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Welcome to The Metadata, the only NFT newsletter that you’ll ever need.

Today we cover:

• Market Update: A dead cat bounce but Pixelmon bucks the trend

• 🚨 NEW SECTION ALERT: We give you the best NFT takes inside Friend Tech, for free

• Someone took out a $1,100,000 loan on a set of T-shirts

Market Update

The number of monthly active traders on OpenSea have fallen to a new low of 125,928, the lowest level since July 2021. It’s a sign of the level of disinterest in NFTs right now.

And as we predicted last week, it looks like it was pretty much a dead cat bounce for NFTs. Not a lot to get excited about yet.

One collection that’s bucked the trend: Pixelmon, up 80% from last week. Someone bought 41 of them over the past 2 days. Is something brewing?

Notable Collections:

• Bored Ape Yacht Club (26.4 ETH, 7D change: +2%)

• Mutant Ape Yacht Club (5.1 ETH, 7D change: +1%)

• Milady (3.5 ETH, 7D change -9%)

• DeGods (4.3 ETH, 7D change +1%)

• Azuki (3.9 ETH, 7D change -12%)

The Best NFT Takes Inside Friend Tech

Lately, we’ve been big on Friend Tech. There are so many good conversations happening there. More raw and unfiltered compared to Twitter.

We’ve been stacking up the keys of smart NFT and gaming people, including Dingaling, Ben Roy and folks at WolvesDAO. We spend hours—yes, you read that right—curating the juiciest, most enlightening conversations over there.

So we thought we’d present some of the most interesting, curated takes from the top minds in the space, all for free in our newsletter each week. No key needed.

Remember: None of this is financial advice, always do your own research

Sparkc on SugarTown, Zynga’s Web3 game:

“They’ve got a quality socials and marketing team who know how to generate web3 hype - a rarity for a big web2 incumbent like Zynga.

I’ve got faith that they can milk as much hype as possible given the market conditions. The market conditions of course are atrocious right now in NFT land but sentiment with gaming specifically has been on the rise lately.

I want to see supply + utility first but I think this is likely to perform relatively (relatively) well immediately post-mint.”

Raymond Chng on the Ronin ecosystem:

“Ronin ecosystem: imo it’s a must watch, even more so after this gala saga. Ronin and imx are the more dominant ecosystems.

Ronin: q1/2 next year should be interesting because i’d assume they will launch most of their eco games. And they look decent (not the defi kingdom kinda games).”

Bender on the playbook for trading Web3 games:

“web3 games that were funded in the bull will slowly start to appear on the timeline. The hype of how “good” and “fun” they appear to be will cause their corresponding assets (coin/NFT) to pump hard. You will think this is your ticket to Valhalla but you’re going to sell as the euphoria spreads. You will multiply your ETH stacks and won’t be holding the bag when the timeline realizes that the tokenomics don’t work, new users stop buying, and paying $1000’s for a game with no return is the opposite of what crypto wants. This will happen many times in the future and this is your playbook to not fall for the trap of glitter and fools gold”

Derek Edws on 10k PFP collections:

“Think in general, 10k was a great early number to help “network” a collection (and create some threshold of collectibility) given small pool of collectors in web3. As digital object, crypto, wallet penetration increases, think there’s def a higher degree of networking that can occur with more objects in the collection itself. The trick will be to make sure it’s working in lock-step with collectibility”

Dingaling (huge NFT whale) and his view on the NFT market:

Flippen.eth’s favourite NFT collections

Do you like this new section? Want us to do more of this curated Friend Tech content every time? Reply and let us know!

Our Favourite Tweets

🐥 Someone took out a $1.1M on-chain loan on…T-shirts

🐥 The open beta for Yuga Lab’s next game (Legends of the Mara) will be in September.

🐥 Raffle for this bold Chromie Squiggle will be on 29 September. I love bolds

🐥 Ordinals is the protocol for digital artifacts that are immutable and fully on-chain

🐥 We need to get our priorities right

🐥 Someone really likes the Elementals

🐥 An update on our favourite main character of 2022.

New Projects

🍿 Alienzone is teasing a launch in September. It’s a decentralised betting hub that’s doing something with NFTs 🤔

🍿 Juicy Perp looks like it could be an NFT perp protocol with “a different approach”, possibly gamified mechanics. Teasing a discord link drop this week.

That's it for today folks. If you want more, follow us on Twitter (@the_metadata). If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can subscribe with just one-click:

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for educational purposes only. None of this is financial or investment advice. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell any assets. Minting and buying NFTs is risky. Please do your own research.