Daily NFT News & Drops for August 5 | Lucky Trader

Lucky Trader covers the latest NFT news for Friday, August 5. Top stories include Meta partnering with Coinbase and Dapper for its NFT future, Moonbirds going CC0, and Tiffany's NFTiff making its public debut.

Top NFT Projects to Watch Today, August 5th

NFT trading volume continues to be incredibly low, as Thursday tallied $14.3M in OpenSea revenue.

But while liquidity may be down, headlines are up, as this has been a huge week of news for the NFT market overall punctuated by some big announcements on Thursday. Yesterday saw news events from Meta with Coinbase+Dapper, a new billion-dollar crypto hedge fund forming + Blackrock opening up institutional crypto investing, Moonbirds making the controversial switch to CC0, a new launch, and staking details from Ledger and Potatoz, and a new Art Blocks Curated project announced.

This recent surge in headlines is a fitting lead-up for today's marquee drop with NFTiff coming from luxury brand Tiffany & Co. this morning, and the success of that drop will likely set the stage for many more to come.

Let's get into it.

Top NFT Mints Today, August 5th

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

• Tiffany's NFTiff
• Art Blocks Factory: Scribblines 

Tiffany's NFTiff

Top luxury brand Tiffany's made major headlines when they announced their 250 supply NFT drop this past Sunday, in partnership with "brand ambassador" Deepak.eth (infamous for his alien punk and M3 MAYC purchases). NFTiff has been the hot topic of the week and seemingly has already kicked off a rush of luxury brands into the NFT / crypto space, as Gucci announced their plans to accept $APE at select stores, shortly followed by Tag Hauer announcing the same.

Today NFTiff goes live, and the results will likely be broadcast to their 1.7mm Twitter followers. Part of the chatter early in the week was if this would even sell out at the 30 ETH mint price, but that question seems to have changed to not if it would sell out but how fast, with the current sentiment that today's drop will sell out in minutes or even seconds.

Part of that fast-mint-out thesis is based on the fact that 40 percent of the supply is now out, as they conducted a 100-NFT presale for their CryptoPunk pendant NFTs for select punk holders. The secondary market has been a bit underwhelming so far, with just two sales (one by Deepak himself for 55 ETH) and then a bid taken last night for 31 ETH (which begs the question of how this person even got on the allowlist and why go through the effort for the 0.2 ETH profit, but I digress).

From a trading perspective, this is a very intriguing drop. First, the mint is open to the public instead of just CryptoPunk owners, which opens the door for flippers. They will either be flippers or bag holders though, as only Punk owners are able to claim the physical Tiffany's jeweled pendant, and that window to claim is just open for about one week. So any non-Punk owner who mints today will have just 7 days to either buy a punk or flip the NFT, as it could very well become worthless once the claim window closes.

The low supply is definitely the X factor in this drop, especially now that just 150 NFTs remain to be minted. The general sentiment is that if the mints get into the right hands (Punk owners who plan to keep/claim), the floor rises to 50 ETH for these based on their scarcity and the high demand. But if minters are mostly flippers, and Punk owners "hold the line", this could be a bloodbath especially closer to the end of the claim window as the NFTs will have to be offloaded. 

This makes minting today very risky, and the risk/reward is just not quite there with the 30 ETH mint price. But this is the main event of the day and the week, so get your popcorn ready early today at 9:00 a.m. ET as this goes live.

Art Blocks Factory: Scribblines

After a recent downturn, this week's Art Blocks drops have both been big successes for minters and thus attention will be back for today's Factory drop "Scribblines" from Orpheusk.

This 256 supply set, at a fixed price of 0.15 ETH, is all about doodling. From the project page, Scribblines "are a tribute to countless drawings that are being created every day during monotonous meetings and are forever lost in trash." 

This is certainly a project style seen before in Art Blocks so nothing new here. Recent Factory projects have failed to mint out, including Gels from last week which has minted just half of its supply at the resting price of 0.15 ETH. Even though Ieva and undead wyverns (this week's two AB drops) have performed very well on secondary, they are both from leading artists and Orpheusk being a new entrant likely won't have the same backing.

Expect this one to sit open for a while, so mint if you enjoy the art, but likely pass from a pure trading perspective. But this is definitely a heat check mint, and if this mints out and does well on secondary, then the next Art Blocks run may be upon us.

The project goes live at 1:00 p.m. ET.

NFT News and Announcements

Thursday was another big day of headlines in what has become a very bullish week for the NFT space overall (even with project floors bleeding). 

Arguably the top story of the day is from Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, which announced their plans for Coinbase and Dapper integrations along with their plans to launch and support NFTs on Facebook in 100s of countries. Instagram will be the initial focus, supporting wallet integrations from both Coinbase Wallet and Dapper platforms (and NFTs minted on the Flow blockchain will be integrated). This may very well deepen the divide between the centralized and decentralized NFT space and market, but it's hard to be anything but bullish with Facebook's 3B worldwide users about to be exposed to NFTs in the coming future.

