The NFT market keeps pushing hard despite the recent general market downturn. While the price of Ethereum’s native token ETH may be struggling, some NFTs are flying high in the market following the successful “merge”!

Bored Ape Yacht Club, RENGA by DirtyRobot and Gods Unchained recorded weekly trading volumes of $6.6m, $6.1m and $4.9m respectively. The biggest gainer among them was Gods Unchained, which saw its trading volume rise by 391% compared to the week before. In the past 24 hours, both Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club experienced a rise in sales, with over $$1.9M and $1.5M in sales respectively.

Despite some NFT collections seeing a surge in popularity, OpenSea’s overall volume was down 22.4% for the past 7 days compared to the prior 7 days, coming in at $80.9m. Magic Eden, the second-ranked NFT marketplace was able to generate a volume of $27.2m within the same period.

Crypto payment platform MoonPay has helped its partner Universal Studios create an NFT-based scavenger hunt at its Universal Theme Parks.

MoonPay will use its utility minting service Hypermint to create up to 7 million NFTs, which can be claimed at a Universal Theme Park in Orlando, Florida or Hollywood, California as part of the “Halloween Horror Nights” NFT scavenger hunt.

“We're really excited about this because this is a real world use case that we've been trying to demonstrate with people,” said MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright. “We're going beyond just the profile picture identity movement with NFTs to actual real world utility.”

Park guests won’t require any crypto knowledge at all to claim these NFTs. “It's just basically a claim page where you put in your email address, and boom, what we do in the background is we mint that NFT, we spin up a wallet for that particular person and then they're able to claim it when they're ready,” Soto-Wright said.

In Other News,

• Coinbase Partner With ENS To Create cb.id Web3 Usernames. Read More
• Solana’s NFT Protocol Metaplex Unveils MPLX Utility Token, Airdrop Ongoing. Read More
• US States Washington and Pennsylvania Introduce a Tax On NFTs. Read More
• Yuga Labs Plans To Make $50M With A New “Mecha Apes” NFT Collection. Read More

• PGA Tour Golf NFTs Coming to Tom Brady’s Autograph Platform. Read More

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NBCUniversal and Samsung are bringing The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to the metaverse via an interactive experience called Tonight at the Rock. Fallon teased the activation on last week’s shows and on Wednesday, viewers will be encouraged to visit virtual gaming platform, Fortnite.

Visitors will be able to play games and visit The Tonight Show’s virtual writers’ room and Samsung Store. Players can help Jimmy Fallon get to Studio 6B, race up 30 Rockefeller Center or play pong on rooftops along the New York skyline. The immersive experience is enabled by Samsung Galaxy’s products.

“At Samsung, we’re always looking for opportunities to give users one-of-a-kind experiences with their Galaxy devices,” said Janet Lee, senior VP of mobile experience at Samsung Electronics America. “Tonight at the Rock empowers fans with a unique social adventure right in the heart of 30 Rock, all enhanced through in-game Samsung power-ups made possible by the Galaxy ecosystem. We are so excited to offer late night fans the first ever interactive Tonight Show gaming experience, in a way that honours our longstanding creative partnership.”

In other news,

• South Korean City to Offer NFT ‘Citizenship’. Read More
• Metaverse firm implements NFTs into its Minecraft and GTA 5 servers. Read More
• Saudi Arabia Takes National Day Celebrations to the Metaverse. Read More
• Jack Daniel’s files for virtual beverages trademark. Read More

Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced it will add the layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum. Following successful deployment, Arbitrum will join four existing networks on the marketplace: Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Klaytn.

OpenSea noted that popular NFT collections Smolverse, GMX Blueberry Club, and Diamond Pepes would be among the first uploaded onto the marketplace. The company advised that “creators will need to find their collections in OpenSea and set their creator fees directly,” ideally at the time of launch.

In other news,

• KuCoin Labs Integrates BidShop.io To Boost Its NFT Ecosystem. Read More
• OneAset launches an NFT marketplace for Indonesian-based users. Read More
• OpenSea brings an upgrade to NFT drops with an enticing minting experience. Read More
• Magic Eden CEO: ‘Very Natural’ to Expand From Solana to Ethereum NFTs. Read More

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