Underpinned by text-to-image Stability Diffusion tech, this new functionality lets creators make visual layers via prompts that can be remixed in the Canvas interface. Here’s an example I created:

https://opensea.io/assets/0xe3BB341b3FDE622e7aED371F93Bd511da6Ed6Ade/1

There’s even an in-built splits system here, so that a model’s host and the model itself receive 10% cuts each of any accrued ETH from mints. Only the base Stability Diffusion model is available for now, but more models are coming.

It’s a super neat implementation, and it’s perfect for the Zora ecosystem, so I’m looking forward to all the creativity and innovations that will be coming out of this mashup.

In the meantime, let’s get you up to speed on the past week’s NFT news highlights 👇

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Kevin Owocki released his new book “Exploring Mycofi” on Zora.

• Phantom intro’d support for Ledger x Bitcoin.

• Zerion added support for Zora Network.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Art Blocks paused project releases to refine its self-publishing studio and the Art Blocks Curated selection process.

• Aux Arbres, released by zancan on Highlight, became the largest gen art collection in history.

• Fidenza #49 and Fidenza #667 resold for 496 ETH and 290 ETH respectively.

• Jack Butcher announced Opepen v2 is coming March 20th.

• Nouns DAO is voting on funding Efficax 2.0, an onchain art deployer.

• Sotheby’s auctioned XCOPY’s “data_lords” for +$330k.

• Privy added support for onboarding via Spotify.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Bitcoin Pizza Ninja #1 was auctioned for 2.23 BTC at Sotheby’s.

• Bored Ape #830 resold for 500 ETH on sudoswap via Machi’s AIP-304 proposal.

• CryptoKitties #95 resold for 33.68 ETH.

• CryptoPunk #3100 was purchased for 4,500 ETH, the 2nd-biggest onchain ‘Punk sale to date.

📱 Onchain social

• Ethereum Follow Protocol pushed back its Q1 2024 launch plans.

• Grid, a drawing experiment built atop Warpcast, launched.

• Hyperloot released a Dungeon War minigame on Farcaster.

• Lens has amassed more than $500k in revenue since going permissionless.

• Warpcast intro’d transaction frames.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity rolled out new app.axie features.

• Base dropped a referral code for two free Parallel card packs.

• CyberKongz kicked off their Ronin migration.

• Immutable unveiled the Immutable Minting API.

• Nouns Esports signed Cody Schwab, the world’s #1 Super Smash Bros Melee player.

• Parallel reduced the cost of creating Echos.

🪙 NFTfi

• Astaria facilitated the 1st NFT loan on Base.

• Blast saw its TVL reach $2.4B.

• Enjoy kicked off its Airdrop 1 claim on Zora Network.

• NFTfi.com facilitated +$12 million in loans last month.

• X2Y2 intro’d Buy Now Pay Later support.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland added multichain support to its wearables marketplace.

• Nifty League is hosting a tournament series in Nifty Island over the next month.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 💧 The EIP-4844 NFT Revolution

  • 🙊 The NodeMonkes Bitcoin Takeover

  • 🟠 8 Bitcoin L2s You Should Be Watching

This week, meme.market caught my attention.

Created by the minds behind mint.fun, this new platform pairs memecoins directly with picture memes via ERC-1155 NFTs.

The idea here, of course, is to bridge the gap between meme-themed tokens and actual memes.

Deployed on the Base L2, the platform acts as a marketplace and creator hub where people can buy and sell memecoins + memes along bonding curves and create and earn from new memes in existing markets.

My opinion? Keep an eye out here, as meme.market not only adds depth to the memecoin concept but also pioneers a new model for digital creativity in the cryptoeconomy. It’s worth keeping on your radar accordingly.

For now, though, onto the past week’s NFT news highlights! 👇

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Delivery at Dawn, a short film NFT mint for core Ethereum contributors, is coming March 11th.

• $ENJOY, a memecoin for Zora users, is launching on the Zora L2.

• Justin Drake released an NFT Orb for AMAs.

• Magic Eden unveiled its Ethereum marketplace.

• Mint, a new NFT L2, rolled out its testnet.

• VanEck launched a new NFT marketplace, SegMint.

• Zora delivered over $1M worth of creator rewards this month.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• BasePaint released BasePaint Masterpieces.

• diid published On Compressionism, a new look into a rising onchain art movement.

• fxhash unveiled buso by Patakk, the platform’s inaugural Base drop.

• Jonathan Mann launched Song a Day subscriptions via Hypersub.

• XCOPY 10, an old PixelChain mint, resold for 10 ETH.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• CryptoPunk 3100, an alien punk, received a 4,250 ETH bid, which was then shifted over to fellow alien ‘Punk 7804.

• Goblintown creators Truth Labs is offering equity to its holders.

• Inscription #2, the 2nd Bitcoin Ordinal ever minted, resold for 24.48 BTC.

• Yuga Labs sunsetted support for marketplaces that don’t support royalties.

📱 Onchain social

• Lens launched permissionless signups and reached +200k profiles.

• Paradigm unveiled Frog, a new framework for building Farcaster Frames.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Arbitrum announced the Arbitrum Arcade campaign.

• Axie Infinity kicked off Origins S7 Final Era.

• BattlePlan plans to migrate from Arbitrum Nova.

• Crypto The Game allowlisted all S1 players for S2.

• Gods Unchained unveiled mobile support.

• Guild of Guardians released its $GOG token migration portal.

• Immutable reached +200k Immutable Passport users.

• Influence launched its pre-release gameplay.

• Parallel unveiled its open beta.

🪙 NFTfi

• Blast rolled out its mainnet.

• Fungify announced info for its ve404 NFT mint.

• NFTfi.com facilitated a real estate-based 70,000 USDC loan.

• Uniswap intro’d a browser wallet extension, limit orders, and charts.

• X2Y2 rolled out support for Pandora ERC-404 lending.

• Zora added support for Blast and Uniswap.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland is preparing for Decentraland Art Week ‘24.

• Otherside conducted its Apes Come Home demo event.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up, see my other latest write-ups:

• 🎴 Playing the Parallel Open Beta

• 💫 The Infinite Story Machine

• 🙊 What Yuga Should Have Built

• 📱 Lens vs. Farcaster

Yesterday, the first issue of the new ETH Investors Club (EIC) magazine went live digitally, with physical copies redeemable via NFTs on the way.

The EIC effort is focused on spotlighting Ethereum’s current landscape through high-quality essays, and I’m honored that my piece, The Infinite Story Machine, was featured in the inaugural “Culture Corner” section.

In this essay, I lay out my overarching view of Ethereum as a novel kind of cultural engine for storymaking.

This concept largely informs how I approach the NFT landscape, so for today’s post I wanted to share this piece with you here in case it can help anyone else expand how they philosophically approach Ethereum and NFTs!

-WMP

The Infinite Story Machine

Storytelling is fundamental to human culture.

Stories are how we pass down our beliefs and values. They’re how we teach lessons and form communities, how we express our desires and entertain ourselves.

I have another more expansive conception of the word stories, though. It might be more accurately called “storymaking,” which I see as the universal becoming of things into reality and then into history, on and on.

I think it’s useful to consider Ethereum as a novel type of medium for both these senses of stories. This framing offers a new complement to traditional methods of valuing the network.

Of course, Ethereum has its own history, which Camila Russo did an amazing job chronicling the early days of in her book The Infinite Machine. I really love that title. And when I think about Ethereum philosophically today, my slight remix would be: Ethereum is an Infinite Story Machine.

This metaphor operates on multiple levels.

Firstly, Ethereum, fundamentally a ledger technology, is increasingly becoming like a new giant Book of Everything. The passing of its blocks are the filling and turning of its pages. Who did what and when. It’s like Borges’s Library of Babel begun in the real world.

The network’s far from encompassing all things yet, and navigating its early happenings can be labyrinthine, but no book’s organized instantly. And DeFi and NFT pioneers have already pointed toward a future where going onchain becomes much more common, so many more pages are certainly coming.

Furthermore, consider how Ethereum has become an open foundation for supporting external story machines—think L2 scaling solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism, which can in turn support their own L3 rollups, so on and so forth—while also being home to an ever-growing number of little story machines, i.e. app smart contracts.

For example, at the app layer one of my favorite projects is Zora. Zora has previously nicknamed its NFT creator suite, which is underpinned by Ethereum contracts, the Magic Machine. Beyond it’s technical architecture, it’s become a creative nexus of imagination and desire; put your art or memes or music or videos or writings in, i.e. your personal stories, to record and offer them up for ETH and for posterity.

In fact, Zora is also a hyperstructure, a crypto protocol that “can run for free and forever, without maintenance,” making it a great example of what I called a little story machine earlier. Its smart contracts will continue facilitating stories and storymaking atop Ethereum indefinitely, always having the potential for energies and dreams to flow through it and out of it in basically all directions.

Here, I’ll clarify that a set of contracts doesn’t have to be directly linked to creative efforts or NFT projects to be involved with storymaking. The ongoing facilitation and recording of DeFi protocol transactions and things like DeFi DAO votes are 100% storymaking, too, in that philosophical sense. It’s happenings made into history, on and on, onchain. Zora’s just a potent example since people directly use its smart contracts to create and share new cultural assets, i.e. stories.

All that said, Ethereum as the Infinite Story Machine with its ceaselessly churning landscape of smart contracts is ripe for fostering hypercultures, which LGHT has defined as a “crypto culture that can grow freely and forever [...] once it has entered the collective mind.” LGHT’s also asserted that “every creative entity that can put it’s context onchain has the opportunity to birth a hyperculture,” which I 100% agree with.

Think about it: Ethereum metaphorically provides the pages that bind protocols like Zora together, Zora then helps birth hypercultures, and then hypercultures birth more content and protocols, for example Nouns Builder, and this eventually leads to more new cultures and more new content and new protocols, ‘round and ‘round. A single creative act on the right smart contract can ripple out very far—that’s the cultural power of the Infinite Story Machine.

Zooming back out some to the level of people and groups, I’ll also note that Ethereum has literally become a hub for novel storytelling experiments, ranging from art to games and everything in between. Some have already come and gone, like the Cellarius worldbuilding project, or Chainspace, which was originally envisioned as a “cinematic wrapper” for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Yet some of these storytelling experiments are alive and well and poised to be around for a long time. I’m reminded here of the mesmerizing onchain virtual world sculpture Terraforms, which is an example of runtime art. This means the world itself is generated entirely at the level of its code + the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and so it will live for as long as Ethereum lives.

