Daily NFT News & Drops for August 26

This article originally appeared on Lucky Trader: Daily NFT News & Drops for August 26 | LuckyTrader

Top NFT projects to watch today, August 26

The NFT market is booming, or at least it feels like it, as trading volume is on the rise and several floors are up 10-20 percent a week. The sense of capitulation on NFT Twitter just last week has subsided and people are actually feeling bullish again.

BAYC is leading the trend as always, up 12 percent on the week and up to the 77.5 ETH floor. The BendDAO “crisis” now appears to have been overblown and is completely in the rearview mirror, and PFPs have rebounded across the board.

With some recent bullish tailwinds, we have the setup for a very interesting week of NFT trading. And today delivers, with a major new PFP drop, a generative artefact and a token trade that everyone needs to keep on their radar.

Let’s get into it.

Top NFT Mints and Reveals Today, August 26th

Here are the two primary drops on the radar for today:

• The clean
• Art Blocks Factory: Avalon

The clean

One of the most hyped anime PFP projects of the year is finally producing its remaining supply today as Renga launches its final 2,500 NFTs tonight at 19:00 ET for 0.4 ETH.

The team made headlines yesterday afternoon by tweeting out their updated website link, which had a tagline at the bottom “Powered by WENEW.” WENEW is the team behind 10KTF and has some of the biggest names in NFTs as co-founders, including Beetle and Guy O’Seary. Their involvement in the Renga project is certainly a good sign of its potential upside.

For a quick background, Renga is a set of 10,000 characters developed by artist DirtyRobot. The characters were developed using manga-style art, but slightly differentiated via their “liberal use of page space.”

The team has provided black boxes as their pre-reveal “mint pass”, and anyone minting today will also receive a black box, which can be burned for a Renga character.

There are already 7,500 black boxes out on the market and they are trading at the 0.53 ETH floor at the time of writing. This means that 0.4 ETH coin should have no problem selling out. The black boxes have reached a floor of 1 ETH on a few occasions, but the extended disclosure window has hurt momentum. If the team strikes today and announces a reveal soon, this could easily run back to 1 ETH. And with no other notable drops this weekend, it could certainly gain market attention and dominate trading, if it happens.

Art Blocks Factory: Avalon

Today’s Art Blocks Factory release “Avalon” is interesting as it utilizes mythic rich map art similar to work that could fit in a JRR Tolkien novel or Game of Thrones.

The 208 supply set from artist r0zk0 was inspired by “vintage textbooks and map collections” and is named after the place where the legendary King Arthur is buried.

The map passages are both interactive and dynamic. They are interactive in that collectors can use basic keyboard commands to change basic properties and displays of the maps. But the more exciting aspect is their dynamic feature, as each map will “go through 12.5-hour tidal cycles based on a virtual lunar orbit” and will update every two minutes to reflect the tides. The last dynamic set based on lunar cycles was Matt Kane’s Gazers, which has seen a 9 ETH floor and is popular with collectors.

With the dynamic feature and a smaller supply, this is the rare Factory drop that could have real success in today’s bearish Art Blocks market. More recent projects have largely flopped, as liquidity is not actively flowing into generative art right now. But it has driven the pipes/flippers away, and if this one is mostly minted by collectors, it will be more upside post-mint.

Avalon will launch at 1:00 PM ET in an exponential Dutch auction, starting at 2 ETH and falling to the 0.19 ETH final resting price.

NFT news and announcements

Thursday was full of NFT news, but those headlines may be overshadowed by a breaking Solana announcement from this morning.

The super-hyped y00ts project from the DeGods ecosystem announced this morning that it will be minted on September 2nd, a date that has been speculated about for weeks. The project has gained serious attention through its cool and innovative application process, which sends “letters of acceptance” to those who come through, in addition to the burgeoning success of the DeGods ecosystem, which reached approx. 8 ETH floor equivalent this week and made it into the top 5 PFP rankings.

To mint y00ts, those eligible will need 375 $DUST and thus the $DUST token has seen some serious trading interest over the past week and likely much more ahead of next Friday’s coin. Just look at that chart below – almost 100 percent increase in just the last few days. There is increasing chatter that DUST will mirror the $APE chart ahead of its coin, but given that everyone now knows how far $APE fell after coin, you can expect some different dynamics and game theory at play this time around. Still, there is likely real upside potential left in $DUST, as recent numbers showed that most people on y00t’s coin list didn’t have enough $DUST in their wallets to mint. Read this to catch up on everything from the last few years primer from Cam Ciletti.

The marketplace X2Y2 did huge headlines this morning as well, announcing that it will be changing how royalties are handled on its platform, essentially allowing users to screw creator royalties all the way down to 0. This is likely in response to the rise of the SudoSwap NFT platform, which has no royalty fees and has has seen a large increase in trading volume in recent weeks. With this major update, the fight against 0 fees is officially on.

