About the Editor: Spencer Noon is an independent angel investor. Looking to get in touch? DM him on Telegram or reply to this email and say hi 👋
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EXCLUSIVE ONCHAIN COVERAGE:
Onchain Culture ⛓️ 🌐
① Solana NFTs ☀️
👥 Ali Taslimi | Website | Dashboard
📈 The NFT sales volume on Solana crossed $400M in the last quarter of 2023
SOL surged from $20 to over $100 in Q4 2023. The rise, coupled with airdrops, triggered an influx of capital into NFTs. Consequently NFT trading activity peaked on Dec. 15 at $25M in daily volume. Amidst cNFT collections, Tensorians emerged as a standout and contributed significantly to trading volumes with a floor price of 100 SOL. The advent of SPL-20 collections, inscriptions on the Solana, also grabbed a substantial share of the overall trading volume.
Tensor has emerged as the go-to marketplace for Solana's users. The project incorporated features such as cNFTs, a collection called Tensorians, and implemented a point system. Magic Eden, Tensor's competitor, has shifted its focus towards opportunities on other blockchains, like Bitcoin Ordinals.
The floor price of Mad Lads surged from 50 SOL to roughly 200 SOL in Q4. Initiatives by the collection's team such as the introduction of the Backpack exchange marked the initial catalyst. Like many prominent crypto collections, Mad Lads have also received major airdrops, which fueled demand.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: On December 10, 2023, Mad Lads #764 secured an impressive deal, exchanging hands for 1,400 SOL - equivalent to $100,000 at the time. This sale underscores the distinguished position of Mad Skulls, a Mad Lads trait, within the crypto industry.
② NFTs on ETH, BTC & SEI 🖼️
👥 Flipside Community Analysts | Website | Dashboard
📈 Ethereum NFTs lead with $50M daily sales as competitors grow
Ethereum has retained its lead NFTs and achieved $10-50M daily sales volume in the past 3 months. But other Layer 1 blockchains are nipping at its heels, from Solana’s ecosystem-wide revival, to Bitcoin’s popular Ordinals, and NFT activity on other L1s such as Flow, Sei, and more. December 2023 was a particularly noteworthy month for Solana, when daily NFT sales on this chain surpassed $20-22M just on some of the most popular collections.
Inscription is a process to assign onchain information to tokens or their parts which can make each unique. Ordinals protocol made waves by enabling NFT-like tokens possible on Bitcoin. Amid disagreement on whether Ordinals align with Bitcoin’s mission, 2.4M addresses have minted over 55M Ordinals.
It is not uncommon for alternative L1 chains (in this context, those other than Bitcoin or Ethereum) to boast robust NFT markets supported by active and loyal communities. Sei, which only launched its mainnet in August 2023, already shows NFT sales volume close to or exceeding $1M on some days.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Ordinals inscriptions are becoming an increasingly popular NFT-esque format. Amid a wave of protocols following in Bitcoin’s example, Flowverse marketplace released their own version. Since the first mint transaction on January 11, 2024, >1,900 Flow Ordinals (almost $10k total volume) were inscribed in a week, each with an image, text, or a .flow domain name. While modest in absolute terms, these metrics represent one of multiple new inscription protocols gaining ground across L1s and L2s.
③ NFT Art 🎨
👥 denze | Dashboard
📈 19k+ buyers have spent 80k+ ETH on NFT Art in secondary markets in the last 3 months
With an endless increase in new artists and collections, across many genres and styles, the NFT art market has grown significantly in recent years. This is evident if we look at the most popular artists of the last 3 months, measured by secondary volume. It includes established artists such as Larva Labs (37k ETH) and Snowfro (4k Ξ), as well as newer artists like Jack Butcher (13k ETH). The list also reveals the growing demand for AI art from artists like Refik Anadol (4k Ξ) and Star Im (1.4k Ξ).
While artists continue to grow their portfolios, demand is often concentrated in few collections. For example, 86% of Larva Labs volume was for CryptoPunks and 95% of Refik Anadol's volume was from Winds of Yawanawa. In contrast, volume for artists like Jack Butcher and Snowfro has been more evenly distributed.