That art is interactive, as its code beckons collectors to participate in the world’s story. They have the ability to shift their parcel NFTs into “Daydreaming” mode, which can slow or altogether stop the project’s hardcoded obliteration. As Terraforms specialist Astrostl has previously explained:

“The smart contract code is set to begin a decay and eventual destruction of the castle unless ‘enough’ parcels are Daydreaming [...] Each Daydreamer forestalls this event by 10 years. If or when there are 500 dreamers, the collapse is forever prevented. Yay! At the time of this writing there are already 481, so this is delayed by 4,810 years and only needs 19 more to be safe for as long as the Ethereum blockchain exists.”

Another great but very different example would be Nouns DAO, which is creating a CC0 brand from the ground up. They’re forging their brand’s story by funding and deploying other stories, e.g. art, books, games, music, videos, etc. and they use Ethereum as their base of operations.

The Nouns are arguably the foremost collective storytelling experiment on Ethereum today, not to mention how their open, CC0 style has led to countless aesthetic and technical spinoff experiments at this point. The storytellers beget new stories, and those new stories beget new storytellers, and those new storytellers beget new stories, onward and outward evermore.

And with the world always evolving around us, the ways that Ethereum facilitates stories will evolve, too. As more people onboard to metaverse spaces in the decades ahead, Ethereum will underpin much of the associated cultural and economic activities therein. As AI agents become more commonplace, more onchain storymaking will come via virtual agents interacting with smart contracts, other AI, and humans. And validity proofs and coprocessors will likely see 1,000s of chains bloom atop Ethereum over time, the becoming of an ultimate machine of story machines.

Why is this conception of Ethereum as a new technological medium for stories and collective storymaking worthwhile, then? Because it hones in on and takes into account Ethereum’s immense creative, qi-like power in a way that other traditional framings—think “Ethereum as an alternative financial layer” or “Ethereum as a new internet of value”—haven’t.

Additionally, this understanding leads to two new ways to see Ethereum as valuable, one economic in nature and the other political. With regard to the former, stories and storymaking are like oxygen to people. We’re all weaving our own stories constantly or watching others do the same. This is a fundamental aspect of the human experience.

That said, recall the old sales axiom, “sell aspirin, not vitamins,” as people always need aspirin but only periodically buy vitamins. Ethereum’s aspirin, then, is storymaking. Its blockspace sells because of the need for storymaking, which is basically all-encompassing and will never go away as long as humans exist. We do, and we’re going to do more and more onchain. So ETH can gain in value if Ethereum can continue to widen as a gravity well of storymaking in the world. In my opinion, that blackhole’s already been opened.

As for the political dimension, consider how traditional institutions—from cable TV to the U.S. Treasury Department—colonize our desires, they colonize the ways we can experience stories. In other words, they constantly hail us into their status quos and call on us to experience the world on their terms.

Fair enough, but Ethereum in contrast is neutral, opt-in, and like a giant “choose your own adventure” computer, constantly churning, constantly open. It’s a Shakespearean foil to domineering institutions.

As such, Ethereum as an Infinite Story Machine is fundamentally a liberational technology. It offers us flights of escape from top-down, heavily-managed mainstream storymaking to bottom-up, liberated storymaking, whether personal or collective. It’s a juke out of the constant interpellation by corporate and state actors, which are fine in many cases but nightmarish in the worst, into new territories of freedom.

And here on the other side, here in open Ethereum, things are more untamed and experimental and remixable. As ClubNFT’s Artnome recently put it, “When you allow everyone to [create] whenever they like and as frequently as they like, without curation or censorship, you encounter all kinds of fascinating and unpredictable art.”

Accordingly, unpredictable media leads to multiplicitous cultures, and multiplicitous cultures lead to more storymaking proliferating out atop Ethereum in all directions, and on and on and on the new Book of Everything expands along.

In this way, yes, I see Ethereum as an Infinite Story Machine, and I see this machine as like a rising rhizomatic structure, akin to the roots it metaphorically resembles. Each of its points of connection have the potential to branch off and proliferate into new directions. Instead of a centralized hierarchy, it instead presents a vast, interconnected web of narratives that grow organically and intertwine. Each transaction, each smart contract is a node in this sprawling structure, ceaselessly leading to new collaborations and unexpected offshoots.

Here we become nomads, wandering the living machine, living our lives. Another major wrinkle of intrigue here is the ownership potential—what Chris Dixon calls the new Read Write Own paradigm—for us nomads along these infinite pathways of storymaking and interaction. Everything from collecting an Art Blocks NFT to aping into the GROK memecoin occurs along these ways, and while there may be onchain dangers here and there, the machine offers us that awesome freedom to try.

In the meta sense, this movement to build out something different in Ethereum, this kind of technology as a story of stories, is something I find noble. It’s the good fight, and advances the interests of people everywhere. And this conceptual framing helps me better see Ethereum for what it is, a titanic, productive engine of financial and cultural creation.

Ultimately, then, Ethereum will be a success so long as many people are storymaking on it. Like with Terraforms, a minimum number of folks dreaming here will prevent Ethereum’s collapse forever. Beyond that, I believe the ceiling is infinity.

Today’s action steps

• ✨ Check out the full EIC01 issue: Read for free

• 🔰 Grab a copy: Mint to redeem a physical issue later

There are many reasons to be creative around NFTs, like exploring new artistic ideas, experimenting with new tools, and reaching new audiences.

Yet this space also has a way of rewarding creativity and curiosity.

For example, this week alone I made +$4,000 from my personal artistic efforts: 887 $OP from the latest Optimism airdrop to NFTers, as I’ve released various collections like Stable Peasters on the Superchain, and 0.42 ETH so far from my Inglows mint on Highlight.

You don’t have to be a super acclaimed artist or anything like that to dive in here.

Tap in, experiment, and see what opportunities flow from your creative explorations. Share on Warpcast where likeminded people are most likely to find and appreciate your work. Just mint it, and going forward you can gain new friends, new knowledge, and new streams of income.

For now, though, it’s roundup time! Let’s catch you up per usual by recapping the most significant NFT events from the past week 👇

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Magic Eden is holding a Diamond drop for anyone who traded ETH NFTs between 2017 and 2024.

• Phantom added support for the new WNS NFT standard.

• Uniswap unveiled uni.eth subdomains for users of its mobile app.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Fountain brokered an OTC sale of a full Autoglyphs set for 5,000 ETH.

• fxhash launched on Base.

• Sound rolled out a new homepage flow.

• TASCHEN intro’d On NFTs, a book that surveys the history of NFT art.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• AdWorld released a DN-404 collection, Ape In.

• The Based LP launched on sudoswap.

• Pudgy Penguins intro’d a new toy line to Walmart.

• Syncus announced an airdrop for holders of Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, Pudgy Penguins, Sappy Seals, and Rektguys.

• Yuga Labs handed the CEO reins to founder Greg Solano.

📱 Onchain social

• Bello added support for Farcaster analytics.

• Botto intro’d the Botto Frame, which allows users to mint a Botto Access Pass.

• Farcaster added support for Solana addresses.

• Manifold now allows minting on Warpcast via Warps.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Champions, a new puzzle game, launched on Ronin.

• Axie Infinity opened pre-registrations for Classic Guilds.

• Parallel intro’d Boxes and Binders for better organizing your Parallel cards.

• Pizza Ninjas inscribed a Nintendo 64 emulator on Bitcoin.

• Proof of Play announced Multichain, a constellation of chains built on Arbitrum Orbit for Pirate Nation and beyond.

• War, a fully onchain MMO, is coming to Blast.

🪙 NFTfi

• Arcade concluded its Clash of Claims event.

• Nftperp unveiled its V2 alpha.

• Uniswap Foundation proposed turning on the UNI fee switch.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland celebrated its 4th birthday.

• Forbes announced a “permanent presence” in The Sandbox metaverse.

• Yuga Labs is hosting its first Apes Come Home event in the Otherside next week.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect this post on Mirror

• 🆕 See the other latest Metaversal write-ups:

  • 🎮 Immutable Games

  • 👾 Intro to Solana NFTs

Over time, all media will likely go “onchain” to some extent.

That’s why in these early days, advances in new directions here offer a taste of what’s to come. A prime example? This week Coinbase dropped its latest earnings report highlights as an NFT mint.

This crypto-native approach by Coinbase is an early showcase of NFTs, and, again, also signals a future where communications of all types will lean on blockchain tech for greater transparency and engagement.

That’s the future to come, and it’s closer than you think. In the meantime, though, let’s look back and catch you up on the rest of the past week’s biggest NFT happenings!

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• DN-404, an optimized adaptation of ERC-404, launched.

• ENS helped set up a donation address, irc.eth, for humanitarian efforts in Gaza.

• Magic Eden is launching its ETH marketplace on Feb. 27th.

• Zora streamlined its secondary marketplace UX.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Fingerprints is hosting the release of Figure’s latest collection, LINE.

• remnynt released Proscenium on Art Blocks.

• The Yellow Collective hosted its 1st artist edition drop, Chief Noggles by Cory Van Lew.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Pudgy Penguins maestro Luca Netz appeared on Bankless.

📱 Onchain social

• Orb launched its V2 on Lens.

• Pinata launched Photocaster, an image-centric Farcaster client.

• Syndicate intro’d Frame Chain, an OP Stack L3 for Farcaster frame developers.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity rolled out an update to its Axie Origins juggling policy.

• Influence is kicking off early access on Feb. 21st.

• Illuvium: Overworld is launching in Q2 2024.

• Pixelmon is migrating to Immutable.

• The Foundry published a primer on Parallel’s play-to-earn system.

🪙 NFTfi

• Arcade is kicking off its ARCD airdrop next week.

• MetaStreet launched ASCEND, a gamified contributor system.

• Nftperp added support for Concentrated Liquidity.

• Priming intro’d Sleeves, a DeFi vault system for caching Parallel cards.

• Uniswap is launching on Zora Network.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland added prebuilt templates to its SDK7.

• OpenAI intro’d Sora, a text-to-video AI model, which can prove big for generative environments in the metaverse going forward.

