While the crypto market has fallen into the red nfts are back in the game. Welcome to The Daily
Forkast. May 6th, 2022. I'm Megha Chaddha of Forkast covering all things blockchain.
Crypto prices follow the broader market down overnight, but things are looking much brighter
in the NFT space with sales back on the rise. We'll take a look at that,
plus a whole lot more coming up. Let's get you up to speed from Asia to the world.
Join thousands of NFT traders who already start their day on CryptoSlam.
Let's kick off with a market update where the bounce in the wake of the Fed's
rate hike proved very short lived. Thursday saw the worst performance for the NASDAQ composite
since June 2020, with the index closing down almost 5% and the crypto markets swiftly followed
losing over 7% of its total capitalization in the 24 hours to Friday morning in Asia.
Most major tokens also fell, wiping out any gains they made yesterday with Bitcoin down around
8%. It was trading at around US$36,500 Friday morning in Asia. Meanwhile, US 10 Year Yields,
a metric which is often inversely correlated to the broader markets, rose to 3.035%,
the highest mark since 2018. Bitcoin has become strongly correlated with traditional
markets in recent months as more traditional funds have connected to digital assets.
Meanwhile, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, has placed 88 Chinese
companies on its pre-delisting list. Among them is mining rig maker Canaan.
It's on the list, as the SEC has determined that it used an
auditor whose working paper cannot be fully inspected by the Public Company
Accounting Oversight Board or PCAOB. Canaan has until May 25th to dispute being added to the list.
And the company made a statement yesterday saying it will continue to comply with applicable laws
and regulations in both China and the United States and strive to maintain its NASDAQ listing.
The PCAOB is seeking access to the audit working papers of New York listed companies
which are stored in China. However, China has rejected such requests on national security
grounds. Reuters reported in April that both countries are discussing an audit agreement to
avoid the delisting, with Beijing hoping to sign a deal within the year. The US Holding
Foreign Companies Accountable Act stipulates that a company put on such a list by the SEC for three
consecutive years may face delisting. You can find those stories and more at Forkast News.
Over in the NFT space, after a sluggish couple of months, the NFT bear market has finally come to an
end as monthly sales volumes grew by 48% in April over March. Forkast's Lachlan Keller has more.
NFT sales in April hit 3.6 billion USD. That's more than $600 million higher than in February,
despite being recorded across nearly 15% fewer buyers than that month. Yehuda Petscher of NFT
data aggregators CryptoSlam told Forkast that the market is maturing and investors are being
more selective about what they purchase, so they're probably transacting less frequently,
but in much bigger ETH amounts. According to the Chainalysis' State of the Web 3 Report Preview,
as of May 1st, investors have already sent $37 billion to NFT marketplaces this year.
That puts them on pace to beat 2021 total of US$40 billion. The report also showed that NFT trading
is truly a global phenomenon with no single geographical region recording more than 30% of all
NFT marketplace web traffic since the beginning of the year. March's NFT market dip coincided with a
short lived revival of the crypto market when the market cap grew steadily to reach a two month high
of over US$2 trillion. Now NFT sales are up while the crypto market is down and narrative
that the NFT market is inversely correlated with the crypto market has arisen. However,
Petscher says that while crypto moves along with the stock markets, NFTs are riding their own wave.
He says that NFT cycles seem to move around major NFT news and not much more,
and that over time as NFTs become more mainstream, they will probably fall into
more typical patterns. Looking ahead, Petscher says he's looking forward to more play to earn
experiences like The Otherside from Yuga Labs coming from all corners of the metaverse.
He believes it could be an exciting year to come. For Forkast, I'm Lachlan Keller.
And finally, Hong Kong's love of NFT artwork seems to know no bounds with no fewer than
three exhibitions underway all at once. Forkast Danny Park went to take a look.
NFTs are popping up everywhere around Hong Kong on buildings, billboards and trams. And here at
the K11 malls in Tsim Sha Tsui, three major NFT events are being held simultaneously. We see big
names from the world of finance, crypto and the art scene such as Visa, HSBC and AAX riding on the
NFT wave big time. One of Hong Kong's most visited luxury shopping malls, K11 Musea is currently
studded with over 250 artworks by 30 different artists across nine floors. The noteworthy lineup
includes NFT collectibles that have already a huge following, such as the Bored Apes, renowned
artists such as Joan Cornella that have turned their art into NFTs and local Hong Kong artists
such as the eight year-old Arthus Ng, to the French girl who sees massive opportunities ahead.
Then going to the more creative part of it, of course, nfts the digital world,
digital art and the metaverse will offer a lot more opportunities to be creative. You don't have
the same laws of physics, right? So your artwork could be flying or could be flipping, of course,
could be moving, could be giant sized, could be underwater. There are no limit to creativity.
At the same time, in a nearby branch of K11 shopping mall, Global Crypto Exchange
AAX is displaying their NFT collection in a pop up called Apes, Pixels and God's.
We All Human Beings. We started as apes, you know, starting from clay.
And then as we actually interact with technology, in this case pixels, we do have the potential
to become as if we were gods. And what that means is we're able to expand our capabilities,
we're able to expand our skills to have more knowledge, have a more profound experience of
the world in a kind of interconnected way. But on top of that, there's another question, which is,
if that's true, that we are able to create our world through technology, it comes with a great
responsibility as well. And so this pop up is also about questioning where do we kind of who do we
ascribe power to? Who do we give that voice? And that's the question of kind of the crypto gods.
Just a minute's walk away from AAX's display stands,
an exhibition of Japan's leading NFT artists that cover fashion, installation art and more,
emphasizing that NFTs add value because they leave a digital footprint of an artwork's history.
For us, NFT is just a certificate, is a registry right to record the ownership,
the history of the work. So that's why we're trying to showcase to the
audience in Hong Kong that like NFT is not just about pixel art. It could
also use to be like used to like as a utility that to prove the ownership,
the authenticity and also the provenance of a physical art, just like the land registry.
NFTs have already become a force of nature in opening new channels for expression
and appreciation for both artists and viewers.
But where does the future lie, and are they worth parting with some cash for?
I really have no idea if 20 years from now Cryptopunks are anything
interesting or whether they're like, you know, a solid investment product.
I don't know. I really don't know. Nobody knows. The small picture is actually
NFTs. You know, the technology around it allows us to pinpoint a unique asset to a particular
address and just pinpointed there and keep it there. And that idea of
something not being replicable in terms of ownership, that in itself is the innovation.
And while some remain skeptical over the real value of NFT artworks, it has to be remembered
that many new technologies or art forms were viewed in a similar light when they first emerged.
I think the first time NFTs came on my radar was
with CryptoKitties. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous,
but I'm a kind of a sound-money guy, right? So I'm really strong on the Bitcoin narrative
and I thought to myself, This is very frivolous, like what are people doing? You know? But at the
same time we do have to understand that this is also how people experiment with technology. And,
and so I'm open minded generally to... I know when Bitcoin first came out, people were very skeptical
and actually there was no response at all. People were not interested. And let's say a few years
later, you know, it's all about a scam Ponzi scheme. So you can expect that as NFTs grow,
they're still going to be a lot of questions around it. Same for me as a private individual.
I guess there's no telling whether your digital art will maintain its worth a decade later,
but the invaluable core technology may remain. For Forkast, I'm Danny Park in Hong Kong.
And that's The Daily Forkast. And now if you want a deeper dove on these stories,
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Forkast.News/Newsletter. Thanks for watching. I'm Forkast's Megha Chaddah, until next time.