What's Driving Token Prices? December 11, 2024

ME (-54%) - The native token for NFT marketplace Magic Eden (ME) launched this week garnering a $5B+ valuation. Magic Eden is the leading Solana NFT marketplace, however that title has not been as important as it once was with NFT volumes sliding 95% from their peak in 2022. Most recently, the exchange has also launched on Base and Polygon and successfully processed about 83% of all volumes of Ordinals and Runes NFTs on Bitcoin. The airdrop was of course not without drama: to claim the airdrop users were required to do so through the Magic Eden wallet which some reported had security flaws that could open users up to attacks. It also is a cumbersome process to make users go through right at the time of an airdrop going through. Upon launch, the token listed at a $3.16B FDV ran up to $23 for a moment and has since retraced to $5.17.
FTT (+17.8%) - Last week, NFT collection Pudgy Penguins announced it was launching its long awaited $PENGU token to its community. Pudgy Penguins has been one of the few NFT collections to survive the NFT market winter; it has also proliferated the mainstream with pudgy penguin toys sold at Walmart and is known as a key culture project of crypto with its grassroots support and friendly looking NFTs. The big surprise of the airdrop announcement however, was that 0.35% of the PENGU supply will be set aside for FTT holders. FTT is the token for the now defunct FTX exchange and therefore has no value. Despite this, the news shot the price of FTT up 30% initially but has since retraced and is now +17.8% for the week. PENGU is not yet live but based on premarket trading, the token is valued at just under $1B with the FTT allocation valued at $3.3M.
SUI (+18%) - Last week, layer-1 blockchain Sui was integrated into the Phantom wallet, one of the most widely used wallets. The integration means that users who currently have the Phantom wallet can theoretically more easily get their assets over to Sui and use the network. The Phantom wallet also comes with many features including staking, swapping, NFT storage and more. Sui has had quite a year growing its ecosystem from zero to $2.2B in TVL. We can expect to see this grow even more as integrations such as this one continue to get rolled out.
SUSHI (+44%) - A vote is currently live to diversify the Sushiswap treasury. The decentralized exchange project has been around for about four years but has faced a myriad of problems as a result of its decentralized workforce and DAO structure. Over the past 18 months, the new CEO, Jared Grey, has made an attempt to clean up different aspects of the business which now includes the treasury. The Sushiswap treasury mainly consists of SUSHI tokens and these are supposed to provide funding for the project’s costs including software costs and personnel. The proposal suggests selling its SUSHI tokens for a diversified basket of tokens including 70% stablecoins, 20% blue chips, and 10% Defi tokens. The DAO owns about 15M tokens which is only about 5% of the circulating supply. These tokens are worth $30M at today’s prices.

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