I was just preparing my investment total post for August and then Animoca Brands announced a $100 million inflow from Singapore national wealth fund Temasek, closely followed by the Proof Collective’s $50 million Series A round.
Given that’s the case, I’m going to wait at least another day before releasing my first estimate of August’s funding total.
At this stage, anything could still happen!
But it’s also worth highlighting what Proof’s funding means.
Matched only by Yuga Labs’ output, Proof’s projects are regarded — if only by market forces — as the most trusted and expensive ‘mass market’ NFTs, with each of the 1,000 Proof Collective NFTs roughly priced the same as one of Yuga’s 10,000 Bored Apes.
Similarly, Proof’s Moonbirds (10,000 NFTs) are broadly price-matched to Mutant Apes (20,000 NFTs).
Given the differences in number of NFTs, I’m guessing this is much more due to psychological price anchoring rather than any deeper market philosophy around long term valuations.
And as an aside, it is interesting how this anchoring is reflected for other unrelated collections, notably with Doodles, Azuki and Clone X (and now Bored Ape Kennel Club), all clustering around the 6 to 7 ETH price range for no specific reason than that they now do so.
A similar synchronicity is also developing between the land NFTs from The Sandbox and Otherdeeds for Otherside.
But returning to Proof, what’s interesting now is how it’s laying out its future roadmap, which includes the creation of a new NFT - Moonbirds Mystics — of which 20,000 will be generated over time from Q1 2023 onwards as holders of each Moonbirds NFT burn a Moonbirds Oddity NFT.
Actually, it’s a more nuanced and interesting process than this: read here for more details.
In addition, Proof has announced it’s launching a DAO, is expecting to launch a token, and is moving ahead with its various events, conferences and art drops.
It’s also talking sketching out the details of Project Highrise, something described as “own take on the metaverse. An explorable digital world…”
As I previously said, at this stage, anything could still happen!
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital.
Funding Funders news
Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six is rumored to be raising a $177.6 million fund called Kryptos, to invest in what those at the VC are labelling the currently heavily discounted crypto market.
To-date Seven Seven Six has raised $750 million across three funds and although it hasn’t been particular active in the blockchain space to-date, its investments include Sky Mavis, Polygon plus top NFT collections Doodles, Yuga Labs and Proof.
More generally, over $2.6 billion has been raised by VCs investing into web3 during the past three months, with a further $800 million raised by blockchain ecosystems.
Funding news
US web3 video and livestreaming platform Stacked has announced a $12.9 million Series A round. It was led by Pantera Capital with participation from GFR Fund and Z Venture Capital, plus angels including Carl Pei (Nothing) and Eddy Lu (GOAT).
Yet to go live, Stacked is designed to reward its creators, such as game streamers and those creating other community activities — with its governance tokens based on what it calls “various performance metrics”.
It also recently soft launched Valhalla, an NFT PFP collection for gaming and streetwear enthusiasts, that it says will play a key role in the broader Stacked ecosystem.
Bot Overload news
I have no idea how good the research is, but Jigger has run the numbers over various blockchain games and apps to try to work out what percentage of wallets holding the products’ tokens are likely to be bots.
Note this is not the same as calculating what percentage of active wallets interacting with a game’s smart contracts are bots. This is a much more passive investigation of wallets purely holding tokens.
The headline figure is +40% of accounts are bots, although digging into the data, a lot of the game researched run on the BNB blockchain, so personally I’m not surprised at all.
You can see the full report here but some notable results were:
Karmaverse Zombie — 96% of wallets holding its Serum token were thought to be bots
PGX (Pegaxy) — 60% bots
REVV (REVV Racers) — 54% bots
GHST (Aavegotchi) — 32% bots
TOWER (Crazy Defense Heroes) — 25% bots
TLR (Alien Worlds, BNB) — 14% bots
GAMEE (Arc8) — 14% bots
There Are Now Gabe Leydon Parody Twitter Accounts news