Sailing Toward the OpenSeas ⛵

Dear Bankless Nation,

The NFT ecosystem is young, so there’s still plenty of growing pains ahead to be had.

But this is also a space where if you really look around, there’s so much promise in every direction. And there’s also lots of compelling organic activity, which tells us many users are really starting to embrace NFTs.

This is why leading NFT marketplace OpenSea just handily raised over $20M in its Series A round. The NFT boom isn’t a myth or a bubble: it’s simply our reality now that NFTs are part of the cryptoeconomy’s primetime, like DeFi.

There’s no going back to NFTs being obscure, then. Sure, the ecosystem will have growth spurts, and building an alternative global economy for creators in decentralized fashion is going to be messy at times. But the seas ahead are very beautiful 🌊

-WMP

🏆 Digital Collectibles

• According to NonFungible, CryptoPunks trading has generated $25M in 7-day volume this week. Not bad for a bunch of digital punks, right!
• The Hasmasks project has gone fully on-chain through a combo of Ethereum, IPFS, and Arweave.
• JOY’s Unicorn Fart just resold on the secondary marketplace for 128 ETH, making it the highest valued JOY collectible to date! 🦄

• Minting for Avastars Gen1 Series 4 began.
• The Ether Cards public sale kicked off.
• The MoonCatRescue community is voting on whether to burn the project’s main private key, which would lock away the Genesis MoonCats forevermore.

🎨 Cryptoart

• The artist Frenetik Void saw his genesis SuperRare piece sell for +56 ETH this week ...

• Russian feminist activist group Pussy Riot sold their first NFT artwork, PANICK ATTACK 1, on Foundation for 100 ETH. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to victims of domestic violence in Russia.
• Art Blocks’s latest Curated Drop, Aaron Penne’s Apparitions series, sold out 1,500 mints in 30 minutes!

🕹️ Blockchain Games

• Axie Infinity continues to be one of Ethereum’s most popular apps. The game’s bringing in even more users lately than DeFi powerhouses like SushiSwap and 1inch ...

• SC Heerenveen midfielder Siem de Jong became the second player to receive a signed player-edition card from global fantasy ⚽ game Sorare.

• Aavegotchi has saved its users +$14M in gas fees in just two weeks by going L2 via Polygon.

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Welcome to the rise of the metaverse preppers ...

• Cryptovoxels launched its latest round of auctions for parcels based in the project’s Milan district.
• Decentraland is chipping in $5k worth of MANA for ETHGlobal NFTHack prizes.
• The Sandbox is hosting “The Glitch in the Metaverse” game jam ...

• Time to get your Aavegotchi on in Somnium Space ...

🛒 NFT Marketplaces

• OpenSea announced its $23M Series A round, which was led by a16z.
• The RobinhoodSnacks podcast minted its first episode on NFTs into an NFT using Cargo.

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• Two new fractionalized NFT projects hit the scene this week: Fraction.art and Fractional.
• NFTX core contributor 0xChop has proposed the creation of the NFTI index, which would be composed of NFTX’s single-fund tokens like $MASK, $PUNK-BASIC, and more.
• NFT governance via NFT fractions? NIFTEX demonstrated how this week using an Async Art layer token.

Action Steps

• 📰 Read “How to Display Cryptoart” on Metaversal
• 📰 Read “Hackers Want Your NFTs” on Metaversal
• 📰 Read “How to Value NFTs” on Bankless
• 📺 Watch “The State of NFTs, with Andrew Steinwold” on Bankless