The NFT Groundswell 🥳

Dear Bankless Nation,

It seems like around NFTs there are two kinds of people right now.

The more speculative trader types, who are dejected at the bite of the NFT bear market.

Then on the other hand there are the more creative explorer types, who are currently having a ball experimenting with new apps.

I know which camp I’m in. Just this week alone I’ve tested out a handful of new NFT projects, and they were all treats in one way or another.

These sorts of new innovations are all around us at the moment, you just have to zoom in and experiment. If you do, you’ll find the foundations of tomorrow’s NFT wonders being laid today!

In the meantime, thanks as always for reading everyone. Have a great weekend, now let’s get you caught up on the latest NFT intrigues ✌️

-WMP

📊 The big picture

Over the past week, the floor-based market cap of the NFT space rose from 7.54 million ETH to 8.55 million ETH for a 13.4% increase ⤴️

🔝 7D top collections by volume

📰 General news

• ApeCoin voters are discussing the creation of a royalty-friendly OpenSea competitor.
• Chris Dixon joined Nouns DAO.
• ethOS held an NFT mint for preorders of its upcoming phone.
• Farcaster announced plans to move to Optimism.
• Nate Chastain was sentenced to three months in prison over the OpenSea insider trading case.
• PartyDAO introduced the ability to customize the artwork of Party membership NFTs.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Lazy Lions introduced Lazy AI, an AI-powered character builder system.
• Pudgy Penguins unveiled its own clothing brand, Igloo.
• Rainbow, the Ethereum wallet, added support for NFT offers.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Braindrops announced its next collection drop, Mappings by Ira Greenberg.
• Manifold achieved a new ATH auction record via the 420.69 ETH fetch for Sam Spratt’s IX. The Monument Game.
• NiftyKit introduced its V8.1 toolkit, which brings support for deploying generative collections, soulbound tokens, and more.
• Pob Studio created a decentralized copy of all gen.art NFT metadata.
• Snowfro and Jordan Lyall released heart + craft on Prohibition.
• Sound introduced a native bridge to Optimism.
• zeroone, a new platform for freely minting and collecting cryptoart, launched.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Minters announced a migration to the MUD onchain gaming engine.
• Nouns Esports just qualified for The International 2023 Dota 2 tournament (LFG!)
• Parallel is introducing Split cards in its upcoming Planetfall expansion.
• Pirate Nation unveiled its Combat v2 system, adding new depths to its gameplay.
• Ronin welcomed its latest game studio partner, Zillion Whales.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland launched Single Sign-On support.
• M3 held its Demo Day presentation in Upstreet.

🪙 NFTfi

• Degenscore and NFTfi.com kicked off a collaborative rewards campaign for their users.

🎆 Mint spotlight: MOCA Fundraiser 2023

Back in early 2020 when I started diving deeply into NFTs for the first time, I remember seeing The Museum of Crypto Art start up. The mission? Support and highlight the rising scene of artists making blockchain-based art. Since then, MOCA’s been a true force for good and has shined as a creator-first institution in the NFT ecosystem.

All that said, 2023 has been a tough year on most crypto team’s treasuries, so MOCA’s raising operational funds through an open edition (OE) of a mosaic work featuring contributions from over 700 cryptoartists. The 0.0142069 ETH a pop will go to a good cause, yet MOCA’s also emphasized the pieces will be burnable going forward for art contributed by community artists. No rush here though, as there’s still a little over one week remaining to mint.

🙇 New insightful reads to level up your web3 knowledge!

1. Chainleftist on Mooncats

2. 0xKepler on onchain games

3. Andrew Jiang on onchain gen art

4. Ben Giove on Stake-to-Play (S2P)

5. nftperp.xyz on the 6 main NFTfi verticals

✨ My NFT tool of the week: onchaingaming.world and On-Chain Space Station

It’s a double whammy Tool Tip! This week 0xKepler unveiled onchaingaming.world, a news aggregator for onchain games, and thecoreloop launched the On-Chain Space Station, which is like an onchain gaming wiki. I’ve skimmed through both resources and have been really impressed, so if you’re even remotely interested in the crossroads of NFTs and gaming make sure you bookmark and track these awesome info hubs going forward!

😜 Be grateful, pioneers, there’s never a dull week here…