Daily NFT News & Drops for August 17 | Lucky Trader

Lucky Trader covers the latest NFT news for Wednesday, August 17. Top stories include a massive gold BAYC sale, the launch of Grails 2 from Proof Collective, and new drops today across generative art, avatars, and free mints.

Top NFT Projects to Watch Today, August 17

The NFT market feels as close to the full capitulation that it has in the past two years. Volume has been at the lowest levels of the year, with OpenSea seeing ~$14M/day in volume across Monday and Tuesday of the week. Other metrics paint an even gloomier picture, as Giancarlo pointed out yesterday afternoon that WETH offer acceptance is at an all-time high and 40 percent of sales. Some traders want out, and they want out fast.

It certainly creates a very challenging market for new projects to drop in, but at the same time, some see new projects as the only remaining hope with all the existing ones in such bad downtrends. And there certainly are some interesting new projects dropping today.

Let's get into it.

Top NFT Mints and Reveals Today, August 17th

Here are the two primary drops on the radar for today:

• Art Blocks Factory "80s Pop Variety Pack - for experts only"
• Huxley Humans
• Dream3 Genesis

Art Blocks Factory: 80s Pop Variety Pack

The current Art Blocks primary and secondary markets are in as rough shape as they've been in months, punctuated by most sales volume being conducted through lowball WETH offers and Monday's Factory drop only minting 20 out of 222 so far.

It is a terrible backdrop for Rev Dan Catt's latest drop in his Pop Variety series, but maybe 80s Pop will provide a temporary spark. Dan is moving on to the 80s from his prior sets based on the 70s, focusing on the year 1982 and in his words "a whole year of games, tech, and art crammed into one variety pack." 

This set truly is a variety pack, as there is a mix of games, still, and animated art in the test outputs for this project, a combination we haven't seen from any other artist within one project (Hideo is probably the only other artist having done both games, animated and still art). This makes the set quite unique and does give it some real upside.

The set of 366 NFT supply will mint at a fixed 0.128 ETH, a smart move by Dan as recent higher-priced limits have failed to mint out. Given his 70s Pop sets are both in the 0.4-0.45 ETH range, this set should mint out as there will be some collector attention. The question is - will the batters/flippers show up for this one? If so, the secondary market could be very painful, with 50%+ of the supply listed and most collectors choosing to wait to buy for a few weeks. But if this one slips under the radar and is minted by a more traditional Art Blocks base, it has much more upside in the near term.

Huxley Humans

Monday's weekly preview had a full breakdown of today's Huxley Humans drop, so that won't be recreated here. Instead, we will focus on a few recent developments and what to expect from a trading perspective.

The team has been rolling out previews of the Humans artwork, starting Tuesday afternoon, starting with Alabaster and Crimson. The art from founder Ben Mauro (of Halo, Call of Duty, The Hobbit, and much more) seems rock solid and in nice alignment with the HUXLEY Robots collection. Those robots hold a 3.45 ETH floor, a very solid price in this market, though the supply is just 1,000.

The Human NFTs will be minted across three days, through an allowlist mechanism based on holders of Robots and Genesis Tokens (full detail in the thread). This will be a free mint for those holders, thus a nice reward for collectors in this ecosystem. But with 3,000 Human NFTs coming, the avatar ecosystem is about to triple in size and some selling pressure should be expected.

Given the Genesis Tokens are holding a 0.7 ETH floor for the cheapest one, that is likely a decent expectation for where the Humans will land in the first few days of trading. This seems more like a long-term hold for any potential collector than a quick flip, so understand that going into this one. But with one of the biggest names in the NFT space in Ben Mauro behind this one, it likely is a good long-term play.

Dream3 Genesis

Most likely the top free mint of the day will be Dream3 Genesis, a cyberpunk collection that has accumulated over 100K followers on Twitter pre-launch.

The team's vision is "changing the way content is consumed and distributed...", and they plan to do so by decentralizing IP by giving holders the chance to vote on content and the direction of storylines. In what is called their "Preseason", the team plans to launch a live-action Twitter series, allow holders to vote on the storyline, and then create collectible film stills. Its longer-term vision is to use NFTs to "build the foundation of interactive media" through their holder participation, token-verification on platforms with prizes, and gamifying content.

The NFTs themselves appear to be cartoon human PFPs, based on the founder images on the team's site. It should also be noted that the founders have partnered with Ledger and Alchemy for this drop, two very big names in the space.

With just 2,222 supply, this should be a well-performing mint for anyone on the whitelist.

Given the lack of free mints or new drops in general on Wednesday, this one will likely be the focus of attention, and if the liquidity is there it could certainly rise to a 0.3-0.5 ETH floor or higher, especially if listings stay low. 

NFT News and Announcements

While market action was slow Tuesday, there was a decent uptick in relevant NFT news.