Last August, I first wrote about TITLES, a promising AI-friendly NFT remixing app.

Take note, then, because the TITLES team just joined forces with the Own the Doge project for a $DOG airdrop contest.

The idea? Go to titles.xyz/create, use the Doge AI model to prompt your best doge output, and then mint your work on Base by March 8th to earn a cut of the $300,000 prize pool.

It’s a fun and easy opportunity at the crossroads of NFTs, AI, and airdrop hunting, what’s not to love???

You’ve got one month to get your entries in, so get to prompting if you’re interested. In the meantime, let’s catch you up on the past week’s biggest NFT happenings!

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• ENS partnered with GoDaddy on ENS names support.

• Quest Protocol rebranded to Boost and intro’d Boost Inbox.

• Rabby Wallet announced its mobile beta.

• Squid rolled out crosschain EVM-Cosmos NFT buys.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Extropy, a new digital art studio, has arrived.

• Foundation intro’d Exhibitions.

• Sound unveiled a song pre-saving feature.

• Zora added support for Arbitrum mints and launched a remixer feature.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Claynosaurz is hosting a free open edition on Magic Eden next week.

• CryptoPunks launched its Punk in Residence program.

• Magic Eden announced partnerships with Azuki, Pudgy Penguins, and more.

• Pandora published their 1st audit via Peckshield.

• Quantum Cats sold out and conducted their first evolution.

📱 Onchain social

• Farcaster founder Dan Romero appeared on Bankless.

• Mirror rolled out support for Farcaster frames.

• PartyDAO intro’d Party Rooms, a new way to team up onchain.

• Yup announced a new crossposting tool.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity published an update on its SLP Stability Fund.

• Axie Homeland kicked off its Lunar New Year event.

• Beam deployed sphere.market on Immutable zkEVM.

• Guild of Guardians intro’d its updated whitepaper.

• Treasure intro’d Infinity Chains.

🪙 NFTfi

• MetaStreet is launching on Blast.

• Sudoswap launched on Base.

• Wasabi Protocol added support for ERC-404.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland announced its artist selections for its Art Week 2024 event.

• Nifty Island unveiled a dedicated Discord bot.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect this post on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 🌐 The ENS GoDaddy Partnership

  • 🪙 Intro to ERC-404

Minting’s the future.

This week, two enlightening NFT essays caught my eye.

The first, Minting Is the Native Business Model for Web3 (and maybe AI too) by Fred Wilson, explores how minting can empower people to monetize and control their data, reshaping the creator-consumer dynamic in crypto and AI spaces.

The second, Mintellectual Property by Zora’s Dee Goens, champions minting as a strategy for creators and brands to protect and monetize their content in this brave new world of AI-generated media.

I recommend reading both of these great write-ups, as they underscore minting's potential to redefine digital ownership in the years ahead. Let's dive into this week's NFT news inspired by these ideas! ✌️

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• ENS Vision rebranded to Vision.

• Holograph is preparing to launch its V2 protocol.

• Juicebox is hosting an NFT-based fundraiser for Tornado Cash devs’ legal defense.

• Magic Eden intro’d Non-Fungible DAO and $NFT and its new rewards system.

• Rabby, an Ethereum wallet, started its points system.

• Rainbow added support for custom networks and RPCs.

• Rarible launched Rari Chain, an L3 built on Arbitrum.

• Tensor unveiled a price lock feature.

• Xverse rolled out support for +30 exotic satoshi categories.

• Zora introduced follows and a new Canvas feature.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Art Blocks uploaded p5js 1.0.0 fully onchain.

• BasePaint started a sponsored gas program with CyberWallet.

• Catalog is launching a new internet radio offering.

• Christie’s kicked off its Creating Connections: Digital Art for Connectivity curated sale.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• 1337 Skulls is launching a new Zeros collection on Bitcoin.

• Commoners completed its mint atop uncommon sats.

• Courtyard released a revamped website.

• CyberBrokers intro’d Paradise Lost, a new production house.

• Mochimons, a collection by the artist behind the Pudgy Penguins art, launched on Base.

• Pudgy Penguins sold +750,000 toys in 2023.

• Quantum Cats auctioned their genesis cat for 6.28 BTC via Sotheby’s.

📱 Onchain social

• Ethereum Follow Protocol unveiled 8 new launch partners.

• Farcaster intro’d Frames, which can turn casts into interactive apps.

• Warpcast added support for NFT-gated group chats.

• Zapper launched profit and loss leaderboards for NFTs.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Aavegotchi published its latest dev update.

• Axie Infinity launched its Homeland beta.

• Endless Clouds is bringing Treeverse and Capsule Heroes to Immutable.

• Parallel is preparing for the Planetfall Prime Event, which will distribute 60k $PRIME tokens.

• Pirate Nation unveiled a procedurally-generated Exploration mode.

• Speedtracer kicked off its public mint.

• Tyson Battistella intro’d CYTO, a cellular evolution game on Zora.

🪙 NFTfi

• Arcade added support for Wasabi tokens as collateral.

• Blast welcomed a series of new projects, including Bloom, Insrt, and Particle.

• Gondi set a new record for the longest-term NFT loan, i.e. 5 years.

• Uniswap added shortcuts to its wallet.

• Wasabi Protocol added trading pairs for CryptoPunks and Mfers.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland is hosting its Wellness Week event.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect this post on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 🎨 The Highlight NFT Marketplace

  • 🌴 The Nifty Island Play-to-Airdrop

  • 📜 The Bankless Guide to Scroll

The NFT ecosystem is entering a new spring.

All around us, creativity and opportunity are blooming. There are new collections, games, tools, airdrops, and beyond sprouting in every direction.

That said, try making a list of 3-5 things from this week’s news roundup that interest you most and then go explore them deeper in the coming days. My list looks like so right now:

• Explore the Nifty Island open beta

• Set up my Bountycaster account

• Check out Gallery’s new features

• Try Party’s new group chats

• Update my Ronin wallet

Make this process a routine, each week put some time into learning about and trying new things around NFTs to level up your experience and opportunities. Sow the seeds now for the harvests to come!

What’s your list look like, what’re you exploring this week? Let me know! In the meantime, let’s catch you up with the latest Metaversal roundup ✌️

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Blast launched its L2 testnet.

• Bonfire unveiled its 2.0 platform.

• NFT Price Floor published its 2023 retro report.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• BasePaint passed +100k canvas mints.

• BasePaintBot added support for 1-year subscriptions.

• Gallery rolled out a series of new features.

• Outland published an essay on Mathcastles's Zero Suite release.

• SHL0MS released a new work, ∞.

• The Yellow Collective, a new group focused on supporting creatives around Nouns and the Superchain, launched on Base.

• Zora creators have collectively earned +555 ETH via protocol rewards so far.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Bitcoin Pizza Ninjas raised 45 BTC through its collection drop.

• CryptoPunks relaunched the CryptoPunks721 system.

• CryptoUndeads concluded its art reveal.

• Little Swag World, a PFP collection created with AI, dropped on Solana.

• Pooly NFT minters may soon be receiving airdrops.

• Donald Trump announced a new Bitcoin NFT trading card collection.

• Nakamigos released the Crypto Trading Cards collection.

• Pudgy Penguins temporarily passed a +20 ETH floor.

• The Shadows, a new Ordinals collection, opened claims for holders.

• Quantum Cats is publishing its mint details today.

📱 Onchain social

• Bountycaster added support for user services posts.

• Ethereum Follow Protocol unveiled seven new launch partners.

• Farcaster dropped an NFT to commemorate its Giraffe update.

• Hey, formerly Lenster, added support for tipping.

• Party intro'd private group chats.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Aavegotchi opened registrations for its Gotchi Battler tournament.

• Apeiron announced its $ANIMA airdrop campaign.

• Axie Infinity launched Origins Season 7.

• BattlePlan notched +300k battles in its first week.

• Cool Cats is bringing its new Match Quest game to Immutable.

• LooksRare saw its onchain games pass +10k ETH in volume.

• Nifty Island launched its open beta and Play-to-Airdrop campaign.

• Ronin intro'd the latest Ronin Wallet update.

🪙 NFTfi

• NFTfi.com launched a bug bounty program for its upcoming refinancing feature.

• Uniswap is the top burner of ETH over the past month.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland launched an open call for its Art Week 2024 event.

• Upstreet is onboarding all Webaverse Genesis Pass holders to The Street.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect the latest Metaversal posts on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 🔶 Recursive Bitcoin Inscriptions

  • 🚦 15 Tips for NFT Beginners

  • 🪙 Getting Started with ether.fi

There are things I know now about NFTs that I wish I knew when I first began here.

That said, with a new bull crypto market taking shape, NFTs are gaining momentum again and may soon face their next big influx of users.

If family and friends start asking you for advice anew then, what should you tell them today?

I've been thinking about this question a lot, so for this latest post let's go over 15 tips you can share with any NFT newcomers in your life!

-WMP

15 Tips for NFT Beginners!

1) Not everything's a flip

Newcomers tend to initially approach all NFTs as investments, which is a recipe for frustration.

Sure, there are digital collectibles like profile picture (PFP) projects that you can speculate on as you would with physical collectibles, like action figures or trading cards.

But there are many different types of NFTs, from access passes to gaming assets and everything in between. And many of these are not "buy low, sell higher" plays, as they offer different types of value—e.g. cultural value, educational value, utility value, etc.

For example, I don't want to sell my 20 Axies and don't view them as investments because I use them as gaming pieces to access Axie Infinity, to fight for AXS token rewards, to breed more Axies, and so forth. Approaching all the different types of value around NFTs beyond just financial value is how to really make the most of being here.

2) Ceilings are for fans

If you're like me, you may periodically find yourself fawning over the NFTs with the rarest traits in a collection, e.g a new 10k PFP project.

However, down the road these rarer NFTs tend to be very illiquid compared to their "floor" NFT counterparts, i.e. a project's common lowest-price pieces.

All that said, only go after rare NFTs if you love them and wouldn't mind holding them for a long time and potentially selling for a loss later.

Otherwise, if it's flipping you're after, stick to the floors, as they offer much better liquidity and volume prospects in general.

3) NFTs can be like levered longs

Speaking of flipping, owning an Ethereum NFT can be similar to having a leveraged investment in ETH. The same is true of a Bitcoin NFT for BTC, or a Solana NFT for SOL, etc.

