🥩 NFTs Leak into Meat-World...

Coinbase is Coming

• The biggest news of the week came from Coinbase, which announced it’s own NFT platform set to arrive later this year as a direct competitor to OpenSea.

• The crypto giant that sports more than 68 million users worldwide has the NFT world buzzing as “Coinbase NFT’ is primed to bring a torrent of new crypto enthusiasts into the collectables game.

• The waitlist for access to the platform exceeded 1 million users on the day of its announcement, and as of this writing has topped 2 million. The potential of a massive wave of new users into the NFT market has spurred a new phrase to make its way around the Twitterverse.

Fake Art Maker Makes Real NFTs

• Legendary German art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi spent decades pumping out forgeries of famous paintings, pushing millions of dollars worth of sales between 1980 and 2011 before being caught and sentenced to 6 years behind bars. 

• These days, he’s ramping up to release his own, very legit, NFT collection in which the artist recreates the famous painting, “Salvator Mundi” which has been arguably attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci and in 2017 became the highest selling painting ever in an auction at 450 million. 

• Titled, “The Greats”, the project features 7 NFTs, each a re-creation of the painting made in the styles of 7 “great” artists in Andy Warhol, Picasso, Van Gogh, and more. The collection will consist of 4608 total pieces. For the famous former fake artist, things are about to get real.

Steam…NGMI?

• Steam, the massively popular video game distribution company, is apparently banning sales of NFT-related games on it’s platform. Wait…Huh?

• There’s still no word on exactly what led the company to make the decision, as the new  ‘no NFT stuff allowed’ policy was just recently found on the company’s documentation for onboarding new users.

• The move is a curious one, especially given the rumors of GameStop’s entry into the world of online gaming, as well as it’s yet-to-be announced NFT play, It seems the future of NFT gaming is yet to be seized upon, and there for the taking.

Peeping New Projects...

Galactic Apes

Produced in the style of an early-90s video game, Galactic Apes is a nostalgia-invoking project that seems to be a hit amid the gamer-saturated community of NFT collectors. The project was inspired by CyberKongz, and sports a small, two-person team that doesn’t seem to be daunted by it’s new rabid fanbase.

The Deets:

• Galactic Apes pushes big time gamification in their project. Each avatar is a possible “crew member”, and owners will be able to assemble crews and conduct missions that yield new NFTs and other rewards. 

• Prior to the release of its 9,999 collection, there exists a genesis collection of 151 unique pieces which, you might like to know, reached a floor price of 65 ETH.

• After selling out it’s mint in 7 minutes on 9/28, the 10k collection swung from its .08 mint price to over 2.8 ETH at one point. A pretty bananas start to say the least.

Bird’s-Eye View:

• Galactic Apes has cult-vibes written all over it. The technostalgia and gamification seems to hit the bullseye of the NFTverse. Though with just two team members (according to the website), we’ll have to wait and see if the execution, marketing, and community engagement can keep a sustainable pace in the long-term.

• Speaking of nostalgia, this reminds us that so many PFP projects are rooted in aesthetics that appeal to millennial childhood, and we simply wonder what blast from the past may be conjured next in the space.

Woodies

Woodies is a 10k generative project brought to us by UltraDao, a network of artists and collectors who work collaboratively on a range of different initiatives relating to “shape and support new ways to create and experience art.” The project sports some fun lore about characters in an enchanted forest, and alongside the normal collection there will be a separate collection of hand-drawn Core Characters that will be given at random to holders of Woodies Mint Passes.

The Deets:

• The artwork for Woodies is undeniably awesome and immediately distinguishable, and given the fact that the project is generated from over a whopping 900 possible traits, there are loads of unique pieces to be had. 

• The project Roadmap promises that Woodies will “take on the metaverse” in early 2022, complete with gifting owners #D avatars based on the Woodies they own, and then ability for owners to buy land and build communities, and collect new items.  Fun!

• Further on, the team hopes to take the project IRL with what it called Woodies Weekends, a series of international events and outdoor activities like skiing, hiking, and boating. Wait, people still go outdoors?

Bird’s-Eye View:

• When we see a project with a team of 12 people behind it, we ought to take it seriously, not only for the broad mix of skills and ideas that stir the pot, but for the network effect that is crucial for collections to take and hold their place in the NFT ecosystem. 

• The project includes a One Million Tree Pledge, a partnership with an organization called Trees for the Future that aims to plant one million trees in sub-Saharan Africa. The team has so far donated over 73 ETH for the cause, a substantial amount that furthers the culture of collections projects giving back.

