Crypto is currently in the midst of a renaissance. Really. As we covered in a previous report, there are now users that are actively creating, buying, trading, and selling digital art — you know, jpgs and gifs — worth thousands of dollars.
One piece of art sold for 100 Ethereum, which currently equates to over $35,000.
Seeing the growth in the space, many Ethereum-based projects, many in decentralized finance (DeFi), have looked into how they can pivot to capture this new trend.
Some have yet to pivot, seeing digital collectibles, also known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as a fad. Some are pivoting, and are seeing extreme success as a result.
One such coin seeing success is Shroom Finance, which began as a fork of SushiSwap, but the coin has quickly turned into its own thing with an internal pivot.
Ethereum-based SushiSwap fork pivots to NFTs, rewarded with 7,000% rally
Early this month, seemingly every Ethereum developer on Earth was creating forks of one of two things: Yam Finance or SushiSwap. Both projects had contracts that allowed users to stake coins to earn a new cryptocurrency, which surged in value, gaining the love and attention of many in the industry.
There were absurd forks like Kimchi, HotdogSwap, Y U NO Finance, and Shroom.
Shroom.Finance was launched in the tail end of the SushiSwap fork FOMO, meaning its price collapsed pretty quickly. At the time, the farming meta was to farm coins as fast as possible, then dump them for a safe bet like Ethereum or stablecoins.
The coin dropped over 95 percent from its initial price to the lows. The cryptocurrency also ran into some internal controversy because the yields proposed on the site were dramatically overshooting the reality, leaving some users upset.
Like other food coins, Shroom seemed dead: its Ethereum-based coin was trading under $0.01 and the total value locked in the protocol was minimal.
But, the cryptocurrency revealed it had plans for a decentralized game that would involve “NFTs (ERC-721, ERC-1155) and ERC-20 token standards.”
After the recent spike in interest, we have decided to openly invite LPs again to our farms and we will be granting rewards retroactively in the coming days when the 2nd farming round starts. Liquidity added now will count towards our upcoming NFT and token rewards. ??? $SHROOM
— shroom.finance (@ShroomFinance) September 22, 2020
The details are not yet clear what exactly this will entail, but the project has received coverage from analysts such as Josh Rager and reputable research firms like Delphi Digital.
This coverage has sent the coin from $0.0035 at its macro lows to $0.25 as of this article’s writing, marking a rally of over 7,000%.
Chart of Shroom’s price action over the past 10 days. Chart from Chartex and TradingView.com
Not the only winner
Although Shroom is a unique success story in that it is converting from it being a run-of-the-mill fork into a potentially marketable product, it isn’t the only winner in the ongoing shift of attention from vanilla DeFi to NFTs.
Rarible, one of the main digital collectible marketplaces, has seen its native RARI token rally over 500 percent since the start of September. Other more niche NFT-related coins, such as Chads VC, have seen strong rallies as well.
Speaking in a recent podcast on NFTs, it was said that this segment of the industry is important because we need something to value with our currencies — our cryptocurrencies.
That’s to say, if there are valuable on-chain items, then the utility of our cryptocurrencies should increase as a result.
Qiao Wang, a crypto-asset trader, also summed up the argument for NFTs well when he recently wrote:
“I am no NFT expert, but NFT haters are making an obvious logical mistake. If cryptographically secured *fungible* digital assets are storing $300B+ in value, why can’t *non-fungible* digital assets have any value?”
I am no NFT expert, but NFT haters are making an obvious logical mistake. If cryptographically secured *fungible* digital assets are storing $300B+ in value, why can’t *non-fungible* digital assets have any value?
— Qiao Wang (@QwQiao) September 28, 2020
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