Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & more!

Dear Bankless Nation,

The floor prices of most NFT collections were shellacked over the past month, but over the last day many floors sharply rebounded up. What gives?

Some are pointing fingers at nftperp, an NFT derivatives exchange that yesterday paused its V1 system’s smart contracts. 

The perpetuals platform’s done major volume so far, so with all that shorting action instantly dried up, it seems a decent amount of downward pressure has been lifted off of collections’ floors for now. 

Is that pressure coming back when V2 launches, if V2 launches? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime thanks for reading everyone, and have a great weekend ✌️

-WMP

🙏 Sponsor: Kraken — Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

📊 The big picture

Over the past week, the floor-based market cap of the NFT space dropped from 7.91 million ETH to 7.43 million ETH for a 6% decline. 

🔝 7D top collections by volume

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📰 General news

• mint.fun is getting ready to unveil L2 support.

• Nouns DAO is about to vote on a collab with Pudgy Penguins, and its V3 system is currently undergoing an audit on Code4rena.

• OpenSea just added support for the Zora Network L2.

• Seed Club, an onchain accelerator network, announced the 10 members of its 6th Cohort, including Fini and Pods.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Azuki is conducting its community vote on whether or not to update the Elementals backgrounds today.

• Cool Cats kicks off its new Journeys experience on July 10th. 

• Kevin Rose published a State of the Moonbirds primer.

• Opepen Set 008 revealed.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Folia is launching Viper, the successor of its cult classic Kudzu virus NFT.

• Sound.xyz unveiled new post-release editing functionalities and axed its percentage-based fee on mints.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Gods Unchained rolled out a new game mode, Chaos Constructed.

• Guild of Guardians launched NFT staking for Season 2 of its Guild’s Treasure campaign.

• Realms migrated its LORDS token from Ethereum to Starknet, the first token to do so.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland Foundation published its Q2 Report.

• Webaverse just released an open beta of its AI assistant-themed moemate app.

🪙 NFTfi

• Arcade is seeing a rise in loans backed by generative art and 1/1 cryptoart.

• Blur rolled out its V2 system, while its loan originations have recently dropped.

• nftperp conducted a surprise pause of its V1 private beta.

🎆 Mint spotlight: mint.fun !teams

mint.fun just introduced !teams, a group minting competition. Minters are randomly assigned to teams (I got Team Purple💜), and each member’s points contribute to their team’s total score. The contest offers a chance to win from a growing ETH prize pool, bonus !fun rewards on mint.fun, and other prizes. Learn more by visiting the !teams FAQ. Keep in mind that one mint is 0.0025 ETH, and the contest concludes on July 28th!

🙇 New insightful reads to level up your web3 knowledge!

1. apix on their latest onchain gaming report 🎮

2. foobar on why vAMMs are doomed to fail 💀 

3. jalil.eth on the design decisions behind Opepen Set 009 🔥

✨ My NFT tool of the week: Optimism on Gallery

Gallery, a web3 curation platform, just added support for NFTs minted on Optimism, meaning you can now organize and share your Optimism NFTs however you’d like. For example, publishing platform Mirror mints its NFTs on Optimism, so if you’ve previously collected any Mirror posts you can start organizing them as you wish on Gallery 🖼 

😜 Sorry Zuck, I’m more of a Farcaster or Lens guy myself…

Weekly action steps

• 🆕 Read FTX Wants Another Shot, Tracking the LayerZero Opportunity, and Hot Miner Summer in Bankless

• 🙇 Catch up on my other NFT write-ups from this week: 

  • 🐻 8 NFT Projects That Will Survive the Bear

  • 🌞 Getting Started with Summer.fi

  • 👾 Autonomous Worlds

  • 🧮 Ranking NFTs

A Bankless Citizen ⚑ turned $264 into $6,077 last year. A 22x ROI 🚀 in a bear market!

Level Up

🙏Thanks to our sponsor

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Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.