NFTX Weekly Round-up #34

We’re back after a long absence in the updates.  There’s been too much focus on building and keeping things running smoothly and not enough focus on sharing all the great things we’ve been working on with you.

Let’s take a look at what has been happening recently.

New Vaults & Protocol Activity

There have been a few new vaults created over the past two weeks, and while you can see a full list of all the vaults here are a few select ones we’ve seen.

BB — Bitcoin Billionaires is a collection of 13,337 unique pixel art NFTs. Owning one provides you access to a community with games, rewards and benefits. Fortunately for us, a Liquidity Pool was one of the road map features and they’ve delivered with more than 150+ billionaires in the pool

GENMINT — This vault is based on the Gen.Art memberships which were minted a few months back. These memberships entitle you to a free mint (just pay gas) and has been popular with the Swap feature we rolled out recently on NFTX. The interesting thing about this is that while we let you filter on the mints that are available on memberships, that metadata doesn’t actually reside on the standard OpenSea metadata. We go into a bit more detail about custom metadata later in this update.

BOMB — Adam Bomb Squad was created with an initial seeding of 20 NFTs into the vault.  This is a great start and where we would recommend any project starting a liquid vault as it gives a good enough spread for the first few buys and sells.

KINGS — The King’s Gala was a pre-mint created through the Incoom project which gave the Incoom Genesis Card holders VIP access.  There were 9,999 PFPs in total and due to the ongoing success of the other three Incoom vaults it wasn’t long before we saw more than 100 kings and plenty of vault fee’s generated (16 vault tokens in the past 30 days).

The Protocol currently has $51,932,704 in Total Value Locked, and over the past 30 days NFTX has distributed approximately $370k in fee’s to our liquidity providers.

One October 31st we hit a small milestone since the release of V2 as we crossed the 1000 ETH mark of fees being distributed to NFTX Liquidity Providers.

During the high ETH prices and expensive Gas recently there has been a drop off in the number of active users across the platform with 543 active users,

Our most popular vaults in terms of pure volume has changed in the past month as Phunks had a revitalisation in the market with 160 transactions despite their growing value and high gas fees. The Top 5 vaults for volume include:

1. Phunks — 160 volume
2. Bitcoin Billionaires — 87 volume
3. Waifu — 59 volume
4. MANA — 43 volume
5. UWU  — 40 volume

NFT Swaps

NFTX Swaps are now live!

Want to swap your NFT for a different one of the same collection? Now you can on http://nftx.io/swaps

Landing on the homepage of NFTX, find and click on a collection you own an NFT from.

For the example, we're using the Crypto Kitties vault.

On the NFT Collection page, click on "Swap" and select the NFT(s) in your wallet you want to swap from.

You can swap one or multiple NFTs in one transaction.

Next, select the NFT(s) you want to swap to by clicking the "Select assets" button on the right side of the UI. This shows all eligible NFTs.

Select the one you want to swap to, approve and swap!

You will now have the brand new NFT in your wallet! Got questions or running into problems? Join our discord or reach out to the support team through the chat bubble at the left bottom of your screen.

As part of the rollout we now have another two fee options when it comes to setting up your NFTX vaults, and we also took this opportunity to update the default base level fees assigned to vaults.

These new default fees are

• 10% Redeem
• 5% Random Redeem
• 10% Mint
• 10% Swap
• 5% Random Swap

Recent Fee Accumulation

A recent Twitter thread from Mason Nystrom from Messari looked at the financialisation of NFTs and how NFT liquidity protocols are continuing to gain traction.

In the report he showed the fees that Liquidity Pools are now generating for their users. Looking at the graph below you can see that while August was an outlier with more than $2.1M in fees generated, being involved in NFT liquidity pools is generating large amounts of fees for the users.

While this month there is a lull in the fees generated, we’ve seen a slow down in the general NFT market due to the soaring ETH and Gas fee prices.

If you want to get involved with staking you can learn more about how on our staking docs, and we’re about to launch Single Sided Staking which will make the process a lot easier for NFT holders that don’t also want to put up ETH in the pool.

Single Sided Staking

Since the delivery of Swaps the team took a short breath before getting started on Single Sided Staking. Currently the NFTX protocol only offers two sided staking which means that you need to put equal amounts of NFT and ETH when becoming a liquidity provider.

This can become expensive with the more NFTs you stake, or the more valuable the item. For example the below options require one NFT plus the token value in ETH:

• 1 PUNK - 81.28 ETH
• 1 HashMask - 0.7115ETH
• 1 Phunk - 0.7065 ETH
• 1 Pogger - 0.0257 ETH

With Single Sided Staking, NFTX will allow you to add just your NFT into the pool without having to also provide the ETH balance. Now Punk owners can add their Punk as liquidity and earn vault fee’s without also needing the additional 81.28ETH to join the pool.

Contributing just the NFT you won’t get the same percentage of vault fees generated as your two-sided liquidity friends though, with the split likely to be 80/20 for double/single sided staking.

