Playboy lost almost $5 million for one year from falling prices after NFT sale

Net book value of digital assets of Playboy as of December dropped to $ 327 thousand. A year earlier the figure was equal to $ 6.8 million

PLBY Group, parent company of Playboy magazine, said it suffered a $4.9 million asset impairment loss in Ethereum (ETH) in 2022, according to its annual report. The company was accepting the leading altcoin as payment for its 2021 Rabbitars collection NFTs.

In 2021, the company received $7.8 million from the sale of NFTs. At the end of that year, however, it recorded a $1 million loss on their impairment. At the end of 2022, the value of the digital assets on the Playboy balance sheet was $327,000.

Digital assets as of December 31, 2022 and 2021 consisted of Ethereum cryptocurrency from the sale of NFT. As of December 31, 2022 and 2021, the carrying value of our digital assets was $0.3 million and $6.8 million, respectively. The digital asset impairment charges for the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021 were $4.9 million and $1 million, respectively.

Playboy explained that it accounts for its digital assets as “indefinite-lived intangible assets.” These are subject to impairment if their fair value falls below their carrying value at any time. Impairment losses that the company incurs on digital assets cannot be recovered. Even if the fair value of the assets increases after impairment losses are accepted.

The market price of a single Ethereum ranged from $964 to $3,813 during 2022. But book value of each Ethereum that Playboy owned at the end of a reporting period. It reflects the lowest price per Ethereum on the exchange at any time since it was received.

Our experts note that negative fluctuations in the market price of Ethereum could have a significant impact on Playboy’s profits and book value. While an increase in prices will only have a positive impact on company profits. If the tokens on the balance sheet are sold at a profit.

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Amazon to launch NFT trading platform in April

You will only be able to buy NFTs through your Amazon account with a bank card. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

The Amazon NFT Marketplace will launch on April 24, according to TheBigWhale. At first, a service called Amazon Digital Marketplace will be open only to U.S. users. But in future, customers from other countries, including Europe, will have access to it.

At launch, the site will feature 15 NFT collections. It will only be possible to buy NFTs through an Amazon account with a bank card. This method of payment was chosen to make it convenient for customers to use the service in the traditional way. At the same time not tying cryptocurrencies like Metamask to it.

To host a marketplace, Amazon chose a private blockchain platform that is not compatible with Ethereum. Therefore, developers who want their NFTs to be available on the new platform will have to use blockchain bridges (tools to transfer tokens between different networks).

Our experts note that Amazon is preparing to launch its own NFT-platform, it was reported in early January. At the time, it was known that US online retailer was considering launching blockchain games. Participants in such games will be able to receive digital tokens, and it plans to hold at least one NFT airdrop.

 

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GQ magazine will release its first NFT collection

NFTs will allow their owners access to subscriptions GQ and opportunities to participate in fashion publication events. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

GQ men’s fashion magazine has announced its first NFT collection. The name of this collection is GQ3 Issue 001: Change Is Good.

The collection will consist of 1,661 NFTs. Artists Chuck Anderson, REO, Kelsey Niziolek and Serwa Attafua worked on the collection for four months. The price of each item in the collection is set at ETH 0.1957 (about $330). The price is set to honor the 1957 founding year of the magazine. The collection is scheduled to launch on March 8.

Buying NFT will give you access to a subscription to the magazine, a gift box from GQ, exclusive merchandise and participation in various magazine events and parties. Additionally, NFT owners will also get access to a special Discord channel and priority access to future issues of NFT.

Also our experts note that in mid-January another popular magazine, National Geographic. Launched sales of its first NFT collection called GM: Daybreak Around the World. The publication released the number of NFTs equal to the year the magazine was founded – 1888.

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The NFT market has grown a lot in a month. Review by Crypto-Upvotes experts

Trading volume on NFT marketplaces is approaching its peak. And news surrounding the largest collections keeps investors hype going

The NFT market is recovering from the disappointing end of 2022. According to a new report from the DappRadar platform, there was a sharp increase in both prices and the number of NFT units sold on marketplaces at the beginning of the year.

There were 9.2 million transactions in January, a 37% increase over December. This was the highest marketplace volume in six months. Trading volume in dollars also rose, reaching $946 million, up 38% from December. And it’s the highest since the market peaked at $1 billion last June.

