Somehow, the second time felt almost normal. As if 235 ETH for a single card was just this thing we do on a slow weekday. Never mind the fact that not even 3 days prior, another card sold for the equally absurd sum of 210ETH. Any other game would have lost their minds. The press would have interviewed friends and families. The prime minister would be asking questions. Somewhere, someone would be thinking about the children. But not in GU. here, it was just another Tuesday. No one would be speaking about it tomorrow.
Ignoring these two sales for a moment, this week the market took a deep breath as the initial gold rush seemed to wane down a bit. The days of simply calling out a card to see it moon seem to have passed, making way for a much needed and healthy correction.
Lets dive in and see how week 3 did.
The Mood
What’s awesome about having everyone together in one discord group is that it’s not hard to get a feel of what people are thinking. After all, the market is not a rational thing. It's a stinking, steamy hot mess of emotions, driven by what people see as fundamentals to base their actions of the day on. So when half the chat in a channel is about things going over the moon, this tells you people are happy and content. Similarly, when all the talk in the channel is dominated by an unrest as people eagerly await an update on how things are going, you know the market is influenced by this.
With the passing of the natural high that came with the opening of the marketplace, prices started to stall out as traders went looking for clues on things yet to come. Not that we don’t know what’s coming. Sometimes we enjoy being reminded about things we already know, especially if it reinforces our belief that we made the right investment calls. Alas, as Immutable remains tight lipped on anything related to the rumoured 0.2 update, the mood in the trade channels is starting to shift slightly to a more restless state.
Meanwhile, in upside down world, one buyer has bought 2 cards for a total of 445 ETH. as if oblivious of the fact that we are now in choppy waters, this buyer seems to have not a single doubt about where GU is headed. Completely skipping the need for daily updates on the game state, this buyer invests more than one third of the week’s trade volume in 2 cards and vanishes from sight.
So, compromise: let's split the sentiment into day traders and the long term trend. For day traders, I would say we need a fresh dopamine injection. Something to justify manipulating all these prices into oblivion while we gleefully glance at our ever growing genesis collections feel excited about. Long term trend: clear skies, business as usual.
The Volume
This is something I haven’t touched on yet in my previous write ups, which is quite silly to be honest. Prices alone mean nothing without an idea of the trading volume: how often are these cards actually selling for the prices we associate them with?
Looking at the past week, this has been the slowest week of the three weeks of trading so far. Opensea tells me trading is down 21% on the weekly. To be honest, this does not shock me. When the markets opened, people had been waiting for a very long time to buy and sell cards so the rush was real. Now that the initial hype is waning down, numbers will start to even out a bit more.
Trade volume sits at 1721 ETH for the week. 455 ETH hereof is the two mythics that sold, which leaves us with 1266 ETH weekly volume. This makes GU the most active market performer of all NFT projects currently active. The runner up, Decentraland, has a total trade volume of 475 ETH.
It’s still not easy to track individual card volume at this point. That said, I do know of multiple projects who are working on this exact issue so that we can have both price and volume readily available to us. Soon as I have something to share on this, I’ll be sure to do so.
The Cards
The top spots for cards have remained mostly the same for legendary cards, with Jason sinking to 0.3793 at the time of writing. 2nd and 3rd place are for Avatar of War (0.2754) and Avatar of Magic (0.2499).
The most notable drops are found in the middle segment, where some of the pumps that occurred were not really reflected by usage popularity. The result is that most legendaries are looking slightly like they did right at the start of the hype wave end of week 1.
The bottom segment is still mostly the same as it was before. There is a clump of cards sitting at or around 0.05 ETH which hardly moves. Sometimes a new card joins the clutter, sometimes a card breaks out. But mostly it stays there. What’s interesting is that we are starting to see cards below the 0.05 mark now for the first time in a long time, meaning we may start questing for a new floor soon.
The Epics market took a bit of a hit. Demogorgon is still trading at 0.1743, Ocular Fiend is still going strong at 0.0813 and new in the top 3 is Apocalypse now, trading at 0.0820. That being said, the middle segment and below did see the correction I hinted at last week. Again, this is most notably seen in the “what shall we pump next?” category of cards. Not enough real world usage turns speculative stockpiles into bags needing to be dropped significantly so that someone else feels like taking over. The floor is still intact, with no epics trading below 0.01. In fact, the lower segment is doing fine overall.
Rares are breaking the trend a bit, with the top segment tanking and the middle segment somewhat pulling out of the cheaper-than-gas regions. The overwhelming volume seems to be shrinking in size as time goes by, with only a handful of cards sitting below the .001 mark. Top performers are still Pyramid Warden (0.0246), Anputian Magus (0.0195) and Trojan Golem (0.0132).
Commons are still deep in oversupply so I won’t look at these too hard. A Real Man had an incredible rally earlier in the week, rising all the way up to 0.0103 before dropping back down to to 0.0036. Whoever sold at the peak can pride themselves as being the first to have a card go x100 from market opening. You’re living the meme, a real man would be proud.
Shines
Something interesting is happening here. With fusing not being a thing yet, the whole fusing formula seems to be a thing long forgotten as cards start trading way beyond their fuse multipliers.at higher rarities, the multipliers sit closer to the trading price due to the higher price making snap call purchases less frequent. Though, here too, we can see how the multiplier is shifting beyond the 5x point at times.
Promos
With the recent price hike of Blessed Chimeras, First Phoenixes and Light’s Bidings, people seem to have set their sights at Etherbots parts. Etherbots, Immutable’s previous blockchain based game, was a game where users could build robots using parts they found in packs. Now that GU is a thing, Etherbots players can exchange parts for packs of a special Etherbots set. Well, they could: at this time the contract seems to have been deactivated by the team. However, with the team’s promise that any redeemable part can be used at any time in the future, players are expecting the current situation to be nothing but a temporary hitch in the process. With etherbots cards not yet tradable, it’s hard to predict what these things will be going for. Based on the current expectations, I don’t expect these cards to have a cheap market opening.
Chests
Chests seem to have largely ignored the overall correction of this week. Rare chests have gone up significantly in value, sitting at 0.1845 at the time of writing. Legendary chests are now trading at 1.3819, also up from last week. There have been some issues with chests not activating right away after opening and cards not displaying correctly upon opening. Nonetheless, chests are still being opened frequently, placing more and more price leverage in the hands of less and less people as time goes by.
Snuffy The Fortune Teller
With most players having the cards they need, the biggest demand comes from long term investors. If the price is right, they will grab the bits they need and go back down the abyss they came from.
Coincidentally, this usually happens during slumps where volume is down and prices are low. Next week will probably be such a period, where day traders start folding due to low volume and the rush of a pump not as likely to occur as during a market opening. Long term investors usually try to avoid pumping price, rather sneaking by without alarming the daytraders who see any spike in demand as a reason to ask a higher price.
I predict the coming week will be all about discovering new price floors as long term investors swoop in once the prices are right. The long term fundamentals are still there, not much has changed since GU opened its doors. With that being said, I don’t expect any new price rallies until new avenues of demand pop up. For example, I predict chests to see extra demand once friendly challenges become a thing, which will probably lead to the first community led tournaments. If those tournaments give out chest prizes, I expect quite a few to be opened. Similarly, I expect fusing to have a profound effect on the singles market and core trading to see an increase in genesis demand. These new sources of demand will have an impact on the market. as time goes by, new features pop up and new players join the game. If we take this calm as a zero reference point, I am excited to see what things will look like “in a hot minute”.
Happy trading, don’t spend it all in one place.
Next week we’ll see how we did!