The idea here? Sometimes NFTs have amplified price correlation with their native currency.

For instance, if ETH increases in value, an Ethereum NFT's price may increase even more so percentage-wise. Be careful, though, because the opposite is also true: a drop in ETH's value could lead to a larger percentage drop in the NFT's value at that time!

4) Try to always at least mint 2

There's always new drops happening around the NFT ecosystem these days.

Some of these projects may go on to become very popular, so a good rule of thumb is to mint at least two NFTs from any given drop.

This way you can have one to keep and enjoy forever if you'd like, while also having at least one available to sell in case good offers start flowing in later!

5) Beware of scams

There's money to be made around NFTs, so the unfortunate reality is that scammers—ranging from lone-wolf blackhat hackers to nation-state cyber warriors like Lazarus Group—are on the prowl here.

As such, you have to take wallet security seriously at all times. Consider things like:

• 🔏 Siloing your most valuable NFTs in a Safe multisig.

• 👛 Minting from a dedicated mint wallet that doesn't store your main crypto holdings.

• 🔍 Using transaction preview tools like Fire to vet your transactions.

• ❎ Routinely revoking your old token approvals on Revoke.cash to defend against smart contract hacks.

• 🧠 Researching and cross-checking drop links to avoid fake mint traps.

If you layer these sorts of approaches together, you can secure your NFTs and make sure hackers don't have their work cut out for them.

6) Don't rush on new chains

Over the last year, we've seen a resurgence of NFTs on non-Ethereum networks like Bitcoin, Solana, Cosmos, and Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions.

There's a lot to explore across the board, then. But if you're just learning the ropes of NFTs in general, don't let FOMO make you cut any corners.

Do your research, safely store your new wallet recovery phrases, triple check that the addresses you're interacting with are the right ones. Stuff like this will help you surf the NFT frontier without major snafus.

7) Just mint it

For creatives, NFTs offer a great avenue for distributing your work, whether that be illustrations, music, photography, 3D sculptures, etc.

But in being creative, you may also have certain doubts. What if my work isn't good enough? What if no one mints? What if I don't have everything organized yet?

My advice is to ignore these doubts: just mint it. Experiment, explore, try different platforms. Archive your work, old or new, onchain for posterity. See what happens. And whatever happens, you can always look back on these NFTs as digital signposts of your creative journey.

Also, consider testing the waters at the start by dropping free mints on projects with "Protocol Rewards," e.g. Zora, Mirror, and Sound, so you can earn a little bit of ETH every time someone collects your work!

8) Explore NFTs as a medium

Some projects use NFTs just as plain ol' digital containers for static art.

That model's perfectly fine, especially from a distribution standpoint, but it's also not as artistically interesting compared to blockchain-native art that approaches NFTs as a new medium.

That said, study the projects that couldn't exist as they do without NFTs because they're some of the finest demonstrations of boundary-pushing creativity in crypto today.

One excellent example here is the fully onchain art collection Terraforms by Mathcastles, which uses Ethereum as an always-on computer for the many 1,000s of interactive parcels that make up its Hypercastle artwork. Hunt for and study efforts like this, and you'll learn the deeper magic of NFTs.

9) Experiment with NFT games

The NFT gaming sector may still be young and experimental, but its potential to disrupt mainstream gaming in big ways grows by the day.

Accordingly, NFT games are one of the most promising areas in crypto right now, and we're starting to see more variety and deeper gameplay possibilities here, meaning more fun all around.

While you're still getting the hang of things, it's probably better to start with something simple and passive like the Tamagotchi-style Fren Pet game on Base, then work your way into deeper titles like Axie Infinity and Parallel.

10) Engage in interesting communities

Found a project you like? Hop into its Discord server and have a look around!

Some of the best discussions, connections, and mints I've ever come across have been derived from engaging around the communities of NFT projects I enjoyed.

To be sure, you'll make the most of your time around NFTs if you shift from lurker to active participant, that I promise.

11) Try new projects

It seems like new platforms and protocols arrive every day in the NFT space. Don’t be complacent! This blooming gives you opportunities to be among the first users of these projects in the world.

Of course, knowledge is its own reward in crypto, so trying new things grants you valuable frontier XP. You want to be knowledge-maxxing all the time here.

But these opps can also lead to other rewards, like discovering more new projects or earning airdrops from protocols that are decentralizing to their communities. Sometimes it pays to be curious in NFTs!

12) Keep an eye on gas fees

In times of high network activity, the gas costs of transactions on chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum can run pretty steep.

If you're facing high gas prices when trying to move some NFTs around, consider waiting for a period of lower activity when prices get cheaper to save money! For instance, Etherscan has a great Gas Tracker service you can monitor.

Also, make use of low-cost networks like L2s and Solana where you can sidestep fee pains altogether.

13) Don't over invest

You may get FOMO and want to ape into an NFT project that's caught your eye.

That's normal, but it's also important to never let that FOMO go so far that you overextend yourself and invest more than you can afford to lose.

Don't try to keep up with others, everyone's in a different place in their journey. Set aside what's right for you when it comes to NFTs, stick to that and have some fun, and see what happens from there. That’s the way.

14) Don't over fret your sells

You may end up selling an NFT one day whose value skyrockets after you sell it.

Whatever you do, don't dwell on this fact. It leads nowhere good, like emotional "catch up" trading that tends to lead to busts.

Take your sells in stride, and avoid obsessing over your misses. You'll be more relaxed and grounded for whatever the future brings accordingly. This is the NFT frontier, you’re going to experiment and have some hiccups. It happens to everyone!

15) Mind your taxes

Remember, NFT transactions are taxable events in many jurisdictions.

That said, research your local tax laws regarding crypto and NFTs, and keep notes of your transactions for accurate tax reporting. Tax tools like Token Tax are also a great help here.

It's certainly not sexy or fun, but keeping on top of your NFT tax obligations will save you massive headaches come tax season!

Action Steps

• 🔥 Catch up on my previous write-up: Recursive Bitcoin NFTs

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror

On Ethereum, and besides the base constraints of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the programmable possibilities around NFTs are limited only to our imaginations thanks to smart contracts.

As for Ordinals, a.k.a. Bitcoin NFTs, they face a different set of tradeoffs in being inscribed on individual satoshis. One of the downsides here? The lack of composability and expressiveness that smart contracts offer.

However, the Ordinals community has innovated a sort of native workaround here known as recursive Bitcoin inscriptions. They’re not smart contracts, of course, but they do notably bring dynamism to Bitcoin NFTs.

This type of inscription use is on the rise as more Bitcoin projects are embracing the technique, so for today’s post let’s get you up to speed on the basics of this new innovative method!

-WMP

An Intro to Recursive Bitcoin Inscriptions

When it comes to Ethereum NFTs, composability and dynamism come via smart contracts.

For example, regarding composability, Ethereum NFTs can be readily built on and around through integrations with other smart contracts, like those seen in the protocols of the rising NFTfi lending sector.

And as for dynamism, Ethereum NFTs can tap smart contracts to evolve upon certain conditions being met, e.g. a transfer to a new wallet, or in real-time via code running in the always-on EVM.

In contrast, Ordinals, which burst onto the NFT scene in 2023, don’t enjoy the benefits of smart contracts, which aren’t native to Bitcoin—hence “Bitcoin L2s” like Stacks.

Yet take note, because this lack hasn’t stopped Ordinals builders from establishing their own Bitcoin-centric versions of NFT composability and dynamism via recursive inscriptions.

What Are Recursive Bitcoin Inscriptions?

If you recall, minting Ordinals entails inscribing data—images, videos, texts, game emulators, etc.—onto satoshis, the smallest denomination of Bitcoin.

In the context of Ordinals, then, recursion refers to the ability of one inscription to access and use the content of other inscriptions.

This technique can be achieved by tapping specific “recursive endpoints,” like r/sat, which is usable for fetching the initial 100 inscription IDs on a particular satoshi.

Accordingly, recursive Bitcoin inscriptions allow projects to effectively bypass the typical data limitations of Bitcoin’s 4 MB block size limit, enabling more extensive and intricate digital creations atop the OG blockchain.

This method has also notably paved the way for composability and dynamism in Bitcoin NFTs, as recursive inscriptions work well for things like sharing resources (openly usable audio, code, images, etc. on Bitcoin) and content remixing (modifying existing inscriptions on Bitcoin).

The Recursive Inscriptions Landscape

Initially, Ordinals were siloed content—an inscription wasn’t aware of anything but itself, so to speak.

Then the OnChainMonkey (OCM) project helped pioneer the recursion method with the design of its OCM Dimensions collection, which it first inscribed on Bitcoin back in February 2022.

In deploying the OCM Dimensions, the OCM team uploaded the p5.js creative coding library via inscriptions and then used recursive inscriptions to ping p5.js to build out the collection.

This innovation expanded the landscape of possibilities around Ordinals and led to a surge of new creative efforts, like generative art releases, on Bitcoin.

The popularization of recursion led the developers of the ord protocol, the system underlying Ordinals, to officially integrate recursive inscriptions starting with the ord 0.6.2 and 0.11.0 updates.

Since then, a range of projects have begun embracing recursive inscriptions toward new ends. One area where this method is gaining a lot of traction presently is in Bitcoin’s PFP sector, where collections have started uploading their traits via inscriptions and then using recursive inscriptions to build out 1,000s of unique digital collectibles.

A team breaking ground here right now is Bitcoin Pizza Ninjas, which is using recursive inscriptions for its art generation and upgradeable traits. The builders have even deployed a Super Nintendo emulator on Bitcoin that its ninja characters can play within via recursive inscriptions.

Another project worth tracking currently? Quantum Cats, a collection by the Taproots Wizard team that’s using recursive inscriptions and other new techniques to build the project out in the open but without revealing the completed art ahead of its official release.

Trying Recursive Inscriptions

As a regular end user, there’s nothing special you have to do to access the capabilities of recursive inscriptions—you simply collect from projects that employ this method and then enjoy however they use it, e.g. upgradeable PFP traits.

However, you will need a Bitcoin wallet that offers support for recursive inscriptions, as many don’t. Two wallets that do offer such support currently are Leather and Xverse.

With either of these browser wallets in hand, you’ll be able to own and manage your Ordinals, recursive or otherwise, in non-custodial fashion. As they say, not your keys, not your Bitcoin NFTs!

