🦸 Top NFT Avatars: Here's A Comprehensive Guide

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,

Research

• A Comprehensive Guide to the Top NFT Avatars
• Ethereum Activity Heats Up Ahead of EIP-1559

Opinion

• The End Of The Beginning for DeFi: 2.0 is Coming

Video

• Jam Session #3: Synthetic Tokens with Kain Warwick, Do Kwon and Hart Lambur

Links

• Damien Hirst’s $20 Million Twist on NFTs 6X Oversubscribed: Decrypt
• We just reported a potential security issue: @peckshield
• Ethereum Celebrates Sixth Anniversary—As Devs Race to Upgrade It: Decrypt
• Binance to Wind Down Derivatives in Europe; Malaysia Orders Closure: CoinDesk
• Solana Enjoys 7% Boost Amid Sponsorship Of Lollapalooza Music Festival: Decrypt
• Ethereum-based video streaming platform Livepeer raises $20 million in Series B funding: The Block

Podcast

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• The DeFi Pulse Index, by Index Coop - DPI is the easiest way to capture the upside of DeFi with the benefit of diversification. Buy DPI today on your favorite DEX.

NFTs

👩‍🎤 A Comprehensive Guide to the Top NFT Avatars

NFT Avatars. Image source: OpenSea

NFT AVATAR GUIDE If you’re looking to get into NFT Avatars, you might be suffering from decision paralysis. After all, there are so many projects out there and new ones launching nearly weekly. It’s hard to keep track — Well we make the job a little easier by listing some of the top projects and their stats in one tidy post.

WHAT ARE THEY NFT avatars are images of a character, usually from the shoulders up, frequently used as digital profile pictures. The vast majority of NFT avatars are individually unique and algorithmically generated from an array of traits (ie: clothing, accessories, hairstyles, etc.) with various rarities. Many NFT avatar projects have other functions built-in, or at least planned for the future. For example, some NFT avatars give their holders access to special virtual clubhouses, while others may have future implementations in games or multimedia projects.

MAKING WAVES The market for NFT avatars is still relatively niche, which is why many of these projects have edition sizes of 10K, but only between 2K and 4K unique owners. Still, demand is growing, as evidenced by active Discord channels, Twitter feeds and, perhaps more tellingly, on-chain data, as it is NFTs projects what’s driving the recent Ethereum gas price increase.

THE OGs

CryptoPunks

• Highest Sale Price (pictured): 42K ETH
• Floor Price: 21.9 ETH (according to official website)
• Official Site: https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks
• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/tQp4pSE
• Edition Size: 10K
• Owners: 2.6K
• Total Volume Traded: 217K ETH (according to official website, OpenSea volume listed at 207.8K ETH)

PRECEDENT CryptoPunks is the OG NFT avatar project. It set the precedent for every other project following in its footsteps. CryptoPunks was released by Larva Labs in June 2017 — one of the first NFT projects on the Ethereum blockchain. The 10K uniquely generated 24×24 pixelated avatars were free to claim by anyone with an Ethereum wallet.

APES AND ALIENS CryptoPunks have achieved legendary status, broaching the mainstream art world and headlining auctions at major art houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s. CryptoPunks are essentially the rolexes of NFTs. Even the lowest-priced Punks fetch tens of thousands of dollars. The rarest ones — zombies, apes and aliens — are priced well into the millions of dollars.

For the rest of the list:

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

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EIP-1559

🔥 Ethereum Activity Heats Up Ahead of EIP-1559

By Lucas Outumuro of IntoTheBlock

ETH ACTIVITY RECOVERS Following the market’s crash in May, on-chain activity on Ethereum slowed down as demand for dog-themed tokens and opportunities for yield diminished. Over the past few days, this trend has reversed as demand for NFT and gaming projects picks up.

ETHER SUPPLY With the implementation of EIP-1559 less than a week away, it is worth looking at the recent growth in on-chain activity and how it is expected to affect Ether’s supply.

