Morning Minute | Uptober Kicks Off, NFTs and Crypto 📈

TylerD's Market Summary

Crypto prices are up, and NFTs surprisingly are as well. Is this the beginning of a new trend? And catch up on the weekend Friend Tech action.

📈 Uptober Begins

"Uptober" is the meme already going around across Crypto Twitter (CT) since October started yesterday.

And so far, it's living up to its name.

Crypto pumped yesterday afternoon ahead of the ETH ETFs opening up today, and then NFTs saw some green overnight.

Could this be a set up for an NFT bottom?

NFT Market Overview

The most important trend in NFTs right now - Blur farmers are rotating to FriendTech.

We saw trading volume fall off a cliff late last week, now in the $5M-$7M range daily (vs $10M+ for FriendTech).

But this may be a good thing. The buyers who are still buying may be more organic.

The first winner - BAYC.

A Yuga whale seemingly went hard on BAYC and other assets overnight, leading to a 10% spike in the BAYC floor now at 26.59 ETH (+11% on the week).

Now we'll see if this trickles down into other PFPs besides the Yuga mainstays.

The art market is back in focus as well, with:

• Winds of Yawanawa holding at 6.94 ETH after the remaining supply dropped (now 1,000 tota) and Refik announcing next steps for the reveal starting Oct 9
• Velocity Series pumped 30% to 1.7 ETH ahead of the upcoming mints from Snowfro and others
• Fewocious' Fewos cut supply at 18,000 and are holding at 0.13 ETH ahead of that major reveal event happening today

Now for a quick look at broader price action.

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

• Fidenza: 50 ETH (-4%)
• CryptoPunks: 45.5 ETH (even)
• Ringers: 29.25 ETH (-3%)
• BAYC: 26.59 ETH (+12%)
• Gazers: 14 ETH (-7%)
• Chromie Squiggle: 9.8 ETH (-2%)
• Grifters: 9 ETH (+13%)
• MAYC: 4.94 ETH (+4%)
• Pudgy Penguins: 4.69 ETH (+3%)
• Azuki: 4.17 ETH (+9)
• PROOF: 3.6 ETH (-16%)
• Captainz: 3.25 ETH (+8%)
• DeGods: 3.19 (-6%)
• Otherside Koda: 3.19 ETH (even)
• Milady: 2.04 ETH (-10%)

So a slightly red week for art NFTs and a slightly green week in PFPs, though most traded within a +/-5% window.

Besides BAYC (covered above), Grifters were the top winner, jumping 13% back to 9 ETH. Pudgy Penguins were briefly the major winner in PFPs before retracing most of their "Walmart Toys" pump to settle almost even on the week.

Azuki and Captainz rebounded nicely on the week while Milady's fell another 10% near 2 ETH.

Now we'll see if Uptober is real for NFTs or not. As for Friend Tech...

👥 Friend Tech Trend Tracker

Uptober might be applying to Friend Tech as well.

It was another green wave weekend after a somewhat controversial airdrop, with Blur farmers and Asia leading the way.

Let's start with the numbers.

Here are some of the core Friend Tech metrics for 10/2 and their day-over-day change:

• Return users: 9,811 -> 8,906 (-9%)
• Daily Buy volume: $6.18M -> $6.6M (+7%) 
• Total Volume: $10.9M -> $11.8M (+8%)
• TVL: $50.6M -> $52.4M** (+3.5%)
• Highest key: Vombatus 8.055 -> 8.15 (+1%)

*4.3% of TVL is from self-buyers (down from a peak of 15%) per Slice Analytics' new dashboard.

**TVL in ETH terms at 30,246 ETH

Some major milestones were hit this weekend.

The app passed 300,000 total users, 5M keys traded and over 10,000 ETH in fees.

Lifetime volume is at $347M in less than 2 months, over 1/3 of the way to $1B (with the team raking ~$17M off of that).

As for the airdrop, this is the TLDR of how it went down on Friday evening:

• Team dropped points but had error in the algo
• They re-ran, giving more points to some users and less to others
• Median user got 50-60 points per ETH portfolio value, ranging up to 100+ for those who hit the bonuses
• Levi #1 on the week with 40.3k points, with CBB #2 with 31.8k

Per the analysis done by Levi and his team, points were primarily rewarded for Portfolio value, # of unique holders, Watchlist count, with smaller bonuses for distribution, fees, and activity.