We have deployed this to Rinkeby and are going through the testing process this week and hope to launch shortly. As part of the launch we’ll add a blog post to explain the process, along with a new tutorial on single sided staking.

Growing the team

A huge welcome to the newest member of the NFTX teams, @jackieboi.

Jack has been helping out on the client side development for a couple of months now and has allowed the team to separate infrastructure and UI and iterate the product much faster than with just the one person (even though @quag is said to be a set of identical twins who work around the clock).

After a successful Forum and Snapshot vote, Jack handed in his notice and officially joined the team 22nd November.

We have also added both @Toes and @Aeto into the Crew role who have been assisting the DAO behind the scenes with support, documentation, business development, and input on Governance calls.

It’s great to see more of the community helping out and to assist with this more we’re going to be looking at creating a board of community tasks which can be picked up by anyone that would like to get involved with continuing to build on NFTX.

Running our own Graph Node

Another recent governance vote on the forum and snapshot has resulted in the DAO buying 100k GRT tokens so that we can stake them and create our own Graph Node to help power the NFTX front-end.

Running our own node makes us less dependent on third-party nodes, improving the stability and performance of our nftx.io front-end, while also contributing back to the decentralised ethos that NFTX is built upon.

Secondary effects of staking GRT are potential yields generated by others using our indexing & query processing services.

The acquired GRT tokens will be part of the NFTX DAO Balance sheet. Funds used to acquire GRT will be raised from the partial sale of our existing xSUSHI balance.

To start with we will be be providing an Index for the core subgraphs which we use including

• ERC721
• ERC1155
• SushiSwap
• NFTXV2

If we find that the new infrastructure can handle the load we may look to add additional subgraphs that are recommended as part of the Graph curation process.

Snowflake Filter Options

Filters have been a valuable addition to the vault pages to allow users to find the right NFT they are searching for, but now you can extend those filters beyond what OpenSea might provide.

It’s no secret that we, along with many others, use the OpenSea NFT metadata API to provide the details about the NFTs you are browsing on the site. Sometimes, however, the metadata that is provided through OpenSea doesn’t provide everything that might be required.

For example, the MANA Vault has a number of different NFTs and each of them have three different traits.

1. Order
2. Inventory Slot
3. Item

As part of the MANA game you need to collect all of the cards from a particular Order to be able to claim the next level NFT, however on OpenSea none of them have any traits.

Using a “post hook” on our Algolia Search integration that we call “Snowflake” we were able to run each of the MANA items being added to our vault through our own data definition and add those traits to the items as they were added to Algolia.

Now on the MANA vault you can filter by specific traits, making the vault the best place to complete your NFT collection (which in turn increases the fees for our liquidity providers)

Another example is that the number of traits associated with Punks is not part of the metadata that is displayed on OpenSea, and therefore by default you can not filter by the number of traits.

Using our Snowflake hook, we now count the number of traits assigned to the Punks and include that data as part of the Algolia search filters.

This can even be extended further to perform on-the-fly web3 calls to add additional trait information.

In the case of the Gen.Art vault, each membership is eligible to claim one of each drop on the Gen Art platform at the cost of gas. This means that memberships with unclaimed drops would become more valuable than those that have been claimed.

As part of the Snowflake hook, we check each of the NFTs that are being added to the vault to see which of the items have yet to be claimed and add those as additional metadata to the holding, allowing users to filter by the types of mints they are looking for

If you are part of an NFT project or have created a vault where additional filtering could be added to improve the discoverability of NFTs for users please reach out on the site or via Discord and ask how we can help improve the filters.

Vault Insight - P(H)UNKS

The last time out we looked at the success of the $MANA vault. This week we’re going to look at how PHUNKS have been performing recently.

PHUNKS have experienced a rocky path in their journey so far. Initially the project devs received DCA notices twice from Larva Labs before both OpenSea banned the project completely.

The NFTX vault lived on, however with OpenSea not providing Metadata anymore we integrated the Covalent metadata endpoint to pull back images and search filter data. This provided Phunk users with an easy way to filter and find their Phunks which helped ignite a surge in the Phunk buys/sells and swaps.

At the end of October was when the API was switched over which helped with the increase of vault activity.

There are currently 269 NFTs inside the Phunk vault.

The TVL of the vault is sitting at $826k and has had more than 2k ETH in trading volume in the past month. You can see by the lifetime turnover, 2993 Phunks, that people are doing a lot of selling, buying and swapping.

The vault has been great for Liquidity Providers, generating 100 vault tokens in fees which has been distributed to users staking their SLP.

The $PHUNK vault has had a few spikes in value which kicked off at the end of October with the price moving from 0.09 — 1.5 ETH in a matter of days.

If you would like to learn more about how NFTX can be part of your NFT launch or provide an additional marketplace for your project and help secure you a stable liquidity pool for the floor price then reach out at [email protected].

Numbers check

The 30d price for NFTX is down by 24.7%, but up by 10.3% over the past 24 hours and sits at the $110.81 mark as of Monday afternoon.

That's all for this week. If you have any questions, come and join in on the Discord channel.