Top sales are another key metric for NFT Art, especially since some artworks or collections are rarely sold. This is often the case for 1/1s, low supply editions or "grails" of collections. Recent top sales include ETHBoy, a 1/1 by Trevor Jones & Alotta Money (200Ξ) and Sam Spratt's Skulls of Luci (55Ξ).
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The Wrapture is a generative art collection by Dmitri Cherniak, which was part of an experiment where supply would be limited to 50, or expanded to 666. If any collectors of Dmitri's "Eternal Pump" traded, sold or listed their edition over a 1 year period, then the Wrapture's supply would expand. The period ended in December 2023, so the supply of 50 is now fixed. Despite launching in Dec 2021, this sale for 24 ETH is the only on-chain sale of this collection, and only 3 are listed for sale; showing how constrained supply can be for NFT art.
④ Web3 Social 🍿
👥 sealaunch | Lens Data | Farcaster Dashboard
📈 Daily Active Users reach 8k+ on major social protocols Lens and Farcaster
In 2023, the landscape of Web3 social witnessed a landmark shift, primarily driven by significant launches from two key players: Lens Protocol launched V2 and Farcaster opened the protocol widely. Examining daily active users (DAU) of both protocols in the past 30 days, Lens has DAU fluctuating between 3,000 and 4,500, while Farcaster's DAU has varied between 2,000 and 3,500. Presently, Farcaster is open to anyone to join, while Lens Protocol remains in an invite-only closed beta.
Regarding users actions, Farcaster leads in “casts”, the protocol’s action with highest intent (6k-10k/day), surpassing the daily “posts” on Lens (4k-5k/day). On the other hand, Lens has more reactions registering total daily actions between 50k and 75k (while Farcaster' has between 20k to 40k).
Farcaster launched a growth campaign with Coinbase Wallet. During this campaign, users who created a Farcaster account through Coinbase Wallet were rewarded with either $20 or $10 in OP for each new account. This campaign significantly boosted new account creation (1k to 4k/day) and also DAU. But the increase in DAU is much less pronounced. To better understand the effectiveness of this campaign, it's essential to analyze user retention within this particular cohort, especially as more time elapses post-campaign.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: More than 25k accounts were created on Farcaster during the Coinbase Wallet quests period. While not necessarily all accounts created are directly attributable to the quest, this represents more than 60% of accounts created in the last 3 months.
⑤ Doge and Bonk 🐶
👥 Maus | Website | Dashboard
📈 BONK daily DEX Volume peaked at $350M+ in December
BONK established its position as the premier memecoin on Solana after a 10x compared to its previous high in January 2023. It is currently the 3rd largest memecoin by marketcap and rivals Dogecoin. Cumulative DEX users for both are around 330k. BONK's users tended to onboard during its bull runs. Bonk generated 14.5M DEX Transactions since launch. DOGE generated 5.5M. The highest BONK DEX Volume was in mid December with $350M+ whereas DOGE topped out in May 2021 with $80M.
For both BONK and DOGE the number of recurring traders is higher than new ones. The exception is high volume time periods, which see influxes of new traders. Both user peaks of BONK coincide with its volume peaks. Outside these peaks the DEX BONK volume has been essentially flat around $1M.
Looking at the buy/sell ratio both are staying consistently within 10% points of parity. What is evident however is that BONK is able to maintain a —still running— buy ratio of +55 since the beginning of December. DOGE was not able to gain the same momentum in any period since mid 2021.
⑥ Onchain Gambling 🎰
👥 Cody Garrison | Dashboard
📈 Onchain casino volumes surge with Rollbit surpassing 1M users, >$5B wagered
Onchain gambling and the popularity of decentralized crypto-native casinos has skyrocketed to become an enduring use case for crypto especially as bull market exuberance promotes consumers to take on longer tail risk. Rollbit, a leading onchain casino & trading venue, is pulling in $2.8M/day in fee revenue from their casino vertical with expectations to hit an impressive $65M/month.
Polymarket, a leading decentralized predictions market on Ethereum, is on pace to set a monthly record for betting volume on the platform. This was boosted on the back of the January 10th Bitcoin ETF approval that brought in daily volume records.
JustBet – a decentralized casino developed by WINR Labs – has seen $77.6M of betting volume since its launch just 9 months ago, despite a regression from summer 2023 highs. The platform's breakout game, Limbo, has captured >60% of this betting volume to date, with Plinko taking 10% of betting share.
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