NFT sales hit $926 million over the past week. These were the 5 best-selling digital collections.
NFT sales had a breakthrough year in 2021, with total sales volume surging to $14 billion.
The NFT market is dominated by a handful of standout leaders due to their popularity and rarity.
These are the five best-selling digital collectibles that helped drive $926 million in NFT sales over the past week.
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The cryptocurrency boom over the past few years has helped propel a newer market to record heights: digital collectibles known as NFTs.
In fact, 2021 was a breakthrough year for NFTs, with total sales volume topping $14 billion as artists, investors, and entrepreneurs descend upon the nascent Web3 space.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique, irreplaceable, mostly digital items that users buy and sell online.
NFTs use blockchain technology to keep a digital record of ownership, similar to cryptocurrencies. They were first launched on ethereum, the same blockchain that supports the cryptocurrency ether, and most NFTs can still only be purchased using ether.
Despite the ongoing sell-off in cryptocurrencies, NFT sales have held up relatively well. In the past week alone, sales hit $926 million, according to data from NonFungible.com.
With NFT sales soaring, these are the five best-selling NFT collections over the past week, according to NonFungible.
- Cool Cats
7-Day Sales Volume: $14.8 million
Number Sales: 427
Highest Sale Price: $128,838
Coolcatsnft.com
Explainer: “Cool Cats are a collection of programmatically, randomly generated NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. The 1st generation consists of 10,000 randomly assembled cats from over 300k total options. Cool Cats that have a variety of outfits, faces and colors – all cats are cool, but completed outfit cats are the coolest.”
- Doodles
7-Day Sales Volume: $19.0 million
Number of Sales: 580
Highest Sale Price: $692,807
OpenSea
Explainer: “Doodles come in a joyful range of colors, traits, and sizes with a collection size of 10,000. Doodles are a funky bunch that like to role play or transmogrify themselves into delicious treats. Holding a Doodle allows you to participate in coordinating the Doodles Community Treasury.”
- CyberKongz
7-Day Sales Volume: $19.3 million
Number of Sales: 1,308
Highest Sale Price: $261,410
OpenSea
Explainer: “CyberKongz are unique and randomly generated 2D/3D NFT Social Avatars for your online experiences. Some appear normal. Some look weird. Some are just damn cool! Maybe some even look familiar!”
- CryptoPunks
7-Day Sales Volume: $48.5 million
Number of Sales: 189
Highest Sale Price: $3.1 million
CryptoPunks Rokas Tenys
Explainer: “10,000 unique collectible characters with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The project that inspired the modern CryptoArt movement.”
- Bored Ape Yacht Club
7-Day Sales Volume: $182.4 million
Number of Sales: 2,083
Highest Sale Price: $1.3 million
This Bored Ape is just one of the NFTs auctioned at Sotheby’s recently. Sotheby’s
World Wildlife Fund’s NFT Sales Spark Controversy
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Key Takeaways The U.K. division of the WWF has begun to sell a series of non-fungible tokens themed around endangered species.
Over 300 people have purchased NFTs from the collection so far, producing a trading volume of $30,000.
However, critics argue that the WWF’s choice of blockchain supports the ecologically damaging practice of mining.
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The World Wildlife Fund’s U.K. arm began to sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) today to finance its conservation efforts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the move has attracted criticism.
WWF Is Selling Endangered Species NFTs
As of Feb. 3, the WWF U.K. has begun to sell NFTs themed around 13 different endangered species. The conservation group’s official website shows that about 7,900 individual NFTs are on sale, equivalent to the total number of animals remaining among those species.
So far, at least 300 people have purchased NFTs from the series, according to statistics from the group’s OpenSea marketplace. This amounts to a trading volume of 11.6 ETH ($30,800).
Users who buy the NFTs will receive ownership of the digital media attached to each token. They will also receive an online meeting with a conservationist, discounts on merchandise from CyberKongz and World of Women, and other promotional benefits.
The series features artwork from the digital artists Ted Chin (TedsLittleDreams) and Yam Karkai.
Sale Attracts Immediate Backlash
The WWF chose to issue tokens on Polygon (MATIC), a second-layer network for Ethereum. The conservation group noted that Polygon uses little energy: “Each transaction has the equivalent carbon emissions of a glass of tap water,” it says.
