Weekly Roundup: What Happened in Play2Earn Games and NFTs This Week? [Dec. 10, 2021]

NFT Collector Splashes $450k on The Sandbox Estate

Investors have continued to spend huge sums on NFTs and metaverse projects. An NFT collector, who goes by the name P-APE, has spent $450,000 or 71,000 SAND on a virtual plot on The Sandbox.

Snoop Dogg is looking to recreate his California mansion on the decentralized metaverse. Commenting on the deal with Dogg, a representative of The Sandbox said that "the next campaign is going to be around selling LAND with Snoop Dogg, and then we have this big concert. We sold 1000 tickets, and it's coming early next year."

The estate that sold for $450,000 is adjacent to Snoop’s virtual property. To put things in perspective, the average price of a multi-bedroom middle price tier home in Phoenix, Arizona is less than $400,000. 

The buyer of the estate, P-Ape, has acquired some other notable NFTs, including Bored Ape #6445 and Mutant Ape #11089.

Seneca of the Bored Ape Yacht Club Unveils New NFTs at Art Basel Miami

All Seeing Seneca, the lead artist behind the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT series, released five new NFTs at Dfinity’s Iconoclast gallery event at Art Basel Miami. Surprisingly, two of the pieces appear to reference Bored Apes.

Seneca is often viewed as the official artist of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), having drawn the ape concept sketches and developed the final artwork. Although others were undoubtedly involved in the project, Sotheby’s recognizes her as the lead artist.

That being said, following the success of the BAYC collection, Seneca’s latest drop was much-anticipated. And although her design scheme often combines bright and cartoonish designs with surrealist elements, her latest drop is much softer and ethereal compared to the famous BAYC pieces.

Chainalysis Report Points to Most Profitable NFT Trades

Beyond owning a beautiful piece of art, the dream of every NFT collector is to spot the next CryptoPunk early before it gains popularity. In trying to find the next gem, investors have sent $27 billion to ERC-721 and ERC-1155 contracts.

Getting in early is often akin to being whitelisted, allowing collectors to buy the NFTs at a discount. OpenSea asserts that about 50% of such buyers often sell their NFTs at double the price. They wrote:

“Overall, 78% of sales by unwhitelisted buyers later result in a loss on resale, with 59% resulting in a loss equal to or below 0.5x their initial investment. 78% of sales by whitelisted buyers, on the other hand, result in a profit, with 51% resulting in a profit of 2x or more the initial investment. The data is clear: Whitelisting provides a significant financial reward for those who play a role in an NFT project’s success by seeding its early community growth efforts.”

Taking whitelisting out of the equation, only 29% of sales result in profit.

“Transaction data from the OpenSea marketplace shows that just 28.5% of NFTs purchased during minting and then sold on the platform result in a profit. Buying NFTs on the secondary market from other users and flipping them, however, leads to profit 65.1% of the time.”

Nifty Gateway Set to Cut Gas Fees by 70% on ‘Wallet-to-wallet’ Trades

Come January, the NFT marketplace will roll out the new solution that will allow users to buy and sell collectibles directly from their Ethereum wallets. It will leverage its existing custodial system to enable wallet-to-wallet trades, which it claims will require significantly less gas than other existing platforms.

The solution is more of a hybrid model since Nifty handles some on-chain processes outside the Ethereum blockchain in order to minimize cost.

“We're really hopeful and optimistic that this will be a boon for the entire NFT ecosystem, and help a lot of those projects that are impacted by high gas fees—to make everything more accessible for everyone.”

Pak Sells Experimental NFT ‘Merge’ for Nearly $92M

One of the earlier stars of the NFT mania, and the first artist to earn more than $1 million from digital artwork, has moved on to score one of the largest NFT sales to date.

“Merge NFTs are generated dynamically based on the total mass of the NFT. Your NFT will visually become bigger as you acquire more mass […] There are no hosted images. All visuals are generated on the chain, in the contract. Merge visuals also allow future customizations, with 100 secret classes distributed evenly among all tokens.”

Pak’s latest work was highly sought after by NFT collectors, as the two-day token sale attracted a total of 28,984 buyers, collectively spending more than $91.8 million. In total, 266,444 mass tokens were purchased, with a top wallet gobbling 8,695 tokens.

It is also worth mentioning that existing Pak NFT collectors enjoyed early access to the token sale and were allowed to purchase the tokens for $299 apiece, while the public sale began at a whopping $400 per token and increased by $25 every six hours. The last set of tokens were sold at $575 apiece.

NFTs Are Going to Space, According to Deus EX Anima

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first human to travel into space. Before Yuri, on January 31, 1961, Ham became the first chimpanzee in space. From man to robots, animals, and cryptocurrencies, we’ve seen different things go to space. Now, it may be time for non-fungible tokens to also head to space.

Anima, an augmented reality startup, is looking to send NFTs to space by building an augmented reality platform that adapts to the physical world.

Last week, the company released PHASE MN:01 Mirror, a collection of 8,888 AR NFTs created in collaboration with street artist Demsky. Away from the typical image and profile picture NFTs, Mirror AR NFTs will interact with the real world through smartphone camera filters through a real-world Bitcoin-hunting game created by the same developer.

These NFTs will change based on how they react to the physical world. To spice things up, NFT holders will be given coordinates to 10 still-secret locations around the globe. Traveling to these locations and placing their NFTs in these locations will alter the properties of their NFTs on the blockchain – visually, audibly, and in composition. Each Mirror NFT can be altered up to eight times, and even if resold will still retain these transformations.

Speaking of the team behind the project, Anima is a U.S.-based company comprising seven individuals. It was founded in January and has so far secured funding from Coinbase Ventures, Divergence Ventures, FlamingoDAO, and several others. The project has so far released two standalone AR NFTs, with Mirror being the first to be released on its recently-launched AR platform.

The NFT project is currently in a “reservation phase,” meaning that interested collectors can participate in a lottery to stand a chance of buying up to 15 Mirror NFTs. The public sale is expected to go live later this month.

At the end of the token sales, the project will move into phase 2. At this point, users will be able to travel the world to evolve their NFTs at specified curated physical locations. Phase 3 will kick in when enough NFTs in the collection have been altered. In this phase, NFT holders will receive new objects with special properties and instructions on where to place them around the world for others to find.

Reason Magazine Debuts Ethereum NFTs on OpenSea

From Time to Fortune, Rolling Stone, The Economist, and Playboy, the NFT space has become a playground for many traditional magazines. But it is not too late to join the party, as Reason magazine becomes the latest publication to tap on NFTs to raise funds and awareness.

The Chief Technology Officer at Recur, James Seibel, won the bid for 0.75 WETH or $3,300. The pixelated NFT depicts the four hosts of the Reason Roundtable podcast. Seibel told Decrypt that:

“Owning it creates a connection between myself and the institution which is a voice of reason in a media landscape dominated by partisans, bias, and a basic misunderstanding of facts.”

Meanwhile, the proceeds from the sale will go to the Reason Foundation.

NFT Marketplace OpenSea Welcomes New CFO, Mulls Over IPO Plans

Earlier this week, the world’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea announced that it was hiring Brian Roberts as its first chief financial officer (CFO).

“A community exit to [an] alternate platform will give a super strong message to the market and all teams.”

Interestingly, Roberts has backtracked on his earlier statement following a public outcry. The tech veteran clarified his stance in a tweet on Wednesday, stating that:

“There was inaccurate reporting about OpenSea’s plans. Let me set the record straight: there is a big gap between thinking about what an IPO might eventually look like & actively planning one.”