About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

Network Coverage
Coverage on Magic Eden, Art Blocks, and Layer3.

• Magic Eden is the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. The project recently crossed 400k YTD users, tracking at ~425k. Cumulative volume reached 21.6m SOL (~$821m). Over the past few months, it has defended its market share, currently tracking at ~99% of volume. Despite recent declines in volume, their user numbers remain strong: 10-15k DAU and ~120k MAU, down only slightly from May and April highs.

• Magic Eden’s retention is quite strong: ~6/7th of their current DAU are returning customers from earlier in the month. The average number of transactions per DAU further supports that the marketplace is beloved by its users, suggesting users purchase ~4 NFTs every day they visit the site.

• With a drop in floor prices and broader market lag, Magic Eden’s monthly volume (SOL) is tracking lower. Daily transactions, however, are still tracking ~60k / day, indicating users are still transacting despite price drawdowns.

• ArtBlocks, the leading generative art platform, recently surpassed $1.3b (412,526 ETH) in total secondary sales. There are now over 300 published projects among the Curated, Playground and Factory collections. ArtBlocks just kicked off Season 8 of its Curated series with Running Moon project by Licia He. The project minted out quickly during a Dutch Auction which started at a price of 3 ETH and reduced less than 0.2 ETH before minting out.

• Nearly 35k unique wallets hold an ArtBlocks piece, and the number has rarely gone down. Over the past month, there's been an increase of roughly 500 wallets, after a relatively flat period from April through mid-June.

• Art Blocks saw over $3.1m (2,500 ETH) in primary mint sales past 30 days, driven primarily by the Running Moon collection from Lucia He, which accounted for 47% of volume (1,767 ETH). Sudfah and Montreal Friend, both part of ArtBlocks Curated Series 7, combined for ~420 ETH of primary sales.

• Layer3 is a user acquisition platform to drive discovery, targeted conversions, and retention for platforms across EVM chains. Their modular bounty builder enables protocols to acquire & retain users effectively and efficiently – a web3-native ads manager. They launched the feature in April and recently eclipsed over 350,000 conversions by over 15,700 monthly active users across products such as 1inch, Slingshot, Aave, Uniswap and more.

• The impact from these bounties is massive. For example, 97% of the users that completed this bounty were new users to Aave Optimism, 19% were new to Optimism, and 81% continued to use Aave after the bounty.

• Layer3 is well on its way to becoming a daily part of users' lives. The top 500 users come back, on average, 30 days in a row; the top 1,000 come back an average of 23 days in a row.