Recent NFT controversies ☕️
Dear Bankless Nation,
The NFT ecosystem, growing as it is in all directions, has been wrangling from one hot topic to another lately. The biggest of these ongoing debates have centered around heady questions like:
- Should NFT projects offer licensing agreements to holders, or should projects submit their IP to the public domain via CC0?
- Is AI art authentic art?
- Is the 0% NFT royalties approach, a la Sudoswap, acceptable?
My quickfire answers to each of these questions respectively are: 1) it depends on the circumstances, 2) absolutely AI art is real art, and 3) not in all cases but again it depends on the circumstances.
Ultimately, the design space around NFTs is totally open and essentially endless — and this reality will make the ecosystem increasingly multiplicitous over time — so expect more and more big debates going forward.
Keep your footing by tracking and thinking through the arguments of supporters, critics, and onlookers alike, as a bird’s-eye view will best position you to critically and fairly approach these debates. In the meantime, thanks for reading and I hope you have a great weekend ✌️
-WMP
🛒 General NFT News
- Fractional rebranded to Tessera and announced a $20M Series A raise.
- TreasureDAO hired Anonymice creator MouseDev to its Bridgeworld team.
- Unlock Protocol unveiled new monetization options for its users.
- Zora and Connext rolled out Lanyard, an open-source tool for creating universal NFT allowlists.
🏆 Collectibles
- BAKC #8234 resold for $500k, marking the new biggest BAKC sale to date:
- Chimpers now has over 4,000 NFTs staked in its gamified DOJO staking hub.
- CrypToadz are now completely on-chain.
- Finiliar minted out and held its art reveal:
- Rally is offering fractional ownership of Noun #160.
- Yuga Labs published the new CryptoPunks and Meebits licensing agreements.
🎨 Cryptoart
- Art Blocks unveiled its newly structured Curation Board, whose luminaries include Anne Spalter, Casey REAS, Dmitri Cherniak, Micol Ap, and beyond:
- 6529 acquired The Sailor by FEWOCiOUS for 350 ETH from fellow cryptoart collector YeahYeah.
🎮 NFT Gaming
- Axie Infinity launched Origin Portal minting for Ronin Runes and Charms:
- The Forgotten Runiverse fantasy MMO is slated to launch in the first half of 2023.
- Gods Unchained, the NFT trading card game, has seen a recent spike of activity on ImmutableX:
💽 Music
- Coopahtroopa announced the first artists accepted to his Music NFT Launchpad program.
🌐 Virtual Worlds
- Decentraland is kicking off the Metaverse Art Week 2022 event next Wednesday.
💎 DeFi x NFTs
- Uniswap (which has NFT LP positions in V3) optimized its routing APIs to find more trade routes between Uniswap V2 and V3:
- Aelin, a deal coordination protocol on Optimism, activated NFT-gated pools.
- Arcade, an NFT borrowing and lending protocol, launched its V2 system.
Action steps
📸 Watch the IP Lawyers Talk NFTs panel and an interview with Venice Music’s Austin Hurwitz on Overpriced JPEGs
🌳 Watch interviews with Ceramic Network’s Danny Zuckerman and Upala’s Petr Porobov on Green Pill
🧐 Catch up on my other write-ups from this week: