Flight of the JPEGs 🖼️

Is NFT winter finally over?

The total NFT market cap has surged by 22.4% on Monday, breaking past the $6B level to a daily peak of $6.4B.

The top-performing collections of that day include Pudgy Penguins, Moonbirds, and Crypto Punks.

Interestingly, a whale recently spent over 2080 ETH, worth approximately $7.9M, to snap up 45 CryptoPunks NFTs in 2 minutes.

Their purchase caused the CryptoPunks floor price to rise from 41 ETH (~$154K) to 47.5 ETH (~$180K) as of this writing.

Similarly, NFTs within the Pudgy Penguin ecosystem have continued to recover alongside their native PENGU token. 

The floor price of the main Pudgy Penguins NFTs has increased by 15.9% to 16.8 ETH in the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile, PENGU has continued to extend its miraculous run, rising by another 24.8% today from $0.031 to $0.039.

Magic mainland money 💵

Chinese L1 blockchain Conflux has announced the launch of its 3.0 upgrade and upcoming plans to deploy yuan-pegged stablecoins.

 At its conference over the weekend, the project announced that it has teamed up with fintech company AnchorX and Shenzhen-listed Eastcompeace Technology to create offshore yuan stablecoins.

Additionally, the team has also teased the release of Conflux 3.0, slated to go live in August.

Conflux 3.0 will include the new Tree-Graph consensus mechanism, which will enable the network to process up to 15,000 transactions per second.

Since these announcements, the price of Conflux’s native gas token, CFX, has jumped by 108.4% from $0.11 to $0.22 as of the time of writing.

In Other News…

Bitcoin Slashes Minimum Fee by 90%. The minimum fee rate of Bitcoin transactions has been slashed to 0.1 satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vByte). This change was likely made due to low network activity.

ETH Season?! Bitcoin dominance is down for the week, as XRP and ETH climbed over 20% each. Bitcoin dominance is down to 61% from 65%.

Aave DAO Allows Kraken Fork. The Aave DAO has approved Kraken-backed Ink Foundation to launch a white label version of Aave V3 for their upcoming ETH L2, Ink. This means Ink will likely have a Kraken branded money market lending protocol using Aave’s code.

SSD Killing MetaMask Bug Discovered. Github user ripper31337 discovered a bug where the chrome extension of the crypto wallet was writing 500 GBs of data to your SSD daily, burning through its lifespan needlessly.  Consensys acknowledged the bug and will be “imminently” releasing a fix.

CoinDCX Suffers $44M Exploit. Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX was drained last Friday by compromising one of CoinDCX’s internal accounts used for “liquidity provisions” with another exchange. Sumit Gupta, the CEO clarifies that no customer funds were lost and intends to fully absorb this loss.

Bit Origin Bets Big on DOGE. Bit Origin, a publicly listed Bitcoin mining infrastructure firm is raising $500M to purchase the DOGE memecoin. Bit Origin’s shares BTOG is up 90% since this announcement.

BSTR Goes Public with $3.5B Worth of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR) is going public via SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners I. Most of the firm’s accumulated Bitcoin comes from Blockstream Capital CEO Adam Back, who will also serve as BSTR’s CEO. 

Pump.fun Shenanigans. Zachary Gollan, an Australian man is attempting the world record for most tattoos of the same name by tattooing “Pump.fun” on himself more than 700 times. Pump.fun is a popular Solana memecoin launchpad.

Caldera Launches ERA Token. Roll-up service provider Caldera is airdropping their ERA token with eligibility checkers live now. Users have until 31 July to claim their tokens.