Morning Minute | CRV Exploit and Base Blast Off Highlight Wild Weekend in Crypto

GM!

Take a minute to catch up on the latest in the Web3 space with today's NFT market analysis, top movers, and upcoming mints.

TylerD's Market Summary

A major exploit, a 4M% rocket and a notable NFT project is selling itself to the top bidder in a wild weekend of crypto and NFT action. Read on for more.

🚨 CRV Hacked and Drained; BALD Rockets

It was not a quiet weekend in the crypto space.

Crypto Twitter (CT or CX now I guess) was euphoric Sunday morning after a new memecoin on the L2 Base rocketed 4M% to an 80M marketcap in about 12 hours.

But that euphoria quickly turned to dismay a few hours later as some major CRV exploits started playing out, leading to over $70M in tokens being hacked.

CRV's Vyper Exploit

For quick background, CRV has $3B in liquidity and is the 2nd largest DEX (decentralized exchange) in ETH DeFi. It is particularly important for the stablecoin swap market.

A number of CRV's stablepools which used Vyper, a programming language, were exploited (i.e. had their funds drained).

This included major pools such as crv/eth, aleth/eth, mseth/eth, and peth/eth, and early estimated losses were in the $40M ballpark.

The extent likely won't be known for a bit as several whitehats (good hackers) jumped in to take the funds to keep them from bad actors.

This led to the CRV token dumping and a huge arbitrage spot briefly with CRV's onchain price at $0.15 and the exchange price at $0.65.

Then, panic ensued related to a major $100M CRV debt that CRV founder Michael Egorov has with Aave and a potential DeFi lending liquidation cascade.

People began pulling funds from CRV and from Aave in the wake, in a very chaotic afternoon and evening.

Those following closely are starting to report that the situation is stabilizing and that Michael's loan in particular looks safe. 

It appears the worst may be behind us, but it's likely too soon to tell. There will likely be ripple effects for days and weeks, and certainly trust has been eroded.

$BALD Rockets on Base

The CRV chaos overshadowed a very fun weekend for coin traders on the Base L2.

The highlight - a trader with the @cheatcoiner handle apparently turned a $500 bet on the BALD token into over a $1M windfall in less than 24 hours.

The BALD token (a reference to Coinbase's CEO Brian Armstrong's bald head) soared to an $85M marketcap at peak, a 4,000,000% increase from its issuance price.

The buy thesis for BALD - there is no working bridge back. This was the common sentiment going around CT, sharing an NBA Top Shot-esque set up where all funds bridged to Base would be stuck there for at least a few weeks, meaning any token sales would likely just rotate around the eco (vs being withdrawn).

There are reports popping up that there are available bridges, though they don't seem to be widely known yet.

Regardless, TVL on Base is now up to $69M. For reference, it was just $2M at the start of Saturday July 29th.

Things move quickly in crypto.

📝 NFT Weekend Recap

It was another painfully slow weekend in the NFT sector following a pretty quiet week overall.

The main trend is continued bleeding, as attention and liquidity are siphoned to other areas of the crypto ecosystem (namely memecoins).

A few highlights from the weekend:

• CryptoDickbutts made the surprise announcement of a season 4 mint along with a point system indicating that the person or group with the most points would effectively take over the CDB Twitter, Discord, all collections and a treasury spot. So far, 3,429 of the 6,900 S4 CDBs have been minted at the 0.069 ETH price, while the overall CDB floor fell 37% to 0.7 ETH.
• The Grapes led top movers soaring nearly 150% on the week to 0.4 ETH as speculation tied to their upcoming GrapeCoin drop for holders has driven big buy demand.
• A new land project dropped 10,000 grids at 0.01 ETH with an interesting mechanic that the plots would instantly list for 2x their sale price once sold (i.e 0.02 ETH, then 0.04, etc.); this land ponzi ran all the way to 0.16 ETH Saturday evening before stalling out.

Now on to the top movers.