Importantly, DappRadar excludes data from transactions falling under any suspicion of manipulation in its calculations. The most popular method is so-called “wash trading”. When owner from his own wallets makes fake sales of NFT, artificially inflating its price or imitating the appearance of excitement for a little-known project.

Most popular NFT collections

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) collections remain the ” Blue Chip” of NFT market. And the Yuga Labs behind them retains its status as one of the most recognizable brands in the industry. In January, a new collection of NFT company products called Sewer Pass. Which serve as keys to the blockchain game Dookey Dash, accounted for 34.3% of all transactions in January’s marketplace. The passes were issued to owners of images from the BAYC and MAYC collections. And their daily turnover on the secondary market after the launch exceeded $27 million.

Other famous collections also had high-profile infomercials in January. Doodles creators acquired Emmy-nominated animation studio Golden Wolf. And PROOF, the company behind Moonbirds collection, contracted with Hollywood’s United Talent Agency to promote the brand outside of the Web 3.0 sphere in traditional advertising and TV shows. The average image price from Doodles was up 1.82% in January and Moonbirds was up 3.43%, according to NFT Price Floor.

Overall, collections in the top 10 by market capitalization survived the market downturn best. They also had the top 10 sales in January, according to a DappRadar report. They were also the first to recover from last year’s market decline. For example, the Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Collections Index showed a 28.6% increase in prices from December. However, it is still nearly 65% lower than in January 2021.

Main NFT marketplaces

Marketplace sites oriented toward collectors are gradually wresting market share from those whose focus is primarily on traders and speculators. Blur, which seeks to minimize commissions for art creators. They accounted for 20% of the market for the third month in a row. In terms of turnover, the site is second only to OpenSea, with X2Y2 and Magic Eden in third and fourth place, respectively.

PFP-collections (NFT-collections with profile images) remain the most successful in terms of sales on the platforms. This is due to their high liquidity and hype in social networks. OpenSea remains the largest site in terms of trading volume, ($495 million in January). Platform received about $12.3 million of income from commissions from the trades and placement of NFT by their creators.

Our experts note that despite encouraging crypto market results. NFT platform Coinbase, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced that it is suspending new collections listings. However, company representatives stressed that this does not mean the closure of its platform.

Coinbase’s NFT platform was not one of the top six trading platforms. And its trading volume, according to Dune Analytics, is only $7.3 million for its entire existence, roughly equivalent to 7% of OpenSea’s January results.

Market trends

In January, sales increased at all significant blockchains. For example, NFT sales on the Ethereum blockchain jumped from nearly $558 million in December to more than $772 million in January. And on Solana – respectively, from $69.5 million to $86 million. The largest NFT collection on Solana blockchain, called “DeGods,” showed a 113% increase in trading volumes in January. This was despite the fact that at the end of December its authors announced plans to migrate to Polygon.

NFT sales on Polygon were up 157% from December, reaching 4.5 million units. This was greatly aided by the launch of Donald Trump’s NFT collection, which has seen sales of $12.1 million since its launch.
As well as popularity of NFT passes to the “Mocaverse” meta universes from Animoca Labs and The Sandbox. Polygon token (MATIC) also had a successful start to 2023, rising 72% to $1.23 since Jan. 1.

Lending platforms that allow you to borrow crypto assets against NFT are also showing growth. NFTfi hit record highs in January with $300 million in turnover, 4,399 loans and 907 active borrowers and lenders. According to Dune Analytics, NFTfi and BendDAO together account for about 70% of the NFT lending market.

Despite the skeptical sentiment of the past six months. NFT market is starting to come to life, although its trading volumes as a whole have clearly correlated with the rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

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ENS registrar reported that more 2.2 million .eth domains created in 2022

ENS registrar reported that more than 80% of all addresses appeared in the past year. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

Last year, users registered more than 2.2 million addresses in the Ethereum Name System (ENS). This was reported by representatives of the ENS registrar in its official Twitter account. According to ENS Domains website, the number of .eth addresses exceeds 594,000.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum ecosystem, called ENS-domains the most successful application of NFT technology in an interview with WIRED.