The Big Picture

With projects like Bitcoin Pizza Ninjas and Quantum Cats pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with recursive inscriptions, we’re entering a new era of digital collectibles on Bitcoin.

While it still lacks all the power of smart contracts, this emerging technique not only circumvents the data limitations inherent in Bitcoin’s architecture but also introduces layers of interactivity and dynamism that were previously unattainable on the OG blockchain.

In other words, love ‘em or hate ‘em, recursive Bitcoin inscriptions are just another reason why Ordinals are here to stay. As such, look for further booms around Bitcoin’s art, gaming, and PFP scenes going forward as more and more projects start experimenting with linking inscriptions with other inscriptions!

Action Steps

• 🔥 Catch up on my previous write-up: Optimistic Bloom

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror

Optimism’s blooming.

The stewards of the Superchain just awarded millions of $OP in grants to builders across its ecosystem.

The L2’s also welcomed +41,000 new creators since the start of its We ❤️ the Art contest, which just entered its judging period and will feature 1.2 million $OP in prizes.

These windfalls will ripple out through our space, leading to new experiences and better resources around the NFT frontiers of Optimism, Base, Zora, and beyond.

Bullish. Keep your eyes peeled on the Superchain then, as the party’s just starting here. In the meantime, let’s catch you up on everything else—time for your latest weekly NFT roundup! ✌️

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• OpenSea added support for embeddable wallets.

• Presail, a web3 fundraising platform, launched on Ronin.

• Rare Pepe Wallet added support for Bitcoin Stamps.

• Twitter axed support for NFT-linked profile pictures.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• 0xfff.eth released YOU ARE HERE, a conceptual art drop spread across +20 chains.

• 3LAU unveiled 3DM, an AI music generator trained on his music.

• Amber Vittoria dropped her new Vibes collection on OpenSea.

• Fingerprints acquired 10 pieces from 0xhaiku’s Receipts series.

• Golan Levin released Cytographia on Art Blocks.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Azuki announced plans for an anime series.

• PROOF Collective launched the Talons Marketplace for Moonbirds holders.

• Shadow Hats, a new collection by the creators of the Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult, quickly sold out on Bitcoin.

• Taproot Wizards introduced a new collection, Quantum Cats.

📱 Onchain social

• Farcaster projects just received +$1M worth of grants from Optimism’s RetroPGF Round 3.

• Zee Prime Capital published its SocialFi thesis.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity updated the monetary policy of $SLP.

• Bitcoin Ninjas deployed a Super Nintendo emulator on Bitcoin.

• Cartridge proposed the creation of a Dope World L3.

• Gas Hero, a new strategy game, is racking up big stats on Polygon.

• Immutable welcomed new games, including Second World and Space Mavericks.

• LooksRare migrated its games suite to Arbitrum.

• Pixel Vault released BattlePlan.

• Sky Mavis launched the Mavis Store, a game assets shop on Ronin.

• Sky Strife open-sourced its onchain RTS game infra.

🪙 NFTfi

• Astaria is sunsetting support for its initial app ahead of the launch of its new Starport system.

• NFTfi.com added support for Rare Pepes and Spells of Genesis cards.

• Wasabi, a new NFT leverage protocol, notched $2M worth of trading volume in its first week.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland rolled out simplified account creations via Magic.

• Nifty Island added support for Base and Coinbase Wallet.

• Voxels unveiled a new home page experience.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect the latest Metaversal posts on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 🔥 Return of Ronin

  • 💚 Green NFTs

  • 🔮 The TIA Staking Opp

  • 🟠 The Bankless Guide to Ordinals

NFTs have an image problem in the mainstream.

One reason? Many people think NFTs are bad for the environment.

The reality is that most NFT activity today happens atop proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana, which use remarkably little energy.

For today’s post, let’s dive into some energy estimates here and use that as a springboard to discuss the bigger picture!

-WMP

The New Era of Green NFTs

One of the biggest outstanding misconceptions about NFTs is that they require excessive amounts of energy.

This is a holdover from the 2021 NFT bull run, when Ethereum still ran on proof-of-work (PoW) mining. PoW was used to bootstrap Ethereum, and the physicality of mining operations is energy-intensive, but the plan all along was for Ethereum to dephysicalize by switching to PoS, i.e. ditch physical miners in favor of digital validators.

That plan was put into action in September 2022 via The Merge update, which officially shifted Ethereum to PoS. The energy savings were immediate and immense.

Indeed, according to a 2022 report by the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI), The Merge slashed Ethereum’s yearly energy consumption by +99.9% and its annual carbon footprint by +99.9%, making the network a decidedly green blockchain.

Additionally, a newer October 2023 report by CCRI examined the energy stats of seven PoS chains, namely Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Avalanche, Algorand, Cardano, and Polkadot.

Of these projects, the study found the least-consuming network was Polkadot, which matched the average annual energy consumption of ~15 U.S. households, while the most-consuming was Ethereum, which equaled the usage of ~542 U.S. households.

Equally modest were these networks’ carbon footprints, which CCRI’s 2023 report found ranged from Polkadot’s 70.8 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to Ethereum’s 2,088.4 tonnes.

Altogether, then, these seven PoS chains notched around 4,935 tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2023. To give you a sense of scale here, a recent Our World in Data report estimated that the entire world emitted more than 34 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2022. That means the most popular PoS chains in crypto currently account for somewhere around 0.000014% of global emissions!

All that said, currently one of the most popular use cases for blockchains is NFTs, and most NFT activity today occurs on PoS chains. The reality is that the energy footprint of the contemporary NFT ecosystem is minuscule, and it pales in comparison to emissions from things like the mainstream gaming industry or the operations of global data centers.

Of course, in combination with these base PoS networks, the advent of Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions atop chains like Ethereum means the cryptoeconomy is well-positioned to accommodate increasing amounts of extremely energy-efficient financial activity (DeFi) and cultural activity (NFTs) going forward.

This is why the “NFTs are killing the environment” chatter in the mainstream is so absurd, as the opposite is true. PoS infra + NFTs should be championed as a green alternative to physical collectibles, physical merch, etc. because they are a green alternative!

Imagine if every big touring band and every big sports team in the world replaced 10% of their physical merch offerings with digital merch via NFTs—that switch alone would lead to tremendous savings in annual CO2 emissions thanks to the cuts in manufacturing and shipping operations. It’s just the truth, whether naysayers want to accept it or not.

Here, I’m reminded of the Optimism L2’s We ❤️ The Art contest, which just fielded +7,000 NFT submissions. It didn’t entail 1,000s of artists shipping in physical canvas submissions from around the world, a process that would’ve drawn a huge carbon footprint. It happened with digital mints ultimately atop Ethereum, a network with the same annual energy consumption as a small town with a population of 1,000-1,500 people.

It’s not that everything physical has to or should be digitized as an NFT, but let’s be clear, among their other benefits PoS NFTs offer a green, environmentally friendly way to engage in 21st-century culturemaking, and that’s something that should be celebrated.

However, there has been a revival in Bitcoin NFTs since the arrival of the Ordinals tokenization method last year, and these NFTs are underpinned by PoW mining. Ordinals are technically compelling and offer a great cost-to-permanence ratio, but their energy footprint is unquestionably many multiples higher than PoS NFTs because of the extensive physicality of Bitcoin mining operations.

I suspect, and personally wish, that Bitcoin will eventually make the shift to PoS. In the meantime, Bitcoin may give ammunition to NFT critics, but that shouldn’t stop us from trumpeting the extreme energy efficiency of PoS NFTs in contrast and pushing back against blanket mischaracterizations of all NFTs as energy-intensive!

Action steps

• 🌳 Read CCRI’s 2023 PoS report: The PoS Benchmark Study

• 🔥 Catch up on my previous write-up: Return of Ronin

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror

Crypto has a way of rewarding the curious.

The NFT space was reminded of that dynamic once again this week when scaling project Dymension announced DYM airdrop allocations for holders of Pudgy Penguins (Ethereum), Mad Lads (Solana), and Bad Kids (Cosmos).

That’s just one recent example, but it highlights how going wide across the NFT frontier is poised to be increasingly rewarding for the crypto curious in this new bull market.

I say explore this frontier, have fun, and collect and mint some stuff you like. The chips can fall where they may after that. Knowledge is its own reward here, always, but other rewards are likely, too.

You’ll need your starter tools, of course. Your Ethereum + L2s wallet can be your home base. For Bitcoin NFTs, consider the Xverse wallet. For Solana, Phantom. For Cosmos chains, Keplr.

In the meantime, though, let’s get you up to speed on the latest happenings here—time for your latest weekly NFT roundup!

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Bitcoin faced a potential BRC-20 indexer schism, though a split was averted.

• Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Ordinals, unveiled the latest update of the ord block explorer and indexer.

• ENS reached +2 million names registered.

• House of Nouns launched its V2 platform.

• Less Fees & Gas airdropped $LFG, a Solana token, to Ethereum users.

• Ordinals underwent its Jubilee upgrade, an optimization that “blesses” what would have otherwise been “cursed” inscriptions going forward.

• The Nouns Square published the 2023 Nouns DAO Wrap-Up.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Mathcastles deployed its Terraforms V2 release, featuring Antenna mode, and its latest artwork, the zk-based Angelus.

• Sound upped its curator rewards.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Emblem Vault launched the Emblem Vault SDK.

• Jack Butcher announced giveaways of a special series of inscribed Checks, slated for Feb. 8th.

• NodeMonkes, a new Bitcoin NFT collection, has surged to a 0.28 BTC floor.

• Rektguy holders are being given equity in Rekt Brands Inc.

• Yaypegs has been offered up for sale.

📱 Onchain social

• Bountycaster streamlined support for Base payments.

• Buttrfly added support for minting Sound tracks.

• Farcaster, in collaboration with Coinbase Wallet, is temporarily offering free sign-ups.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity added the Parts Evolution system to Axie Origins.

• Cartridge proposed the creation of a custom L3 rollup for Realms World.

• Parallel kicked off Season 6 gameplay, with the title’s closed beta now having notched over 725,000 matches to date.

• Pixels launched its Play-to-Airdrop 2.0 campaign.

• Ronin reached +1 million monthly active addresses.

• Sky Strife begins its Season 0.1 gameplay next week.

