Daily NFT News & Drops for August 3 | Lucky Trader

Lucky Trader covers the latest NFT news for Wednesday, August 3rd. Top stories include a Solana exploit, Gucci and TAG accepting ApeCoin, and surging interest in art NFT projects.

Top NFT Projects to Watch Today, August 3rd

Tuesday was an eventful day in the NFT and crypto space, with most of crypto Twitter watching flight tracker all morning, a Solana exploits happening in the evening, and some big name brands making big NFT-related announcements.

Overall NFT trading volume remains very low, with just $13.5M in OpenSea volume yesterday, but that isn't stopping several projects from having some real success in the secondary markets. Most of the recent success has been in the art sector, but low caps have fared surprisingly well this week as well (after being declared dead by yours truly).

Those art market tailwinds bode well for today's new drops, from Art Blocks and Braindrops co-founder Claire Silver.

Let's get into it.

Top NFT Mints Today, August 3rd

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

• Art Blocks Factory: undead wyverns
• AI Art Is Not Art

Art Blocks Factory: undead wyverns

Today's Art Blocks drop is from cult favorite generative artist hideo, famous for several prior projects including Celestial Cyclones (the first on-chain generative art game), Dino Pals (which hold a 20 ETH floor and briefly touched 100 ETH last summer), and several others. 

Last year hideo announced that he's building a game, and each of his art pieces will be characters in the game. Not much is known about the progress or timeline of that development, but it is definitely a differentiator for his sets.

From the undead wyverns project page, hideo is drawing inspiration from the mythical creatures dragons, drakes, and wyverns. The final paragraph of his description reads "Dragons typically have four legs and wings, Wyverns have only two legs and wings, and Drakes have no wings and four legs. 
undead wyverns explore the procedural generation of skeletal versions of these different kinds of creatures."

The project has just a 100 NFT supply, and will start at a Dutch auction price of 5 ETH falling to a resting price of 0.10 ETH.

That makes minting tricky, especially based on the big success of the last Art Blocks mint "Ieva" from Shvembldr on Monday (minting at 0.9 and now at 2.1 ETH). With Dino Pals at 20 ETH floor, the recent success of other projects, and this extremely limited supply, expect this one to go high. It most likely mints out in the 2-3 ETH range, and will likely be a great value if it drops much below that. 

But be careful if minting to flip, as the secondary markets have been incredibly volatile in Art Blocks lately, making quick flips very risky. Collectors have been sitting on their hands and letting flippers get into undercutting battles, which has led to floors tanking fast on the secondary market. That will be the main risk, especially if today's drop mints out high. Regardless, expect some major attention on this drop today at 1:00 p.m. ET.

AI Art Is Not Art by Claire Silver

Leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) artist Claire Silver is back today with her latest AI series hosted by the Mirage Gallery AI. Her 500 NFT supply body of work will be mostly reserved for holders of her 1/1 art and her Braindrops genesis set, with approximately 100 pieces available for the public. The mint price will be 0.15 ETH.

For this project, Claire is leveraging a combination of several different AI sales and combinations, including DALLE-2, across several different artistic styles including Impressionism, Baroque, and Manga. This should lead to a wide variety of outputs, with rarity based on both the AI input tool as well as the artistic style. And of course, the aesthetics of the outputs will play a big role in the secondary value.

Claire's previous AI work has held up very well, with her Braindrops Genesis set still holding a 3.1 ETH floor after 8 months on the secondary market, reaching a ~5 ETH floor at peak.

Given the low entry price and recent demand for art NFTs, this will be a smash for primary minters. The recent hype around Dalle will help this as well, and an immediate floor price of 1 ETH or higher is definitely possible. Most likely this set will trend below her Genesis project, so expect that to be the ceiling at least temporarily, but that does not mean that some of the rares from this set won't command higher prices. 

Today's mint will take place in three phases, with Mirage Gallery and Claire 1/1 holders minting at 12:30 p.m. ET, Genesis holders minting at 1:30 p.m. ET and the public sale at 2:30 p.m. ET.

NFT News and Announcements

Tuesday was a big day of news and announcements, both good and bad. Let's start with the bad.

There was a fairly significant hack on the Solana blockchain yesterday evening, as four wallets were able to drain the NFT and cryptocurrency balances of several accounts totaling more than $5.7mm in losses. Trusted web3 dev and founder 0xFoobar posted several times about the hack as information was released, and as of yesterday evening, it appeared to be a private key compromise. Solana users were encouraged to transfer their assets to never-before-used hardware wallets to best prevent impact. At the time of writing the hack seems to be over, and the Solana price has recovered from local lows near $38 and sits at $39.71. 

Let's switch to more positive news. We had another top brand in Gucci make a big splash in NFTs/Crypto on Tuesday as they announced that they will be accepting ApeCoin at select stores. This comes just days after Tiffany's announced their NFT drop for Punks holders called NFTiff, and was followed just hours by Tag Heuer announcing that they would also be accepting ApeCoin levering BitPay. Some $APE holders already capitalized on the announcement, and purchases have seemingly already been completed using the cryptocurrency. 

