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NFT mania continues.
Parallel NFTs in Hot Demand
Parallel, a sci-fi NFT card game on Ethereum, is exploding.
The game dropped its first collection of digital trading cards Sunday during a weekend of mania across the NFT market. The sale was oversubscribed as it’s been touted as one of Ethereum’s most promising NFT projects since it emerged earlier this year.
NFTs are non-fungible tokens, a type of asset that lives on a blockchain like Ethereum. Unlike other types of cryptocurrencies, they are not interchangeable. They’re most useful for proving the ownership and scarcity of an asset and have caught on in digital art, gaming, music, and many other sectors this year.
Parallel sold various NFTs in packs through an off-chain reservation system that aimed to circumvent bots and gas bidding wars. Buyers had to wait until after they had paid to open their packs, each of which contained cards with differing levels of scarcity. There were three types of packs: Core, Enhanced, and Premium. The packs were grouped according to the cards available in each, with prices starting at 0.01 ETH for the Core set up to 0.2 ETH for the Premium set.
The rarest pieces, unique royalty-generating items from a set called “Masterpieces,” have surged in value on the secondary market, with a high sale of 58 ETH, around $145,000, so far. Two other pieces have sold for closer to $100,000 as speculation reaches new highs. The floor price for more common cards in the collection is currently at 0.04 ETH.
Looks like the @ParallelNFT Neutron Bomb masterpiece sold for 58 ETH
If the guy who owns it follows me – I'll buy it for 116 ETH – you'll make a 2x in 7 hours – not bad right?
Please DM. Ty pic.twitter.com/5wMHsCoyuU
— Sisyphus (@0xSisyphus) August 3, 2021
As with many other NFT projects, secondary sales are taking place on OpenSea, the NFT marketplace that recently raised $100 million to scale its operation. While activity for the likes of CryptoPunks and Art Blocks has dipped in the last 24 hours, Parallel’s trading volume is up 93.58%. It’s currently the fifth most traded project on the platform.
Parallel was praised for taking careful steps to ensure it had a fair drop, as well as the artwork it used for the collection. By all measures, it also timed its drop very well: trading volume for NFTs surged to record highs over the weekend, helped by several big players rushing to accumulate sought-after CryptoPunks and other pieces. One pseudonymous user spent $6 million to buy up 1% of the supply of the prized LarvaLabs collection Friday, while Three Arrows Capital reportedly began accumulating pieces from CryptoPunks, Art Blocks, and others.
While DeFi’s leading tokens are still significantly down from all-time highs, some have suggested that the recent flurry of activity for projects like Parallel marks the onset of crypto’s first “NFT summer.”
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH, ETH2X-FLI, and several other cryptocurrencies.