CC0 summer is in full swing, with the very controversial announcement from Moonbirds founder Kevin Rose that Moonbirds will be switching to the Creative Commons public license. Kevin's thread explains their reasoning behind the decision, what owners can expect, and announces the launch of the Moonbirds DAO, the DAOwl. The DAO will "oversee licensing of the Moonbirds and Oddities names with the primary goals of encouraging general commercialization while preventing scams, hate speech, and violence." This was controversial as the Moonbirds team has been very public about how owners have IP rights for their birds, and in fact, some Moonbird owners have already started using their IP in business and product creation, and some feel that this decision was made unilaterally by the founders and not in conjunction with the community. The Moonbirds team will be conducting a Twitter Space today at 3:00 p.m. ET to clarify the announcement. The Moonbirds floor is down 10% since the announcement.

Recently debuted and hot NFT projects the Memeland Potatoz and Ledger Genesis each made some major announcements Thursday as well which have already moved their markets.

Potatoz released some new details of their upcoming staking ("growing") mechanism, stating their site would be available later today and that staking would start next week. They then on to release a teaser for their first raffle (which stakers would be eligible for), which appears to have a prize of around 80 ETH, making it one of the biggest prize pools in NFT history. And this is just for the first draw. This news sent the Potatoz floor from ~1.4 ETH to 1.6 ETH ahead of today's clarifying spaces happening at 12 p.m. ET.

The Ledger team joined the Rug Radio crew for their morning show yesterday and announced that their marketplace would be opening next week along with more information about their first curated project release. While details are not formally known yet, speculation is that "BRICK" will be their genesis partner, based on a PREMINT signup that has been making its way around the NFT community. The Ledger floor was up over 30% in the hours following the Rug Radio appearance, moving from ~0.53 ETH floor to over 0.7 ETH.

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

• Domain NFTs.com sold for $15mm according to this press release, making it the 2nd highest domain sale of all time (beating out sex.com) and falling short of voice.com at $30mm
• UFC Strike's Vegas 59 Moment Burn Challenge went live yesterday, allowing collectors to burn up to 10 moments to receive two new Fully Loaded packs 
• Decagon saw a massive volume spike yesterday on rumors that Grant Yun will be doing a drop for decagon holders of a certain tier/level (details still TBD)
• NFL All Day airdropped its rewind reward packs yesterday for all those who completed the Record Breakers Challenge from August 1
• GutterCatGang's GutterCon 2022 tickets are now live and claimable for those eligible 
• The Akutar claim for Planes Crown is now live for holders of the Aku X Planes NFT

NFT Market Action Data, August 5

Thursday was a mixed day of trading, with the top-end projects seeing some red but the newer joiners on the lower end seeing some big gains.

CryptoPunks led volume with 730 ETH though their floor fell 2 percent to 74.69 ETH ahead of today's NFTiff sale. This week has seen some major bids come in on aesthetic and rare punks, but the floor has stalled a bit around the 75 ETH level, though they are closing the gap on BAYC.

Speaking of, volume was up for the Yuga ecosystem on Thursday, as BAYC/MAYC/Otherdeeds combined for ~1200 ETH as their floors mostly remained stable at 81.75 / 16.9 / 2.2 ETH respectively. 

The Potatoz and Ledger Genesis were two of the big winners on the day, with Potatoz jumping 15 percent to 1.6 ETH floor (on its staking announcement) and Ledger up nearly 40 percent to 0.75 ETH (on the hints of its upcoming marketplace and first project drop). CloneX and Squiggles were each up 9 percent on the day as well, sitting at 8.9 and 9.5 ETH respectively. The Care Bears launch on Recur was also a mega success, as the $50 packs sold out in seconds and instantly traded for $200-$250 on the early secondary market.

Moonbirds were a notable loser on the day, down 10 percent to 16.5 ETH on its recent CC0 announcement backlash. A few other losers included Goblins (-10% to 1.9 ETH) and Rags to Richie (-5% to 0.45 ETH, now below mint).

NFT Market Analysis

The crypto markets saw a surge Thursday as Blackrock announced its plans to offer institutional investing through Coinbase Prime and Brevan Howard announced plans for a new $1B hedge fund focused on crypto investing. Coinbase may be the biggest winner of the week on the back of this news, up 48% on the week to $88.90 and up nearly 100% from its local lows.

ETH is up 5 percent on the day, now at $1,690 and BTC was also in the green slightly at $23,200 up 1.2 percent on the day. $APE continues to trade well on the back of the recent luxury brand announcements, holding $7.55 at the time of writing up 1.5% on the day.

The equity markets have been mostly green this week ahead of today's payroll numbers, with those results at 8:30 a.m. likely to dictate how today goes. Geopolitical tensions with China on the back of Pelosi's Taiwan trip remain in the spotlight, but if those can cool, it will likely be a boon for the markets in the near term.

The August NFT bull run isn't here yet, as there just is not enough liquidity in this market to sustain much of a run for any project right now. But with that said, there have still been ample opportunities for traders to make big gains. This week saw two Art Blocks project up ~100 percent from mint, Claire Silver's Mirage drop do 10-20x for some minters (with a 33 ETH sale up top thanks to Moderats Art), and some low cap success stories with Subway Rats and Rare Apepes, and big name projects Potatoz and Ledger seeing big gains.

Without many new drops this weekend, expect secondary action to focus on those projects which can steal attention and maintain momentum into the weekend (i.e. Ledger, Potatoz, NFTiff). This NFTiff drop is the wild card for today, and if it goes wild on secondary, it could certainly send the Punks market up and make the re-flippening a reality.

As always, enjoy your Friday and your weekend, be careful out there to those minting and make sure to stay up to date with the latest news with the Lucky Trader newsfeed.