Nifty News: ‘Blue-chips’ halve in value, free-to-mint Goblintown NFT volume surges

Published at: May 30, 2022

“Blue-chip” nonfungible token (NFT) collections have seen their floor prices and market capitalization slide over the past 30 days, with some of the most well-recognized projects halving in value for these key metrics.

Data collected on key Ethereum NFT projects by DappRadar shows the floor prices of established collections such as CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) and Moonbirds are at most down around 55% over 30 days.

The MAYC is the worst off of the four, with the floor price diving 55% to 16.7 Ether (ETH), or $31,300 at the time of writing. The more popular BAYC has fallen over 47% to 86.7 ETH, or $163,000, and CryptoPunks by almost 49% to 45 ETH, $85,000.

The only collection to gain in the month was Moonbirds, up 22% with a 19.6 ETH floor price, roughly $37,000 at the time of writing.

While the floor price for Moonbirds may be up, its market cap has fallen 55% to $368 million. The others have also tumbled, with the biggest losses being the MAYC, down over 71% to under $610 million, while BAYC and CryptoPunks were down 62% and 51%, respectively.

Despite the falling metrics, the collections still continue to dominate the top NFT sales over the past 30 days, with the most expensive being a BAYC NFT sold for 410 ETH on May 5, worth about $1.2 million at the time.

Free-to-mint collection tops charts

A free-to-mint NFT collection called Goblintown launched on May 22, now commands a nearly $50 million market cap and is in the top 30 NFT collections.

Despite the website stating that the NFTs have “No roadmap. No Discord. No utility,” Goblintown is in second place for volume over the last seven days at nearly $23 million, according to DappRadar, beating out collections such as Otherdeeds and the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The collection features 9,999 goblins, which debuted without any real marketing, fanfare or the usual hype-building for an NFT project. The team behind Goblintown is not known and often post seemingly nonsensical and crude tweets from the official Twitter account.

ₐₐₐᵤᵤᵤᵤgggg ₙᵤₘbᵤᵣ ₒₙₑ pic.twitter.com/eLGl6ASJXI

— goblintown.wtf (@goblintownwtf) May 22, 2022

Despite all of these factors, the floor price of the collection was 2.7 ETH, or around $5,000, on NFT marketplace OpenSea at the time of writing. The most expensive NFT sold from the collection has fetched a price of 69.4 ETH, or about $130,000.

Imagine working on a NFT project for months, setting up collabs with the biggest projects/alpha groups, getting 200K followers engagement farming WL spot giveaways, then after mint everyone bricks the floor under mint pricegoblintown: free mint, no collabs, no WL, no discord pic.twitter.com/bMiJoWufyg

— ashrobin (@ashrobinqt) May 22, 2022

Nike scoops ENS domain

RTFKT, pronounced “artifact,” the Web3 arm of sportswear and sneaker giant Nike, has added an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain to the company’s repertoire, purchasing “dotswoosh.eth” for 19.72 ETH, about $37,000 at the time of writing.

While it’s unclear what use Nike will put the domain to, the company has been investing in Web3 through the creation of multiple sneaker-based NFT collections with RTFKT, and has defended its claim to the space, taking a reseller of Nike NFT sneakers to court.

The purchase of this latest ENS domain brings the total owned ENS domains by the company to ten.

More Nifty News

The popular move-to-earn NFT game STEPN has banned users in China from its app to adhere to Chinese regulations. Mainland Chinese users make up 5% of the platform’s overall user base and STEPN’s founder has said the move will not have a significant impact on the firm’s finances.

The community for a Solana-based NFT game has dished out payback to a scammer after the developer of the game raised royalties to 98% on a batch of NFTs stolen in a Discord hack phishing scam. Community members bought back the NFTs to return them to their original owners while the hacker made a measly 2% on each sale.