1M/DAY Ethereum transactions decreased by nearly a third from their peak, but still managed to sustain above 1 million per day. This is particularly impressive considering that this figure excludes transactions in layer 2 solutions and side-chains such as Polygon.

As of July 28 via IntoTheBlock’s Ethereum network indicators

NFTS AND GAMING Having bottomed at 1.02 million transactions per day, Ethereum activity appears to be picking up over the past few weeks. This time around it appears that it is not DeFi but instead NFTs and gaming leading demand for transactions on Ethereum.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Opinion

🌅 The End Of The Beginning for DeFi: 2.0 is Coming

By Blake West of Goldfinch

In his famous 2018 talk, The End of The Beginning, Benedict Evans laid out his view on the large-scale phases of the internet. See if you can spot some analogues with crypto:

If we think about the first 20 years of the internet, we really did, kind of, the easy things. It didn’t feel terribly easy at the time… but what we did was things that worked with low penetration [ie. low % of society using the internet] and low amounts of capital. It would work with consumers who weren’t comfortable buying online so they were kind of low-touch goods, things you didn’t have to hold in your hand. We tended to build tools rather than build entire stacks. We tended to build information arbitrage. We did sort of price comparison, and plane tickets. Now we do things that need high penetration and lots of capital. We invert all of these assumptions.

As an example, Evans compares Yelp (first wave) with DoorDash (second wave). Yelp is a tool. It sells information about restaurants to consumers. DoorDash has to manage a three-sided marketplace, including real-time logistics, across an array of independent restaurants nationwide. As Benedict says, “that’s a different kind of business with different assumptions about what the internet looks like”. I believe we’re currently watching crypto make a similar shift.

If you’re familiar with the “S-curve of innovation”, we are cresting the top of “Crypto 1.0”, and simultaneously starting the bottom of “Crypto 2.0”

For the rest of this opinion piece:

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

🔗 Damien Hirst’s $20 Million Twist on NFTs 6X Oversubscribed: Decrypt

“British artist Damien Hirst looks set to make $20 million with his latest art-drop, “The Currency,” which forces prospective buyers to choose between physical and digital art in the shape of non-fungible tokens (NFTs.)”

🔗 We just reported a potential security issue: @peckshield

PeckShield Inc. @peckshieldWe just reported a potential security issue and got the following response. Any community advice on the next step? A. Continue the private disclosure to the team B. Raise necessary alerts to the affected community C. Do a white-hat demonstration

6:35 AM ∙ Jul 29, 2021553Likes71Retweets

🔗 Ethereum Celebrates Sixth Anniversary—As Devs Race to Upgrade It: Decrypt

“In the six years since the network came into existence, it has weathered a near-catastrophic early attack, undergone a contentious hard fork, and built up a market cap of $278 billion—second only to Bitcoin.”

🔗 Binance to Wind Down Derivatives in Europe; Malaysia Orders Closure: CoinDesk

“Binance’s regulatory woes worsened Friday as Malaysia ordered it to halt operations in the country. Separately, the cryptocurrency exchange said it’s planning to wind down futures and derivatives products across Europe, starting with Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.”

🔗 Solana Enjoys 7% Boost Amid Sponsorship Of Lollapalooza Music Festival: Decrypt

“The proof-of-stake cryptocurrency Solana enjoyed a hefty boost during the popular music festival after it was advertised prominently during the opening day of the Lollapalooza music festival.”

🔗 Ethereum-based video streaming platform Livepeer raises $20 million in Series B funding: The Block

“Livepeer, a decentralized video streaming platform built on the Ethereum blockchain, has raised $20 million in a new funding round. This was a Series B for equity, Livepeer co-founder and CEO Doug Petkanics told The Block.”

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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Dan Kahan, Lucas Outumuro, Blake West, and edited by Bailey Reutzel and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr).