Digi-Physical Art Drives Record-Breaking $3.5M in NFTs Sales

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

• Artist Beeple sold NFTs linked to his hybrid digital to physical collection for $3.5M over the weekend
• Coinbase Pro lists three more DeFi tokens
• Compound token holders reject proposal to compensate users affected by Dai price jump over Thanksgiving
• Nexus Mutual founder suffered an $8M hack to his hardware wallet

and more :)

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Beeple Beats Records Selling $3.5M in NFTs Over 72 Hours

By Cooper Turley

Prolific 3D artist Beeple sold $3.5M worth of crypto art on fiat-to-crypto marketplace Nifty Gateway, a record for non-fungible token sales over a 72-day period. The sale highlights that provably scarce digital art is becoming increasingly valuable.

The Beeple Everyday: 2020 Collection featured 21 single edition auctions, three open editions which were auctioned for 5 minutes and started at $969, and an edition of 100 pieces which were auctioned at a starting price of $1 each.

Beeple’s “The Complete MF Collection” which sold for $777,777. Image source: Niftygateway.com

The 21 single edition auction and the three open editions featured both a digital NFT and a physical version of the digital art ––a video of the piece displayed in a glass frame–– set to ship in six to eight weeks. This hybrid of digital art of provable scarcity thanks to the link with a non-fungible token, of NFT, together with physical art you can actually display has struck a chord.

“Twenty years ago graffiti was vandalism, vinyl collectibles were just toys and they weren’t seen as art,” Beeple said to his 1.7M Instagram followers in a post explaining the collection. “I really feel like this could be the start of people looking at digital art as something that is much more respected and as ‘real art.”

The most valuable piece, ‘The Complete MF Collection,’ sold to the notorious NFT collector illestrator for $777,777, helping Beeple become the top selling artist in crypto, with 824 pieces sold for $6.4M according to Cryptoart.io/artists.

Beeple Resales Soar

Pieces of the collection are now trading at 100x their original value in secondary markets. The highest-priced piece is the second copy of 207 of the “Into the Ether” open series, which is selling for $2.2M on Nifty Gateway, more than 600x its primary market price of $696.

Now, Beeple will set his sights on a collaboration with Meme, a project we’ve covered in depth on The Defiant Youtube. As expected, anything Beeple touches turns to gold with MEME soaring over 150% on the back of the announcement.

Taking a step back from the financial success of the drop, Beeple’s moonlighting of the NFT ecosystem has seemingly kickstarted the next wave of mainstream interest in what appears to be one of crypto’s biggest sectors headed into 2021. Total Crypto Art is now valued at ~$26M according to cryptoart.io/data,with every other metric of usage soaring.

Coinbase Continues DeFi Push Listing AAVE, SNX and BNT

Coinbase Pro added support for Aave’s AAVE, Synthetix’s SNX and Bancor’s BNT on Monday, as it continues its push to increase DeFi trading coverage.

While order books launched in three phases, AAVE-USD, AAVE-BTC, BNT-USD, BNT-EUR, BNT-BTC, SNX-USD, SNX-BTC and SNX-EUR pairs were already in full trading mode as of this morning.

The additions follow recent listings of DeFi-linked tokens including Balancer’s BAL, Uniswap’s UNI, yearn.finance’s YFI, Loopring’s LRC, Compound’s COMP and Maker’s MKR. Coinbase is considering adding more tokens.

Coinbase is one of the centralized exchanges most aggressively leaning into DeFi, integrating lending protocols like Compound into its wallet, adding USDC liquidity to DeFi protocols, and offering users the chance to earn free DeFi tokens like MKr and ZRX by learning about the protocols.

Compound Votes for No COMPensation on Proposal 32

By Cooper Turley

Compound governance has rejected an autonomous proposal to reimburse DAI borrowers whose collateral was liquidated after the price of DAI spiked to $1.30 on Coinbase on Thanksgiving.

