Art Gobblers, Reddit NFTs and other winners of the October NFT Market

The NFT market is known for its volatility, and this bear market has been no different. But October showed some reprieve – a few select NFT projects bucked the trend, at least in the short term.

It was a month where Apple moved to crack down on NFT functionality in the App Store, banning apps like OpenSea from including external links or buttons that take customers away from the App Store to facilitate purchases or auctions.

It was an apparent move to capture potentially lost NFT revenue – something these NFT projects seem to have little problem with.

Art Gobblers

The new NFT project Art Gobblers generated $24 million in ether (ETH) in the first 24 hours after launching on October 31st.

Venture capital firm Paradigm and Justin Roiland, co-creator of the popular animated show Rick and Morty, are behind the NFTs, described as an “experimental decentralized art factory.”

Launched on the Blur NFT marketplace, which is also backed by Paradigm, the project has reported 26,759 ETH ($41.8 million) in trading volume so far, with an average NFT price of 18 ETH ($28,000) continuing to climb.

Thanks to Art Gobblers, Blur has surpassed OpenSea and other major NFT marketplaces for the first time in terms of ETH volume in the last 24 hours, per Dune Analytics data.

It was a free coin for those who were whitelisted, similar to Goblintown, a collection of similar raw NFTs that also had rapid initial success. However, the considerable sums on the secondary market have drawn some attention skepticism from market guards.

In any case, a list of prominent NFT influencers and content creators bought Gobblers, including Rug Radio co-founder Farokh Sarmad, NFT influencer Andrew Wang and content creator Zeneca.

The Art Gobblers ecosystem currently has fewer than 2,000 NFTs, meaning that a few trades can really affect floor prices. The cheapest Art Gobbler NFT is now 15.9 ETH ($25,000), just two days after launch.

Art Gobblers has a distinctive minting mechanism – Gradual Ownership Optimization – that issues goo, an ERC-20 token. Proprietors spend money creating blank pages on a specialized drawing tool, on which they can create and sell their own art.

According to a Paradigm overview of their tokenomics, Art Gobblers spew goo at a rate proportional to the square root of the goo already in their minds. In other words, the more goo a Gobbler has, the faster it generates more goo (the token is already traded on Uniswap).

The more Gobblers are minted, the higher the total goo supply and the near-exponential earning potential. About 290 goo holders currently exist. Notably, the project offers a royalty rate of 6.9% – a higher than average rate issued at a time when most NFT marketplaces are optional.

Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks and Art Blocks

Art Gobblers arrived amid a month-long slide in crypto prices, as well as falling values ​​among the most popular NFT projects and Web3 brands – including Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks.

However, as of November 1, DappRadar has assessed that both Yuga Labs collections have regained their $1 billion valuation status, calculated based on market capitalization.

While volume, number of sales and number of dealers were down over the last 30 days, the market capitalization increased by almost 6% to a market capitalization of $1.09 billion at the time of publication.

Similarly, CryptoPunks saw a 14% decrease in volume during October, but marked a 30% increase in market capitalization approaching a value of $1.05 billion at the time of writing, according to DappRadar data.

Parent company Yuga Labs’ valuation was once $4 billion after money after a $450 million funding round in March. This amount has not been reassessed since.

The company also has Meebits and Otherside projects as subsidiaries.

Another collection that has performed very well in recent months – and especially during October – is the curated Art Blocks collection Gazers by Matt Kane.

According to OpenSea analytics, the numbers have increased across the board in the last 30 days. At the time of writing, trading volume was 414 ETH ($644,057) with an increase of 74%; 23 sales meant 10% more sales than the previous month; and the floor price was up 46% to 25 ETH ($38,892).

Like Art Gobblers, Gazers only have 1000 NFTs in their collection, so the increased number of sales and trades resulted in the sharp increase in the floor price.

The most Ether paid for a Gazer during October was 25 ETH ($39,077) on October 31st.

Meanwhile, another popular Art Blocks collection, the Chromie Squiggle Project by Snowfro, sold an NFT for 34 ETH ($45,000) on October 4th.

Chromie Squiggle, a collection of 9,700, recorded a 93% increase in trading volume and sales, 2,345 ETH ($3.6 million) and 164 ($256,000) respectively, over the past 30 days on OpenSea. The floor price is currently at 15.9 ETH ($24,700), up 41%.

Reddit NFTs and Azuki

The popularity of Reddit’s Avatar NFTs increased dramatically towards the end of October, peaking at $2 million in daily transaction volume, a 14x increase from September, and reaching a market cap of $100 million.

Since then, however, daily transaction volume has fallen back to September levels, and its market capitalization is just under $70 million.

The impact that the Redditfloor NFT marketplace had on Web3 was significant for two main reasons. It showed that the fastest way to add news users to the Web3 space – nearly 3 million in four months – is to use familiar language and not blockchain jargon.

It also proved that NFT profile pictures (PFPs) remain the best NFT use case to date for onboarding these users.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop a scammer from creating fraudulent Reddit NFTs and listing them on an official Reddit collector page on OpenSea.

On the same weekend as Reddit’s success, the Azuki NFT project set a record for the most expensive skateboards – digital and physical – sold in history.

Nine “Golden Skateboard” NFTs sold at auction for a total of $2.5 million.

The most expensive of the set – the Azuki Golden Skateboard NFT – sells for 309 ETH ($482,000). Winners can redeem their digital golden skateboards for physical skateboards coated in 24-karat gold starting this month.

A month-long boom could mean NFT sentiment is looking up, but at least in Art Gobbler’s case, the market seems ready to reward innovative (and wacky) projects.

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