4 Major Art Mints to Watch
4 Major Art Mints to Watch
Some of the biggest names in digital art are back and dropping marquee projects over the next week. Here's everything you need to know.
TylerD's Market Summary
GM!
Today's top news includes:
4 major art drops coming from Mitchell Chan, Larva Labs, Sam Spratt and Snowfro
Zynga's Sugartown announces 1st NFT
Rik Oostenbroek shares Velocity Series mint details
Doodles toys to be 1 foot tall
FDIC adds crypto to list of notable risks
🖼 A Major Week for Art
While the PFP NFT sector continues to get utterly destroyed (please don't look at the large-cap index), one sector is holding up much better in this bear market.
Art.
And there are several major events to look forward to over the next week.
The major drops on my radar include:
Mitchell Chan's "The Boys of Summer"
"Voxelglyphs" by Larva Labs / FingerprintsDAO
Sam Spratt's "The Monument Game"
Snowfro's new "Heart + Craft" project
This marquee set of mints will be a real test for liquidity in this art market. But even if they all don't outperform, there are likely to be some major winners from this list.
Let's take a quick look at each one.
Mitchell Chan's "The Boys of Summer"
This one snuck up on me, minting today at 1:30 p.m. ET (for 0.12 ETH), but it may be the highlight of the entire bunch.
Mitchell Chan, a baseball and statistics lover-turned-artist is behind this PFP slash Art project slash game.
Each of the 999 NFTs are baseball players with several pieces of data (stats) tied to their performance which are updated after each game.
Data points captured range from character traits to hitting and power stats to social scores, college grade, strength and even sex life. Data is everywhere, front and center.
The project is a commentary on how big tech views humans as a mass of data points, centered around the game Mitchell loves - baseball.
This is not Chan's first digital project, as his "Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility" released in 2017 as a very early piece of digital art and went on to sell one of its editions for $1.5M in 2021 at Sotheby's.
So expect some demand on this one today over on wild.xyz, from baseball lovers to stat nerds to collectors and speculators.
Larva Labs Is Back with Voxelglyphs
The infamous team behind Autoglyphs, CryptoPunks and Meebits is back after a long hiatus with a new art project Voxelglyphs.
It comes with a slight catch - the piece is a membership NFT for FingerprintsDAO.
For quick background, the piece draws inspiration from Autoglyphs and Protoglyph and is influenced by artists like A. Michael Noll, Ken Knowlton, and especially Sol LeWitt.
The NFTs are effectively 2D-renderings of 3D-images, as the Voxelglyph code generated a structure with 60,500 vertices in a modular field. Collectors can then build or change that generated structure how they please to craft the image.
To become a FingerprintsDAO member and gain access to the Voxelglyphs, one needs to obtain 5,000 $PRINTS (about $6,000 or 3 ETH).
Today the auction on Voxelglyph #1 will end and then migrations of the next wave will begin.
Given the $PRINTS token is down about 50%, it's hard to see demand going through the roof on this one (surprisingly). But perhaps once the NFTs are out there this will change.
Sam Spratt Shares Full Detail for The Monument Game
The long-awaited "The Monument Game" from Sam Spratt is coming on August 21, and just yesterday Sam shared all of the major details.
The twist? He did it in code.
But luckily, codes are as easy to crack as ever and sleuths had it decoded within minutes.
Here's the TLDR:
The Game: A unique competition that uses "Player" tickets (an art edition) to drive interactive storytelling around a central 1/1 piece of digital art
The Art: A 1/1 artwork named "IX. The Monument Game" is up for auction and is the centerpiece of the game, with players leaving messages on it to try to win the rewards
The Ticket: Spratt’s 1/256 edition called "Player" is required to play The Game; 205 are available for public sale at 3.33 ETH with the rest reserved for Council of Luci members
The Prize: A Skull (recently valued at 70 ETH) and a spot in The Council of Luci, awarded to the top three observant players
How To Win: The Council of Luci will deliberate and choose the best "observations" (comments on the 1/1) through 2 rounds of deliberation
Key Dates: Observations begin Aug 21-24; Game closes Aug 24; Deliberations Aug 25-30; Winners announced on Aug 31
Overall this is one of the most exciting and innovative styles of performance art meets 1/1 and edition art we have seen in quite some time.
Expect major attention and demand next week, even with the 3.33 ETH entry price.
Let the games begin.
Snowfro Drops New Generative Open Edition
Snowfro is quickly becoming a pantheon-level digital artist and likely on the NFT / digital art Mount Rushmore.