• WASD published 5 Onchain Games to Try and Guide to Onchain Solana Gaming.

🪙 NFTfi

• NFTfi.com facilitated +150 loans against Rektguys last month.

• Uniswap notched a new all-time high volume record on Arbitrum.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland unveiled a series of new build templates.

• Midjourney is angling for a holodeck, i.e. real-time “open world” visuals, by the end of the year.

• VIPE saw its VRM marketplace grow to +250,000 avatars in 2023.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect the latest Metaversal posts on Mirror

• 🔴 Collect my free We Love the Art submission: Audacity of the Troubadour

• 🆕 See my other recent write-ups:

  • 🎇 2023 NFT Highlights

  • 📬 Bitcoin Stamps Explained

As we reflect on 2023, it's evident that the NFT space just weathered a tough bear market.

Yet resilience has been our hallmark, with numerous projects not only surviving but thriving here thanks to new advancements and new tailwinds.

Accordingly, today let’s dive into the most prominent NFT trends of this past year, spotlighting the biggest happenings and notable projects that got us to where we are now!

-WMP

P.S. This is the final Metaversal post of 2023! I’ll be back with my next post on Jan. 5th after a little holiday R&R. In the meantime, Happy New Year!

The 10 Biggest NFT Trends of 2023 📆

1. Rise of the NFT L2s

When I first started tracking NFTs in 2019, the L2 scene didn’t exist yet.

Fast forward to this year, and we’ve started to see all kinds of NFT-friendly L2 advances.

First-movers like Arbitrum and Optimism have started gaining more minting activity and have seen their evolving tech stacks embraced for launching new culture-centric rollups, e.g. Xai and Redstone.

Big industry names like Coinbase and Zora also joined the fray, deploying Base and Zora Network respectively.

And new upstarts have thrown their hats in the ring, like Frame, an L2 that’s enshrining things like NFT royalties directly into its network.

In other words, the NFT Scaling Era has officially begun!

2. New PFP Powers

The profile picture (PFP) sector of NFTs was particularly hard hit this bear market, with attention and floor prices caving in for most projects through the first three quarters of the year.

However, some collections bucked this downtrend and became new powerhouses in the PFP category, namely Opepens and Pudgy Penguins.

Launched in May 2023 with Set 001, Jack Butcher’s Opepens have provided a new blueprint for how to release a collectively curated NFT collection over time, capturing the imaginations of thousands in the process.

As for Pudgy Penguins, the project ascended into “blue-chip PFF” status after a string of big developments in 2023, not least among them the placement of Pudgy Toys in 2,000 Walmart stores.

3. Games Get Gud

The entire NFT gaming scene made strides broadly in 2023, yet it’s safe to say that the space’s reigning S-tier titles—Axie Infinity and Parallel—continued to separate from the pack.

Not only did Axie’s ecosystem swell with a handful of new Axie-based titles, the franchise’s main game also fielded huge upgrades like the arrival of Axie Experience Points (AXP) and the Axie Parts Evolution system.

On the other hand, Parallel released new starter decks this year and kicked off its Closed Beta gameplay, which has seemingly received rave reviews from everyone who’s tried it, including myself.

These two games are better than they’ve ever been, and there’s much more to come!

4. The Infra Renaissance

There was an explosion of incredible and varied infrastructure developments around NFTs in 2023.

For example, Nouns V3 just open-sourced the first DAO-native forking mechanism.

The ENS Name Wrapper also arrived, offering unprecedented flexibility and functionalities to ENS domain holders.

And we can’t forget Zora, which unveiled Protocol Rewards, a system for rewarding Zora users with ETH.

Yet this is all just scratching the surface. ERC-6551 just turned every NFT into a wallet, mint.fun made minting easy, Privy introduced user-friendly embedded wallets, so on and so forth.

Long story short, it’s a good time to be building around NFTs.

5. Multipolar Momentum

While Ethereum has dominated the vast majority of all NFT action for years now, the Bitcoin and Solana NFT scenes joined the NFT party in a big way in 2023.

Of course, the Bitcoin NFT scene has been rejuvenated and surging in activity ever since the arrival of Ordinals, a new native tokenization system for Bitcoin, back in January.

In kind, Ordinals quickly inspired the standardization of other alternative Bitcoin tokenization methods, like Stamps, which has only quickened the pace of recent Bitcoin NFT activity.

As for Solana, the network has become the next big airdrop frontier and has seen its SOL token and activity stats rally in recent months, bringing in a new influx of users that have swarmed to the chain’s top projects, e.g. NFT marketplaces like Magic Eden and Tensor.

Accordingly, now Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana are the current majors when it comes to NFTs, and that dynamic seems poised to remain true for the foreseeable future.

6. Onchain Revival

2023 saw a resurgence in onchain NFTs and onchain experiments.

For instance, the Chaos Roads mint and the recent Terraforms update have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible with blockchain art.

Additionally, projects like BasePaint and Party have paved new avenues for people to coordinate and create together onchain.

Of course, “onchain” isn’t inherently better than “offchain.” It’s just that blockchains are a new type of medium + infra combo, and never before have the creative horizons here been so wide open with potential!

7. Crypto Social’s Bloom

Crypto social apps have risen to the fore in 2023, with prime examples here being Warpcast and Lens.

With this app surge has come new spotlights on NFTs, as these types of projects can and do natively highlight and facilitate NFT mints.

As such, it’s now becoming that much easier to find what your friends are minting and to share with them what you’re minting at any given time.

Simply put, then, the rising crypto social scene this year has made NFTs more social in general!

8. Arrival of AI

Notably, 2023 witnessed the first big research undertakings around the crossroads of AI and NFTs.

In the metaverse sector, Upstreet, an NFT-integrated multiplayer world designed for interactions between humans and AI agents, released a 28-page ChatWorld that explored a variety of potential applications for AI agents within Upstreet.

Moreover, gaming experiments like Parallel Colony introduced the idea of “1.5 player games,” where humans will passively guide autonomous AI agents to perform a variety of different tasks, blurring the lines between where human play ends and AI play begins.

These types of efforts, while early, suggest the AI x NFT crossroads can be massive going forward.

9. RWA Tokenization

RWA stands for “real world assets” on the blockchain, and they can be anything from real estate to physical trading cards.

One of the main ways to bring these sorts of offchain assets onchain? By representing them with NFTs!

Indeed, in 2023 we saw the first high-profile demonstration of what NFT-powered RWAs can look like via Courtyard’s tokenized Pokémon card drops.

This is just one example on the cultural side of things, but more experiments—both cultural and financial—are coming here, and the first blueprints are decisively laid now.

10. Going Cross-Chain

2023 was also the year where taking NFTs cross-chain from one network to another became more viable than ever.

This is largely thanks to the rise of projects like LayerZero, the pioneer of Omnichain NFTs for transferring between blockchains, and Holograph, which has developed Hologram NFTs that can maintain consistent IDs on all Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments.

Additionally, Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) arrived this year, paving another robust avenue for projects to make NFTs interoperable across a range of chains.

As such, NFTs no longer need to be isolated to one network. They can go where they need to go, and this is a newer possibility that will undoubtedly be explored extensively in the years ahead!

Action steps:

• 🪂 Catch up on my previous write-up: 2024 NFT Airdrops

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror

Happy holidays!

This is, of course, the last Metaversal post before Christmas this year—I’ll be picking things back up with the next issue on Thursday, December 28th.

In the meantime, I wish you all a joyful and relaxing holiday season filled with warmth and cheer. I deeply appreciated your readership throughout the bear, you’re all permanently on my Nice List!

For now, let’s close out the week strong—time for your latest weekly NFT roundup. Thanks for reading everyone, until next time ✌️

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• ENS passed control of its root system to ENS DAO.

• Etherscan added support for refreshing NFT metadata.

• Frame, the upcoming NFT L2, unveiled $FRAME airdrop plans.

• Mirror intro’d Protocol Rewards.

• Phantom added Bitcoin support.

• Privy unveiled global wallets.

• WalletConnect announced plans for a decentralized messaging network.

• Xai, an Arbitrum-powered L3, is conducting an airdrop next week.

• Zora kicked off creator referrals, rolled out instant withdrawals, activated bridge-less minting, and launched payment splits.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Atrium has paid out +$2.6M to artists to date.

• BasePaint has facilitated +220 ETH volume over the past four months.

• Pob Studio announced Ethverse, a new hub for exploring your Ethereum history.

• Sound intro’d Protocol Rewards.

• Sotheby’s Metaverse announced its latest curated group of long-form generative artists.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Moonbirds was at the center of acquisition rumors this week.

• Smolbrains holders just received a community-created $SMOL airdrop.

• Yuga Labs intro’d a new optimized CryptoPunks wrapper contract.

📱 Crypto social

• Orb, a Lens app, just added support for shared community wallets.

• MadFi, another Lens app, unveiled a Zora Mint open action.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity launched its highly-anticipated Parts Evolution system.

• EthXY, a new MMORPG on Base, released its app.

• Gods Unchained returned to the Epic Games Store.

• Nouns DAO is voting on renewing the Nouns Esports team.

• Parallel conducted its 2023 Holiday Airdrop event.

🪙 NFTfi

• Arcade added a Uniswap integration.

• MetaStreet just facilitated a 250 ETH loan against a Zombie CryptoPunk.

• Uniswap crossed $1B worth of swaps in its mobile app and published its 2023 Recap.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Nifty Island is launching a Play-to-Aidrop (P2A) campaign around its upcoming $ISLAND token.

• VIPE rolled out VIPE Rooms.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect the latest Metaversal posts on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 🪙 2024 NFT Airdrops

  • 📬 Bitcoin Stamps Explained

With the return of a bull market in crypto, the only thing on the rise as much as prices lately?

Airdrop opportunities.

The NFT sector’s proving no exception here. A handful of upcoming NFT-related airdrops have already been confirmed for 2024, and we might see more than a dozen projects also throw their chips down here before next year’s end.

Where to be watching right now, then? I’ve got you covered! For today’s post, let’s talk both known and potential airdrops that could make the new year a boom year for us NFTers.

-WMP

Airdrops in NFT Land: Opps to Watch in 2024 💫

Airdrops, in which projects launch and distribute tokens for free to the wallets of their community members, have become the main way to incentivize participation and loyalty in crypto.

