The Defiant

Moonbirds Fly High On $50M Round and New Collections

Proof Collective Bags a16z Cash and Phantom Offer Scam Roils NFT Market

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Moonbirds Fly High On $50M Round and New Collections

Institutional investors continue to place bullish bets on NFTs despite the current bear market in digital assets.

Proof Collective, the company behind the popular Moonbirds collection, said on Aug. 30 that it had raised $50M in a Series A funding round led by venture capital behemoth a16z. Other investors include Seven Seven Six, True Ventures, and Collab+Currency.

The news came just a day after Limit Break revealed that it had raised an eye-popping $200M to build Web3 games. The company’s DigiDaigaku NFT collection commands a floor price of 12.3 ETH ($19,000) at the time of writing.

Moonbird Mythics

In a livestream on Tuesday, Proof CEO Kevin Rose outlined the company’s plans, which include a third NFT collection of 20,000 profile pictures (PFPs), called Moonbird Mythics, and a $PROOF token. Both are expected to launch in 2023.

Proof will create the Moonbirds DAO, which will oversee licensing of the brand and be partly funded by royalties from secondary sales.

“We believe that the next generation of massive mainstream media franchises will be community-owned and governed, and PROOF is one of those companies demonstrating just that,” Sriram Krishnan, General Partner at a16z crypto, said in a press release.

A flurry of sales briefly drove the Moonbirds’ floor price up 14% to 16 ETH, but it has since settled to 13.75 ETH. Meanwhile, Oddities are trading 25% lower at 1.28 ETH.

Phantom Offer Scam

If an offer sounds too good to be true, it always is, especially when it comes to NFTs.

Some well-heeled scammers have been attempting to lure arbitrageurs with the promise of a riskless profit. First, an NFT owned by the scammer or an associate is listed for sale, as in the case of Otherdeed 49395, which is listed for 50 ETH.

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This is well above the current floor price of 1.75 ETH, and this particular NFT doesn’t have any rare traits to justify the premium.

Next, the scammer makes an outrageous offer on the NFT, well above the listing price. Here, we can see that there’s an offer of 98 ETH. The trade is then promoted on Twitter using questionable accounts.

A cursory look at the address making the offer shows that it holds enough ETH to fulfill the trade.

Free money, right? Not so fast.

The would-be scammer has revoked OpenSea’s permission to withdraw WETH after making the offer. This means that although OpenSea continues to display the offer as valid, the trade cannot be executed.

One user seems to have fallen for the scam, shelling out 50 ETH for Otherdeed 27238, only to dump it for 2 ETH upon realizing that the offer was no longer valid.

Team Behind Goblintown Plans To Launch NFT Marketplace

Truth Labs, the company that created the popular Goblintown NFT collection, will launch its own NFT marketplace, co-founder Alexander Taub tweeted on Aug. 25.

The Truth Marketplace is expected to launch in the next few weeks and will feature a fixed royalty fee of 5% on all collections, with no marketplace fees. Goblintown arguably kicked off the free mint trend, opting for a higher share of secondary sales at 7.5%. With the new marketplace, traders will be able to save 50% on creator and marketplace fees compared to OpenSea.

The Truth team is also addressing the issue of stolen or hacked NFTs. “We have strong opinions on stolen NFTs. The current flagging system in place does not help or accomplish anything,” Taub wrote.

The new marketplace will require a police report to be submitted in order to flag an NFT as stolen, similar to OpenSea’s recent policy change. However, the company says that the flag will be removed after 14 days if the police report is found to be inactive or closed.

State Of The Market

Sales volumes were down 9.2% to $147M in the week ending August 29 for a second weekly drop. However, the number of transactions climbed 8% to 460K, indicating that the drop in USD volume can be attributed to Ether’s slide over the week.

Source: Dune Analytics

Floor Prices

Most major collections saw their floor prices fall this week as traders seem to be stacking ETH ahead of the Merge.

  • Bored Ape Yacht Club – Flat this week at 72 ETH
  • CryptoPunks – Flat at 66.5 ETH
  • Otherdeeds – Up 10% to 1.7 ETH
  • Moonbirds – Up 6% to 13.75 ETH
  • Doodles – Up 17% to 8.2 ETH
  • Clone X – Up 6% to 6.8 ETH
  • Pudgy Penguins – Up 7% to 3.2 ETH

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