ON–059: NFTs

This is issue #59 of the on-chain analytics newsletter that reaches 8000 crypto investors every week 📈

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The O.N. community is perhaps the strongest collection of independent analysts and data-driven thinkers in crypto, so I’m hoping interested readers will apply for this role.

1inch, whose v2 offers the best rates by discovering the most efficient swapping routes across all DEXes—swap on the customizable new UI. And also Aave, where you can experience DeFi: Deposit, Earn, & Borrow on Aave.

This week our contributor analysts cover NFTs projects: NFTX, SuperRare, Foundation, and Rarible.

📌 Latest update: CryptoPunks single index funds now on Sushiswap
👉 Join the community: NFTX Forum

• NFTX is an NFT-focused project that launched on December 22nd. Normally NFTs must be traded individually, but NFTX allows anyone to create a “fund” token that is pegged to a group of NFTs—for example, there is a PUNK-ZOMBIE fund that is pegged to the minimum price it costs to purchase a zombie cryptopunk (currently over 100 ETH).
• NFTX was the first project to include NFTs in its capital raise and now holds over $5M in NFTs in its DAO treasury in addition to ~$10M in ETH and ~$40M and NFTX tokens. The community raise for NFTX began at a valuation of ~$3M and was open for anyone to join in. Since then, the circulating market has grown substantially and is now about $120M.

• Sushiswap is a popular DeFi DEX which lets people deposit assets and earn fees from traders. Colloquially, this is called “supplying liquidity” and is usually done in pairs, with the second asset being ETH. The NFTX/ETH “liquidity pool” on Sushiswap began with ~$2.9M in liquidity and now has ~$13.4M. This means that it is currently possible to buy/sell up to ~$135,000 without moving the price more than 2% (slippage).

• One of the recent funds which was created on NFTX is called MASK and is designed to track the minimum price it costs to purchase a Hashmask NFT—a popular collection that recently went viral within the crypto-community. The fund token, MASK, was launched on February 4th with an initial market cap of $0 and has since grown to a market cap of ~$2.4M.

• There is also a MASK/ETH liquidity pool on Sushiswap which currently holds ~$630,000 of liquidity for those assets. This means that it’s possible to buy/sell about $6,000 of MASK without changing the price more than 2%.

📊 Resources: get industry data on cryptoart.io
🐤 Stay in the loop: follow the SuperRare twitter bot for artwork sales
🕳️ Dive deeper: read the SuperRare editorial for artist and collector opinion pieces

• The crypto art industry has exploded in the last few months, with the total crypto art market cap surpassing $100M just a few days ago. Monthly crypto art volume is on pace to surpass $20M in February. Nifty Gateway and SuperRare are the two largest art marketplaces, with SuperRare focusing on 1 of 1 “super rare” pieces rather than 1 of N editions.

• SuperRare, in particular, is on pace to reach almost $8M in volume in February, more than triple its previous all-time high in January. There is a notable increase in secondary volume in February, as blue chip artworks from Pak, Hackatao, Coldie, and others are being resold for 50-100 ETH each.

• As a result of new NFT demand, average artwork prices have gone exponential and not just because ETH price is increasing. Right now, the average SuperRare piece is sold for just over 3 ETH. The data also implies that crypto art is decent at storing value denominated in ETH.

• Monthly active collectors, which is measured as the number of collectors who successfully purchased an artwork, is steadily increasing MoM and is projected to reach almost 650 in February.

🖼️ Start collecting: Foundation.app 
👉 Join our community: Foundation Discord 
🏗️ Build with us: fnd.dev

• Foundation is empowering its community of artists and collectors to build the new creative economy — an economy where digital work is valued and collectors are rewarded with upside in an artist’s career. We launched v2 of the platform on February 3rd. Since then we’ve done:

  • Total bid volume: 789.33 ETH (~$1.53mm)

  • Total sales volume: 232.72 ETH (~$452k)

  But more importantly, creators are making real money selling digital work. In just two weeks, creators have earned over 197.81 ETH ( $384k USD).

• We have attracted a wide range of high-profile creators as well as up-and-coming artists. Some of our most active creators include:

  • Katherine Frazer - 8 works sold for 3 ETH

  • Zach Lieberman - 4 works sold for 14.74 ETH

  • Jeff Kraus - 7 works sold for 2.96 ETH

  Creator works are sold through an auction system — once there is a bid equal to or greater than the reserve amount, a 24-hour countdown begins. One of our most active auctions was on a piece by Robbie Tilton called “Fire Sword,” which ended up selling for 10.5 ETH. As we are starting to see in our auctions, when an auction nears its end,, bidding intensifies and creators benefit.

  Click here to keep reading our NFT coverage.