Cornering The Market - April 7, 2023
Collection offers on fxhash, Eclipse launch, and more | Cornering The Market #29
Welcome to your weekly generative art review!
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Sentiment Check
Sentiment feels to be picking up a bit. It’s always helpful when Ethereum is near $2000, and although we are seeing some beautiful pieces selling for cheap, we feel like deals this good don’t last and the capitulation might be in. For context, it felt similar in June 2022 when we had USD value lows for many NFTs (e.g. $7,500 squigglse)
Join us at NFT NYC!
Jared and P will be in Soho from 4pm to 530pm on Wednesday April 12th! Location TBD, we’ll send out a message once it’s finalized (likely today). Come join us for an informal meet and greet, we’d love to see you all!
Market Overview
Crypto - BTC was flat, ETH and Tezos slightly up on the week, but overall not a lot of action. Great to see stable prices after a big run up though!
ETH gen art - So many amazing deals like two beautiful Fidenzas that sold for 51 and 58. Overall volumes are stable, but low. This feels like a capitulation nearing the end of the gen art bear market.
Tezos gen art - Consistent with ETH, the Tezos gen art market has been weak with low volume and only the top of the top moving. No big news.
Chromie Squiggle update - Squiggle volume decreased as well as the market tightened and the floor dropped to ~9.5E, and seems to be holding around $17,000. No major sales to report.
Friendship Bracelet (FB) update - FB remained stable with a slight uptick in volume leading up to NFT NYC where Artblocks will have them in full display.
Release Recaps
Only one this week, PRELUDES by Trevor Paglen, the latest Artblocks x Pace Verso collaboration released on Wednesday Apr 7th and minted out at ~0.31ETH, near the resting price of 0.25ETH. Now it’s trading at a floor of 0.25 with 25% listed, full supply was 250.
A few lessons here:
When a dutch auction gets near it’s resting price, the botters come out in force
Artists without a big web3 following are struggling to sell out much above resting mint (in the current market)
Art that gets botted tends to drop after mint, so if you think a collection you are going after might get botted, it’s best to wait for secondary
Generative art news
Our top story is about collection offers on fxhash! For those who aren’t familiar, that means you can give an offer on any single item in the collection, e.g. I’ll pay $100 for any piece. The real difference comes on the seller side because now there’s an offer you can accept, adding liquidity to markets and improving people’s willingness to buy (knowing they’ll be able to sell later).
Eclipse is a new digital art launch platform launching soon that is open and cross chain. This is a similar model to fxhash and “open” means that any artist can release work on there, aka they don’t have to be accepted by the platform’s central team in order to launch. This is a first on Ethereum, and P thinks this is a huge deal because it allows for more experimentation!
Elon Musk went a bit wild with Twitter changing the logo to the Dogecoin logo, which sent the crypto world into a frenzy. The NFT world was next when he tweeted out one of Punk 6529’s Meme Cards (above, tweet since deleted)!! It’s only a matter of time until he starts collecting gen art!
Great art, great prices - beautiful art for ~$500 or less
Generative Glasses by C4RC0 - such a fun project, a bunch of glasses with different features and aesthetics, only a 7 XTZ floor at the moment
Reading A Book by Kim Asendorf - at a 250 XTZ floor this is a much cheaper entry into pixel sorting vs Cargo, Kim’s recent Artblocks Curated collection
Bravura by Dmarchi - 250 XTZ floor for some stunningly beautiful art which is an fxhash blue chip held by many top collectors
Photon’s Dream by Harvey Rayner - at a 0.29E floor these have retraced heavily, which is great for collectors because this are stunning
Agar Mint Passes by Emily Edelman - we mentioned this last week in upcoming drops, the mint is on April 11
Exciting upcoming drops
90 miles by MCB is a post photography AI collection releasing on April 11 curated by well known collector Blockbird. MCB has been a photographer for almost 2 decades and is incorporating AI into his work, which is very exciting as this new genre grows. This series tells the story of refugees from Cuba and is stunning. There are 400 pieces that will mint for 0.1E - check out the website for the moving story and allow list details.
Augury by LoVid - Beautiful art by an Artblocks Curated artist with a distinctive style. Releasing May 3rd with a current mint price of 0.1 ETH (we’ll see if it changes) on Artblocks Presents, we wanted to share their distinctive style as we know it really resonates with many.
Bright Moments is adding even more to their stacked Tokyo Lineup, with 11 Japanese artists each releasing 100 works across a variety of genres and styles.
Obliqua by Protozoo - This is a beautiful fxhash collection currently for only 16 XTZ using fxhash params, which means you can tweak your output to find one that fits your style.
Artists to highlight
[AI/Digital] Pixelord - P just discovered this fantastic artist after our deep dive on Bitcoin Ordinals Art and loves his aesthetic. Definitely worth a look.
[GenArt] Lars Wander - We’ve did a long-form video interview with the master artist, but now that he’s a full time artist and releasing amazing previews for his next release we felt it was worth highlighting him again
[GenArt] LOVID - the Artblocks Curated artist with the new release coming out has a distinctive style and recently had their work collected by the Whitney Museum in New York City
[GenArt] Olga F - we may have mentioned her before as P loves her art, but Olga is featured in an upcoming Unit London release and she’s gaining momentum, definitely an artist to keep an eye on (check out Lithography too!)
Art To Watch
Any of Lars Wander’s fxhash long form projects! He has three and they are his original works - Geode, Unfolded, and Gossamer. They are distinct and beautiful in their own right, and the only Lars works other than his 1/1s, so we could see these getting a boost as more attention comes to this fantastic artist.
Land, Sea, and Sky by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy - this project just released on artwrld, which is a platform that is on boarding trad artists into web3 and this is their latest release. Their last release Out of Game Flowers by Jill Magid was in our newsletter and is now at a 1.7 ETH floor!
Art Charts
The Harvest by Perkwerk has retraced down to a 4 ETH floor after peaking at 11 ETH. There appears to be support here & we think this collection could move quickly when the market turns around given the strong response to it initially and only 16 sales to a doubling in floor price.
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