An ENS domain is technically an NFT on a particular wallet. To make a transfer to this wallet, you can specify not its address in the usual format. And replace it with a conveniently readable address such as “vitalik.eth”. Such a wallet address can also be used for authorization in decentralized applications (dApps) and searches in blockchain browsers such as Etherscan.

Domains in the form of NFTs can be traded on leading marketplaces such as Looks Rare or OpenSea. However, the largest marketplace by volume is ENS.Vision, which specializes in ENS domains. According to the platform, the most expensive addresses were “333.eth” and “metaverse.eth,” sold for 100 and 99 ETH, respectively.

Domains are becoming a form of identification in the crypto community. And this provokes demand for short and easily recognizable addresses. Floor price for domains in the “999 Club” category, that is, three digit addresses consisting of numbers, is at 20.22 ETH.

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NFT sales at Christie’s are down 96% from last year

Christie’s sold only 87 NFT in 2022 for a total of $5.9 million. Review by Crypto-Upvotes experts

NFT sales at Christie’s are down 96% this year. The auction house sold more than 100 NFTs worth more than $150 million in 2021 and only 87 items worth $5.9 million in 2022.

In 2021, the most expensive lots of Christie’s were the works of American artist Michael Winkelman, known under the nickname Beeple. NFT-painting “Every Day: the first 5 thousand days” was sold in March for $ 69.4 million. And an animated 3d-image of an astronaut called HUMAN ONE left the auction in October of the same year for $ 28.8 million.

The NFT sculpture by Turkish-born media artist and filmmaker Refik Anadol was the most expensive lot of 2022. Living Architecture: Casa Batlló, which sold in May for $1.38 million.

Despite the decline in digital art sales. Christie’s continued to be active in web3 and NFT in 2022. The company created a venture capital fund, which on July 18 made its first investment in the startup LayerZero. This campaign specializes in blockchain interoperability.

Our experts also note that in September Christie’s launched its own NFT trading platform called Christie’s 3.0. The platform is based on the Ethereum network. Also now all payments are accepted in cryptocurrency and they include post-sale transactions (payment of commission and taxes).

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Prospects of investment in NFT for the next few years

Crypto-Upvotes experts conducted their analysis and told about prospects of NFT segment

Throughout 2022, application solutions with NFT have been actively developed in a variety of projects. The audience of the technology continues to grow at a tremendous rate due to the introduction of the technology by social media. This year, some tools related to NFT were implemented by Twitter (audience of about 400 million users), Reddit (audience of about 430 million users), Onlyfans (audience of about 175 million users).Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Youtube also announced their plans to implement NFT.

Based on these data, we can consider a long-term investment portfolio, taking into account the prospects for the development of NFT

We would suggest dividing the investment portfolio into two parts. The first would be a liquid backbone, the tokens of projects that provide infrastructure for NFT. Polygon blockchain turned out to be the most popular for application solutions. Therefore, as the audience grows, the entire ecosystem could get developed, so the demand for native blockchain tokens would grow accordingly.

Other top blockchains – Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain – may also get a comparable effect from the development of NFT.

Another interesting application of NFT is the Fragment platform from Telegram. It is likely that in the future the supply will expand and the demand for TON will increase.

We suggest forming the second part of the portfolio from specific tokens of various promising NFT tokens. In a growing market, which by all projections should occur in the second half of 2023 and all of 2024. Therefore, collections with high social capital could go up in price several times over.

When to buy ?

Today, terrific conditions for opening long-term positions for at least 1-2 years, better from 3 years or more. The ongoing scandals around centralized exchanges are constantly weighing on the value of the Binance exchange’s native token. And rumors around the potential centralization of Ethereum due to the move to PoS, with validators predominantly in the same jurisdiction, are also negatively affecting the price of ETH in the medium term.

The market as a whole continues to be in a global bearish trend, which opens up the possibility of buying any tokens at undervalued prices.

What is the right investment portfolio structure ?

  • Polygon (MATIC) — 20%
  • Toncoin (TON) — 20%
  • Ethereum (ETH) — 10%
  • Binance coin (BNB) — 5%

Another 5% can be allocated under ApeCoin (APE) acting as a native token in the company’s developed meta-universe. The company that owns the world’s most popular NFT-collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks and Meebits.

