The NFT collection from former U.S. president Donald Trump is already on a crash course to the ground. Its first day of sales brought in about $4.45 million.
On December 16, Trump’s 45,000 strangely themed NFT trading cards went on sale for $99 each. Within a couple of hours of the launch, all of the NFTs were bought up, and in the next two days, the floor price jumped to an all-time high of around 0.83 ether (ETH), or $1,006 on OpenSea.
Since then, though, the floor price has changed a lot, and some people in the community have pointed out that the NFT artwork may have been stolen from other places.
Related: This year’s top 10 most expensive NFTs
At the time of this writing, OpenSea data shows that the floor price is 0.2 ETH ($242), which is a big drop of about 75%.
The amount of money traded in 24 hours has also dropped a lot. On December 18, about 1,541 ETH ($1.8 million) was traded, but by December 21, only 14.37 ETH ($17,402) was traded.
went away in 77 seconds.
This week, another well-known person joined the NFT movement. Scottie Pippen, a great Chicago Bulls player who is in the NBA Hall of Fame, started an NF Project that sold out in just 77 seconds.
The “Scottie Pippen SP33” drop has 1,000 unique NFT Metaverse wearable sneakers that sold for 0.2 ETH ($241) each. The NFTs are based on Ethereum and are said to work with “almost any ecosystem.”
OpenSea data shows that the floor price has since gone up to 0.42 ETH ($507), and the project has seen 211 ETH ($255,000) worth of trades since Dec. 21.
A small number of randomly chosen hodlers will also get extra perks. 33 of them will get a real pair of sneakers, two will get to play golf with Pippen, and one lucky person will get a tour of Pippen’s hometown and dinner afterward.
The NFTs were made in collaboration with the Web3 entertainment company Orange Comet. The company seems to have a good handle on the format since it also made a collection for Sir Anthony Hopkins that sold out in just seven minutes.
NFT gaming is akin to the early mobile gaming days.
Chris Akhavan, who is in charge of gaming at Solana, California’s NFT marketplace Magic Eden, thinks that NFT and blockchain gaming are at a stage similar to when mobile games first came out.
“I was around in the very early days of mobile gaming, right after the iPhone and App Store came out,” he told TechCrunch on December 21. “I remember that back then, traditional gaming companies thought mobile games were stupid.”
Even though there was a lot of doubt about it at first, mobile gaming has become the most popular way to play games all over the world. In June 2020, a report from New Zoo showed that there were 2.5 billion mobile gamers, compared to 1.3 billion PC gamers and 800,000 console gamers.
So, Akhavan is not bothered by the criticism of the Web gaming space and thinks it will grow rapidly over the next few years.
“We think the same thing will happen with Web3,” he said, pointing out that billions of dollars have already been put into the Web3 gaming studios to create a new way for people to play games.
Ethereum NFT wash trades
hildobby, a pseudonymous NFT market analyst, recently wrote on the Dune Analytics blog that the high trading volumes of Ethereum NFTs may be a “mirage.”
This is because NFT trading volumes on Ethereum may have been skewed by a lot of NFT wash trading, which Hildobby says made up about 80% of all trading activity in January of this year during Nits.
If you look at Hildobby’s data for all of 2022, this number is around 58%, which shows that the problem is still very common and that trading volumes may not be the best way to tell how often an NFT marketplace is used.
“In a nutshell, the most common way is to trade your own NFTs between two wallets you control for the most ETH possible. “The goal is to get token rewards that are worth more than the gas fees you pay,” hildobby wrote.
“The rise of wash trading has made it hard for us data analysts to do our jobs because it messes up the basic statistics we use to track how the market is used.”
Related: NFTs are still “in high demand,” as the number of unique traders rose 18% in October, according to DappRadar.
Gabriel Leydon, the CEO of Limit Break and a Web3 game designer, said on Twitter on December 20 that the removal of royalty fees by a number of NFT marketplaces may have contributed a lot to this problem.
“Wash trading that is encouraged by the exchange will bring down NFTs.” “It’s amazing how important royalties were for the space,” he wrote, adding that they had “tamed the exchanges and stopped washtrading on the scale we’re seeing now.”
Since then, different data platforms like CryptoSlam have come up with their own ways to filter out possible wash trades. In their post, hildobby explained how they will filter out these trades from their future analyses.
What is the connection between the blockchain and Web3?
Hildobby is now flagging trades where the buyer and seller have the same wallet address, where NFTs are sent back and forth between two wallets, where an address buys three or more of the same NFT, and where both the buyer and seller’s wallets were first funded by the same wallet.
“The results are eye-opening when we use all of these filters.” Wash trades only make up 1.5% of all trades on Ethereum, but they make up almost 45% of all NFT trading volume, which is over $30 billion.
Some other cool news:
Independent game developer Metaverse Game Studios, which has a number of developers who have worked on AAA games like Far Cry and Diablo Immortal, has announced a partnership with Web3 development platform ImmutableX to continue making its upcoming RPG Angelic.
Coda Labs, a blockchain entertainment company, asked game developers to fill out a survey so it could find out what they thought about Web3. The researchers found that most of the people they talked to thought that Web3 gaming was coming to their companies, and 75% thought they would work on Web3 projects in the future.
