The first week of April brought some of the best cryptocurrency adoption and non-fungible token (NFT) news that impacted the market positively.
Within the week, popular luxury brand Ralph Lauren leapt into the decentralized finance industry by accepting crypto as payment at one of its stores in the United States.
Former President of the United States, Donald Trump was in the news again as he appeared in court, and his response resulted positively in his digital collectibles called Trump Digital Trading Cards.
Licensed Attorney Mike Kondoudis of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) shared an image on Twitter which showed that there was a substantial decline in the metaverse and NFT trademark filings during the first quarter of 2023.
Staying on NFTs, to stay in the competition, LooksRare, an NFT marketplace launched a second version (V2) which has reduced its trading fees to 0.5% from 2%.
Aside from LooksRare, OpenSea also launched OpenSea Pro with zero trading fees for professional traders.
Let us delve into the individual news stories to see how it affects the blockchain-powered economy.
OpenSea Launched OpenSea Pro
OpenSea is widely credited as the largest NFT marketplace by all-time sales volume. Unfortunately, OpenSea saw a threat to its dominance in the second half of 2022 due to a new marketplace called X2Y2 which took a substantial part of the market away from the platform.
After OpenSea fought and won its place back as the number one platform, a new marketplace launched in October 2022 called Blur overtook OpenSea by more than $1 billion in trading volume during the first quarter of the year.
This is the reason why the team behind OpenSea decided to act and launched OpenSea PRO during the first week of April.
According to the Official Press Release of OpenSea, the new platform will operate with zero fees for professional traders, pull listings from around 170 marketplaces, and this will give traders the best deals they have been waiting for.
OpenSea Pro has the mission of becoming the most efficient trading platform in the NFT sector.
LooksRare launched a second version
LooksRare is an NFT marketplace just like OpenSea. With so many NFT platforms competing for the same number of digital collectibles’ traders with new ones lined up in the coming weeks, LooksRare has decided to act to stay competitive in the ongoing NFT marketplace saturation.
On Thursday, April 6, LooksRare V2 went live with the older version set to be scrapped during the second week of April.
Version Two (V2) comes with a 75% reduction in fees to 0.5%. It comprises a one-signature bulk listing and traders can buy more than seventy (70) NFTs at once.
Sellers receive ETH, the native asset of Ethereum and not its wrapped version in the form of Wrapped Ether (WETH).
More importantly, in trying to steal the market from its current crown holder, LooksRare said its gas fees (transaction) are 50% cheaper than Blur.
Metaverse and NFT Trademark Filings Have Fallen Sharply in the United States
The filing of NFT and metaverse trademarks have become a new way of measuring the growth of the two highly correlated markets. Unfortunately, the highs of previous quarters could not be replicated in Q1 2023.
On Wednesday, April 5, Mike Kondoudis shared on his Twitter handle that the number of new NFT trademark filings from January to March 2023 was 885.
Compared to different yearly quarters, NFT trademarks filings for Q1 2022 were 2,530. From the statistics given, trademark filings related to NFTs in Q1 2023 plunged by more than 60% when compared to the same period in 2022.
The attorney also shared data about metaverse filings over the same period with 835 applications from January to March 2023 compared to 1,819 within the same period in 2022. Overall, metaverse trademark filings fell by 54%.
Only time will tell if the situation will improve in the upcoming quarters.
Donald Trump NFTs soar significant sales
Donald Trump is a huge name in United States politics and global affairs due to his somewhat controversial nature. He appeared in court during the week and gave a positive response of NOT GUILTY to all the charges that were labelled against him in New York.
The resultant effect of this was a significant rise in daily sales of his Trump Digital Trading Card.
Daily sales rose from an average of $25,000 to more than $70,000. This has taken the NFT collection into the area of the top 350 digital collections by all-time sales after languishing below the top 400 NFTs for a long time.
Ralph Lauren joins crypto adoption
On April 4, it was announced that luxury brand Ralph Lauren accepts the largest digital asset by market capitalization, Bitcoin (BTC) in its Miami store in the United States of America (USA).
Bitcoin has been the primary cryptocurrency adopted by many mainstream institutions and the latest development is a step in the right direction for all digital currencies aiming for a strong utility base.
Promotion (@Jpex_official_int)