About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

Ask from the editor:

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Network coverage:
Coverage on DigiDaiguka Genesis, Hello Moon, NFT cluster analysis, and the Avalanche NFT ecosystem.

• The free-to-own DigiDaigaku NFT project has seen a meteoric rise in prices and sales volume since the initial mint on August 9. After surpassing a 1 ETH within a day, the floor steadily rose until jumping to over 3 ETH on August 20th and then continued to rise. Limit Break, the team behind the project, announced a $200m raise for a mobile blockchain game on August 29, followed by an airdrop hint, briefly sending average prices over 13 ETH / $20k. Prices have since retraced to ~10 ETH / $16k.

• After the recent price peak on August 30, the volume of trades completed via "offer accepted" has increased to over 50% of all sales, compared to those of "buy now" type. This data suggests weakening demand as early holders accept offers from bidders rather than waiting for buyers to make outright buys.

• Nearly 98% of volume has come via OpenSea, with LooksRare making up a small sliver of sales.

• DeGods is a deflationary collection of degenerates, punks, and misfits. The collection has been dominating the Solana NFT market. The DeGods market cap is ~$170 million, which is ~5x higher than the next largest project in the Solana NFT ecosystem.

• The collection has also been consistently dominating secondary volumes. DeGods volume in August was ~3.5x higher than the next highest project and at peak was doing 35% of the volume on the dominant Solana NFT marketplace, Magic Eden.

• DeGods have a 10% royalty rate, which when paired with massive volumes has generated a substantial war chest. This has allowed the project to continue to innovate and provide value to holders, like buying an ownership position in a professional 3-on-3 basketball team that appeared regularly on CBS.

• For this analysis, a dataset (via Nansen Query) was created of every NFT address, with aggregated metrics then passed into a clustering algorithm (K-Means) to discover NFT personas. “Normies” are most NFT buyers, “Trophy Hunters” are second largest owner of blue chip NFTs, “HODLERs” are the largest HOLDER of NFTs, “Smart Flippers” have the highest average price sold, “Traders” are similar to flippers but have a low mint ratio. and “Sweepers” have the highest buys per transaction.

• As the NFT market wanes, Normies make up most of the NFT trading market. It could indicate sophisticated traders see less of an opportunity in the NFT market and are waiting to re-enter. This is in far contrast from July 2021, where Normies, Trophy Hunters, Traders, and HODLERs made almost equal volume.

• DEX trading stats by NFT clusters reveal distinct audiences. Only 22% of Normies have made a DEX trade, but even more sophisticated NFT personas have similar DEX adoption rates. Traders and Flippers have the highest DEX adoption rate, which makes sense given their NFT activity.