Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

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Dear Bankless Nation,

I always wondered what a more crypto-native version of Reddit Collectible Avatars might look like. 

That’s why cygaar’s thread on Sofamon, a digital stickers project that just launched its beta on Base, caught my attention last week. 

Sofamon has the potential to catch on with Telegram’s many millions of crypto users, so for today’s post let’s break down what you need to know about this interesting new platform.

P.S. The Metaversal rebrand is kicking off on Thursday, catch up on what’s leveling up! All Metaversal issues after today’s will come via team@bankless.com 🧑‍🚀️

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

Sofamon Explained: A New Onchain Take on Digital Stickers

The beta begins

On March 26th, Sofamon—“a new layer of social expression” centered around collecting and trading onchain Telegram stickers—kicked off its beta on Base. Within just one week of launching, the project has already generated over 3,300 ETH in trading volume and over 95 ETH in revenue.

The key aspects of Sofamon

Sofamon is designed to serve as a new cultural platform for crypto natives. It’s main pillars include:

• 📱 Telegram — Leveraging Telegram, a favorite app among crypto diehards, Sofamon allows people to use their avatars and collectible wearables as stickers. 

• 🎀 Customizable Avatars — Sofamon lets users customize their avatars with a variety of collectible items for individuality and expression. 

• 🎨 A Platform for Creators — While only the first genesis collectibles are live today, Sofamon will eventually allow artists to launch their own collections on the platform, thereby expanding the aesthetic options over time. 

• 📈 Dynamic Pricing — Sofamon uses a Friend Tech-style bonding curve for its collectibles, ensuring liquidity for immediate buys and sells and a responsive price mechanism based on demand. 

• 💬 Collector Chats — The project also provides token-gated Telegram channels, exclusive to collectors of specific items. This creates a unique social layer, where ownership not only provides access to coveted stickers but also entry into private communities. 

Are Sofamon stickers NFTs?

I’m not a smart contract dev, but in scanning the Sofamon smart contract, I didn’t come across any NFT mentions, e.g. ERC-721, ERC-1155, etc. 

Instead, Sofamon appears to use a more streamlined metadata system where each sticker is tracked as a unique segment of metadata onchain. This approach offers fungibility within sets of wearables and non-fungibility between them, and it also lends itself well to the project’s fractional ownership and dynamic pricing elements. 

Of course, my analysis could be off here. The Sofamon team could also expand with added NFT elements later. As for the stickers now, though, they’re non-fungible-ish but don’t appear to be NFTs per se. And that’s perfectly fine, it’s a different but similar approach. Let’s see if it sticks!

Hunting for an invite

Sofamon’s beta is in invite-only mode, so you will need an invite code like one of these already used ones to get started. 

I’m currently clamoring for a code myself, and I think the best strat this early on is to turn on post notifications for the Sofamon Twitter account, which has been dripping out new batches of invites over the past week. If you do get your hands on a code, then just punch it in at sofamon.xyz/onboarding/invite to begin. 

Base, Privy, Telegram, oh my!

Base is currently the hottest Ethereum L2, Telegram has hundreds of millions of users, and Privy makes onboarding simple via embedded wallets. 

This is Sofamon’s stack, and the project is the first of its kind when it comes to using this exact combo. In my opinion, this approach positions the platform to become a force to be reckoned with in the crypto social scene in the months ahead. 

Like I said in the intro, I’ve been curious to see a more crypto-native take in the general ballpark of Reddit Collectible Avatars, and now I think we’ve got our first real answer here in Sofamon. 

To be sure, the project has only just begun, and it can evolve much more going forward. But I see a charming and promising foundation that I believe the team can build some serious momentum around, and I’m excited to try it myself. 

Looking further ahead, it will be interesting to see how Sofamon continues to position itself in the increasingly crowded NFT market, especially against or with the reigning PFP (profile picture) projects. Also, the project’s expansions with new art releases and potentially with leaps to platforms beyond Telegram will be key threads to watch!

Today’s action steps:

• 🧑‍🚀️ Catch up on the rebrand: Metaversal Levels Up

• 📱 Explore Sofamon: Hunt for an invite

Author Bio

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

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👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be leveling up the Metaversal experience.  

The first part of the revamp kicks off next Thursday, April 4th, when I’ll migrate the newsletter from Substack into Bankless.com.

At that point, your Substack subscription will evolve into a Bankless account, and you’ll start receiving Metaversal emails from team@bankless.com. 

