Sales of Bored Ape’s NFT Otherdeed — making it the hottest virtual real estate brand on the market — exploded in the first quarter of this year, hitting $120 million in sales.
The volume growth of the series meant that the Otherdeed token became the second best-selling NFT series in the first quarter of this year. Bored Ape Yacht Club is also associated with the growing Metaverse platform of Otherdeeds and Otherside and is the best-selling series. Both Bored Apes and Otherdeeds are products of the highly rated NFT Yuga Labs store.
This month, however, sales of a lesser-known series (also tied to the emerging Metaverse platform called MG Lands) have held steady; at one point even surpassing sales of Otherdeeds. However, the rapid rise of MG Land seems to be entangled with the wash trading.
How to Spot Wash Trading?
“When we compared peak sales in MG Lands to those in Otherdeeds, there was a significant difference in the length of time between a buyer’s first transaction and a sale in MG Lands,” said The Block researcher Brad Kay. “Of the top 20 MG Lands sales, 19 buyers made their first transaction on the day of the sale. In contrast, the number of buyers in the top 20 sales of Otherdeeds all had previously created monthly or yearly Wallets. This shows that buyers and sellers are not bots or fake transactions like on MG Lands.”
Wash transactions are defined as transactions between wallets owned by the same person or company. Not only can it create artificial volume, but it can also manipulate prices.
All of the top 19 sales closed at between $27,500 and $28,500 per NFT. In March, MG Lands recorded a cumulative transaction volume of US$27.1 million. After a few days of strong trading, Otherdeeds NFT has surpassed MG Lands, and the current total trading volume is close to 30 million US dollars.
MG Lands vs Otherside Daily Volume Price Chart
MG Land is a metaverse composed of 10,000 NFT virtual lands. The platform is designed to allow people to bring NFTs of characters from various popular series such as Bored Apes, Doodles, and Azuki into their online worlds. People should then be able to customize their virtual lands and create play and trading spaces. Headquartered in Singapore, MG Lands is part of the Metagame Group founded by Mr. Chennywong.
LandVault CEO Sam Huber said he can’t understand why MG Lands is doing so well, even though it’s trying to keep pace with the top NFT collections.
Last week, web3 data analytics company DappRadar released its Q1 2023 report titled “Virtual Worlds Soar: Record Land Sales Generate $311 Million.” The three-month report states:
“Virtual land transactions hit a record high of 147,000 in the quarter. MG Lands emerged as a top performer with nearly $60 million in transactions and $45,219 in sales.”
DappRadar warns in its report:
“The high volume is mainly due to NFT whales using this collection of NFTs to collect BLUR tokens from the Blur NFT marketplace airdrop.”
Launched last year, Blur offers rewards to those willing to use its platform for transactions. Some of the money laundering may have been facilitated by Blur’s generous compensation plan to lure traders.
“While sales were split evenly between Blur and Opensea, with Blur accounting for 32.46% and Opensea accounting for 67.52% in February, the situation changed in March.”
DappRadar data shows that in the past month, 70.36% of the series’ revenue came from Blur, while only 29.57% came from Opensea.
“These trends confirm that MG Lands has become a popular choice for NFT whales looking to grow on Blur.”
DappRadar’s analysis of MG Lands sales has angered many NFT fans, especially one who is quite famous on Twitter.
“Even crypto media doesn’t recognize NFT wash trading,” tweeted @Punk9059. “Reports of miraculous skyrocketing virtual land sales have come out, all because of fake sales by MG Land.”
Currently, DappRadar is silent on many community responses. Regardless of MG Lands’ issues with transaction volume, LandVault’s Huber is pleased to see the recent uptick in transactions, and he’s optimistic that virtual land sales have a bright future – generating utility that will drive people to places like Otherside, Bored Apes, For a big platform like The Sandbox, he said that Decentraland is very important.
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As reported by Cointelegraph