Despite the organization’s decision to use a sustainable blockchain, the announcement saw immediate backlash.
Catherine Flick, a faculty member at De Montfort University, noted that Polygon is a second-layer protocol for Ethereum. As such, Polygon arguably supports the energy-intensive practice of crypto mining despite the fact that it uses very little energy itself.
Ethereum is currently moving to a Proof-of-Stake system, which will eliminate mining and reduce its energy consumption. At present, however, Ethereum uses 106 TWh of energy per year, comparable to the annual energy consumption of the Netherlands.
Other critics noted that the German division of WWF issued similar NFTs last November, which saw similar backlash. Nevertheless, that campaign has successfully raised $245,000 to date.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.
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Miami Has Earned $5 Million Through Mining CityCoins
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Key Takeaways Miami mayor Francis Suarez announced today that the city has received its first payout from CityCoins.
The first payment amounted to $5.25 million of cryptocurrency; another $15.9 million remains in the city’s wallet.
New York is also participating in the CityCoins project. Its wallet currently has a balance of $20 million.
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Miami mayor Francis Suarez announced today that the city has received its first cryptocurrency payout from CityCoins.
Miami CityCoins Received
Suarez said that the city received $5.25 million in cryptocurrency from its mining efforts within the CityCoins project.
“This is a historic moment for our city to collaborate with an innovative project that creates resources for our city through innovation not taxation,” he wrote on Twitter.
The wallet sending the transactions also holds another $15.9 million of crypto. It is unclear whether those funds are for the city itself or for individual participants. Earlier statements suggest that funds will be split 30%-70% between Miami and its residents.
CityCoins Effort Began In August
Miami’s decision to participate in the CityCoins project was first announced in August 2021. Early reports suggested that its participation could generate as much as $60 million. The city also received $7.1 million from CityCoins as an initial donation.
CityCoins uses Proof-of-Work mining “recycled” from Bitcoin’s blockchain, meaning that the effort is ecologically sustainable. The project is built on the Stacks network, a development layer for Bitcoin.
CityCoins aims to extend its partnerships to other cities. New York, under the governance of mayor Eric Adams, notably expressed his intent to work with the project last November. New York’s CityCoins wallet currently has a balance of $20 million.
Both Adams and Suarez have also accepted certain paychecks in Bitcoin. Adams received his first Bitcoin paycheck on Jan. 21.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.
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Feature: Behind the record sales, the NFT space is evolving
Fin is an editor at TechForge Media and University of Bristol graduate. He wields an impressive knowledge of the latest technologies and has interviewed leading industry figures from companies like CBS, Rakuten, and Spotify. You can follow his Twitter @FinStrathern or connect with him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/finstrathern/.
As the cryptocurrency market tanks more than £1 trillion from its November all-time high of £2.2 trillion, the NFT world shows no signs of slowing down.
In fact, the most widely used NFT marketplace, OpenSea, had a monthly trading volume of £3.5 billion in January, well surpassing its previous trading record of £2.5 billion in August 2021.
What’s more, the market is seeing major structural changes thanks to the launch of LooksRare, a decentralised NFT marketplace that rewards both the seller and the buyer in any given NFT trade.
Taking to an aggressive marketing campaign on social media, the platform has been directly comparing its favourable services to that of OpenSea’s and reaping the benefits.
Since its launch on January 10, LooksRare has axed OpenSea’s utterly dominant 99.4% market share to a lowly 20-30% on any given day.
It has done so by catering to the absurdly wealthy and dominant NFT elite, seeing its trading volume almost triple OpenSea’s with only a fraction of the amount of users and transactions.
As the market booms, there has been a lack of inflationary pressure on NFTs despite the massive price drops that Ether – down 32% this month – and other tokens are facing.
Somehow, through close-knit community ties and a relentless desire to be self-sustaining, the NFT economy has managed to detach itself from the crypto world that birthed it.
Still just a fad?
Even so, articles continue to tear down NFTs as part of an “overblown speculative bubble”, with the only reason to own one being “bragging rights” and to resell it on to someone else for more money.
What these articles tend to miss is the extent to which NFTs have developed over the course of their short lifespan. No longer is it simply about owning a piece of art, many NFT projects today are access keys into community projects with their own economies, hierarchies, and play-to-earn gaming systems.
