Daily NFT News & Drops for August 19 | Lucky Trader

Lucky Trader covers the latest NFT news for Wednesday, August 19. Top stories include the pending BAYC liquidation crisis, Pudgy Penguins building out their brand, and a few upcoming art drops from leading female artists.

Top NFT Projects to Watch Today, August 19

The crypto markets took a tumble overnight Thursday, and it is looking like a rough weekend for NFTs is likely incoming. Sentiment and volume have been at yearly lows, and add in some crypto volatility, and it is about the worst recipe we could ask for.

It does not help that this is one of the slowest days and weekends for new drops in recent memory, with no real new projects on the radar. There are a few art projects dropping from some major female artists, which could catch some steam in this quiet environment.

Let's get into it.

Top NFT Mints and Reveals Today, August 19

Here are the two primary drops on the radar for this weekend:

• Amber Vittoria: With What We Have
• Claire Silver: Velatura

Amber Vittoria: With What We Have

Amber's latest drop is coming on the infamous Coinbase NFT, which has been the butt of most of NFT Twitter's jokes but has had some surprisingly successful drops. 

The project is called "With What We Have" and features a series of three paints, each of which will be an edition of thirty counts. Each of the three pieces has its own themes, including gratitude, a call to action, and thankfulness. 

Amber's prior collections have seen strong market interest, with Alphabet trading ~200 ETH and holding a 0.3 ETH floor, Final Forms holding a 1 ETH floor, and her inaugural collection holding a whopping 6.9 ETH floor. Given that this new drop is done with editions, the pieces likely will not have the same upside as the previous unique pieces, but given her overall success, they should still at least mint out and have some upside.

The sale will start at 3:00 p.m. ET and each piece will be available for 0.1 ETH.

Claire Silver: Velatura

Star AI artist Claire Silver (notable for her 1/1s and co-founding BrainDrops) is back this weekend with a mega-drop on Nifty Gateway. She will be releasing four pieces, each in different styles. One will be an open edition, a collector's edition of 100 count, a patron edition airdrop to 1/1 holders, and then an auction of a 1/1 piece (details in thread below). 

The open edition "Imprimatura" will run for 10 minutes with a 0.2 ETH price point, limited to 1 per person. Claire warns not to mint this for profit, and this is a fair warning, as uncapped open editions have not performed well on the secondary market this year. The collector's edition "Mischtechnik" will be 100 pieces at 0.45 ETH and only holders of her Braindrops, Mirage Gallery, or PROOF Grails are eligible to mint. "Concatenation" is the animated piece airdropped to 1/1 holders, and then the new piece "Thixotropy" will be the 1/1 up for auction.

Thixotropy is the most interesting piece here, as it is her first mint with AI music and is also an animated piece (most of her prior works are stills). Claire's SuperRare genesis piece sold for 52.69 ETH, and while this one likely will not command that premium, expect it to go at 20 ETH+. 

NFT News and Announcements

While market action remains slow in this bear market, news has picked up in the last few days.

Pudgy Penguins led headlines with two major announcements on Thursday, first with its marketplace and then a few hours later with their toys teaser. Late Wednesday night, the Pengus announced the opening of their new marketplace, with lower fees than most competing marketplaces. The mp includes Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgy's, and Pudgyrods at this time for trading. While this is a nice development, the toys were much bigger news. New owner Luca Netz previewed one of the plush toys, based on an actual Pudgy Penguin NFT along with the tease that they may license more Pengus for this toy deal (in partnership with PMI Toys). This is a major step forward for this brand, which is currently winning the "cute NFT" race and is in the midst of an amazing comeback story from its recent lows and fud around its prior ownership group. The Pudgy floor jumped almost half an ETH on the day, ending at 2.75 ETH.

Spotify is showcasing NFTs now, according to a tweet from Water & Music's Cherie. Artists are now able to display NFTs along with their top songs on the music platform, with direct links allowing app users to navigate directly to those NFT pages. A Spotify spokesperson noted to Techcrunch that "Spotify is running a test in which it will help a small group of artists promotes their existing third-party NFT offerings via their artist profiles.” Of course, notorious DJ/NFT enthusiast Steve Aoki is included in this test run and has his NFTs on full display.

On the back of their recent Fractional pivot to Tessera, and a $20M raise, founder Andy8052, and team member DeezeFi announced more details of its coming podcast "We Do A Little" along with an NFT drop. The "Season 0" NFT can be minted for 0.0142069 ETH, will be an open edition through the duration of season 0, but will be required for anyone to listen to the podcast as it will be token-gated. The first episode is set to launch next week on August 23rd. 

