer advised everyone to avoid all risk assets, specifically naming crypto. With the trending meme to trade the opposite of Cramer's calls, the markets started celebrating, the max long posts started surfacing, and ETH quickly rallied about 5 percent from the local bottom. At the time of writing, ETH is at $1,590 and BTC is at $20,300. That puts the BTC:ETH ratio at 12.76:1, nearing its local lows and showcasing the market's interest in Vitalik's ecosystem.

Equities dipped Tuesday even as crypto rallied a bit, as the macro picture seems as bleak as ever. Interest rates are back up, there is no sign of inflation dropping any time soon (seriously have you been to a grocery store lately?), and now the market awaits the job numbers coming Friday as the latest metric which will likely impact the market movement.

The Merge trade is going to come back into the spotlight very soon, as it is now just ~2 weeks away. It will be interesting to watch the impact on NFTs, which have been having a recent rebound with ETH stabilizing in the $1,400-$1,700 range. ETH moving violently up or down will likely pause this recent recovery, though general sentiment seems to be that cheaper ETH will actually be better for NFT prices (in ETH) in the near term.

That aside, this market is clearly in hyper-short-term trading mode. This post below from T-Rey may be the best summary of that short-term trading mode around the Future Proof event. Kevin Rose and the team had about as good of a conference as possible, with multiple major announcements and laying out a great vision, and almost all of the NFT floors in the NFT ecosystem proceeded to dump after. It raises the question of what kind of announcement at all could move these markets right now, and most founders are simply opting not to try (see Doodles).

That emphasis on short-term trading means the new projects will remain a key focus, and we have seen a lot of nice success there this week. Multiple new projects have run into the 0.1-0.2 ETH range, and early minters have been nicely rewarded. Expect a continued focus on these stealth drops and free mints over the rest of this week, especially as we have a lull ahead of the two huge drops on Friday in y00ts and the Digi airdrop.

As always, good luck to those minting today, be careful out there and make sure to stay up to date with the latest news with the Lucky Trader newsfeed.