Art Gobblers became the talk of the NFT community this week after raking in over $20 million in the project’s first 24 hours on the Blur marketplace.

The Paradigm-backed collection also generated controversy for its association with Justin Roiland, co-creator of animated show Rick and Morty.

Instagram, meanwhile, said the social network plans to become an NFT marketplace as part of the Meta subsidiary’s plan to attract more users to the creator economy. Starting with a select group of US creators, Instagram will soon permit users to mint and sell digital assets directly.

Here are other notable stories that caught the eyes of the Web3 Watch.

Europe’s first NFT vending machine in London

The 2022 NFT London conference kicked off this week with a neon-purple NFT vending machine greeting attendees outside of the Queen Elizabeth II Centre. Users can pay 10 British pounds ($11.37) for an NFT that could be worth up to 1,000 pounds.

Customers select an envelope within the display and key in the code provided like any other vending machine. After payment has been made via Apple Pay, Google Pay or credit card, customers receive an envelope that contains a QR code on it. They either use an existing wallet to receive their NFT or set up a new one.

Supported NFTs include the projects Dr. Who Worlds Apart, Thunderbirds, and Delft Blue Night Watch.

The proceeds from the vending machine will be donated to charity in a split between Giveth, an organization that funds services and education in developing nations, and Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity.

Back in February, Solana blockchain-based NFT marketplace Neon set up the first NFT vending machine in New York.

NFTs by the numbers, DappRadar report

DappRadar’s latest industry report found NFT trading volume in October decreased by 30% from September to $662 million — the lowest monthly volume yet this year.

While Ethereum and Solana recorded the steepest declines, Polygon’s trading volume and sales increased by 770% from September, likely driven by the success of Reddit’s NFT collections. Polygon and BNB Chain also increased their sales count by 60% over the same period.

Even still, competition between NFT marketplaces has increased. Newcomer Blur launched in October — with at least $14 million in funding from venture capital firm Paradigm, plus additional unspecified backing from NFT-native investment fund 6529 and digital art collector Cozomo de’ Medici.

The hype surrounding Blur was in large part due to the overnight success of the Art Gobblers project. After four days on the market, the collection has an ether (ETH) volume of $61.9 million at the time of publication.

Nevertheless, OpenSea maintains its nearly 50% share of the entire market. In October, OpenSea marketplace dominance decreased by 8.3% compared to August, and NFT trading volume decreased 12.1% ($313 million) month over month — the lowest trading volume registered since July 2021.

OpenSea’s new anti-theft features

As the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea also typically has the greatest number of scams and thefts. It’s now turned its attention to address the challenge and introduce a new system in a bid to ward off bad actors.

OpenSea can now proactively scan URLs shared on its platform against a blacklist of known malicious sites. It can also analyze interactions and transactions with new URLs to identify malicious behaviors such as signature farming and wallet draining. OpenSea will suspend accounts of known scammers.

The marketplace’s second update aims to stop additional resales of potentially stolen digital items. It hopes to start training the system to more effectively detect NFT theft.

OpenSea’s goal, according to a company blog, is “to help make the ecosystem safer by reducing the downstream sales of stolen items – both using OpenSea and elsewhere in the NFT ecosystem – and thus reduce the incentive for NFT theft in the first place.”

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