CurioCards Sells for $1.25M; Thoughts on AXS Staking

CRYPTODAY 051

1. I know I said I was going to shift my Cryptoday newsletter to a once-a-week, Friday-morning schedule, but wouldn’t you know it, I had stuff to say today! Our CurioCards set was auctioned off at Christie’s for 393 ETH ($1.25M approximately) on Friday night in a session streamed live over Youtube. You can watch a clip of the auction here; the whole thing was over in under 2 minutes. This auction represented a number of important firsts: (a) CurioCards is the world’s first NFTart project, (b) it was the first artwork to ever be sold at Christie’s in exchange for cryptocurrency, and (c) it included the first Filipino NFTart to ever be auctioned at Christie’s. Quartz has a great write-up here. At 393 ETH, I think the general sentiment from the Curio community was that the auction actually under-performed, as most of our internal estimates were in the 500 ETH range. (And yes, I fully appreciate how ridiculous that sentence probably sounds. I don’t determine these prices, the market does!) But more than anything, the auction indicates mainstream acceptance for the Curio project. In the 48 hours since the Christie’s auction was completed, we’ve seen over 500 ETH in new sales volume on our OpenSea page, so even if the auction itself arguably under-performed, our public marketplace certainly hasn’t.
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2. I also wanted to do a follow-up on AXS staking, because we didn’t have much data on Friday when I first talked about it. So far the community has voluntarily locked up 12M AXS, which represents about 15% of the circulating supply. Why are they doing that? Well, if you choose to lock up your AXS using the Staking Dashboard, you will earn more AXS. Where is that AXS coming from? It’s from the AXS tokens that are currently held in reserve, which you can read about here. Basically, the total supply of AXS is not all circulating yet, and they are releasing it in stages so as not to flood the market. The staking pool is thus a way to trickle the AXS into the economy and reward its most fervent investors.

3. In the screenshot below (taken on Sunday afternoon), the estimated annual reward is 200%. We call that Annual Percentage Rate (APR), and it is re-calculated in real-time as people add or remove their funds from the pool. How is your reward determined? That’s simple: the total reward that will be issued every day is 64,516 AXS, and that amount gets split amongst ALL the current stakers in proportion to their respective share of the pool. So if your deposit is equal to 10% of the pool, then you make 645 AXS per day.

   

4. I won’t reveal precisely how much AXS I locked up, but let’s just say I was aggressive. At a 200% APR, your money essentially grows by 1% every 2 days, and I suppose I’m as greedy as the next human. As a passive investment, this is a pretty great deal. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s a passive investment that you can back out of at any time. Just don’t forget that as more people add more AXS to the pool, the proportionate rewards go down. Conversely, if people remove their AXS from the pool, the rewards go up because there are fewer people to reward. Why would they remove their AXS? Well, there may be better pools to join that give better yield, or perhaps the AXS price is so high that they are incentivized to liquidate and take profit. (For instance, the AXS/WETH liquidity pool over at Sushi.com was generating 300% APR over the weekend. If you had both AXS and ETH, this would have been a good place to move your liquidity temporarily.)

   

5. $AXS has nearly doubled in value since Thursday, from $75 to $135 this Monday morning. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on: people are buying up all the $AXS that they can in order to earn from the staking. Since we’ve established that the more people pour their AXS into the staking pool, the lower the share of rewards get, how low can the yield actually go? Well, not that low, apparently. Even if HALF of the entire circulating supply of AXS gets locked up (30M), the pool rewards will STILL be about 80% APR. This means that even in the pessimistic scenario, everyone in the pool would still nearly double their AXS in 12 months’ time. To put it another way, if you invested 100,000 pesos into the AXS staking pool, it would conservatively yield at least 6,000 pesos a month assuming the pool stops growing substantially. (I’m simplifying here of course; you still have to account for $AXS price volatility.) If you think Axie Infinity has a good shot of doing well over the next year, this arrangement is definitely worth considering.

   

6. The crypto markets are heating up again this week, with $BTC attempting another run at $50,000 and $SOL showing signs of life following its 40% drop from its ATH on Sept 9th. I’m personally not invested in Solana as I can’t keep track of the ecosystem, so I’m far from being an expert here, but the chart looks promising.

7. The Cryptopop Art Guild is now at over 160 scholars, but we’re still open for applications! If you’re an unemployed Filipino artist and want to earn regular income from playing Axie Infinity, while ALSO receiving mentorship from the country’s leading NFTartists, please apply now by sending us a message at fb.com/cryptopop!

See you all on Friday, cryptofam!