Weekly Wrap: 28th August - 4th September

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One of biggest excitements this week was Grayscale's win against the SEC which many have stated clears the path for an ETF filing. Immediately the market made a leap. However, just a couple of days later, the news was released that decisions current ETF filings has been delayed by 45 days and the market has now retracted all of the Grayscale moves and more...

Source: Bitcoin Coaster

On the NFT front, volumes continue to find new lows and it appears the temporary pause in the decline earlier this year was exactly that, temporary. With that said, a few of the most popular collections have seen a small boost in their floor prices. Although in some cases that appears to be due to massive leverage which doesn't tend to end well.

September is officially upon us which has historically been a bad month for crypto returns. With prices already on the slide at the same time as the wider economy looking pretty weak and the first post-summer fed meetings in the US approaching, there is a lot to be concerned about in the short-term.

On a lighter note, actual experiences in the NFT space are finally making their way out of the lab. RTFKTs Cryptokicks are shipping this month and Yuga's Legends of the Mara game is set to launch. Time for some non-market based excitement that many probably need about now.

- @nuconomist

Crypto Market Cap: 1.08 Trillion Dollars 🔽 -0.90% (Was 1.09 T)

Bitcoin: $25,969 🔽 -0.45%

Ethereum: $1,635 🔽 -1.33%

Bitcoin Dominance: 46.53% 🔼 +0.41% (Was 46.3%)

Ethereum Dominance: 18.1% 🔽 -0.44% (Was 18.2%)

Other Crypto (excl. BTC & ETH): 35.37% 🔽 0.31% (Was 35.5%)

NFT Market Cap (ETH): Ξ 8.5 Million 🔽 | $13.90 Billion (-0.90%)

30 Day NFT Volume (ETH): 202k 🔽 -6.05% (Was 215k)

Weekly NFT Volume (ETH): 37,775 🔽 -14.46%

Weekly NFT Traders: 49,632 🔽 -6.60%

1. OpenSea: 34,916 🔽 -5.64%

2. Blur: 14,664 🔽 -7.296%

3. Gem: 6,897 🔼 +16.60%

Blips: 860 Sellers profited a combined 300 ETH 📈

Mutant Ape Yacht Club: 306 Sellers lost a combined 595 ETH 😬

Undoubtedly, one of the hot topics this year has been whether the introduction of the Blur marketplace and its incentivised liquidity model has been a net positive or negative for the NFT market. It has increased volume of trading while the floors of many collections slowly (and sometimes quickly) descend lower.

My personal take is that it naturally grinds down floors as traders buy assets they don't want and immediately list for a small loss hoping that a Blur airdrop will bail them out. At the same time, the assets being repeatedly listed on the floor and often true "floors" in a collection with the least desirable aesthetics and in some cases flagged as stolen on OpenSea. With less organic buyers for these assets, the cycle of low conviction buying and dumping grinds the collection floor down to the lowest common denominator while those seeking quick liquidity are forced to go lower and lower to be seen near the floor.

Whatever the answer we may start to see what happens when Blur farmers step away as the token used to incentivise bidding has fallen to new lows, opening this week at around .18 cents per token. This is a far stretch from it's peak at around $1.23 in February this year. With the token valuation under question, many attempting to farm the airdrop are now questioning whether the token airdrop will offset their losses and some are even stepping away completely.

While it is too early to say whether the current trend will continue, Blur's market share has fallen to 66% in the past week after reaching highs of around 80% earlier in the year. If the liquidity continues to head elsewhere we may finally get the answer to what happens without Blur farming even sooner than their next round of airdrops.

SEC Delays Blackrock ETF applications - Bitcoin Magazine

Coming hot on the heels of the Grayscale win against the SEC, the SEC were quick to throw cold water on the party by delaying their decision on recent ETF applications. Although this article suggests odds of an approval this year could still be as high as 75%

Exchanges Launch ChatGPT Powered Assistants - Coin Telegraph

While this article mainly focuses on ByBit, other including Crypto.com and OKX have recently launched their own AI tools and ChatGPT itself even includes a few crypto-focused plugins for its premium users. Having tried a few of the plugins, they show promise but it is definitely early and I woudln't want to rely on them alone for trading just yet. Some of the prices in the plugin I tested were over 100% off the actual value and other query results were just broken.

The Top 10 Best Selling NFT Artists Right Now - NFT Now

This post is a who's who of the NFT art world and introduces the background behind the highest valued NFT artists right now. A great read for anyone who has heard the names of crypto artist like XCOPY and Hackatao thrown around but don't quite know who they are or what they are known for.

Lido Dominance Prompts Warnings About Liquid Staking - Decrypt

This is an interesting problem with many variables, but essentially, Lido stakers currently are responsible for about a third of staking on Ethereum. This is important, as staking is a security mechanism and any one entity holding too much power here brings into question the decentralisation of the entire network. While technically the ETH staked by Lido is owned by many entities, the shared governance does introduce a strong centralising vector. This is likely a problem that won't be solved by tech or simple market mechanics alone as things stand.

Ordinals may have fallen off the timeline, but that doesn't mean they have disappeared. This post gives a good feel for how far the Ordinals protocol has come in the past year and a half. IMO there is definitely going to be more to this story/

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