NFT Builder Boom

p.s. Next week, Metaversal is adding a new special series to the mix: The AI Roundup — chronicling updates and alpha in onchain AI. With this new issue, we’ll be moving from 3 to 4 weekly newsletters, now coming to you every week on Mon, Weds, Fri, and Sat! Expect the same great content, just more alpha for you 🫡

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That NFT creativity you like is coming back in style—at least if activity around NFTs this past year is any indication!

The context here is Electric Capital just released their latest Developer Report for crypto in 2024, and therein they highlighted how NFT deployments, minting volume, minting transactions, and minting wallets reached all-time highs this year.

There's no doubt that for many people, sentiments around NFTs got gloomy over the course of the last bear market. Personally, I always figured that gloom was way overblown.

That's because nothing fundamentally changed about the endless programmable possibilities here—the first major market cycle just came and went for an entirely new asset genre.

The good news is that more than a few creative tinkerers in our space remained undeterred and have continued to experiment around NFTs, as evidenced by Electric's new Developer Report.

That said, what has changed is the meta. In 2021, trading digital collectibles as luxury Veblen goods was the main approach for many NFTers.

Since then, there has been a huge migration of activity toward more accessible, low-cost social mints, e.g. on Zora where the average mint now is far less than $1 worth of ETH.

This trend is reflected in Electric Capital's new research, which found that 87% (!) of new NFT deployments in 2024 have launched on the Base or Zora Network Layer 2s.

All this is to say that NFTs may have gone under the radar for many this year, but the recent historic activity levels here are a groundswell that I think bodes well for an even bigger year of milestones in 2025. Plan accordingly is my advice!

📰 General news

• ENS Rent, a new platform for listing and renting ENS domains, launched
• Magic Eden rolled out it $ME token and BNB Smart Chain support
• Midjourney released the Patchwork worldbuilding resource
• Zapper introduced its Ultimate Onchain API
  

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Flamingo DAO presented the Flamingo Flutter gallery series
• fxhash unveiled its new beta platform

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Pudgy Penguins reached a $100k floor price

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Dot launched a new game, Ribbit
• Eternum, a new onchain MMO on Starknet, launched its Season 0 gameplay
• Fantasy announced its V2
• Treasure released its new L2 on ZKsync's Elastic Chain tech and Treasure Cartridges

🪙 Memes & NFTfi 

• GONDI facilitated a two-year CryptoPunk loan, the longest loan to date for a 'Punk NFT
• Rug.fun is shuttering operations.

📱 Onchain social

• Eliza, the AI agent framework, now supports Farcaster
• Enjoy integrated the Zora comments system
• Nastya unveiled a new social trading mini-app on Farcaster
• Warpcast just launched a revamped Frames tab
• Zora released an Android version of its mobile app

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Oncyber has undergone its next big evolution

Season 2: Methamorphosis is now live on mETH Protocol, following the launch of their governance token, COOK, and cmETH, the liquid restaked version of mETH. With cmETH, holders can enjoy yields across multiple restaking protocols like Karak, EigenLayer, Symbiotic, while earning Powder for more COOK.

• 🧱 Nounish Innovation - Gramajo
• 😎 Taking Over Wynwood - Nounsletter
• ⛓️ Next Gen Onchain Physical Infra - David Tso
• 🐧 My Journey with Pudgy Penguins - Albert Hu & catherinechang.eth
• 🤖 Why Agents and Crypto Are Meant for Each Other - 0xAntidote.eth