bravenewcoin.com
The price of leading crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum remains 50% down from the highs achieved earlier this year, but the NFT market is proving surprisingly resilient. The NFT boom of early 2021 captured global headlines and peaked with Beeple’s record price of $69 million for his Everydays piece auctioned by Christie's.
Despite the crypto market crash in Q2, data shows that Q2 NFT sales exceeded Q1. Data from DappRadar shows NFT sales for Q2 of $2.4 billion, just ahead of $2.3 billion in Q1. These numbers don’t include off-chain sales such as auction houses, as with the Beeple sale. This compares to NFT sales of just $13.7 million for the first half of 2020.
OpenSea is now a crypto unicorn
Popular NFT marketplace OpenSea has become the latest crypto unicorn. OpenSea announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $1.5 billion. The round had participation from Coatue, along with Michael Ovitz, Kevin Hartz, Dylan Field, Kevin Durant, Ashton Kutcher, and Tobi Lutke.
In a blog post announcing the raise, OpenSea said that while the immediate mission is to build the best marketplace for NFTs, the broader mission is to create the systems and standards that enable the conversion of all types of digital wealth into forms that are truly ownable and freely exchangeable. “In other words, OpenSea’s broader mission is to turn the internet from an information transfer machine into a value transfer machine.”
Apollo 11 on SuperRare
With so many NFTs on the market it is hard to keep up with the flood of releases but here is one that caught our eye.** **Finnish astrophotographer and artist JiiPee has released a tribute to astronaut Michael Collins and the Apollo 11 mission through the SuperRare NFT platform. JiiPee is best known for his 12-year creation of a depiction of the Milky Way encompassing over 200 million stars.
Voices of Apollo 11 celebrates the 52-year anniversary of the historic trip to the moon. The auction started on July 20, to the anniversary of the landing of the spacecraft on the moon and is scheduled to end on August 3, 2021.
After JiiPee unveiled his Milky Way mosaic, worldwide coverage included Michael Collins, who tweeted about it, praising it as a “beautiful mosaic of the Milky Way”. Collins’ admiration so humbled and impressed JiiPee that he decided to create his “Voices of Apollo 11” artwork as a tribute to Collins, who died soon after posting the tweet.
JiiPee used the transcribed audio from the Apollo 11 mission to create an image of the moon that displays a “spectacular” tapestry of human interaction, an historical event and the beauty of the universe. JiiPee created the artwork as a tribute to Collins and feels that auctioning this 1/1 NFT would best honor Collins and his work by donating portions of the proceeds to efforts that represent Collins’ enthusiasm to help mankind understand science and outer space.
“Because he was a director of educational STEM projects for the Air & Space Museum, I decided that I would donate a large part of the funds from the sale of the NFT to help fund the Virtual Moon project creating multi-user virtual experiences for kids and providing access to the Apollo 11 landing site for educational institutions worldwide,” said JiiPee.