As Ethereum continues on a historic rally, taking it to new all-time high prices, there continues to be a lot of exciting news revolving around the NFT sector and decentralized finance as a whole. With the end of April wrapped up, here are some of the most significant events that took place across the NFT landscape in the last month.
Vechain has established itself as one of the preeminent smart contract platform alternatives, continuing its climb in the ranking amongst networks by total market cap. Vechain has a Distributed Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism that makes it a preferable distributed ledger for many medium and large enterprises, with partnerships with some of the largest players globally within their respective industries. Vechain plans to bring another use case to their growing network, introducing an Enterprise NFT ecosystem, known as eNFT.
This ecosystem will service different levels of the NFT lifecycle and its congruent applications, such as DEXs, token bridges, DeFi applications, open-source tools, marketplaces, and more. With the recent spike in Ethereum transaction fees and Vechain’s work with mainstream organizations, they think an NFT ecosystem can thrive on top of the network. The Vechain team has committed $1 million to spur growth in this new sector through its Vechain Grant Program, contributing to developers working on building on top of the ecosystem.
Vechain isn’t the only network looking to make a play within the NFT marketplace, as the popular Binance Smart Chain is also getting in on the action. At the end of April, Refinable’s FINE token launched, a precursor to its Binance-based NFT platform, at a whopping price of over $9 each. The price quickly fell to $4 and is now hovering between $2 to $4 per token, but with 500,000,000 total tokens in their supply, that represents an all-time high fully diluted market capitalization of over $4.5 billion. Refinable aims to unlock the Binance Smart Chain NFT ecosystem, making it easy for users to buy, sell, trade, discover, and leverage their NFTs on a faster and cheaper (albeit centralized) smart contract platform than Ethereum.
Last week, a CryptoPunk, a variant of the first NFTs ever created, sold for $1.7 million worth of ETH. This was a high sale for the 8-bit digital and unique avatars, but came nowhere close to the over $7.5 million paid for a CryptoPunk alien. With only nine aliens in existence out of the 10,000 produced CryptoPunks, they are the rarest iterations and command the highest price. However, depending on the traits of a CryptoPunk, others can also fetch staggeringly high prices. April also saw many six-figure CryptoPunks sales, with no signs of the historically significant NFTs losing steam amongst the NFT collector and investor base anytime soon.
Musicians have begun using NFTs to capitalize on new ways to produce and distribute their music and art, and April saw the first foray into NFTs by a heavy metal band. The piece is an exclusive one-of-one piece of artwork and the genesis token of Megadeth, a pioneer heavy metal band, reaching a price of over $18,000 in an auction held in the middle of April. We have seen many other bands and musicians create NFT tokens of their art, with other heavy metal bands such as Avenged Sevenfold and Slipknot planning to follow Megadeth in this heavy metal NFT introduction.
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