These fungible tokens, e.g. Ethereum ERC-20s or Solana SPLs, are typically designed for collective governance, and their launch events can provide big paydays to their recipients.

Yet just because airdrops center around fungible tokens doesn’t mean they can’t be NFT-centric. Indeed, some of the biggest airdrops ever—like APE, ENS, and LOOKS—were via NFT projects. So don’t blink now, because there are currently a handful of confirmed airdrops around the contemporary NFT scene that are on the verge of arriving.

For instance, perhaps the highest-profile example in the NFT space at the moment is Blur. The leading NFT marketplace on Ethereum recently announced plans for its Blast layer-two (L2) scaling solution and unveiled that its Season 3 rewards campaign would conclude in May 2024 with an airdrop of “REDACTED” tokens via Blast.

The general idea? Use Blur, hold $BLUR, earn REDACTED.

In other NFT L2 airdrop news, Frame also just revealed plans for its $FRAME token. The upcoming Arbitrum-powered optimistic rollup will conduct an initial airdrop (followed by further distributions) on January 31st, 2024. Anyone who’s traded an NFT on Ethereum over the past 2 years qualifies for this first allocation, so everyone who reads this newsletter should be able to claim! 😆

As far as other L2s go, you may have previously experimented with NFTs in the onchain gaming scene of Starknet, a rising zk-rollup scaling solution. The Starknet Foundation has already announced plans to release 10 billion STRK tokens, and they recently confirmed that they’ve taken a snapshot for the upcoming airdrop. There’s nothing to do here for now eligibility-wise, then, but keep your eyes peeled if you’ve tried the L2 before.

Another major confirmed airdrop that’s coming next year will be via LayerZero, an interoperability protocol that facilitates cross-chain bridging. And what’s one of the main things you can bridge across chains right now? NFTs!

For example, earlier this year I wrote about Holograph, an NFT platform built atop LayerZero. If you’ve collected, created, or bridged NFTs on Holograph before (and presumably for some time hereafter), then it seems you’ll be in line for the LayerZero airdrop. Additionally, this could end up being a two-for-one maneuver, as Holograph itself already has a points system, suggesting its own native token may be imminent.

But it’s also not all chain and bridge opps around the NFT airdrop landscape lately. At the app layer, there are known prospects ranging from crypto games to NFTfi. Perhaps the highest-profile examples here at the moment are Nifty Island, a metaverse gaming project that just unveiled $ISLAND and a Play-to-Airdrop (P2A) campaign, and NFTfi.com, the NFT liquidity protocol that has an ongoing rewards system ahead of its upcoming token launch.

That said, all the aforementioned projects except Holograph have confirmed token plans. So what about potential opps to be watching out for? What NFT scene airdrops could happen next year but also maybe never?

In my opinion, there are three no-brainer categories to be watching for airdrops right now: chains, marketplaces, and wallets.

For example, concerning chains, I think Coinbase’s Base and Zora’s Zora Network are L2s to watch here. Reportedly, a token is "not something [Coinbase has] ruled out entirely," while a token does indeed appear in line with Zora’s long-term vision. I wouldn’t be shocked if we eventually see both projects dive in here.

Regarding marketplaces, I predict we may see OpenSea launch a token and an L2 to better compete with Blur in 2024. Also, the Bitcoin NFT and Solana NFT scenes are experiencing booms currently and seem like other obvious places to begin. Magic Eden comes to mind, as it’s an increasingly popular tokenless NFT marketplace that supports both Bitcoin and Solana NFTs. The other large Solana NFT market, Tensor, which is similar to Blur on Ethereum, seems like a strong airdrop prospect too since it’s currently running a points system.

When it comes to wallets, there appear to be many NFT-friendly wallets that you could focus on in the weeks ahead. Rainbow just launched Rainbow Points for Ethereum users. Magic Eden has a new wallet. Phantom, a popular multichain wallet, seems poised to go the points route as well. There’s also Backpack for Solana users and Leather for people getting into Bitcoin NFTs.

Beyond these infra projects, one way to hunt around the app scene is by looking for areas where tokenless projects are surrounded by many projects with native tokens. For example, consider the NFTfi sector here. Most of the large lending and liquidity protocols in NFTfi currently have tokens or have announced plans for one, while two that haven’t yet are MetaStreet and Gondi. There’s also good chances that token releases soon extend into areas they haven’t reached yet, like crypto social, as big projects like Lens and Warpcast may potentially eye their own onchain incentive programs sooner or later!

Action steps:

• 🏹 Check out the Bankless Airdrop Hunter: Hunt smarter

• 📬 Catch up on my previous write-up: Bitcoin Stamps

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror

Ordinals have kicked off an explosion of “Inscriptions” tokenization activity on Bitcoin (and beyond) recently.

Yet there’s another relatively new Bitcoin tokenization protocol, Stamps, that’s also been gaining steam as of late.

Never heard of Stamps or SRC-20s? No worries. For today’s post, let’s go over how Stamps work, how they compare to Ordinals, and how you can try them for yourself!

-WMP

The Rise of Bitcoin Stamps ⏫

Released by Mike In Space in March 2023, The Bitcoin Stamps system started as a proof-of-concept project on Counterparty, a Bitcoin L2 that’s been around since 2014. Stamps has since shifted completely to Bitcoin thanks to an update to its underlying protocol, now dubbed SRC-20, this past summer.

The creator, Mike, originally conceived Stamps as a way to mint permanent Bitcoin NFTs. However, the protocol has expanded to also replicate BRC-20s, the batched (semi-)fungible tokens that have boomed atop Bitcoin thanks to the Inscriptions craze taking off since Casey Rodarmor launched Ordinals back in January 2023.

The main difference between Stamps and Ordinals is architectural. That’s because Stamps store their metadata in multi-signature unspent transaction outputs (UTXO), while Ordinals store their metadata within what’s known as the “witness” segment of a Bitcoin transaction.

This design contrast leads to subtle, but notable, tradeoffs here. Namely, the UTXO method of Stamps makes them unpruneable and thus seemingly permanent, though they’re more expensive to create than an Ordinals-style mint. Conversely, the way Ordinals use witness data ultimately makes them pruneable—however unlikely—yet they’re more affordable to make than Stamps.

As such, while Ordinals may offer the best permanence-to-cost ratio for NFTs in crypto today (it’s possible to get onchain NFTs on Ethereum, but they’re comparatively more expensive to build than Ordinals), the Stamps system currently appears to offer the best straightforward permanence guarantees here.

All that said, not everyone finds these projects interesting or useful!

For instance, old-school hardliner Bitcoiners like Luke Dashjr have recently come out swinging at both Ordinals and Stamps, hailing these minting systems as spam attacks against Bitcoin. For his part, Dashjr’s new Ocean mining pool is set up to filter Inscriptions and Stamps transactions, and he’s already put forward the notion of changing Bitcoin to a different proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm to fight back against NFT-friendly Bitcoin miners.

Perhaps the Bitcoin community will eventually split anew over the disagreements here. Another blocksize war may be coming, with creative experimenters on one side and “Bitcoin is just money” veterans on the other.

For now, though, Dashjr’s recent comments have only added fuel to the fire, as attention and activity around Stamps have seemingly hit new all-time highs in recent days. In fact, the first and second Stamps ever created just sold as a bundle for 1.7 BTC (~$150k USD), a sign of spiking interest.

Of course, Stamps markets may go through boom and bust cycles like all assets, but the tech is legitimate and compelling either way. Stamps are interesting not just thanks to their permanence but also because, like Ordinals, they offer a new token standard that’s opened up new possibilities that didn’t previously exist on Bitcoin.

Smart contract platforms like Ethereum and Solana have already enjoyed native token standards for years, and hardly need these sorts of systems. Conversely, Bitcoin’s just decisively broke through into the tokenization big leagues in 2023 as advances like Ordinals and Stamps have started rising to the fore and unleashing unprecedented demand.

It’s a Bitcoin Renaissance like we’ve never seen before, in other words. So let’s say you’ve already tried Ordinals, and now you’re keen to also explore Stamps some. Where to begin?

On the wallet side of things, I recommend starting with something like Leather (previously Hiro), a Bitcoin wallet that supports Ordinals and Stamps and BRC-20s and SRC-20s as well. If you have previous experience with browser wallets like Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, or Rainbow, you should find navigating Leather familiar and straightforward because it offers a similar UX to these mainstays, albeit in a Bitcoin-centric fashion.

That said, whatever you do, don’t just dive into Stamps with any ol’ Bitcoin wallet. You can lose your assets if you try using them with a wallet that isn’t compatible!

Once you do have a wallet primed and ready to go, you can start surfing around for Stamp NFT mints or SRC-20 tokens. OpenStamp is one platform where you can currently do both, but some other early marketplaces you can also consider right now include RareStamp, Stampscan, and StampedNinja. If minting your own Stamp is something you’re curious about, Stampsbot offers a minting service you could try.

Ultimately, whether the Stamps system will become a permanent fixture in the crypto ecosystem remains an open question. However, the current surging popularity of Stamps mints and the fresh possibilities they introduce for Bitcoin cannot be ignored. In combination with Ordinals, Stamps put Bitcoin’s creative scene in a position to become increasingly teeming in the years ahead, and that means there’s more definitely showdowns to come with JPG-hating Bitcoin maxis. We’ll see what happens from here!

Action steps:

• 💯 Catch up on my previous write-up: Points Season

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror

The points meta is in full swing in crypto. I’m racking up scores in at least a dozen apps at the moment!

We’ll have to wait and see how and when these offchain scores go onchain. Whatever happens, many projects are currently looking to reward you for your time and liquidity, so don’t sleep on these opportunities.

As for the here and now, it’s that time again—let’s get you caught up with your latest weekly NFT roundup! Thanks as always for reading everyone ✌️

-WMP

This Week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Mirror added support for publishing on Zora Network.

• Prohibition launched Santa.fm, an NFT gift swap event.

• Rainbow unveiled NFT support for Rainbow Extension and rolled out Rainbow Points.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Catalog introduced Catalog Radio.

• Foundation added support for importing generative Highlight collections into its Worlds onchain curation system.

• fxhash 2.0 launched on mainnet.

• Sound acquired Soho, a mobile platform for digital collectors.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• FIFA is dropping an NFT collection on Polygon in honor of the FIFA Club World Cup.

