The token that powers decentralised data storage network Arweave is surging — thanks to a bunch of degenerate apes.

The Degen Ape Academy and two other Solana NFT projects, Sollamas and SolanaDoges, are using the platform to store their JPG files, according to Arweave’s community-driven news website.

“It looks like Arweave is making a fast transition to the de facto home for permanent NFTs, especially on Solana, and attracting projects that would traditionally rely on IPFS,” Arweave.News said, referring to InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer data storage system.

Arweave.net usually sees about 700 requests per second, but the Degen Ape Academy drop over the weekend caused about as much as a million requests to the gateway in just a minute, according to Arweave.News.

An NFT is simply a token with metadata that points to an associated image file hosted off-chain, and many Solana projects are using Arweave for that decentralised image hosting.

While competitors Filecoin and Sia also offer decentralised file storage, Arweave is focused on storing data permanently.

The AR token, which is used to pay for storage on Arweave, was up 22 per cent yesterday afternoon to a three-month high of US$25.72.

The project was founded by two PhD students at the University of Kent in the UK and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.
 

SuperRare launches token, artists get paid

If you’ve ever bought or sold an NFT on SuperRare, you are in luck!

The curated, Mark Cuban-backed NFT marketplace has airdropped a “curation token,” to its users.

One billion $RARE tokens were created and 150 million are available to claim in the airdrop. The tokens were changing hands at US$1.26 yesterday, on US$45 million in volume.

One art buyer posted that he’d received 4,569 in $RARE tokens – US$5,756 worth, at yesterday’s prices – so the art he’d bought a few weeks ago “almost paid for itself today.”

Another NFT investor posted that SuperRare artists had just received a “life-changing” amount of tokens.

Greek artist Paulius Uza, a longtime SuperRare seller, wrote that they’d received 47,454 RARE tokens – US$59,792 worth.

RARE tokenholders will determine which artists get to sell in SuperRare’s new collection of independent marketplaces. The platform had until now been curated by the SuperRare Labs team. It has sold US$90 million in NFT art from 1,400 artists since its launch in April 2018.


 

Overall market down 2.8%

The total crypto market meanwhile had dipped to a five-day low yesterday afternoon in its second day of declines.

The overall coin market was down 2.8 per cent to US$1.93 trillion, according to Coinmarketcap, with Bitcoin down 1.4 per cent to US$45,419.

Ethereum was down 3.2 per cent to US$3,068.

Coingecko

Layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution Avalanche was the biggest gainer in the top 100, up 25.8 per cent to US$24.24. (Arweave was No. 2).

XinFin Network, Near Protocol, Quant and Helium had also posted double-digit gains.

Audius (AUDIO) was the biggest decliner top 100, falling 31.3 per cent after strong gains earlier in the week following its partnership with TikTok.

 

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