So news that he is officially launching a new project in collab with Jordan Lyall on Prohibition Art stopped the NFT world in its tracks yesterday.
The project is called "Heart + Craft" and combines a physical element with each native digital piece. Snowfro's idea and hope is that the project can inspire people to take a break from our increasingly digital world and refocus on the physical.
For quick TLDR:
What: a generative edition mint, similar in concept to Friendship Bracelets
When: Aug 24
How much: 0.01 ETH
How many: timed open edition
Who: Snowfro & Jordan Lyall (Prohibition founder)
Where: Prohibition.art
In typical Snowfro fashion, he's making the project as accessible as possible at a low entry, and thus this will likely be more for collectors than speculators. But who knows, we saw what happened with Friendship Bracelets - so the speculators will likely come out too.
🚚 What else is happening in NFTs?
Here is the list of other notable headlines from the day in NFTs:
Trading volume dipped to just over 9k ETH on Tuesday, once again led by DeGods volume as they continue to tumble (-15% to 4.24 ETH); most leaders were down 1-4% on day, Sproto Gremlins lead top movers
New hyped Web3 game Sugartown from Zynga's Web3 gaming venture announced its first NFT collection "Oras" providing access to Sugartwon, its games, rewards and more
Doodles' upcoming vinyl figurines were revealed to be one feet tall, come in three types and will be available online and in CAMP Stores on August 18
Artist Rik Oostenbroek shared new teasers and details for his upcoming Velocity series mint, including 200 1/1s in 8K 300dpi resolution (Velocity Pass -7% on day to 0.93 ETH)
CyberConnect is collaborating with Animoca Brands to introduce a decentralized social layer for Mocaverse and create social graphs for its users, all powered by CyberConnect’s CyberAccount system
Nifty Island shared a new trailer for its upcoming game Spy Hunt, touting blending in, deceiving enemies and eliminating spies as core game play elements
Yue Minjung's "Kingdom of the Laughing Man - Boundless" NFTs are set to reveal today (exact time TBD); the passes fell 3% on the day to 0.44 ETH
🌎 Around Crypto and Web3
A few other Crypto and Web3 headlines that caught my eye:
The crypto market fell on the day; BTC -1% at $29,150; ETH -1% at $1,820; leading alts down 4-7%, while $UNIBOT & $BITCOIN reach new ATHs
The FDIC added crypto to its annual report on risks facing U.S. banks and says it’s set for “robust supervisory discussions” with banks, a sign that regulators are more formally acknowledging crypto in their discourse
Immutable launched its zkEVM public testnet yesterday in collaboration with Polygon Labs; more than $320M in funding is attached to games like MetalCore and Shardbound building on the network
🚀 NFT Total Volume
DeGods (2,791 ETH, 4.22 ETH Floor)
BAYC (1,501 ETH, 28.4 ETH)
MAYC (477 ETH, 5.86 ETH)
Azuki (410 ETH, 4.85 ETH)
Opepen (266 ETH, 0.57 ETH)
📈 NFT Floor Price Increase
Mind the Gap (61%, 1.11 ETH Floor)
Streets of Milady (37%, 0.22 ETH)
Super Cool World (16%, 0.58 ETH)
Sproto Gremlins (18%, 1.86 ETH)
The Grapes (15%, 0.53 ETH)
🗓 Upcoming NFT Mints and Reveals
Today is a busier day of drops, once again focused in the art sector.
Floor is back with their weekly ICONs drop, this week from artist Aoife O'Dwyer. Zora is up for today's Onchain Summer drop on Base. And the first auction in the Voxelglyphs project will wrap up today before the rest of the migrations begin.
The highlight today is definitely The Boys of Summer, covered above. Expect some major demand.
If you want more, see the full list of today's drops from Swizzy's daily mint monitor.
Memes by 6529 (11:00 a.m. ET)
Fingerprints DAO x Larvalabs "Voxelglyphs" (11:00 a.m. ET)
Floor ICONS (12:00 p.m. ET)
Wildxyz x Mitchell Chan "The Boys of Summer" (1:30 p.m. ET)
Zora drop on Base (TBD)
Enjoy this write-up and/or want to sponsor the Morning Minute? Follow along with me on Twitter @tyler_did_it or reach out via email tyler.warner@luckytrader.com.
For all volume and floor price data, see Lucky Trader's Project Rankings page.
For all upcoming mints, see Lucky Trader's NFT Calendar page.