Trump’s NFT Tank, NBA All-Star Collection Disappeared in 77 Seconds and More…

by · December 20, 2022

After a sold-out launch that cost approximately $4.45 million from primary sales, former US President Donald Trump’s NFT collection is already on a lightning course towards Earth.

Trump rolled out his unique collection of 45,000 NFT trading cards on December 16 for $99 a time. The NFTs were all gobbled up within a couple of hours of launch, and over the next two days the floor price shot up to an all-time high of around 0.83 Ether (ETH), or $1006 on OpenSea.

Since then, however, the floor price has been unstable, while some in the community have highlighted that the NFT artwork may be plagiarized from other sources.

According to OpenSea data at the time of writing, the floor price is at 0.2 ETH ($242), marking a hefty retracement of about 75%.

24-hour trading volume has also dried up significantly, from around 1,541 ETH ($1.8 million) on December 18th to just 14.37 ETH ($17,402) by December 21st.

Gone in 77 seconds

Another big celebrity name jumped on the NFT bandwagon this week. NBA hall of famer and Chicago Bulls great Scottie Pippen launched an NF project that sold out in just 77 seconds.

The drop called “Scottie Pippen SP33” consists of 1,000 unique NFT Metaverse wearable sneakers that went for a mint price of 0.2 ETH ($241). The NFTs are Ethereum-based and are said to be compatible with “just about any ecosystem.”

The floor price has since risen to 0.42 ETH ($507) according to OpenSea data, and the project has generated 211 ETH ($255,000) in trading volume since December 21.

A limited number of randomly selected hodlers will also receive bonus benefits, with 33 receiving a pair of physical sneakers, two getting the chance to play golf with Pippen and one lucky person getting a tour of Pippen’s hometown plus dinner afterward.

The NFTs were developed in partnership with Web3 entertainment company Orange Comet, which appears to have a solid format, given that it also produced a collection for Sir Anthony Hopkins that sold out in just seven minutes.

NFT games similar to early mobile gaming days

Chris Akhavan, head of gaming at Solana-based NFT marketplace Magic Eden, believes that NFT/blockchain gaming is at a similar stage to the early days of mobile gaming.

“I was around in the early days of mobile gaming, right after the iPhone came out, the App Store came out,” he told TechCrunch on December 21, adding that “I remember the attitude back then among traditional gaming companies was that mobile gaming was stupid .”

Despite much skepticism in its early days, mobile gaming has become the most popular method of gaming worldwide. Notably, a report by New Zoo in June 2020 highlighted that there were 2.5 billion mobile gamers compared to 1.3 billion PC gamers and 800,000 million console gamers that year.

As such, Akhavan is unfazed by the criticism of the Web3gaming space and tips that it will flourish over the next few years.

“We think the same journey is going to happen in Web3,” he said, noting that billions of dollars have already been invested in the Web3 game studios to build a new path for gaming.

NFT wash trading on Ethereum

The impressive trading volumes of Ethereum NFTs may be a “mirage” according to a recent Dune Analytics blog post by pseudonymous NFT market analyst hildobby.

This is because NFT trading volumes on Ethereum may have been skewed by significant NFT wash trading, which hildobby says accounted for around 80% of total trading activity in January this year under nits

Looking more broadly at the whole of 2022, this figure is around 58% according to hildobby’s data, which highlights that the problem is still widespread and that trading volumes are not necessarily the best indicator of the use of an NFT marketplace.

“In a nutshell, the most common method is trade your own NFTs between two wallets you control for highest possible amount of ETH. The goal is to accumulate token rewards with a value that exceeds the gas fees you pay,” hildobby wrote, adding that:

“The laundry boom made life really tough for us data analysts, as it distorts basic statistics that we use to track marketplace usage.”

Limit Break CEO and Web3 game designer Gabriel Leydon highlighted via Twitter on December 20 that the removal of royalty fees from a number of NFT marketplaces may have contributed significantly to this problem.

“Exchange-incentivized wash trading will destroy NFTs. It’s amazing how many different ways royalties were important to the space,” he wrote, while suggesting that royalty fees had previously “tamed the exchanges and prevented washtrading on the scale we’re seeing now.”

Various data platforms such as CryptoSlam have since developed their own methods to filter out potential wash trades, and in their post hildobby outlined how they filter out such trades from their analytics going forward.

Related: What is the relationship between blockchain and Web3?

In particular, hildobby now flags trades where the buyer and seller have the same wallet address, NFTs that are sent back and forth between two wallets, addresses that buy three or more of the same NFT, and wallets that the buyer and seller were in. first funded by the same original the wallet.

“When we apply all these filters, the results are eye-opening. On Ethereum, wash trades are only 1.5% of all trades, but…….Over $30B of NFT trade volume – nearly 45% of the total – is from wash trades.”

Other good news:

Independent game developer Metaverse Game Studios, which boasts a number of developers who have worked on various AAA titles such as Far Cry and Diablo Immortal, has announced a partnership with Web3 development platform ImmutableX to continue building its upcoming RPG Angelic.

Blockchain entertainment company Coda Labs commissioned a survey aimed at game developers to gain an insight into their thoughts on Web3. The researchers found that a majority of respondents believe Web3 games are coming to their firms, with 75% expecting to work on Web3 projects in the future.