NFT welcomes a renaissance, but did Solana’s co-founder pour cold water on it?

Author: Bright, Foresight News

NFTs seem to be following ETH back on the road to $4,000, as established blue-chip NFTs have thawed and revived from an 18-month ice age.

Among them, the CryptoPunks NFT series saw a trading volume exceeding $24.6 million last week, setting a record high since March 2024, with a 416% increase compared to the previous week.

On the evening of July 24, Nasdaq-listed GameSquare announced that its board had approved a strategic purchase of CryptoPunk #5577 from Robert Leshner, founder of the DeFi protocol Compound and CEO of Superstate. According to the terms of the acquisition agreement, GameSquare issued $5.15 million worth of preferred shares to Robert Leshner, which can be converted into approximately 3.4 million shares of GameSquare common stock at a price of $1.50 per share.

This move triggered a trading frenzy for CryptoPunks NFTs, significantly increasing the floor price and average selling price of CryptoPunks. As publicly listed companies become the main force in hoarding coins, NFTs also seem to be “saved” through corporate entities.

Previously, Arthur Hayes stated that as ETH rises, DeFi and NFTs would also follow suit. He predicted that the returns from holding ETH this round would not outperform CryptoPunks.

Other blue-chip ETH NFTs also saw a general increase over the week. The floor price of Moonbirds broke 2 ETH, rising nearly 50%; the floor price of Milady Maker surpassed 3 ETH, increasing over 20%.

However, NFTs are just getting started. Last Sunday, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Base founder Jesse Pollak entered “mutual attack mode” on Twitter, debating whether creator tokens on Zora could be compared to anonymous meme coins on Pump.fun.

Jesse Pollak claimed that the content and creators of the tokens on Zora have unique value, and equating them with the tokens on Pump.fun is a logical fallacy. Anatoly Yakovenko stated that these tokens are merely products of viral marketing, with buyers looking to flip them quickly. Pollak countered that the tokens are a powerful technology enabling the flow of creator value, and those who disagree can stick to the view that “content has no value.”

In the debate, Anatoly Yakovenko bluntly concluded that “Memecoins and NFTs are digital trash with no intrinsic value.” He compared such digital assets to the “loot box” mechanism of free games.

Although Solana greatly benefited from memecoin-driven activities in the first quarter of 2024, Anatoly himself stated that he has repeatedly made it clear that memecoins have no intrinsic value.

However, Anatoly has unreservedly taken on the role of a meme-pumping KOL, having already gained fame in the community for “crazy pumping memes on Solana.” By the later stages of the Solana meme craze, his credibility as a co-founder of Solana had nearly vanished.

Looking back two years, from its creation in December 2023 to the Chinese New Year in 2024, Silly Dragon became the top meme on Solana. The reason for this meme’s birth was simply that Anatoly liked the dragon image and appeared in that form at events.

After the creation of Silly Dragon, even with only 1,454 followers, Anatoly had already hit the follow button. This action caused Silly Dragon to surge tenfold within 1-2 hours.

Subsequently, as the Silly Dragon community continued to grow, Anatoly became “addicted to pumping.” Not only did he subtly include the dragon emoji in his tweets, but he also directly retweeted tweets related to the meme project.

Reflecting on Solana’s rise from obscurity to the third-largest public chain by market capitalization, its early success was due to the lowest transaction costs, making Solana the preferred public chain for most new NFTs and protocols. NFTs and memes, as the most prominent symbols of the crypto-native community, objectively helped Solana form one of the strongest communities in the entire crypto space. Anatoly’s dissection of NFTs and memes, judging speculative assets from a moral high ground, undoubtedly gives the community a sense of “biting the hand that feeds them.”