Howdy!

Jack must really love the English countryside. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to be stateside for Election Day.

Either way, we’ll leave you in the capable hands of Blockworks’ Macauley Peterson and Donovan Choy today. They’ve got the scoop on a recent tokenized pilot project and some informed guesses as to what OpenSea’s cooking up.

Tokenized funds meet Swift Network

Swift, UBS Asset Management and Chainlink announced today the successful conclusion of a pilot project demonstrating the integration of traditional payment systems with tokenized assets.

Part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian, the pilot shows how financial institutions can use the Swift network for the settlement of tokenized fund subscriptions and redemptions.

Traditional fund processes, particularly in the $63 trillion mutual fund industry, are often hampered by inefficiencies, manual interventions and settlement delays that lead to increased costs and reduced liquidity. This pilot aims to bridge the gap between digital assets and fiat-based systems across Swift’s extensive global network, streamlining processes for the payment leg without requiring a complete shift to onchain transactions.

Using Chainlink’s platform for token minting and burning alongside Swift’s infrastructure, financial institutions can now facilitate the tokenized fund lifecycle — from subscriptions to redemptions.

Chainlink has been working with Swift since 2023, and the pilot builds on previous collaborations aimed at enhancing liquidity and operational efficiency within the tokenized fund landscape.

MAS’s Project Guardian promotes asset tokenization to improve financial market functions, and this trial used existing Swift rails to circumvent the need for new onchain infrastructure.

Swift strategy head Jonathan Ehrenfeld noted the initiative aligns with Swift’s mission to provide secure, scalable options for financial institutions exploring digital asset classes and currencies. Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink’s co-founder, highlighted the significance of this off-chain payment capability, emphasizing its potential to increase capital flow and expand digital asset accessibility across TradFi institutions.

As the financial industry increasingly explores digital assets, these kinds of interoperable solutions pave the way for broader adoption and operational efficiency across global markets.

— Macauley Peterson

OpenSea 2.0 is on its way

OpenSea dropped a cryptic tweet yesterday, hinting at a “new OpenSea” coming in December 2024.

What’s OpenSea cooking? No one knows, but a waitlist to the new version of OpenSea has racked up about 308k wallets sign-ups so far.

Initial speculation is pointing to an OpenSea airdrop token, despite the NFT platform’s strong hints historically at taking the IPO route.

Of all the major NFT marketplaces, OpenSea is the only player that has yet to launch a token. Blur, LooksRare, X2Y2, Tensor and Sudoswap all have a live token, while Magic Eden announced plans to launch one in August.

A user leaderboard that tracked rewards for usage was also spotted in OpenSea’s private beta, which the official OpenSea X account has retweeted.

If OpenSea is indeed launching a token, that’s cool, but it feels far too little, too late. NFT markets are down bad, with total NFT market caps down about 97% from their 2022 peaks.

The points meta was hot in early 2024, but it’s since faded off, so a points program built on NFT trading seems highly unlikely.

For these reasons, it’s hard to imagine OpenSea doubling down on an NFT-only strategy.

In Solana land, Magic Eden has already pivoted to fungible token trading of BTC and ETH with a mobile-centric strategy on its own Magic Eden wallet.

Based on its X account, Tensor seems to be persisting with an NFT product. The Solana NFT marketplace is still seeing an average of $3 to $6 million weekly trading volumes.

Blur’s last tweet was almost four months ago and Zora has pivoted to capitalize on memecoin trading with its new “ERC-20z” token standard that allows NFTs to be tokenized into fungible tokens.

Most other NFT trading marketplaces have negligible daily trading volumes of no more than $22k, and are pretty much dead.

OpenSea hasn’t had a great year. The once-dominant player was brutally outcompeted by Blur, laid off 50% of its staff in November 2023, and then received a Wells notice from the SEC in August that alleged its NFTs were securities.

Keep an eye out for details on OpenSea 2.0 at Devcon next week.

— Donovan Choy

NFT traders in 2024:

In terms of NFT trading, 2024 has been characterized by a rise of Solana on a relative basis, amid an overall downtrend.

On the Ethereum side, only Base has made any substantial inroads in absolute terms. Polygon’s PoS chain remains a major NFT player, but like everything else has been stagnating.

— Macauley Peterson