Daily NFT News & Drops for August 26 | LuckyTrader

Lucky Trader covers the latest NFT news for Friday, August 26. Top stories include a mint date for y00ts, X2Y2 removing royalties, the PFP rebound, and a long-awaited mint today in Renga.

Top NFT Projects to Watch Today, August 26

The NFT market is booming, or at least it feels that way, as trading volume is on an up trend and several floors are up 10-20 percent on the week. The feeling of capitulation on NFT Twitter just last week has subsided, and people actually feel bullish again. 

BAYC as always is leading the trend, up 12 percent on the week and up to 77.5 ETH floor. The BendDAO "crisis" now seems to have been way overblown and is entirely in the rearview mirror, and PFPs have rebounded across the board. 

With some newly bullish tailwinds, we have the setup for a very interesting week of NFT trading. And today is delivering, with a major new PFP drop, a generative art drop, and a token trade that everyone needs to have on their radar.

Let's get into it.

Top NFT Mints and Reveals Today, August 26th

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

• Renga
• Art Blocks Factory: Avalon

Renga

One of the most hyped anime PFP projects of the year is finally minting its remaining supply today, as Renga launches its final 2,500 NFTs tonight at 7:00 p.m. ET for 0.4 ETH. 

The team made headlines yesterday afternoon by tweeting out their updated website link, which had a tagline at the bottom "Powered by WENEW." WENEW is the team behind 10KTF and has some of the biggest names in NFTs as co-founders, including Beetle and Guy O'Seary. Their involvement in the Renga project is certainly a great sign of its potential upside.

For a quick background, Renga is a set of 10,000 characters developed by artist DirtyRobot. The characters were developed using manga-style art, though slightly differentiated via its "liberal use of page space." 

The team has delivered black boxes as their pre-reveal "mint pass", and everyone minting today will receive a black box as well, which can be burned for a Renga character.

There are 7,500 black boxes already out on the market, and they're trading at 0.53 ETH floor at the time of writing. This means the 0.4 ETH mint should have no problem selling out. The black boxes have reached a floor of 1 ETH on a few occasions, but the extended reveal window has hurt momentum. If the team mints out today and announces a reveal soon, this one could easily run back up to 1 ETH. And with no other notable drops this weekend, it could certainly command market attention and dominate trading, if that reveal happens.

Art Blocks Factory: Avalon

Today's Art Blocks Factory drop "Avalon" is an interesting one, as it leverages mythical realm map art that looks similar to work which could fit in a J. R. R. Tolkien novel or Game of Thrones. 

The 208 supply set from artist r0zk0 was inspired by "vintage textbooks and map collections" and is named after the place where the legendary King Arthur is buried.

The map outputs are both interactive and dynamic. They're interactive in that collectors can use basic keyboard commands to change basic traits and views of the maps. But the more intriguing aspect is their dynamic feature, as each map will "go through 12.5-hour tidal cycles based on a virtual moon orbit" and will update every two minutes to reflect the tides. The last dynamic set based on moon cycles was Matt Kane's Gazers, which has seen a 9 ETH floor and is widely loved by collectors.

With that dynamic feature and a smaller supply, this is the rare Factory drop that could have some real success in today's bearish Art Blocks market. Recent projects have mostly flopped, as liquidity is not flowing actively into generative art right now. But that has driven the batters/flippers away, and if this is minted mostly by collectors, there will be more upside post-mint.

Avalon will launch at 1:00 p.m. ET in an exponential Dutch auction, starting at 2 ETH and dropping to 0.19 ETH final resting price.

NFT News and Announcements

Thursday was full of NFT news, but those headlines may be dwarfed by a breaking Solana announcement from this morning.

The super hyped y00ts project from the DeGods ecosystem announced this morning that it will be minting September 2nd, a date that has been speculated on for weeks. The project has gained serious attention through its cool and innovative application process, which sends "acceptance letters" to those who get through, as well as the burgeoning success of the DeGods ecosystem which rallied to an ~8 ETH floor equivalent this week and made it into the top 5 PFP rankings. 

To mint y00ts, those eligible will need 375 $DUST, and thus the $DUST token has seen some serious trading interest in the past week and likely much more ahead of next Friday's mint. Just look at that chart below - nearly a 100 percent gain in just the past few days. There is growing chatter that DUST will mirror the $APE chart ahead of its mint, but given that everyone now knows how far $APE fell after mint, expect a few different dynamics and game theory at play this time around. Still, there's likely some real upside potential left in $DUST, as recent figures showed that most on the y00ts mint list did not have enough $DUST in their wallets to mint. To catch up on everything y00ts, read this primer from Cam Ciletti.