The main headline from Thursday was probably the Grails 2 reveal, which happened live at 1pm ET via a YouTube stream with Proof Collective founder Kevin Rose. Kevin went through a 2-3 minute presentation for each piece, showing the background, how it was made and more before revealing the artist and in some cases the piece itself. There were a few surprises, most notably that the Grail 14 “Bookends” were from Art Blocks founder Snowfro, which saw sales as high as 25 ETH in secondary trading after the reveal. A few other surprises were Grail 11 revealed to be from artist ACK, and Grail 24 from Justin Aversano and mint #0 in his Cognition series. Read a quick overview of all 25 here in this one mail from Jason Bales.

Here’s a quick summary of the rest of the headlines from Thursday:

• A Creepz TV performance is being made by Seth Green’s animation studio and is coming soon, with hopes of launching on a major streaming network like Hulu or Netflix
• Snoop Dogg and Eminem are set perform their BAYC-inspired single “From the D 2 The LBC” at the VMA’s this weekend, in the latest celebrity endorsement of the Yuga assets
• Goblins get their own marketplace soon, as Truth Labs is set to launch its own marketplace in the coming weeks
• Solana-focused marketplace Magic Eden is rollinexit ETH purchase along with credit card

NFT Market Action Data, 26 August

Trading volume rose to $18.9 million on Thursday, the highest daily total in two weeks, and the market felt the impact of the higher volume. Green was all over the leaderboard this morning, with several projects jumping 5-20 percent on the day.

BAYC led with 870 ETH traded, as the floor jumped another three percent to 77 ETH (up from local lows around 66 ETH). MAYC has also had a solid bounce, now at 14.5, even on the day, but up ~20 percent from local lows.

Azuki has been on fire, up 17 percent on the day to 8.4 ETH and flirting with a 9 ETH floor briefly last night. This stems from their recent website updates for The Alley, which tease an upcoming airdrop, as well as the news that Adrian Cheng picked up 101 Azukis and rumours that he can manage an investment. BENZ was also up 33 percent on the day, to a 0.84 ETH floor.

Doodles and CloneX also benefited from this run in the mid-level PFPs, each up ~5 percent on the day to new floors of 7.5 ETH and 7 ETH respectively.

But arguably the biggest winner of the day was DigiDaigaku, the anime PFP set tied to an upcoming game from new Web3 company Limit Break, which ripped more than 100 percent on the day to a floor of 4.5 ETH. This stemmed from the confirmation of an airdrop for holders coming next Friday, along with founder Gabriel Leydon teasing a big announcement coming next week. The set also saw its new ATH sale, like this one 1/1 sold for 59 ETH on Thursday.

There weren’t many losers on the day, but one to note would be Finiliar, which is on a downtrend after the recent rally, now at 0.19 ETH and down 20 percent on the day (-50% from local highs).

NFT market analysis

Crypto markets remain in chop mode, bouncing yesterday afternoon in trade but falling back this morning. BTC is at $21,200 and ETH is at $1,630, both down 2 percent and 5 percent on the day and 9 percent and 12 percent on the week. Equity markets rallied briefly in recent days, but that rally may be ending as the growing energy crisis in Europe becomes more present along with the reality that inflation is not going away anytime soon.

However, regardless of the bearish macro environment, the NFT market is experiencing some bullish tailwinds. PFPs are all up 10-20 percent from local lows, but more importantly sentiment is up. Last week felt like a peak capitulation in NFT Twitter, as WETH offers were accepted left and right as panicked holders ran for the exits – but that fear appears to be behind us, at least temporarily.

It’s incredibly simple, but a big driver of this uptrend is simply news and announcements. Azuki announced an airdrop and a potential raise and their floor jumped 40% in days. Moonbirds laid out its plans last week, along with hints of a token, and has recovered 25 percent from slumps. And there is growing talk that a Yuga announcement is just around the corner. This is an attention economy, as simple as that.

Trading volume is back on the upswing, and this week should come in higher than last in ETH trading volume. This weekend will show and if the rally and liquidity can stay or increase over the next few days, we could have a very nice setup for what could be a really big week next week (Future Proof, y00ts, Digidaigaku airdrop).

The Renga action today will certainly be telling and it will be a big project to watch, especially if revealing details are announced. Also see $DUST trading as people calculate the amount required to mint the 15,000y00ts NFTs coming next week.

Good luck to those making the mark today, be careful out there and as always be sure to stay up to date with the latest news with Lucky Trader News Feed. Have a nice weekend!

Disclaimer: The author or members of the Lucky Trader staff may own NFTs featured in this post. Furthermore, the information on this website or the Lucky Trader mobile application is not intended as, and should not be understood or interpreted as, financial advice.

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