The remaining 40% can be distributed among different NFT-collections.

For example, find interesting offers among applied projects from social media, like collections from Reddit or Twitter.

Risks

The first part of the investment portfolio is quite conservative by the standards of the crypto market. It lists well-established, reliable projects that have many growth and development factors other than the NFT segment. Therefore, the risks in 3/5 of the portfolio do not exceed the overall risks of the market.

However, the rest are extremely risky investments. You have to consider that NFTs have several orders of magnitude less liquidity. And predicting the value of NFTs in the future does not differ in its essence from flipping a coin for luck. But, with all that, the investment can pay off many times over, given a lucky set of circumstances. For example, one appreciated token can potentially outweigh the value of all the others that will fall. But there is absolutely no guarantee that this will happen to you, to your chosen collection, with tokens owned by you.

That’s why it’s worth investing only as much as you’re willing to lose at least half of that amount.

Disclaimer

Crypto-Upvotes experts do not give investment advice, this material is published for introductory purposes only. Cryptocurrency is a volatile asset that can lead to financial losses.

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Winamp media player released an update with support for NFT

The latest version of Winamp allows users to link a Metamask wallet through browsers. As well as access audio and video files on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

Winamp media player has released an update with support for NFT tracks. The new 5.9.1 version of the player for Windows desktop systems allows users to link their Metamask wallet through Brave, Chrome or Firefox browsers. And access NFT-formatted audio and video files, this company said in a press release.

Winamp will now support ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. NFT tracks can be listened to and added to playlists, just like any other audio file format.

NFT support will be added with several other important updates. The capabilities of the player will be complemented by a feature-rich cross-platform service for content creators. This service is scheduled to launch in early 2023.

Winamp, launched in 1997, was a key player in the first digital music innovation – the mp3 format. Now the player, keeping up with the times, is introducing the next generation of formats. As more and more writers and artists use web3 technology.

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Bitcoin has made it into Guinness Book of World Records

BTC has been written into history of world achievement Guinness Book of World Records on several counts, Crypto-Upvotes experts review

Bitcoin has been listed in Guinness World Records, the latest edition of Guinness World Records 2023. BTC is listed as the oldest cryptocurrency. And also as the first decentralized cryptocurrency and the most expensive cryptocurrency.

The latest of these records was recorded on March 24, 2022. On that day, Bitcoin was worth $42,900 and had a market capitalization of $816 billion. In addition, several other records related to BTC can be found in the book. For example: the largest theft of a cryptocurrency or the world’s first confiscation of a cryptocurrency. And even the largest cryptocurrency poker win ($1 billion).

There are also many NFT-related entries in the Record Book now. Among them is the very first unique Quantum token created in 2014. Or the most expensive token from NFT collections – CRYPTOPUNK #5822, bought for $23 million. And also the most expensive NFT issued by a sports club – Manchester City (UK) tokens with a market capitalization of $47 million.

Ethereum also appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records. However, ETH is not marked by any record. It is mentioned in an article about the first NFT Terra Nullius released on this blockchain in 2015.

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Hugo Boss to release NFT collection, Crypto-Upvotes review

Hugo Boss will release 1,000 animated tokens from the series “Take Your Emotions” will be presented in early November

Fashion house Hugo Boss announced a partnership with Imaginary Ones, a Web3 company. With this partnership, the first NFT-collection in the brand’s history will be released. Presentation is planned for early November.

A collection called Embrace Your Emotion or EYE will consist of 1,001 animated 3D objects. With this project, Hugo Boss encourages users to embrace their emotions with courage. And regardless of whether they are bad or good, says this project description.

Also Hugo Boss will release special 5 NFTs will be animated characters. These characters will represent joy, sadness, fear, anger and love. Another character will combine all qualities of these five characters. And he will be auctioned for charity on the occasion of World Mental Health Day (October 10).

Of the remaining 1,000 tokens, 500 will be available to buyers of exclusive merchandise t-shirts. Another 500 will be available to NFT holders from other Imaginary Ones projects and contest participants. Our experts have noticed that these contests will be held on Web-3-company social networks starting Oct. 4.

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