Market Action

Here is a quick rundown of the notable floors and their 7-day price changes:

• Fidenza: 85 ETH (even)
• CryptoPunks: 47.9 ETH (-3%)
• Ringers: 38.5 ETH (-7%)
• BAYC: 29.75 ETH (-4%)
• Gazers: 14 ETH (-15%)
• Chromie Squiggle: 10.55 ETH (+8%)
• Grifters: 9.5 ETH (-3%)
• DeGods: 8.38 (-1%)
• PROOF: 6.3 ETH (+10%)
• MAYC: 5.72 ETH (-1%)
• Azuki: 5.09 ETH (+6%)
• Captainz: 4.95 ETH (-13%)
• Pudgy Penguins: 4.3 ETH (+6%)
• Otherside Koda: 3.99 ETH (+1%)

So the trend was more ongoing chop with both leading art and PFPs seeing slight red on the week. Bored Apes are now below 30 and continue their downtrend, likely a bad sign for the majority of the PFP space.

Squiggles were the outlier in the art sector jumping up over 10 ETH even as new supply hit the market.

And Pudgy Penguins continue to show strength in PFPs, in green for the 2nd week in a row.

With attention clearly in the crypto and memecoin trading space right now, it's hard to see an immediate catalyst for these trends to change. Expect more ongoing chop and decline.

🚚 What else is happening in NFTs?

Here is the list of other notable headlines from the weekend in NFTs:

• Trading volume came in under 6.5k ETH on Sunday as daily trading volume continues to trend lower; NFTs mostly chopped over the weekend, with The Grapes a notable winner
• 50 new Chromie Squiggles were minted on Friday to the community and to raffle winners; the mint outputs delighted as a few grails were delivered including a full spectrum & new "ghost"
• Memeland debuted new hair traits for female Captainz as their smart PFPs continue to evolve, though their floor continues its downtrend now at 4.95 ETH
• A 4-trait Trippy Bored Ape sold for 275 ETH, arguably one of the best in the BAYC collection, after not being traded since its 0.08 ETH mint in May 2021
• CryptoDickbutts announced a Season 4 mint and that the project would be turned over to the owner with the most NFTs in a shocking twist; the CDB floor fell 37% to 0.7 ETH on the news
• Beeple's "Politics Is Bullshit" collection saw 2 sales at 55 and 60 ETH, raising the floor to a whopping 349 ETH
• A major art loan took place on Arcade.xyz as notable collector Anonymoux lent his XCOPY 1/1 “hello admin pm me” for 130 ETH with 20% apy on a 1-year note (pay back 156 ETH)

🌎 Around Crypto and Web3

A few other Crypto and Web3 headlines that caught my eye:

• The crypto market saw a mixed day on Sunday after all the chaos; BTC +0.4% to $29,370; ETH -0.3% $1,865
• Starbucks is introducing the Green Apron Limited-Edition Stamp Collection on Aug 1 at 3 pm ET, consisting of 5,000 unique designs priced at $100 each
• Palm Foundation is partnering with Polygon Labs and ConsenSys to expand its NFT infrastructure on the Palm Network using Polygon's Zero Knowledge Supernet

🚀 NFT Total Volume

• BAYC (1,831 ETH, 29.75 ETH Floor)
• MAYC (592 ETH, 5.72 ETH)
• DeGods (474 ETH, 8.38 ETH)
• Azuki (292 ETH, 5.09 ETH)
• Moonbirds (152 ETH, 1.6 ETH)

📈 NFT Floor Price Increase

• loomlock NFT (28%, 0.48 ETH Floor)
• goblintown (15%, 0.19 ETH)
• RTFKT CryptoKicks (12%, 0.12 ETH)
• PROOF (8%, 6.3 ETH)
• The Grapes (8%, 0.41 ETH)

🗓 Upcoming NFT Mints and Reveals

Today is a slower day of mints to kick off the week.

The highlight today is likely the Mintify Genesis ey mint, as the NFT trading terminal looks to gamify its ecosystem with a new mint. The Genesis Keys, priced at 0.0069 ETH, will accrue points daily, will be shown on a leaderboard, and are likely to impact their future $ME token drop.

The other event of note is Parallel's new game opening up for beta gameplay. So expect some attention around that.

If you want more, see the full list of today's drops from Swizzy's daily mint monitor. 

• Mintify - Genesis Key (9:00 a.m. ET)
• Memes by 6529 (11:00 a.m. ET)
• Paulygon NFT (12:00 p.m. ET)
• Parallel Beta begins (TBD)

Enjoy this write-up? Follow along with me on Twitter @tyler_did_it or reach out via email tyler.warner@luckytrader.com.

For all volume and floor price data, see Lucky Trader's Project Rankings page.

For all upcoming mints, see Lucky Trader's NFT Calendar page.