This week our contributor analysts cover NFTs: Art Blocks, CryptoPunks, Parallel, Pudgy Penguins, and Deafbeef.

First deployed in November 2020, Art Blocks is a platform for launching generative art series where the generation script is stored immutably on Ethereum for each project. When a user mints an ERC-721 from the platform, a provably unique seed determines the variables in the generative script, ultimately defining the appearance of the output.

Since the beginning of this summer, daily volumes have skyrocketed, with ~$25M in sales volume traded on Wednesday across Curated, Playground, and Factory series.

• The total count of wallet addresses that hold Art Blocks is similarly rising in an exponential fashion, with over 14,800 unique owners as of Wednesday. Over the last week alone, the project has seen an influx of more than 2000 new accounts that own a piece.

• The table below displays the top 10 Art Blocks series ranked by all-time historical sales volume in ETH, with much of this volume originating over the last week. With the Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs, for example, more than 86% of the ~23,400 ETH all-time sales volume was traded within the last 7 days. If you take the average 3-day sale price for each series (a naive proxy) and multiply by edition size, you can back out a total estimated market cap for the full Art Blocks collection at ~842,000 ETH or ~$2.5B.

• Editor’s Note: Variant did an Art Blocks drop last year, which you can find here. I’d like to think we’ve been tracking this space before it was cool 😏.

• If you don't know what CryptoPunks (CP hereon) are by now, you must have been living under a...rock?! The OG pfp NFT continues to explode higher, with a total of Ξ 365k of volume processed through the CP contract this year. The last Ξ 150K has come through in the past 40 days. This is a cool 24x in volume YTD and it's only August. Average tx price has followed suit, 6x-ing YTD and 26x-ing in the past year.

• One of the more interesting observations worth zooming in on, is the trend in total sales and unique buyers. Since Dec 2019, there is a consistent trend of hype-cycle waves around the CP contract that tops out every 5 months. Every cycle top sees more unique buyers come in than the one before it.

• And now, for some alpha (maybe)! CPs have different attributes; some more numerous or rare, some less. Granted that for the lifetime of txs there is a loose +ve correlation (35%) between rarity and avg_tx_price, are Buck Teeth and Pink With Hat undervalued, or are they unloved because they...ugly?

• Parallel is a sci-fi trading card game that's a cross between Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. The game has quickly become one of the most anticipated as the community builds out its sets in preparation for launch. Without doing any marketing, Parallel has done nearly $93M (31K ETH) in volume in the last 30 days across only 7K users.

• The first drop occurred in March, followed by one in July. The breakdown of cards ranges from 0.5 ETH to 0.025 ETH, however the prices have accelerated quickly. While the floor hovers around 0.17 ETH, the all-time-high sale went for 360 ETH.

• The project has completed nearly 80K sales, with anticipation of the next card drop in October. The excitement for the game is rooted in the unique storyline, fantastic artwork, and the community support which has been rapidly growing.