Apecoin no longer works, Pharrell sells Doodles and more

by · July 16, 2022

ApeCoin (APE), the Ethereum-based token associated with the widely popular and almost definitely not 4Chan-related Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project, saw market value fall by 67.2% or $ 4.3 billion during May, and it has continued to slide since.

Despite bearish macro factors threatening the both crypto and stock markets through 2022, May in particular was a difficult month for crypto – thank you, Terra.

Like many other assets, ApeCoin failed to escape this downturn, and its market value fell by $ 4.3 billion to about $ 2.1 billion by May 31, when the price fell from $ 21.27 to $ 6.97. according to data from CoinGecko.

APE / USD: CoinGecko

Trading volume was around $ 5.7 billion at the beginning of May, but fell to $ 498 million at the end of the month.

Since then, the market value has continued to slide to $ 1.3 billion, with a price of $ 4.40 per token at the time of writing, while the 24-hour trading volume currently totals around $ 264 million. This is the lowest since it was launched in March.

Overall, ApeCoin is down 83.5% since its record-high market value of $ 6.81 billion at a price of $ 26.70 per token on April 28.

Pharrell Williams signs Doodles NFTs

Doodles, one of the best NFT projects in the area founded by the respected artist Burnt Toast, has signed the iconic musician Pharrell Williams as its chief brand officer.

To date, the Doodles NFT project has generated secondary sales worth around $ 503 million since its launch in October 2021, and the team is currently preparing for its second NFT decline of 10,000 tokenized avatars at a time yet to be revealed. year.

Williams is the man behind the much-loved, stomach-churning and headache-inducing song “Happy”, which has more than 1 billion plays on YouTube, and will work to guide the project’s strategy related to artwork, music, product lines, animation and virtual / public events. The musician will also produce a Doodles-inspired music album entitled “Doodles Records: Volume 1.”

The announcement was made at the NYC NFT event on Wednesday, and the project also revealed that it had completed a round of funding led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capitalist firm, Seven Seven Six. However, the amount of capital was not disclosed.

“I’m a big fan of the brand,” Williams said in a video message, adding that “We are going to build from the core community beyond and bring Doodles to new heights, new levels.”

NFT art helps the total art market: Expert

Art expert Magnus Resch believes that mainstream adoption of NFT technology is helping to break down barriers to art collection and attracting new buyers to a field that has often struggled with numbers due to its elitist nature.

Resch has a degree in art market economics and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He has also written two books on the art industry dubbed Management of art galleries and How to become a successful artist.

In a conversation with Art News on Thursday, Resch highlighted an interesting point about tokenized art, as he claimed that price transparency and the relatively simple purchase make it much less threatening for new collectors to enter the market.

“The biggest problem in the art market is that we have too many visitors and too few buyers, the number of buyers is declining. And why that? Because buyers are afraid to enter the art world. It’s too elitist, it’s not open to first time buyers. If you can not convince beginners [to join] into the art world, we will all fail. ”

“But NFTs can help solve this problem. Suddenly, people are buying because they had full transparency about prices and automatic access,” he added.

Related: Non-fungible airdrops: Can the NFA become the next big acronym in the crypto space?

Solana is building a smartphone, jokes

Solana blockchain / Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has announced that the team will roll out an Android Web3-focused smartphone in Q1 2023 called Saga.

The phone will have a 6.67-inch 120Hz OLED screen, 512 GB of storage and 12 GB of RAM, and will be powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chip. It will also have a primary camera of 50 megapixels and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide shooter. It will be priced at $ 1000 and pre-orders with a deposit of $ 100 are now open.

No word yet on whether the phone will go offline every two months and requires a manual reboot.

Other cool news:

Instagram’s parent company Meta announced on Wednesday that it will start testing NFTs on Instagram Stories using its augmented reality platform Spark AR.

eBay, an e-commerce giant, on Wednesday announced the acquisition of KnownOrigin – an NFT marketplace that will help the company advance into the world of blockchain technology and digital collectibles.