While NFTs can experience significant price increases during periods of high demand, their marketability often decreases sharply afterwards due to their indivisibility and the market's fluctuating interest.

ERC-404

The ERC-404 standard was developed as an experimental protocol to blend the features of ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens. It enables the creation of tokens that are both fungible and non-fungible, utilizing a mint and burn mechanism to manage the non-fungible aspect.

This integration allows for a proportional relationship between the two types of tokens, facilitating unique projects like Pandora, EtherRock404, and DeFrogs, which have demonstrated the market's appetite for such innovative solutions.

Pandora, the first token of this kind, peaked at $320 million market cap within days after launch.

DN-404: Divisible NFTs

Building on the groundwork laid by ERC-404, the DN-404 standard is an enhancement that specifically focuses on enabling the fractional ownership of NFTs and augmenting their liquidity with low gas fee.

Developed by a team of six Ethereum developers, DN-404 allows for the trading of base tokens, which can be considered as fractions of an NFT. This framework permits immediate trading on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as Uniswap, making it possible for investors to hold and trade parts of an NFT directly.

https://twitter.com/0xQuit/status/1757162239637737494

When a holder accumulates a full base unit (10^18) of these tokens, they automatically receive a corresponding NFT, effectively creating a "mirror" ERC-721 token. This mechanism not only simplifies the trading process on both NFT and DEX platforms but also significantly enhances the liquidity of NFT projects.

Projects like Asterix have pioneered the use of DN-404, demonstrating its potential to transform the NFT landscape by unlocking unprecedented levels of liquidity and trading flexibility.

Developers and influencers from diverse backgrounds, including those from the Loomdart and Shib token ecosystems, have begun exploring DN-404 for their projects, signaling a broad interest in the capabilities offered by divisible NFTs.

This shift towards DN-404 reflects a broader trend in the digital asset space towards integrating the benefits of both fungible and non-fungible tokens, aiming to create a more fluid and accessible market for unique digital assets.

Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, founders of the Taproot Wizards NFT project, are at the forefront of this campaign.

OP_CAT, disabled by Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto in 2010, is crucial in Bitcoin's scripting system for setting transaction validity conditions.

OP_CAT specifically allows for the combination or concatenation of two strings in input transactions. While it's a straightforward line of code, its activation could unlock significant capabilities in Bitcoin, enabling developers to create more sophisticated and secure applications. It could lead to the creation of a Bitcoin Virtual Machine, enhancing smart contract functionality on the Bitcoin blockchain, improving multi-signature transactions, and bolstering post-quantum security.

Satoshi Nakamoto initially deactivated OP_CAT due to the risk of DDoS attacks, as it might have led to an unsustainable increase in memory usage, potentially crashing nodes.

However, following the activation of Taproot, a major Bitcoin protocol upgrade in November 2021, this concern has been mitigated.

Taproot introduced Schnorr signatures, enhancing the blockchain's privacy, efficiency, and flexibility, especially for complex transactions.

Bitcoin developer Ethan Heilman has proposed reactivating OP_CAT. He wrote: “

This is no longer an issue because tapscript enforces a maximum stack element size of 520 Bytes.”


This change can be implemented through a soft fork, ensuring compatibility with the existing Bitcoin code without necessitating major modifications.

The success of this initiative hinges on obtaining support from the majority of miners. A key strategy in building this support is to foster community backing, a task that Taproot Wizards are undertaking through educational campaigns.

Participants can engage with these efforts and gain a Quantum Cat NFT by joining quests and creating educational content about OP_CAT. (LIKE THIS ONE!)

Also, Eric Wall has initiated a bet, predicting that miner support for reactivating OP_CAT will surpass 50% of the network's hashrate before the end of 2024.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are undergoing significant developments, and it's reasonable to expect that they will offer features and user interfaces similar to what centralized exchanges currently provide.

What if I told you that one DEX already offers some advanced features, such as limit orders, cheaper transaction fees, and an opportunity to earn an airdrop?

First, let me elaborate on what I mean by advanced features.

Ethereum's largest DEX, Uniswap, announced a slew of new features for its upcoming V4 upgrade on June 12. The two most important features of the upgrade include hooks and singleton contracts.