For example, the CyberKongz NFT collection started in March 2021 as a small collection of pixelated avatars priced at 0.01 ETH. Over time, the project has developed its own native utility token, created a second generation of avatars to increase accessibility to the project, and even designed 3D voxel-based avatars for online metaverse environments.
Had you owned a CyberKongz NFT throughout November last year, the daily 10 $BANANA tokens you were earning, averaging a value of $50 that month, would have been netting you $500 a day.
Now that’s not to say NFTs are not speculative. The overwhelming majority of users today still buy in to projects in the hope of riding a wave of initial hype and cashing out as said hype begins to die.
Nor is it to say that there are not problems with a whale class of early NFT adopters projecting a utopian idea of a decentralised, self-sustaining NFT economy whilst hard-working people lose their savings to rug pulls and scam projects.
The start of something big
The point here is that NFTs are evolving. As with any new technology, we are currently experiencing the surge of initial excitement that comes as said technology tries to find its feet.
This is best demonstrated by consultancy firm Gartner’s hype cycle, which tracks the diffusion of new technologies into mainstream usage through five stages.
One problem with the graph is that it can only show time on a linear axis, suggesting each stage can only come after the other fades away.
A better understanding would be that, as we move towards the plateau of productivity, different users of the technology are experiencing inflated expectations, disillusionment, and enlightenment all at once.
This can be seen in the current state of the NFT market. The lucky few who buy into a project at the right time and watch its value shoot up tend to have inflated expectations that web3 and the metaverse will replace the real world in a matter of years.
On the other hand, those who have been victims of an NFT scam or don’t see the potential of the technology tend to be disillusioned towards the fact that it holds no value.
Meanwhile, within this arena of lucky winners and unlucky losers, there are innovators and developers finding enlightenment and working towards productive use cases.
As such, it may be best to understand the current NFT industry as the primitive yet exciting first stage of the technology’s journey to mass adoption across various use cases.
The path to productivity
In their most basic sense, NFTs force us to bring our understanding of ownership and value into the digital age.
This has been shown by the rise of virtual fashion brands such as RTFKT Studios, who, much to the dismay of anyone over thirty, have built incredible enthusiasm and brand loyalty around their range of augmented reality and NFT sneakers. The company has collaborated with gaming veteran Atari and was recently acquired by Nike.
But beyond exclusive memberships and digital collectibles, which in the ever-innovating NFT space are starting to become stale, real-world use cases are rising to the surface.
On February 8, the blockchain-focused real estate start-up, Propy, will auction the first US real estate NFT in Gulfport, Florida.
Following a successful proof-of-concept with an apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine last June, Propy has since hashed out a legal framework to allow US real estate to be sold online as NFTs in a matter of minutes.
Winning the NFT will provide ownership of a US-based entity that owns the property and give immediate access to the necessary transfer paperwork. The NFT will also function as a decentralised finance (DeFi) asset that can be borrowed against, just as with a normal house.
The implications of this sale could be enormous. NFT real estate has the potential to dramatically digitise an outdated industry, making notoriously illiquid assets easily marketable whilst dusting aside a litany of unnecessary fees, middlemen, and legal paperwork.
Another industry that could face a comprehensive shift in its monetary power structure thanks to NFTs is the music industry.
Popular entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk sees NFTs as a way for emerging artists to avoid having to work with record labels and deal directly with their fans.
“Instead of going and making a deal with a record label because you want the up-front cash, why don’t you make cover art of your first album, sell the cover art in NFT form to your fans, and let them get 20% of the royalties, and you keep 80%,” he said in a video uploaded to his Instagram.
It’s a promising idea that looks set to gain traction as NFTs become more accessible. Royal is currently offering a similar setup through its platform, where artists and fans can co-own songs together.
Prominent American rapper Nas teamed up with the platform earlier this month to sell 50% of the royalties to two of his songs, “Rare” and “Ultra Black”, through a tiered system of NFTs. It sold out in minutes.
Finding enlightenment
The current mainstream understanding of NFTs as worthless images bought only to be sold on needs revising.