• Pudgy Penguins unveiled Pudgy World Alpha, a digital environment on zkSync that will offer games and social experiences.

📱 Crypto social

• Lens teased a points system.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity is on the verge of releasing its Parts Evolution system.

• Fren Pet added a Hibernation feature.

• Immutable announced that the Immutable zkEVM will be gas-free for gamers.

• Parallel released its Planetfall expansion set.

🪙 NFTfi

• MetaStreet facilitated more than 1,300 NFT-backed loans this year.

• NFTfi.com started offering bonus rewards for Pudgy Penguin loans.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• The Sandbox rolled out its marketplace on Polygon.

Action steps:

• 📚 Collect the newest Metaversal posts on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 🤖 The Bull Case for AI Crypto

  • 👾 How to Adopt a Fren Pet

  • 🏦 Earning on MetaStreet

  • 🎮 Crypto’s Gaming Hubs

As we near the new year, there are six scaling solutions in crypto whose gaming scenes I’m watching closely right now.

Let’s take the pulse of these projects and give you some things to look out for in case the gaming sector swells in crypto in 2024!

-WMP

Arbitrum

Tech overview

• Arbitrum is the largest and most popular L2 today (Arbitrum One).

• It also boasts a tech stack, like AnyTrust chains and Arbitrum Orbit, that lets projects create their own L2s and L3s, the latter of which are highly-customizable rollups that settle to an L2 rather than directly to Ethereum.

• For example, Xai is a purpose-built gaming L3 currently being developed atop Arbitrum.

• Additionally, the Arbitrum team has released Arbitrum Nova, their own AnyTrust-style rendition of an L2 optimized for gaming.

• The liquidity and universal app scene of Arbitrum One, the Arbitrum Nova gaming sandbox, the aforementioned Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) offerings, and the Stylus development environment (which lets smart contracts be written in mainstream programming languages like C, C++, and Rust) have made the wider Arbitrum ecosystem increasingly attractive for crypto game devs as of late.

Games overview

• The most recognizable project in the Arbitrum gaming scene today is Treasure, a decentralized publisher and ecosystem of titles, including Smolverse, The Beacon, and Bridgeworld.

• The most successful standalone game on Arbitrum so far has been Pirate Nation, an adventure-themed fully onchain RPG deployed on Arbitrum Nova that uses a mirroring system for compatibility with its Founder’s Pirates NFTs on Ethereum.

• As for upcoming game launches to watch, keep an eye on Battle for Goblin Town by the Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult team and BattlePlan! by the Pixel Vault team.

• See the full Arbitrum ecosystem hub here.

Optimism

Tech overview

• OP Mainnet, a.k.a. Optimism, is the second-largest L2 today.

• Similar to Arbitrum, Optimism offers its own “Superchain” tech stack that’s designed to help projects readily launch their own L2s.

• The Optimism ecosystem has also notably become a hotbed for frontier crypto gaming research and innovations. For instance, the Lattice team has introduced MUD, an onchain game engine framework, and Redstone, a new Plasma-based OP Stack L2 for games and autonomous worlds.

Games overview

• Sky Strife, Lattice’s in-house game, is a real-time strategy (RTS) battler that’s gaining steam and gearing up for a full launch. Also watch out for other games that are coming to Lattice’s new Redstone L2, like Gaul and Primodium.

Ronin

Tech overview

• Ronin is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain created by the Sky Mavis team to provide scaling, i.e. cheaper and faster transactions, for the Axie Infinity gaming universe.

• In having facilitated more than $4.25 billion USD worth of all-time NFT sales to date, Ronin currently reigns as the most prolific gaming chain activity-wise in the cryptoeconomy.

• There’s previously been some chatter about Ronin potentially migrating from a sidechain network into an L2, but there’s nothing official on that front for now.

Games overview

• Ronin is home to the main Axie Infinity: Origins game and the ever-expanding universe of related Axie titles like Homeland, Raylights, Defenders of Lunacian Land, and Project T.

• Furthermore, Ronin is increasingly attracting non-Axie franchises to its network, like Apeiron, Pixels, and the CyberKongz games. At this point, it seems that more than a few projects will be following suit in the months ahead in order to tap into the network’s highly-active gaming community.

• See the full Ronin ecosystem hub here.

Base

Tech overview

• Developed by Coinbase, Base is an optimistic-style rollup built via the OP Stack, making it an L2 within Optimism’s Superchain. In the Ethereum scaling scene, the network’s currently the third-largest L2.

Games overview

• The largest franchise that uses Base today is the Parallel trading card game (TCG), which emits in-game $PRIME rewards on the L2 and has deployed some starter decks on the network. Base has also become home to a burgeoning experimental gaming scene, typified by projects like Fren Pets and Draw Tech.

• See the full Base ecosystem hub here.

Immutable

Tech overview

• Immutable X is an NFT-centric chain designed as a validium, a type of scaling solution that executes transactions offchain and maintains data offchain via zero-knowledge proofs. It’s currently the sixth-largest L2 in the Ethereum scaling scene.

• The Immutable team is also presently collaborating with Polygon on the development of the Immutable zkEVM, an L2 being custom-tailored for gaming use cases. Going forward, Immutable X and Immutable zkEVM will live side by side in complementary fashion.

Games overview

• While there are currently many games in development atop Immutable’s infra, the most recognizable franchise in the Immutable ecosystem today is Illuvium, which is working on multiple titles like Illuvium Arena and Illuvium Overworld. Immutable’s also home to Gods Unchained, one of the longest-living NFT games in the cryptoeconomy.

• See the full Immutable ecosystem hub here.

Starknet

Tech overview

• Starknet is a zk-rollup L2 that supports smart contracts written in its native programming language, Cairo. An early rising pillar in Starknet’s gaming community right now is Dojo, a provable game engine built using Cairo.

Games overview

• Starknet is currently the ninth-largest Ethereum L2, though the network already boasts a teeming experimental gaming scene. Some of the main projects of note here today include Influence, a grand strategy space MMO, and Realms, an onchain multiplayer game set in the Loot universe.

• See the full Starknet ecosystem hub here.

Action steps:

• 🏦 Catch up on my previous write-up: Earning on MetaStreet

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror

MetaStreet is a rising force in the NFT lending sector, offering easy-to-use features for newcomers and seasoned DeFi veterans alike.

For today’s post, let's run through how the project works and how you can consider its Earn platform if you’re currently looking for ETH yield opps in NFT land!

-WMP

An Intro to MetaStreet

What’s MetaStreet?

MetaStreet, known for its Automatic Tranche Maker (ATM) system, is a “liquidity scaling” project that has carved a niche in the NFT lending space.

In other words, it’s a permissionless lending protocol that allows for the creation of onchain lending pools around NFTs. These pools are distinct in that they organize capital based on varying risk and rate profiles from NFT depositors, which then translate into fixed-duration loans for borrowers.

As of the latest data, the new MetaStreet V2, which was launched in June 2023, now has a total value locked (TVL) of approximately $15.26 million and has facilitated more than $58 million worth of loans to date.

How the MetaStreet ATM works

MetaStreet's ATM system is an attempt to address some of the shortcomings of traditional lending protocols.

For example, it's designed to operate without a centralized price oracle, which removes a dependency and potential point of failure. Its dynamic interest rate model is another key feature, replacing fixed, governance-driven interest rates with a more fluid, deposit-driven approach.

Additionally, the permissionless nature of the protocol allows users to set up a lending pool for any NFT collection, which is naturally good for accessibility and flexibility.

Zooming in a bit, note that the pools in MetaStreet aggregate capital based on price, term, and rate tier, before pooling all deposits together. This method ensures that lenders of all risk tolerances can participate, with low-risk lenders enjoying the security of insurance from high-risk lenders, and the latter benefiting from leveraged returns for taking on more risk.

In the event of a borrower default, the protocol employs a 24-hour auction for the underlying NFT in order to absorb and mitigate the originally borrowed sum.

How to get started with MetaStreet Earn

While borrowing is for more advanced users on MetaStreet, the project offers a MetaStreet Earn service that makes lending to its NFT-underpinned pools (and earning yield for doing so) straightforward.

If you’re curious to explore this opp, here are the steps it’d take to get started:

• 🏊 Explore Pools: Visit the MetaStreet Earn page to browse available pools. Each pool is associated with a specific NFT collection and has its own risk and reward parameters.

• 🌊 Select a Pool: Choose a pool based on your preference for the deposit token, the APR (annual percentage rate), and other factors like the associated NFT collection.

• 🪙 Deposit capital: Decide on the amount you wish to lend and deposit it into the selected pool. You’ll use your wallet to 1) approve the deposit token, e.g. Wrapped ETH (WETH), and then 2) fire off the final deposit confirmation transaction.

• 🤲 Start earning: Once your crypto is deposited, you’d start earning yield based on that particular pool's performance and terms. You can track your earnings and other key stats over time via the “My Positions” tab on the Pools page.

Of course, lending isn’t for the faint of heart as there are potential risks here, e.g. the specter of market failures or smart contract vulnerabilities. The MetaStreet V2 architecture has been audited twice already, but still, if you do try the protocol only deposit what you can afford to lose in these early days just to be safe.

What to watch going forward

MetaStreet is promising, but it also has serious competition from other contemporary mainstay NFT lending protocols like Bend DAO ($52M TVL), Blur Lending ($51M TVL), JPEG'd ($29M TVL), NFTfi.com ($17M TVL), and Arcade ($13M TVL).

That said, the project does have a potential ace up its sleeve. Unlike these competitors, all of which either have a live native token (BEND, BLUR, JPEG) or have announced plans for one (ARCD, NFTFI), MetaStreet has not yet introduced a native token.

This leaves room for a possible token launch, which could boost its traction and help it catch up with the higher TVLs and volumes of its larger competitors.

Will it happen? That remains to be seen. But regardless of any theoretical airdrop, MetaStreet's innovative ATM system and user-friendly Earn service makes it a strong contender in the NFT lending space on fundamentals alone. The protocol also seems poised to go multichain soon, which will make it that much more accessible.

Keep an eye on it as an up-and-comer at the crossroads of DeFi and NFTs accordingly!

Action steps

• 🎮 Catch up on my previous write-up: Time to Play

• 📚 Collect this post: Mint it on Mirror (now on Zora Network!)