The marketplace X2Y2 made huge headlines this morning as well, announcing that it will be changing how royalties are handled on its platform, essentially allowing users to toggle the creator royalty down all the way to 0. This is likely in response to the rise of the SudoSwap NFT platform, which has no royalty fees and has seen a large uptick in trading volume over the past few weeks. With this major update, the race to 0 fees is officially on.

The major headline from Thursday was likely the Grails 2 reveal, which happened live at 1:00 p.m. ET via a YouTube stream with Proof Collective founder Kevin Rose. Kevin went through a 2-3 minute presentation for each piece, showing the background, how it was created, and more before revealing the artist and in some cases the actual piece. There were a few surprises, most notably that Grail 14 "Bookends" was from Art Blocks founder Snowfro, which saw sales as high as 25 ETH in secondary trading post-reveal. A few other surprises were Grail 11 revealing to be from artist ACK, and Grail 24 being from Justin Aversano and mint #0 in his Cognition series. Read a quick synopsis of all 25 here in this post from Jason Bales.

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

• A Creepz TV show is being made by Seth Green's animation studio and coming soon, with hopes of launching on a major streaming network like Hulu or Netflix
• Snoop Dogg and Eminem are set to perform their BAYC-inspired single "From the D 2 The LBC" at the VMA's this weekend, in the latest celebrity endorsement of the Yuga assets
• Goblins are getting their own marketplace soon, as Truth Labs is set to launch its own marketplace in the next few weeks
• Solana-focused marketplace Magic Eden is rolling out ETH-purchasing along with credit cards

NFT Market Action Data, August 26

Trading volume was up Thursday to $18.9M, the highest daily total in two weeks, and the market felt the impact of that higher volume. Green was all over the leaderboard this morning, with several projects jumping 5-20 percent on the day.

BAYC led with 870 ETH traded, as its floor jumped another three percent to 77 ETH (up from local lows around 66 ETH). MAYC has had a solid bounce back as well, now at 14.5, even on the day but up ~20 percent from local lows.

Azuki's have been on fire, up 17 percent on the day to 8.4 ETH and flirting with a 9 ETH floor briefly yesterday evening. This is stemming from their recent website updates for The Alley, teasing a coming airdrop, as well as the news that Adrian Cheng picked up 101 Azuki's and rumors that he may be leading an investment. BEANZ was also up 33 percent on the day, to 0.84 ETH floor.

Doodles and CloneX also benefitted from this run in the mid-tier PFPs, each up ~5 percent on the day to new floors of 7.5 ETH and 7 ETH respectively.

But arguably the biggest winner on the day was DigiDaigaku, the anime PFP set tied to a coming game from new Web3 company Limit Break, which ripped more than 100 percent on the day to a 4.5 ETH floor. This stemmed from confirmation of an airdrop for holders coming next Friday, along with founder Gabriel Leydon heavily teasing a major announcement coming next week. The set also saw its new ATH sale, as this 1/1 sold for 59 ETH on Thursday.

There were not many losers on the day, but one to note would be Finiliar, which is on a downtrend after its recent surge, now at 0.19 ETH and down 20 percent on the day (-50% from local highs).

NFT Market Analysis

The crypto markets remain in chop mode, bouncing yesterday afternoon in trading but falling back this morning. BTC sits at $21,200 and ETH is $1,630, both down 2 percent and 5 percent on the day and 9 percent and 12 percent on the week. Equity markets briefly rallied the past few days, but perhaps that rally is ending as the growing energy crisis in Europe becomes more present along with the reality of inflation not going away any time soon.

But regardless of the bearish macro environment, the NFT market is seeing some bullish tailwinds. PFPs are all up 10-20 percent from the local bottom, but more importantly, sentiment is up. Last week felt like peak capitulation in NFT Twitter, as WETH offers were being accepted left and right as panicked holders raced for the exits - but that fear seems to be behind us, at least temporarily.

It's incredibly simple, but a big driver of this uptrend is simply news and announcements. Azuki announced an airdrop and a potential raise, and their floor jumped 40% in days. Moonbirds released their plans last week, along with hints at a token, and they've recovered 25 percent from lows. And there's growing chatter that a Yuga announcement is just around the corner. This is an attention economy, simple as that.

Trading volume is back on an uptick, and this week should come in higher than last in ETH trading volume. This weekend will be telling, and if the rally and liquidity can remain or increase over the next few days, we could have a very nice setup for what could be a really big week next week (Future Proof, y00ts, Digidaigaku airdrop).

Renga action today will certainly be telling, and that will be a major project to watch, especially if reveal details are announced. Watch that $DUST trade as well, as people do the math on the amount required to mint those 15,000 y00ts NFTs coming next week.

Good luck to those minting today, be careful out there, and as always make sure to stay up to date with the latest news with the Lucky Trader newsfeed. Have a great weekend!