No one is arguing that effortlessly being rewarded $500 a day through virtual bananas for owning a pixelated image of a futuristic ape isn’t ridiculous. It is. But to discredit people’s innate desire for new forms of ownership as merely a speculative bubble that won’t catch on in the digital age would be a foolish mistake.
What proponents of this theory fail to realise is that most of the world economy today, including the financial system, is built around the notion of digital trust. To suggest digital ownership is worthless ignores the fact that the largest companies in the world – Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal – are only where they are today because of digital trust.
Whilst the current NFT market cruises on a wave of overexcitement, the technology underpinning it represents a more transparent and efficient way to do business in an increasingly digital landscape. Its ability to simplify issues of ownership has the potential to drastically revise the power dynamics of industries that have traditionally been mired by legal paperwork and middlemen.
As the internet evolves to become increasingly decentralised, NFTs are set to emerge as the authentication framework – the digital paperwork – of this ever-expanding space.
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Apple Reports Record Revenue and Diem Might Scale Back in This Week’s Business and Crypto Roundup
Many brands are starting to see a recovery despite the challenges initially brought on by the pandemic. Some businesses, especially ones that focused efforts on expanding e-commerce ventures, have even seen profits rise even higher than before.
HYPEBEAST has rounded up the top business and crypto stories of the week so you can stay in the know about trends across industries.
Business
The company reported a 65% revenue growth year-over-year to $17.72 billion USD. CEO Elon Musk also discussed a “product road map” and said the company would not release any new models in 2022, including the highly-anticipated Cybertruck.
My @elonmusk $TSLA “Product Roadmap Update” Interpretation: Demand is off the hook for existing models so it doesn’t make sense for us to introduce new vehicle models until all supply constraints can first catch up to that ever-increasing demand — Emmet Peppers (@EmmetPeppers) January 27, 2022
Two people familiar with the matter told the outlet that the company’s revenue increased to around $58 billion USD in 2021. The company is now valued at $300 billion USD.
Consolidated revenue for the period came in at $63.7 billion USD but operating profit was just $11.5 billion USD, marking a slight decline year-over-year. Overall revenue for the year also reached a record high of $232.5 billion USD, with $42.9 billion USD in operating profit.
[Fourth Quarter 2021 Results (in KRW)] Sales: 76.57 trillion, operating profit: 13.87 trillionhttps://t.co/E5UxSGKo9q — Samsung Electronics (@Samsung) January 26, 2022
The company also reported a net income of $34.6 billion USD with gross margins that exceeded 43%. Apple CEO Tim Cook said: “This quarter’s record results were made possible by our most innovative lineup of products and services ever.”
The shapewear brand’s $240 million financing round was led by hedge fund Lone Pine Capital. The brand was valued at $1.6 billion USD in April, according to Bloomberg.
Kim Kardashian’s underwear label Skims nabbed a $3.2 billion valuation, doubling in value in just nine months https://t.co/l3S7B9udf4 — Bloomberg (@business) January 27, 2022
Crypto
The cryptocurrency project founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may soon sell its assets to return money to its investors, Bloomberg reported. Sources told the outlet that Diem wants to “find a new home” for the engineers that developed the technology used for the project.
Each phone case will feature a printed QR code linked to the NFT’s origin and metadata alongside a printed image of the NFT itself. Certain blue-chip NFT projects, like Bored Ape Yacht Club, will come with a blue verified camera ring
View this post on Instagram A post shared by CASETiFY Co-Lab (@casetify_colab)
The country was the first in the world to adopt Bitcoin as a currency in September. The International Monetary Fund wrote in a statement that officially adopting a cryptocurrency “entails large risks for financial and market integrity, financial stability, and consumer protection.”
Earlier this week, a number of blue-chip NFTs, including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats and Cyberkongz, were resold for well-below market value without the seller’s knowledge. The company has since built out a number of improvements to prevent people from taking advantage of this mechanism.
GM ? This is the first edition of weekly threads we’ll be doing to announce platform updates to the OpenSea community. Let’s dive in! — OpenSea Support (@opensea_support) January 28, 2022
TechCrunch reported that the feature will be similar to Twitter’s recent update where the NFT profile picture would provide information on the piece’s metadata. Reddit told the outlet that it is still in the early stages of its NFT testing phase.