Market reaction - we saw some immediate selloff from angry users, and a mix of red and green on the leaderboard, but portfolios mostly grinded up over the weekend.

Racer notably fell 20%+ to 4.65 ETH, now in 4th behind Wombatus, CBB and Levi. 

The 3,3 strategy seemed to have been rewarded and thus remained as the top trading strategy.

Another outcome - buying small accounts at huge scale. Leaderboard members like Herro, Dingaling and 0x5F all made points to buy up 500+ keys of accounts in the 0-0.1 ETH range (seemingly for the airdrop boost).

A few other trends and developments we saw:

• Farmers are winning: The CBB Cartel soared on Saturday after CBB shared a teaser indicating there would be advantages to owning all 5 (now all in the 1.3-1.6 ETH range)
• A new whitelist tool: CBB also announced that he may have found a tool to avoid botting at launch, with a whitelist system that would feature an equal price per key
• Machi Big Brother announced that he plans to join Friend Tech this Friday, an entrance that will certainly have market impact
• Asia is coming, evidenced by Bread's new dashboard that shows the key price trends of the top 10 Global Chinese accounts
• There are now 7 keys over 4 ETH in value and 13 over 3 ETH (both up just 1 on the week)
• Notable winners on the weekend included:
  • Dingaling now at 4.35 ETH and in 5th on leaderboard
  • confusedcollector +60% to 0.67 ETH
  • Loopify +47% to 0.66 ETH
  • Cozomo de' Medici +44% to 0.55 ETH

Now we see what twists and turns may be in store for this week.

🚚 What else is happening in NFTs?

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

• Trading volume came in at $6.7M (3,900 ETH) on Sunday, while the leaderboard saw green
• Winds of Yawanawa fell 5% to 6.85 ETH after the final supply came out, now 1,000 in total; Refik announced that the reveal process will begin on Oct 9 lastin through Oct 13
• LooksRare released a tokenomics update, focused on the continuation of $LOOKS buy backs and the addition of fees from its raffles and YOLO to protocol rewards
• DraftKings Reignmakers finished the week in 3rd place in overall NFT trading volume with $3.9M, behind just DMarket (CS:GO skins) and Gods Unchained, and above every ETH NFT projects

🌎 Around Crypto and Web3

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

• The crypto market soared on Sunday ahead of potential ETH ETF launches; BTC +4% at $28,300; ETH +2.7% at $1,730; SOL +5% at $24
• It's a big week ahead for Macro, with Fed Chair Jerome Powell speaking today, an OPEC meeting on Weds and the Sept jobs data coming on Friday
• Sam Bankman-Fried trial to start today, while author Michael Lewis strangely defends him in recent interview
• Animoca Brands Japan is partnering with Drecom Corporation, with hopes to strengthen Japan's global outreach in the web3 gaming space

🚀 NFT Total Volume

• BAYC (1,385 ETH, 26.59 ETH Floor)
• MAYC (587 ETH, 4.94 ETH)
• DeGods (347 ETH, 3.25 ETH)
• BAKC (231 ETH, 1.61 ETH)
• Azuki (170 ETH, 4.14 ETH)

📈 NFT Floor Price Increase

• NFArcade Pass (181%, 0.15 ETH Floor)
• AnarKey by tradeAI (59%, 25 ETH)
• Memewhales by tradeAI (50%, 10.5 ETH)
• Vegens (50%, 0.3 ETH)
• Blips (39%, 0.18 ETH)

🗓 Upcoming NFT Mints and Reveals

The week is off to a fast start, with several drops and events mostly in the art sector. 

The MoMa Postcard and the Matt Kane airdrop for RarePass holders are the likely highlights.

For those who want to dive in, see the full list and more details from Swizzy's daily mint monitor. 

• Memes by 6529 (11:00 a.m. ET)
• Gretta Louw x Verse (12:00 p.m. ET)
• The Decod3rs (12:00 p.m. ET)
• Ryan Bates - Mellow Yellow (12:00 p.m. ET)
• MoMa Postcard (5:00 p.m. ET)
• Matt Kane x RarePass - airdrop (TBD)

Enjoy this write-up and/or want to sponsor the Morning Minute? 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.