• We’re also seeing collections like this continue to “gamify” the community experience by offering mint passports that make owners choose between exchanging it for an avatar, or holding it for a raffle to win special NFTs. As we’ve seen this dynamic play out from other projects, most notably the Pixel Vault ecosystem, it’s a means of maintaining strong community engagement and giving the little guys a chance at getting some super rare swag.

Since it Matters...

Dev Ghosting Spooks the Market

The anonymous developer behind the collectables project Evolved Apes has ghosted, disappearing with nearly 3m earned since the project’s initial 9/22 launch, and leaving about 4.4k owners holding bags they’ll likely never recover from. The project promised a fighting game, but instead chose to delete the project’s discord and twitter channels.

• We’ve seen this before, and we’ll probably see it again. The risks of the collectables market is substantially amplified by the accepted culture of anonymous developers, allowing for zero accountability when either things go wrong, or when they were never meant to go right in the first place. 

• This serves as an example that due diligence in projects is important, and being confident of the team behind any given collection is paramount, far beyond the quality of the artwork

• The massive rugging led some in the community to begin a new project called Fight Back Apes in an attempt to rebuild and recover from the massive sell-off that ensued

• The current floor price is a paltry .009 ETH, down from an average high of .22 ETH just a couple weeks ago.

• We’re following this project as a case study in how projects like this may be able to live on via community-driven initiatives, though with so many other legitimate projects out there, many owners have simply decided to cut bait and move on.

• Given the velocity and hype-booms in the NFT space it’s far to easy to ape into projects first and ask questions later. But as more and more collectors enter the fold, and who are less experienced than those who’ve been here for awhile, there will remain ample opportunities for rug-artists to take advantage

• In cases like these, the old adage from the old world stock market still applies: Know what you own.

Fight Back Apes @FightbackApes

We are 100% volunteers, community wallet, multi-sig, community voting, AMAs and more in the works currently, stop by and check us out! #wegotrugged but we will #fightbackapes #NFTCommunity #NFT

October 3rd 2021

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Feature: CrypToadz

You know we weren’t going to miss out on the chance to get some !vibe going with Toad Talk. CrypToadz has been nothing but sensational since it’s 9/8 launch, reaching heights rarely seen among such young projects. The artwork is 100% degen, crude, vulgar, and utterly delightful, and the project sports fabulous lore about an Evil King Gremplin invading the “Uniswamp” and declaring his divine right to rule over all CrypToadz. Come for the lolz, stay for the alpha. 

Floor: 6.6 ETH  Highest sale: 420 ETH  Value Traded: 39.7k ETH

Issues: 10,000  Unique Wallets: 3300  Average Owned: 2.164

Fundamentally Speaking

CrypToadz features what could be considered an NFT classic aesthetic of 8-bit pixelated goodness while conjuring associations of both CryptoPunks and Rare Pepe’s in both look and degenerate vibe. All the toads are utterly grotesque, with some featuring buzzing flies while others smore cigarettes and wear funny hats. There are droolers, scruffy hair styles, creepy smilers, and strung-out schizoids among the toad army, which is equal parts charming and repulsive. 

On the Radar

• The team offers the PFP project in the public domain, giving anybody the liberty to use the artwork in whatever way they please .

• The artist, Gremlin, has a great portfolio of certifiably !vibe illusion work on Showtime

• The project has gotten so hot, it lead writer Jay Caspian Kang to muse upon it recently for the New York Times

The project has already inspired a wave of derivative projects, including “FlipToadz”, “ZombieToadz” and, intriguingly, CreatureToadz. For a project that’s only about five weeks old, the culture around this project seems pretty infectious.

Technically Speaking

The price movement of CrypToadz since mint has bounded to huge heights. From a lowly mint price of .069 ETH, the project has seen it’s average sales price reach nearly 22 ETH before cooling off in recent days. In 5 weeks, total volume has exceeded 39.7k ETH, averaging almost 1k in daily volume. And the project still sits 200 owners under 50% distributed ownership, a bullish sign that there’s room for future growth in the near term.

Also Brewing...

• We’re a couple weeks out from NFT NYC, which is sure to stir the pot with surprise news and crazy IRL events.

• We’re waiting patiently to see what comes next with Pixel Vault’s MetaHero Universe from their huge recent drop of planet DAO tokens

• Have you heard that Polygon has overtaken Ethereum in daily active users? Time will tell what this means in the long run…

• Bitcoin and ETH have been pumping this week, and we’ve got an eye out for trends within the correlations between crypto prices and NFT sales. @0xAllen has a theory

• POAP made the splash of the day in the NFT world when it was revealed the company offered a record 2500 ETH (9.6 million rn for you fiat-ers out there)  for @richerd’s Cryptopunk #6046. In an equally epic, boss-level move, he turned the offer down. Doesn’t get anymore diamond hands than that, frens.

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