Daily NFT News & Drops for September 7 | Lucky Trader

Lucky Trader covers the latest NFT news for Wednesday, September 7. Top stories include y00ts leading a Solana storm of activity, a wild story from the art market and ACK, and new drops from Ledger's BRICK and Art Blocks Curated.

Top NFT Projects to Watch Today, September 7

The crypto markets fell off a cliff late Tuesday, in somewhat of a shocking turn of events. ETH fell back to $1,500, quieting growing chatter of a pre-Merge bull run. ETH NFT trading was once again near yearly lows with just 7,500 ETH traded on OpenSea.

Not a great day.

But it was a different story over on Solana, which had its best day in a long time as the y00ts project did a whopping ~200K SOL (~4K ETH) volume on its opening day. The money then started rotating around to other SOL projects, with several seeing massive spikes in daily volume.

So there's clearly still money trading in NFTs, it just hasn't been on ETH. The big question now is if this trend will continue, or if volume can shift back to ETH here this week. There are a few drops today that could kickstart a potential shift.

Let's get into it.

Top NFT Mints and Reveals Today, September 7th

Here are the two primary drops on the radar today, both on ETH:

• BRICK
• Art Blocks Curated "RASTER"

Both of these were covered in detail in yesterday's weekly preview, so I'm including a more succinct version here.

BRICK

The genesis project from the Ledger Curated ecosystem starts minting today at noon ET, as the allowlist for Brick goes live. 

The team has managed to amass quite a following in the past month since it was rumored to be the first drop for Ledger, reaching 100K+ followers on Twitter. Certainly, the Ledger pass NFT trading 4k ETH across nearly 8000 owners helped there as well.

For a quick recap on the project, it's a 10k set of PFP NFTs featuring brick-related art. The primary utility of the collection is tied to an IRL concert venue, which Brick NFT holders will be able to attend for both shows and educational content, and control the future direction via DAO-like voting based on the number of Bricks owned.

It is definitely a unique model, but the IRL nature of the project certainly comes with limitations, as those outside the LA area are much less benefited. Of course, the team has shared that shows/content will be broadcast through the metaverse for all holders across the globe to participate, but it's not clear how big of a draw that will be.

The price arc for the Ledger pass has not been a good indicator of the success of BRICK, at least from a floor price perspective. Ledger has dropped from a local high around 0.7 ETH in early August by nearly 50 percent to 0.35 ETH this morning, which sets a cap on how high BRICK can likely go. For BRICK to 2x from its 0.15 ETH mint price, holders will then have the choice of holding the brick PFP or swapping to Ledger, which is the gateway pass to all future drops in that ecosystem.

Most on the allowlist will likely be waiting to see how secondary trading is going. If secondary is moving at 0.2 ETH or higher in early action, this will be a slam dunk to mint out. But if it struggles to get traction in early trading, this may be a long mint.

We will know soon enough, as the action starts at noon ET today.

Art Blocks Curated "RASTER"

Art Blocks Curated is back today with "RASTER" from artist itsgalo, starting its dutch auction at 1 p.m. ET.

This endlessly animated set of bright colors and brush strokes leverages a style the artist calls "pixel overpainting", and it certainly creates some very aesthetic outputs. The artist is alluding to the nature of our current reality in this set, surrounded by screens in everyday life. From the project description - "The resulting texture is not a skeuomorphic grain but an overt reference to the universe of screens that surround us every day. Electric light arranged in a grid, fluttering and flickering everywhere all the time."

From a trading perspective, the entry price will be important on this one as always. Recent Art Blocks tailwinds have been very poor, with Factory projects now failing to mint out or those that are lucky enough to complete their primary sale seeing secondary action dry up within hours post-mint. There have been some green on the Art Blocks board this week, but mostly in the OG and top Curated sets, and recent drops in Series 6 (this season) have not benefited. In fact, several are down 50-65 percent from the mint price.

If this set can reach near min price of 0.25 ETH, it becomes an attractive trade. At 0.5 ETH or higher, it's much riskier and near 1 it's likely a pass. Unless of course, you are in it for the art, and then by all means mint away.

This set of 400 begins its Dutch auction at 4 ETH starting price at 1:00 p.m. ET today, exponentially dropping to 0.25 resting price.

NFT News and Announcements

Tuesday was a very slow day for NFT news, but still a few headlines to process.

y00ts reinforced Frank Degod's new nickname "Frank Delay", announcing that the y00ts t00bs waitlist mint would be delayed from Monday afternoon. The team still has not set a firm time, but it is expected for some time Tuesday. As of now, nearly 80 percent of the supply has been minted, with just 3,178 left according to data from y00t.wtf. The floor price for y00ts seems to have settled at 150 SOL through this delay, and it's likely to stay near that range until the final 20 percent of the supply enters the market.