This aesthetic and technical rebrand will pave the way for me to start the 2nd phase of the revamp, introducing new types of content and new types of experiences around Metaversal, that I’ll activate in the weeks ahead. 

The goal? Make this the best onchain culture newsletter in all of crypto! 

I’m currently brainstorming new modules to roll out—e.g. “AI Advice,” “Farcaster Finds,” “Game of the Week,” “Metaverse Meets,” “NFT Tool Tips,” etc.—so if you have thoughts on things you’d like to see hit harder in this newsletter, I’m all ears at william@bankless.com. 

It’ll be the same great Metaversal you know and love, just bigger and better, so be on the lookout for the start of the evolution next Thursday. In the meantime, let’s get you caught up on the past week in NFTs per usual! 👇

-WMP

🥳 Thanks to Consensus 🥳

👉  Consensus 2024 – 10 Years of Decentralizing the Future: Discovery, Dialogue and Dealmaking✨

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Bello unveiled ENS-friendly searches.

• Metaplex announced Core, a new optimized NFT standard for Solana.

• Phantom added support for rare sats.

• Wayfinder, the new omnichain AI agents tool, is deploying Command Prompt Key NFTs next week to kickstart its governance.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Amber Vittoria dropped Moods on Highlight today.

• BasePaint added support for minting on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Zora.

• Rarible added support for Base.

• Zora unveiled ERC-20 minting.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Azuki is partnering with Arbitrum to create AnimeChain.

• Bitcoin Puppet #2332, arguably the most iconic of the collection, sold for 4.2069 BTC. 

• Bitcoin Puppets reached a new ATH floor of 0.31 BTC.

• Nansen launched a Pudgy World dashboard.

• Primitives, a new generative pixel art collection, launched on Base.

📱 Onchain social

• Drakula intro’d the $DEGEN Onchain Creator Fund.

• Phi announced Phi Protocol, a credential layer for onchain identity.

• Privy added support for Farcaster.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity updated the app.axie website.

• Crypto: The Game has lined up custom challenges with Lens, Uniswap, and more for Season 2.

• Del Complex intro’d Brain Worms, an onchain parasite game coming on Base.

• MUD, an onchain framework for Autonomous Worlds, released its v2 system.

• Parallel rolled out the Parallel Shop on Base.

• Parallel Studios raised $35M in a new funding round.

🪙 NFTfi 

• Astaria reached $1M TVL.

• Blast recovered $97M from the Munchables exploit.

• Gondi facilitated a 600k USDC loan against Zombie ‘Punk #6784.

• sartoshi unveiled a $mfer airdrop to the mfers ecosystem.

• SquiggleDAO borrowed 1M USDC against 11 Chromie Squiggles on Zharta.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland kicked off the 5th annual Decentraland Art Week event.

• Nifty Island unveiled its Play-to-Airdrop Wave 2.

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Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups: 

  • 🔥 The Next Great Starknet Game?

  • 🌐 Simulating New Worlds with Midjourney

  • 🎊 Party’s New Tool Makes Memecoins Unruggable

Author bio

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

🙏 Together with 🥳 Consensus 🥳

Consensus 2024

Consensus is celebrating ten years as the biggest and most established global hub for everything crypto, blockchain and Web3.

• 400+ speakers

• 17K attendees

• 100+ countries

• 950 investors with $3 trillion AUM

• Presentations from 20+ key protocols, including ETH & BTC Day

• Summits dedicated to regulation, digital assets’ impact on culture and business, onchain innovation and more

Prices increase 4/11 at 4 p.m. ET. Use code BANKLESS for 20% off.

👉 Visit consensus2024.condesk.com to learn more.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation, 

Two sci-fi games I’m a fan of are Eve Online and Stellaris—don’t ask me how many hours I’ve played! 😅

On our side of the block, I’m deep into the crypto gaming scene, and the Starknet games ecosystem is one of my favorites. 

A project I’ve been watching here with great interest is Influence, a space strategy colonization game that’s like a fully onchain cross between Eve Online and Stellaris. 

The idea? In Influence, players vie for dominance and control in a newly formed colony within the Adalian asteroid belt. The game’s Pre-Release is open and playable until April 10th, with the full launch coming soon after, so it’s a good time to dive in. 

Not sure where to start, though? No worries. I asked Jean-Paul Faraj, one of the builders behind Influence, if he’d like to create a beginner’s guide to the game, and he kindly accepted. 

