NFTs Are Levelling Up

Dear Bankless Nation,

This week we saw more than a few NFT projects take major leaps forward, like Async Art’s rollout of Async Music or Axie Infinity’s Phase 2 launch of the Ronin sidechain.

What’s amazing is that these kinds of innovative strides are  being made constantly throughout the NFT ecosystem these days.

So sure, NFTs may be relatively young and many of their possibilities may remain uncharted. But that takes nothing away from the fact that there’s an explosion of progress around them right now, and it’s truly exciting to watch.

Indeed, it’s not everyday you get to watch the future get made right in front of your eyes!

-WMP

🏆 Digital Collectibles

• A group of community members are attempting to form a DAO in order to bid on CryptoPunk 635, the alien Punk being auctioned through Christie’s next month.

• The CryptoPunks market is now valued at around ~$1B.
• Minting for Avastars Gen1 Series 4 concluded this week. For anyone who participated in this latest series, new $ART tokens are now available to claim.

🎨 Cryptoart

• Async Art launched Async Music, a new programmable music division that allows fans to mint limited-edition snapshots of continuously evolving songs.
• Beeple is releasing his Spring/Summer Collection 2021 drops through Nifty Gateway between today and May 2nd.

• Cryptoart marketplace SuperRare welcomed a new slate of artists to the platform this week! 🎉

🕹️ Blockchain Games

• Axie Infinity launched Phase 2 of its Ronin sidechain rollout, kicking off The Great Migration!

  

• Global fantasy ⚽ game Sorare just rolled out a handful of new features, including Awards and a Club Shop.
• Aavegotchi published its Aavegotchi Development Roadmap V2, detailing how the NFT game plans to rise and thrive from here.
• Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner said his company is exploring NFT use cases around Magic: The Gathering and more.

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Wearable minting is returning to Cryptovoxels on May 7th. The virtual world project is also completing its San Francisco and Far Far Away parcel auctions today and eyeing tokenized equity down the road 🌐
• 3,500 people attended the Dillon Francis live show put on in Decentraland in celebration of the Atari Casino launch 🎲
• U.S. crypto exchange Gemini added trading support for $CUBE, the native token of Somnium Space.
• Ethereum gaming world project The Sandbox kicked off Phase 4 of its $SAND liquidity mining program.

🛒 NFT Platforms

• NFT marketplace OpenSea published its April 2021 Spotlight write-up, which highlights the talented up-and-coming artists REO, Farah Manley, and Panagiotis Archontis.
• Thanks to a collaboration with Wyre, Rarible has added support for credit cards so users can easily acquire ETH for collecting.

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• Fractionalized Axie Hauteclere ($HAUS) was bought out on NIFTEX for 450 ETH.
• Fractionalized NFT platform Fractional is now live on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet.
• NFT trading platform NFT20 has settled +$5.5M worth of trading volume to date

Action steps

• 📰 Read “An NFT Juggernaut Approaches” by Metaversal