Hooks enable customization in the creation and management of liquidity pools, allowing features such as limit orders, time-weighted average market makers (TWAMM) orders, and the ability to customize fees for liquidity provision, among countless other possibilities.

Singleton contracts allow all liquidity pools to reside within one contract, significantly reducing the cost of creating liquidity pools for tokens and exchange transactions.

While Uniswap's V4 upgrade is expected to arrive toward the year-end, Ambient Finance has already implemented these features in the DEX design that went live on the Ethereum mainnet on June 16.

The team has been working on the project for the past five years as CrocSwap before rebranding it to Ambient Finance.

The swapping fees for ETH to USDC were 30% cheaper on Ambient on at least two instances in my experience.

Another standout feature in Ambient is flash accounting, which makes managing range orders cheap and fast, a critical advantage for sophisticated traders.

A note from Ambient Finance's founder:

https://twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1669679619635593216

There's a high chance that Ambient Finance will airdrop governance tokens to early users and liquidity providers. You would only need to pay gas fees for the transactions. However, there's a risk of exploitation of the new protocol.

A far-fetched but safe bet

So far, Ambient Finance's volumes and liquidity have been modest.

Uniswap’s TVL stands at $3.7 billion with annualized daily volumes above $300 million, per DefiLlama, compared to $17.7 million TVL for Ambient and daily volumes of less than $1 million.

It's an uphill task for Ambient to capture market share from Uniswap. However, it's not impossible.

Recently, the project secured $6.5 million in seed funding at an $80 million valuation from investors led by Blocktower Capital, along with Jane Street, Circle, and Tensai Capital, among others. The funding might be allocated to marketing efforts to attract liquidity and trading volume.

Uniswap has yet to activate the "fee switch," which accrues trading fees for UNI token holders.

The difference that fee accrual can make to a token's price is evident in the market capitalization comparison of the two tokens during the bull market of 2021. While UNI stagnated or trended downward, CRV experienced a positive run, reaching new all-time highs.

If Ambient Finance's volumes pick up and the community decides to accrue fees for token holders, providing liquidity on the exchange can turn out to be a good bet on a promising application.

TL;DR To me, Real Agency is a community-centric Web3 gaming marketing agency.

The Web3 gaming industry had its breakthrough moment with Axie Infinity, which was built on Ponzi economics. Depending on the time of when you got in and out of the ecosystem determines if you exited at a loss or profit—most did at a loss.

Still, it didn’t stop speculators and FOMO chasers from taking a plunge. As the entry barrier kept increasing, the play-to-earn gaming projects started losing their most essential users in third-world countries like the Philippines. Enter gaming guilds. 

Gaming guilds like Yield Guild Games and Merit Circle acted as a financier for these gamers. They would purchase the gaming NFTs and have players (selected through scholarship programs) play for them. Both entries shared the returns. 

But as the crypto bubble burst, there was no point in owing $1,000 NFTs to play a third-class game without outsized yields. (I am not exaggerating; most games during the time were extremely basic). 

Now, the industry wants “fun games” with an option to own NFTs—play and earn, if you will. In a situation like this, will gaming guilds thrive? While I am skeptical that it will, some initial investment or team involvement might still be required in games, where guilds can step in and lubricate the process.

But the middlemen of the industry are changing. Web3 gaming space wants to be fun and community-first rather than yield-first. Now, games will be evaluated purely on their gameplay merit and nothing else, which means user base and fan following are crucial. 

This finally brings me to Real Agency. It’s a new community of players, content creators, and creators who will help make games popular. The project will also own a treasury of digital assets.

Their website states, “RE3W is developing a contributing writer program for aspiring gaming analysts. We’re early and building a new type of video game data and reporting business. That means we need to be at the forefront of fostering talent in our emerging industry.”

Jonah has formed partnerships numerous upcoming games like Treeverse and Wolf Game along with with guilds like ReadyPlayerDAO.

The projcet’s community will have an NFT collection attached to it; its supply will be 1,000. It will be free-to-mint, but the majority will be restricted to “Realist” holders. Could Real Agency NFTs be soulbound (non-transferable)? Maybe.

Jonah, the founder and CEO is giving out “Realist” to influencers, gamers, writers, crypto shillers, and people he likes for the cause. Exited to see how this community prospers.

