NFT Weekly 3/27/2022: Yuga Labs Raises $450 Million, NFT Rug Pullers Faced With Charges, and Chrome Bug Requiring Update

NFT Floor Price Recap

The market has calmed down this week after insane announcements from Yuga Labs. This week's floor update is highlighted with Azuki, which saw a 43% increase from last week along with a 126% increase in volume across the past 7 days. While there isn't a particular event that caused this spike, Azuki's have done several things since mint such as:

• Create their own ERC721A token that's optimized for minting (1000+ stars on github)
• Fractionalize tokens for core characters
• Some potential hints at either token drop or collabs
• Hodler-only event called Azuki Garden

As one of the newer NFT collections, it'll be interesting to see how the project progresses as it makes it way into one of the top projects in the space.

On the other hand, Cool Cats have seen a steady rise in floor, in particular due to their recent partnership announcement with the CAA (The same agency that has partnered with Jenkins). Bored Apes and Mutants have shown a steady rise in floor even after the the launch of $APE and sit at all time highs in terms of USD while heading back to standard volume.

NFT Project Updates

ApeCoin DAO / Bored Ape Yacht Club

• $APE staking proposal drew controversy due to unclear components, methods, and token allocation. ApeCoin DAO board member Yat Siu explains AIP-4 and AIP-5 here. Summarizing some of the concerns:
  • If only $APE tokens can be staked and not NFTs, whales can stack $APE and earn large amounts from the allocated pool/taking away from others. What about limit per NFT
  • Why are $APE tokens only eligbile and not NFTs? Mutants/Apes were given an airdrop but no voting/actionable use cases of the token at claim.
    *A large amount of token allocation goes to founding members, investors, etc. Staking for token incetivizes/powers the coin over NFTs and seems to be more beneficial for the said founding members/investors. Only 15% were airdropped to NFt holders
  • The staking proposal currently sits at 61.59% against the proposal

• BAYC Co-founder Garga's thoughts on the matter
• Merch drop Monday 9 AM PST using Coinbase Commerce and only accepting $APE! Special limited items: Blanket for BAYC and Jerseys for MAYC. 2 items per holder

World of Women

• WoWG launched this week with a Dutch Auction style starting at 3 ETH, which was a relatively high mint price for a secondary collection. For reference, Mutants were minted at 3 ETH but BAYC had a much higher floor at the moment. Allow list holders were able to mint for 0.3 ETH and existing WoW holders were able to claim for free + gas
• Announced partnership with Jazwares for physical toys and collectibles. Jazwares have previously collaborated with brands such as Fortnite and Pokemon

Cool Cats

• Beta testing for the upcoming game happens on Monday, March 28
• Partnership with the CAA , Creative Artists Agency, to bring Cool Cats characters to events, merchandising, media, etc.

Other NFT Project and Updates

• FWENCLUB's second ever NFT Collection is set to launch in April and various projects such as Doodle's are holding raffles for whitelist spots. Stay in touch with high-profile projects to see if you can earn one!
• Cryptoadz holders can enter a raffle for Storyverse plots (similar to LAND). 100 spots whitelist spots available.
• Diplo's new single "Don't Forget My Love" will launch on Royal, a blockchain music platform created by 3LAU (DJ and OG BAYC). There will be 3 tiers of NFTs available with the top tier giving 0.7% of royalties and meet+greet benefits.
• Adidas "Into the Metaverse" updates this week on Discord with items such as Adidas PFPs, more potential BAYC collabs, sneaker drop access, and airdrops!
• Pseudo-anon artist XCOPY sells over $23 million worth of NFTs this weekend with his signature 1/1 style of NFT culture art.

NFT News

Yuga Labs raises $450 million dollars at a $4 Billion dollar valuation

Yuga Labs, creators of possibly the most famous NFT project The Bored Ape Yacht Club, recently closed a funding round led by investors such as A16z, Samsung, Sound Ventures, and Google Ventures which value the Web3 company at $4 billion dollars. The goal of the company is to be the centerpiece of the metaverse with its entry into multiple sectors of the Web3 space outside of NFT projects. Two of the most prominent areas are currency (their release of the $APE token last week), and then gaming, where they are partnering with many brands to bring forward multiple play-to-earn games.

US Department of Justice charges NFT project creators with fraud for committing a rug pull

In the NFT world, the term rug pull is often used to describe when creators of a project scam their buyers by promising to build new features, items, or partnerships and instead completely turn off the project and run away with the money. In the current NFT space where mint prices are ~0.05 ETH and each collection has 10k items, this is roughly ~1.5 million dollars USD that the creator runs away with. With basically no regulations, this has been a occurring problem in the space for months, until now.

The US Department of Justice recently announced a case against the NFT project Frosties for committing a rug pull and "defrauding investors". Specifically, US Attorney Damian Williams said:

Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Llacuna promised investors the benefits of the Frosties NFTs, but when it sold out, they pulled the rug out from under the victims, almost immediately shutting down the website and transferring the money.

The creators are faced with one count to create wire fraud along with one count of money-laundering. Each count has a maximum sentence of 20 years, and it especially didn't help when the founder admitted to committing a rug pull through a private Discord DM.

Google Chrome releases update for known bug

Two days ago, Google Chrome released update 99.0.4844.84 to solve an issue with the V8 Javascript engine powering the browser. While the exploits of the bug are not known, the severity of the bug requires an instant update. For people in the NFT and Crypto space, this means the hot wallets, such as Metamask, that we use everyday are vulnerable.

Typically, Google Chrome has an option to automatically push out updates, but users should check to ensure that they are using the most up-to-date browser. Browsers built on Chromium, such as Brave and Mighty, may also be impacted by this change.

Other NFT News

• Cofounder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin's comments on BAYC
• NFT LA coming up this week, with many projects organizing meetups! Check them out at the project's official Twitter/Discord! NFT Calendar organized a list of events and potential meetups here
• New NFT scam where people are buying verified Twitter accounts and acting as the cofounders of BAYC to get you to connect to your wallet/give up your seed phrase

That's it for this week's newsletter. If you like reading and learning more about the Web3, Crypto, and NFT space, subscribe! Information in this space moves fast, and we aim to condense the news you need to know!