Proposal 32 was rejected with 681,290 votes, or 76%, against and 212,952 votes in favor. The biggest voters in the for camp included InstaDApp, DeFi Pulse Index, DeFi Rate and Synthetix. The biggest voters against the proposal included Polychain Capital, Dharma, Argent, Kyber Network and Pantera Capital.

Compound Autonomous Proposals (CAPs) are issued by community members with less than 1% of the COMP supply required to submit a proposal on-chain. When the CAP receives at least 1% of delegated COMP, it is moved to a formal on-chain vote.

The proposal requested 55,254.95 COMP, or ~$8.2M, to compensate those liquidated due to the manipulation of Coinbase’s order book.

Known Risks

Those who argued against the proposal in the forum discussion pointed out that 61% of the compensation would go to one yield farming operation, and that the distribution would be made in COMP rather than a stablecoin like DAI.

Others on the opposed side, like venture fund Pantera Capital, said it’s unsustainable for a decentralized protocol to compensate users when known risks, like oracle failure, happen.

User Safety

Voters who supported the proposal, like Synthetix CEO Kain Warwick, said compensation would align with Compound’s focus on user safety.

The debate sparked praise from Compound CEO Robert Leshner, suggesting that autonomous proposals like #32 - despite being ‘rushed’ in Leshner’s eyes - are a growing sign of DeFi governance not requiring core team intervention. Even meta-governance projects like Index Coop were looped into the mix, as INDEX token holders decided to use the DeFi Pulse Index’s COMP holdings to vote For Proposal 32.

Large Holders

While this particular proposal failed, author kybx86 said “If any member(s) want to work to craft a better proposal, to please reach out.”

The proposal offered a glimpse into how community forums can foster discussion around protocol changes. But it also shows that at the end of the day, large token holders will look after their own interests, which won’t always be the same as the retail users’.

Nexus Mutual Founder Was Hacked for $8M of NXM

By Cooper Turley

In one of the most unfortunate hacks of the year, highly respected founder Hugh Karp was subject to $8M in losses after his hardware wallet was exploited following a malicious takeover of his local machine.

Nexus Mutual - a DeFi platform to purchase smart contract cover to protect against hacks and exploits - is unaffected by the hack, though $8M worth of NXM tokens are now being controlled by a rogue actor at the time of writing.

Bug Bounty

The project released a public statement suggesting that the hacker return the tokens in exchange for a $300k bug bounty. No agreement has been reached publicly yet.

NXM can only be exchanged in-app assuming a mutual member has undergone KYC. This has led to the hacker converting tokens to a wrapped version called wNXM, and dumping tokens on 1inch yesterday morning.

The attack goes to show that even DeFi’s most sophisticated users are still subject to extreme hacking and phishing maneuvers, yet another reason to make security a top priority as crypto continues to grow.

Band Protocol Joins OpenAPI Initiative Alongside Bloomberg, IBM, Microsoft to Define Common Data Standard

Band Protocol said it joined the OpenAPI Initiative alongside Google, IBM, Bloomberg, eBay and Microsoft, to connect blockchain applications to common Application Programming Interfaces (API) and streamline the exchange of data between smart contracts and off-chain data sources, according to a blog post.

Secret Network’s Ethereum Bridge is LIVE on Mainnet

Secret Network’s Ethereum Bridge is live on mainnet, allowing holders of ETH and some ERC20 tokens to create "secret" versions of their assets as Secret Tokens and transact with them privately, as the network’s smart contracts have encrypted inputs, outputs, and state, the project said in a blog post. Next is the planned launch of bridge mining next month, where users who lock their ETH and ERC-20s on the bridge can begin earning SCRT rewards.

DJ Deadmau5 Launches $100,000 Worth of NFT Collectibles: Decrypt

Producer and musician Joel Thomas Zimmerman, aka Deadmau5, and blockchain platform WAX announced the sale of a limited series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on the artist’s work, to be offered in form of two limited sets of packs, for a total of roughly $96,940, Decrypt reported.

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About the founder and editor: Camila Russo is the author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum, and was previously a Bloomberg News markets reporter based in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires. She has extensively covered crypto and finance, and now is diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.