Facebook (now Meta) announced its plans to launch a stablecoin backed by a basket of global currencies in 2019. However, it encountered strong retaliation from the regulators. Long story short, the project faded into oblivion.

In the end, Facebook finally sold the intellectual property rights of Diem for $200 million to the U.S.-based Silvergate Bank, showing the importance of Diem's source code.

The people who put the work into it also weren't ready to give up. Two teams, Aptos Labs and Mysten Labs spun off from Meta's blockchain team and created the Aptos and Sui blockchains, respectively. Evan Cheng, who formerly headed research and development for Meta's crypto wallet, became the CEO of Mysten Labs.

Investors

On December 6th, 2021, Mysten Labs raised $36M in a series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Redpoint, Lightspeed, and Coinbase Ventures, among others.

In September 2022, it concluded its Series B investment round, raising $300M at a valuation of over $2 billion. FTX Ventures led the round with participation from others like A16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, and Coinbase Ventures. The fact that FTX led the round would have likely been a setback for the project based on recent revelations concerning ecosystem development.

Sui Vs Aptos

The Libra team’s most important breakthrough was the development of the Move programming language. Move architects claim that the language is more secure and flexible than Solidity, the native code base of Ethereum. It provides a verification-friendly design implemented in the source to avoid hacks and other vulnerabilities.

Additionally, Move is based on the popular Rust programming language. This is why Solana developers find it easy to shift to blockchains like Aptos and Sui.

While both Sui and Aptos are Move-based, there are differences in their basic design. While Aptos implements a traditional “blockchain” design with linear transaction execution, Move has adopted a distributed ledger in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which supports parallel execution. The DAG design has had below-average success in this industry. Currently, Nano and IOTA are the top blockchains that implement this design. Thus, it remains to be seen how Sui performs in the real world.

SUI Token and Testnet Incentives

Sui will have a native token to pay for gas fees, store transactions, and other operations. Stakers will receive these tokens as rewards for validation. SUI token holders will also get to vote on critical matters such as protocol upgrades.

The total supply of SUI is capped at ten billion. Mysten Labs released the devnet version of Sui with four validators in May 2022. Some NFT projects like CapyBaras, Ethos, and Sui Names have launched the test version of their dApp on the devnet. It's unclear whether devnet users will get airdrop rewards. However, there's considerable community activity thanks to the airdrop anticipation. You can become potentially eligible by following some steps laid out in the SIMETRI newsletter.

On November 17, 2022, the team launched the first testnet for Sui with select public validators and node operators. The requirements for running a Sui full node were quite extensive (32 GB RAM and 10-core CPU) for an average user. Moreover, Mysten Labs selected only a few hundred node operators out of thousands of applications.

Overall, Sui represents the next blockchains based on the Move programming language. Mysten Labs borrows its reputation from Facebook's failed cryptocurrency venture and the recent launch of Aptos blockchain. Technologically, it remains to be seen how Move adoption grows within the developer community. Furthermore, Sui has tweaked the design to accommodate scalability and speed, the real-world performance of which is yet to be tested.

Finally, Sui and Aptos also drew popularity as a VC chain because of the hefty early-stage investments. In this regard, it's still concerning that Sui's most prominent investor was indeed FTX Ventures. Still, it will likely have a lesser impact than Solana because Sui was still in devnet. Thus, the FTX debacle may have slowed down its ecosystem development but at least it didn't take down the user's funds and liquidity with it.

Tatsu is used by 1.6 million servers with over 60 million users. The bot helps in community engagement by leveling up users based on their engagement. It’s used by NFT projects to give out WL or mintlists.

The Meekonoly NFTs is the first collection from the team:

https://magiceden.io/marketplace/meekolony

The plan is to expand the project to a Metaverse composed of avatars, virtual land, pets, and other digital items. There will be a role-playing game with turn-based battles modes. Besides, there will be mini-games such as fishing, hunting for loot, and taking care of pets.

The project also has a token $IGS. It was distributed to “staked” Meekonoly NFT holders, one per day.

Recently, the team conducted a land parcel sale in IGS and then public sale in ETH. You can buy them on Immutable:

https://market.immutable.com/collections/0xd6290ac02981dfca715a4c760d1eb8073a849657

With a sizable community and a decent track record in delivering products, Tatsumeeko, looks like a decent long-term bet. NFA.