Trump NFTs Increase 800%, Yuga Lab Blacklists NFT Exchanges and more
Trump NFT’s Daily Sales Increase 800%
Former US President Donald Trump’s collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) trading cards has recently witnessed a massive boom in daily sales volume.
Compared to sales volumes on January 17, January 18 and 19 saw peaks of 800% and 600%, respectively, according to market measurement aggregator Cryptoslam.
Some pundits believe the renewed interest could be due to his imminent return to social media, following reports that the former president sought to join Facebook and Twitter ahead of the 2024 presidential campaign.
The collection of 45,000 self-themed trading cards launched on December 15th and was originally priced at $99 each.
Buyers of the collection were automatically entered into a contest that included “1,000s of prizes,” including one-on-one dinners, Zoom calls and rounds of golf with the former president.
They quickly sold out, recording daily sales volumes of over $3.5 million, but plummeted to a baseline of around $26,000 by the end of 2022.
Yuga Labs blacklists NFT marketplaces
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) creator Yuga Labs has blocked secondary trading of its “Sewer Pass” NFTs on marketplaces that do not fully support royalties.
The NFT project was first announced on January 12th and became available for minting on January 17th.
Only Bored Ape Yacht Club or Mutant Ape Yacht Club holders are able to mint the Sewer Pass, which serves as an entry pass to the new skill-based NFT game, called Dookey Dash.
A royalty is a fee taken from the price of a sale and sent to the content creator. Yuga Labs has been vocal about its opposition to broader shifts in the industry to royalty-free marketplaces.
Sewer Pass has seen a high volume of trades on secondary marketplaces, with a floor price of 1.81 ETH ($2,809) and sales volume of 15,627 ETH ($24,267,411), according to data from NFT Price Floor.
Based on Yuga Labs’ 5% royalty fee, secondary sales for the collection have already generated over $1.2 million in revenue.
Neopets raises $4M to build metaverse
Virtual pet website Neopets – which was popular throughout the 2000s – has raised $4 million from gaming and blockchain investors with plans to create its own metaverse.
Some companies providing the funding are the venture capital firm Polygon Ventures; investment companies Hasket Capital and IDG Capital; gaming company NetDragon Websoft; and the Ava Labs-powered Blizzard Fund.
According to the announcement, ‘Neopets Metaverse’ will be a play-and-earn virtual pet game based on the original and will allow players to “raise, care for, customize and battle with Neopets” on the blockchain.
In the announcement, HashKey Capital’s director of investment Xao Xiao notes: “We believe that GameFi plays a crucial role in the larger metaverse narrative, serving as the interactive layer of the value chain and a key driver of traffic across Web2 and Web3.”
Neopets was founded in 1999 and the company hopes that Neopets Metaverse will bring “the magic of Neopets in a positive fresh light to old players, as well as attract and nurture a new generation of Neopets.”
The community has had an overwhelming response to the announcement, with some suggesting that its previous attempt at creating a Neopets metaverse had been a flop.
The company had initially launched an NFT collection using the Solana network on November 12, 2021, which reportedly went so poorly that it resulted in the hashtag #NoNeoNFT on Twitter.
Touch the metaverse, scientists say
A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have created a pair of haptic gloves that they believe can bring the sense of touch to the metaverse.
The invention, called the HaptGlove, is an untethered and lightweight glove that allows metaverse users to interact with virtual objects in a much more realistic way by conveying touch and grip.
When users don the HaptGlove, they can sense when their virtual avatar’s hand touches something, as well as tell how hard and what shape the object is as a result of the HaptGlove constraining the user’s finger positions.
NUS claims the HaptGlove will also be useful in other areas, such as education and medicine, by allowing surgeons to prepare for operations in a “hyper-realistic environment” or providing students with a hands-on learning experience.
The concept of haptic gloves is not new, with Meta working on their version. However, NUS claims that the gloves can give users a much more realistic sense of touch compared to others that exist today.
Those working on metaverse games have suggested that virtual reality is such an immature technology that it is difficult to incorporate it into metaverse products. Existing games such as The Sandbox and Decentraland have yet to launch dedicated virtual reality clients.
More good news:
On January 18th, NFT marketplace Rarible announced that it would expand its marketplace builder to include polygon-based NFT collections. The developer will allow artists and projects to customize its marketplace, with CEO Alexei Falin believing that community marketplaces will be the future of NFT buying and selling.
Crypto exchange Binance announced on January 19 that it would tighten its rules for NFT listings, requiring sellers to complete Know Your Customer verification and have at least two followers before listing on the platform. The firm plans to “regularly review” NFT listings that do not “meet the standards” and recommend them for removal.