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

• MetaHero cofounder Odious released a statement around project updates and their future vision, including a shift to focus on gaming and that a new artist will be creating the art for upcoming comics
• NBA TopShot announced that Series 1 Locker Packs are coming next week, in exchange for four trade tickets, and these packs will contain a mix of S1, S2, and S3 moments
• Parallel set a date for its fifth pack drop, PDV, coming on September 10th
• Coinbase NFT launched a new feature for NFT creators called "drop auctions," a WETH-style bidding system similar to other marketplace auction styles
• Phantom Network released "The Grid," a token-gated training room for "the Winter" according to a tweet from the team

NFT Market Action Data, August 19

Trading volume has rebounded from recent lows, with Wednesday registering $18M in volume on OpenSea and $16.8M on Thursday, up from Monday's low of just $14M.

All eyes are on BAYC right now, with worries of a pending liquidation crisis involving BendDAO loans making the rounds on NFT Twitter. About 3% of the BAYC supply is currently in loans, several of which were made when the floor was in the 100-120 ETH range, and now a meaningful portion of those loans are nearing their liquidation price. The BAYC floor is at 72 ETH at the time of writing, and if it dips below 70, several auctions will be triggered, and if the market can't absorb the new supply, the floor will dip even further setting off more liquidations. It makes for some interesting game theory for potential buyers, who are now incentivized to wait and see if these liquidations occur before buying.

MAYC has already seen its floor fall quite a bit in this mess, now 13 ETH and down 14% on the week. And the CryptoPunks re-flippening seems inevitable at this point, with just a ~4 ETH difference between BAYC and the OG PFP set.

A few new projects have caught some temporary volume the past few days, with Genuine Undead running from a free mint to 0.2 ETH before falling back to 0.13. And yesterday's top new mint, Finiliar, ran to 0.16 ETH from a 0.08 ETH mint (impressive that it minted out 10K in this market) before falling back closer to mint price in overnight action.

Moonbirds continue to rebound on the back of the slam dunk Future Proof preview meeting on Wednesday, with its floor up 17 percent to 14.2 ETH on the day. Oddities are also up about 50 percent from local lows, sitting at 1.2 ETH.

Two major winners on the day were Pudgy Penguins, up 26 percent to 2.77 ETH floor on the back of their Toys announcement and new marketplace, and Isekai Meta, up 22% to 0.47 ETH on their new trailer release for "Exordium." The Isekai's are still yet to reveal but have their reveal event this Sunday, which may be one of the major liquidity events of this weekend.

A notable "loser" on the day is The Potatoz, which fell 10 percent to 1.2 ETH yesterday on the debut of their new staking mechanism called "growing," and a town hall explaining the process.

As the growing included an evolving aspect changing the NFTs and including a mutation, there was a bit of a "rare lotto" at play and the floor falling 10 percent is in line with the new upside provided by the mutations. Over 60 percent of the Potatoz have been staked on the first day, according to a tweet from the team. They also hinted at the next trait for the next evolve, which will include weather in some fashion.

NFT Market Analysis

The crypto markets fell hard Thursday evening and seem to be continuing that fall this morning, with BTC down nine percent to $21,500 and ETH down 8.4 percent to $1,700. There were indications that more leverage had been introduced into these markets, especially ahead of the coming Merge trade, and with leverage comes more volatility - which we could be seeing here. Whether this is the start of a real retrace or a temporary blip on the road up to the Merge remains to be seen.

If ETH is volatile this weekend, it probably means a bad setup for NFT volume. But if ETH becomes suddenly "too expensive" to spend on NFTs at $2K last weekend, that sentiment may fade away and traders will have more appetite to spend.

Barring any major news coming today though, there is not much on the radar which could move markets here today or this weekend. The BAYC liquidation story is the top one to watch, one that could have some ripples through the NFT PFP market. The Moonbirds rebound and the Pudgy Penguins comeback are two other storylines to watch this weekend, especially the Penguins which are coming off higher lows and set to make higher highs (pulling out my TA terms). Then Isekai Meta reveals on Sunday will likely be the top event that day.

New drops and free mints are seriously struggling right now, and likely not worth the time to watch/mint given their lack of traction on secondary. It is probably safe to wait for a signal that people are interested in the low caps again before re-entering.

Overall, this will be a nice weekend to go outside and enjoy summer, with a quiet NFT backdrop. 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 weekend!