First, the Grails 2 project from Kevin Rose and the Proof team began its 7-day minting window, with all 25 pieces "revealed" and available for selection. Though minters can see images of each grail, the artist behind them is still unknown, and there are some additional secrets that will not be revealed until the official reveals on next Wednesday the 24. Grail #10 is in a surprising lead at the time of writing, with 10 mints, and no piece has less than 2 at the time of writing. 

Continuing on the art theme, top photo artist DrifterShoots announced new details for his upcoming Nifty Gateway drop "Bridging the Gap", coming on the 21st. There will be 3 images available in the drop with different edition counts an x/44, an x/15, and a 1/1 piece.

The art previews appear to be in the iconic Drift style, shot from high up, creating scenes and images that are essentially impossible for almost anyone else to capture. 

NBA TopShot appears to be shaking things up with a new pack drop style, called "RSVP Drops." This new raffle-style drop mechanic was stress tested on Tuesday and will be used for an upcoming WNBA pack drop which users can sign up for ahead of 2:00 p.m. ET today. TopShot's notorious queue style, which often left huge chunks of the collector base out in the cold, has been a major point of contention since the platform gained popularity in early 2021. If the new RSVP style is well received, it could certainly become the new primary mechanism for pack drops.

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

• Puma teased a new project "PUMA NitroPass" which will launch for 0.2 ETH and offered PREMINT spots to holders of Goblins and Illuminati NFTs
• The VeVe marketplace is set to unveil a new series of 1/1 artworks via a silent auction format, starting August 17th
• Rumble Kong League announced a new partnership with Round21, advancing its alignment with basketball and web3
• OpenSea released a UI update on Tuesday, including a new stats page which has been received very well so far as a great update to its prior version 

NFT Market Action Data, August 12

Overall volume remains at the lowest levels of the year, in both ETH and USD terms. Tuesday was up slightly from Monday, closing at $14.4M in OpenSea volume (compared to $14M on Monday) and ETH volume was at 7,700 compared to 7,400 ETH traded on Monday.

Bored Ape Yacht Club led all movers, on the back of its massive 777 ETH gold ape sale to whale holder Vis_eth. This marked the 3rd highest all-time sale for the collection and the 2nd highest gold ape sale behind ape #6388 selling for 869.69 ETH one month ago. The sale happened during the Yuga Twitter spaces last night, which had over 4,000 attendees at peak - a much-needed show of interest in what has been a very dead market. During the spaces the founders said Year 2 would be "insane", but big things take time, and not to expect new drops or updates in the very near future.

MAYC rallied on the BAYC movement as well, seeing 550 ETH across marketplaces and moving up 3.5 percent to 15 ETH floor. Otherdeeds remain in a slow decline, now at 1.74 ETH.

Doodles rallied to jump atop the mid-tier PFP rankings again, after briefly falling to the low 6's on Tuesday. They rode 46 sales back to a 7.35 ETH floor (+2.4% on the day).

Potatoz was one of the bigger winners on the day, up 10 percent to 1.29 ETH in anticipation of its upcoming staking "grows" and also on the back of two "You The Real MVPs" being bought for 28 and 29 ETH, bringing that floor to 33 ETH. CatBlox x Puma was arguably the biggest winner though, up 117 percent to 0.32 ETH on the news that Puma would be launching a new project and opening a discord.

Moonbirds becomes the focus today, as the "preview of the preview" event happens in the Proof discord today, sharing an initial view of the big Future Proof conference coming on August 30. The Moonbirds floor remains in slow decline, down another two percent to 12.2 ETH, and many are wondering if today's preview can be the catalyst to turn things around.

NFT Market Analysis

The crypto and equity markets both dipped slightly on Tuesday, though both are riding some serious momentum over the past month and leading to chatter that the bottom may be behind us. BTC and ETH were both down ~1% on the day, at $23,760 and $1,880 respectively, but both showed nice support at these levels. Crypto OG Arthur Hayes published a piece yesterday on how to trade the merge, along with his personal thoughts, which provided a nice view of how "reflexivity" impacts the market (TLDR: traders can bring about the outcomes they expect as the narrative becomes popular) and his plans to go long ETH into and through the Merge.

Clearly, most of the crypto and NFT market participants are focused on the Merge right now and not on NFT trading, as evidenced by our daily volumes. But with the sentiment meter reading about as low as it ever has, one has to wonder if the NFT bottom is here or close. Both Doodles and CloneX have shown some rallies off the local bottoms (albeit small), a sign of hope, but more needs to be seen to confirm any kind of reversal. The BAYC gold sale and interest in the spaces were also very nice to see, and the Yuga ecosystem remains strong. Perhaps it will take a major Yuga ecosystem drop to revive this market.

New drops remain very slow and free mints are not seeing volume this week, so far. A part of the reason is the market background, but also the fact that there aren't many interesting projects really set to launch this week or in the near future. But brands are showing more and more interest (i.e. Puma most recently), and there is definitely potential that the next NFT wave will be driven by major brands entering the space. 

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