In ENS news, top marketplace OpenSea acquired ENS domain opensea.eth for 99.89 ETH on Tuesday, leading all ENS sales. While this was the top sale of the day for ENS, it was not the top sale of the week as ensmaxisnft.eth sold for 111.69 ETH earlier in the week, and there have been at least 4 sales over 100 ETH this month as ENS remain in vogue.

From the publishing sector, Pearson Education announced that it will be exploring NFTs for its textbooks to benefit more from secondary sales. This quote from CEO Andy Bird sums up their thought process very well and how blockchain and NFTs can transform different industries "In the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale," Bird said. "Technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life." At this time it seems Pearson is still very much in the exploratory phase of research but has a "whole team" working on the initiative.

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

• Top Solana-based NFT platform Magic Eden announced that it is expanding into ETH-based NFTs yesterday morning, though this announcement was overshadowed by the exploit event yesterday evening 
• Jenkins the Valet announced an upcoming airdrop for "We Are Book People" merchandise holders, though timing and details are still mostly TBD
• FVCKRENDER announced his own upcoming airdrop for his 1/1 holders on Tuesday, also without much additional detail at this time 
• A new OpenSea bug was announced by Sterling Crispin allowing holders to list NFTs for 1 WEI (or 0.000000000000000001 ETH), which were unable to be purchased due to OpenSea limitations and temporarily causing NFT project floor prices to show the much hated "<0.01" price tag
• PROOF Collective has set a date for its keynote event on August 30, to update its holders on its "vision for the future"
• Cool Cats Cooltopia will undergo maintenance today starting at 10:00 a.m. ET for 1-2 hours, though without much detail on what fixes or changes may be coming
• Players of the Ape vs. Mutants game from February 2022 will start receiving their first batch of prizes soon, according to the BAYC Twitter 

NFT Market Action Data, August 3

Volume may have been low Tuesday, but green is all over the top of the mover board.

The genesis GODA pass drop Nina's Super Cool World from artist Nina Chanel led all movers, seeing 730 ETH volume as its floor jumped over 60 percent to 1.25 ETH overnight. The GODA pass is also up over 60% on the week, holding a 10.6 ETH floor price at the time of writing.

Another recent art project Ieva from Shvembldr was hot yesterday, trading just over 200 ETH but seeing its floor price rocket from 1.3 ETH to 2.8 ETH at the peak before settling at 2.1 ETH overnight. 

The hottest new PFP project from the Memeland ecosystem, The Potatoz, was back up top with 300 ETH traded as the team teased its upcoming staking feature, and the potential prize of an MVP NFT (33 ETH floor). The Potatoz were up 10 percent on the day at 1.4 ETH floor.

A few low cap projects had some success Tuesday as well, with Rare Apepes up 120 percent to 0.07 ETH and Subway Rats up 10 percent to 0.08 ETH, combining for ~400 ETH across the two projects. 

Notable losers on the day included Lady Ape Club, down 36 percent to 0.7 ETH, and goblins down 9 percent to 1.99 ETH.

The Punks and Yuga ecosystem mostly chopped on the day, with Punks holding 74.69 ETH floor and BAYC/MAYC/Otherdeeds at 82/17/2.2 ETH floors, all within 2-3 percent of prior floors.

NFT Market Analysis

The crypto markets were tense Monday evening and into Tuesday morning, seemingly quite worried about Nancy Pelosi's flight into Taiwan and China's reactions. But at least so far, not much has stemmed from the visit, WW3 hasn't started and markets have bounced. ETH was up 4.7 percent on the day to $1,666 and BTC was up 2.1 percent to $23,400, as the BTC:ETH ratio holds right around 14:1.

ApeCoin ($APE) had a huge day, up 12 percent to $7.2 on the Gucci news and its growing public acceptance, as a new utility for the Yuga currency is slowly realized. With Otherdeeds in slow decline, it seems more and more traders are opting to buy $APE versus the Otherdeeds NFTs to participate in the Yuga ecosystem, and it remains the best low-cost entry.

The NFT markets aren't experiencing the August bull run just yet, especially with daily volume in the $13mm-$15mm range, but there are certainly signs of life with recent success in the art sector. But even with a general lack of volume, there is no lack of major headlines as the announcements from Tiffany's, Gucci and Tag are showing the first real waves of mainstream NFT adoption.

Today's drops should be very interesting and tell of the strength of this current NFT art market. Expect both undead wyverns and AI Art Is Not Art to be on the leaderboard tomorrow. Beyond those drops, the major event to look forward to this week remains the NFTiff drop on Friday, which could certainly impact the Punks market pending secondary reaction (some are calling for a 50 ETH floor for that NFT right out of the gate).  

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.