The next headline is a fairly wild story from the art market featuring top artist Alpha Centauri Kid (ACK). The story involves a 201 ETH sale of "pale blue death (a color study) and a shocking turn of events. Twitter user 0xSpeedyJJ lays out the course of events very nicely in the thread below, but as a quick recap: ACK set up a free claim for his 1/1 holders with the caveat that any listings/sales/transfers would trigger an open edition (which he did not want to do); one holder listed for 69.69 ETH; ACK promptly dropped a new 1/1 mirroring the free claim piece for 201 ETH, daring someone to buy and burn it; someone (@TheRealGVG) did just that, setting ACK's new ATH in the process; ACK responded that the burn did not stop the open edition and it's on for 4:20 p.m. ET today.

Open editions have not fared too well on the open market this year, but this one has a much more interesting backstory than most and may buck the trend. It will definitely be worth watching, especially as this story continues to unfold.

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

• World of Women announced a partnership with Jadu AVAs, enabling a move into the AR space this fall for the project 
• Pixel Vault opened its own marketplace, aggregating listings from Rarible and OpenSea and allowing users to bypass any royalties for sales 

NFT Market Action Data, September 7

Tuesday marked another very low volume day for NFTs on OpenSea, as no set eclipsed the 500 ETH mark and only five managed to get more than 200 ETH. 

ENS led the way for the third day in a row, tallying 470 ETH in volume, led by the 10K club (4-digits) which jumped 8 percent to 2.76 ETH floor on the day. The 999 club (3-digits) is holding at 35 ETH, and the 100K club (5-digits) is at 0.066 ETH. This new focus on ENS NFTs does not appear to be a passing trend and seems here to stay at this point, and this ecosystem is seeing some of the highest daily and weekly sales across all sets.

Todd James "Art Party", the second drop from the GODA Pass ecosystem, had its reveal on Tuesday, with the floor dropping ~37 percent from local highs of 0.8 ETH to 0.49 ETH post-reveal. The set did see several nice top-end sales, with nine pieces moving for 5 ETH or higher, so the floor price dip makes sense with the rare lotto context.

There were not many other highlights from the ETH ecosystem, so let's switch over to SOL where it's much more exciting.

y00ts has created a frenzy of trading on Magic Eden (the primary SOL NFT marketplace), as the ~225K SOL traded on that set in the first-day post mint has already started rotating around the SOL ecosystem. ABC and Galactic Geckos seem to be the primary beneficiaries in early trading, with their volumes surging 100% and 500% respectively as the sets reach 41 SOL and 36 SOL floors respectively. The Geckos also benefitted from a discord visit from Shaq last night and Coingecko using a Gecko PFP in their Twitter profile now.

DeGods has held steady at 440 SOL floor, seeing its floor dip almost exactly by the price of y00ts from local highs. 

And the biggest recent rocket is ABC House, seeing its floor run from 0.08 SOL to 4.85 SOL on the day, though amidst rumors of wash trading.

NFT Market Analysis

Previously it seemed like the pre-Merge trade would likely hurt NFT trading volume in the last few weeks leading up to the event, but with ETH not making any kind of a run in price, that narrative might be false.

The daily volatility is not great for NFTs, as ETH's 9 percent dip on the day to $1,512 seemingly stopped the market in its tracks last night. The macro picture looks bleaker by the day, bonds and the USD strength are showing more signs of pain to come, and the equity markets continue to struggle.

it's all a poor recipe for NFT success, especially on ETH. It's hard to see the catalyst right now to pull ETH NFTs out of this bear market soon or really in the rest of 2022.

But that's ETH NFTs. SOL NFTs are in a different situation and have some real reasons for hopium.

ETH has roughly 400K monthly active users trading NFTs right now, and that seems to have plateaued. Magic Eden, the primary SOL marketplace, has just 35,000 monthly active users. Thus SOL has room for real growth, simply if it's able to pull from the ETH user base - it just needs a catalyst.

Well, Frank DeGod and the team are doing their best to make that catalyst happen with Degods and y00ts. They have captured the attention of the entire NFT market, and with y00ts now 5x'ing from mint price, they are being taken seriously. There is FUD but it's starting to go away, as some ETH native traders' bias against SOL starts to get erased by the potential of this burgeoning new ecosystem. 

It is still too early to tell if the y00ts will have staying power, but there's a lot more excitement over on SOL right now - that much is clear. And we will continue to share a spotlight more heavily on this ecosystem in the days and weeks to come.

As always, good luck to those minting today, be careful out there (especially on SOL), and make sure to stay up to date with the latest news with the Lucky Trader newsfeed.