Jean-Paul’s primer will get you up to speed on how to survive and thrive in Adalia and earn $SWAY, Influence’s in-game currency that will go live later this year! 👇

-WMP

🥳 Thanks to Consensus 🥳

👉  Consensus 2024 – 10 Years of Decentralizing the Future: Discovery, Dialogue and Dealmaking✨

How to Play Influence on Starknet 🧑‍🚀️

The basics of Influence gameplay

The gameplay of Influence consists of resource gathering, trade, and player-driven diplomacy. 

Players must make strategic decisions to expand their territories, establish trade routes, exploit resources, and build infrastructure and industries to generate wealth and influence within the game’s world. 

There are many different ways to play, but competitive play will be about finding your unique niche, whether solo or collaborative, and working to control your slice of the economy within Adalia.

Getting started with a crew

Influence is a slow-paced game where every action has big impact and the player always has an abundance of choices. 

Players take on the role of a set of Crewmates, within one or multiple crews, consisting of five primary classes: Miner, Merchant, Engineer, Scientist, and Pilot. 

You can compose your crew of any combination of these classes, and from there your adventure begins. One thing to keep in mind: the more of one class you have, the more efficient you will be at undertaking their target actions, but at the cost of being slower and less efficient at others.

Realistic orbital mechanics & physics

The game’s setting is within a realistic asteroid belt, where each asteroid has unique orbital mechanics that guide its orbits in real-time, leading players to make strategic decisions about when and where to travel within the game depending on the current or future positioning of these asteroids.

Realistic production chains

There are nearly 200 individual player-crafted goods, from ship hulls and electronics to extractors and warehouses. 

Each good will require potentially tens of processes to refine, manufacture, and craft. These have all been modeled from reality, with adjustments made to ensure fun gameplay. You don’t need a degree in chemical, mechanical, electrical engineering, or organic chemistry, but it may help! 

Player-driven marketplaces and supply chains

Influence will have realistic economic dynamics, as players will need to organize and collaborate on where to mine particular resources, how to deliver goods across the belt in their ships, and how to form liquid marketplaces to supply the demand of the other players. This gameplay element will ensure players can discover opportunities anywhere—find what’s needed and fill the gap!

Pace of play

As a slower-paced, highly strategic game, Influence is designed to be played over months and even years, and the goals are yours to decide. 

Each choice has many potential outcomes and the actions you take only make up a small percentage of the fun within the game. Additionally, every action will take time to complete. Building something isn’t instant and depending on the crewmates within your crew can take well past a day to complete. This also includes flights across the belt, as flights can take up to a month in real-time.

Persistence

Influence is a sandbox environment, which is to say that it’s non-linear, and the story you get to play is not predetermined. Furthermore, Influence is a persistent and onchain world, giving your characters and game items permanence, as they all live on public blockchain infrastructure via Starknet. 

This onchainness allows the game to be continued and built around regardless of the creator studio’s upkeep, and since all actions are onchain, players have deep insight and access to all game actions taken. We will see stories of economic war, sabotage, espionage, empires rise and fall, and it will all be onchain for everyone to engage with how they please.

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The main gameplay mechanics 

In Influence, a player’s session can consist of a variety of actions: 

• 🪨 Mining 22 raw materials from 11 different types of asteroids

• 🏭 Producing items through the use of refineries, factories, bioreactors, and shipyards

• 🧱 Constructing and expanding settlements across the belt

• 🚀 Traveling and delivering cargo in ships across the belt

• 📈 Managing and trading on player-driven marketplaces

• ⛏️ Managing and leasing lots on controlled asteroids

Together, these actions allow a player to build out their own settlement steadily. However, it’s always important to remember that you’ll need to keep an eye on what the rest of the belt is doing. It’s a game of supply and demand if you are trying to compete and earn the most $SWAY!

Admittedly, Influence can feel like drinking from a firehouse at first due to the sheer scale and initial learning curve. To help here, we the creators at Unstoppable Games have provided a wealth of knowledge in our Wiki. We also have a series of tutorials on our Youtube, and our Discord community is filled with helpful resources and members, too.  

An overview of $SWAY

$SWAY is the core utility token and in-game currency of Influence and can also be used for any tool or game built around the Influence ecosystem. Players can earn $SWAY by:

• Extracting resources or building goods to sell at market

• Managing a market and collecting fees from each trade

• Leasing plots of your asteroid or members of your crew to other players

• Providing liquidity at markets to earn incentives set by market owners

• Trading and taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities

$SWAY supply

• Initial supply: 130 billion

• ~60 billion will be unlocked and liquid at launch

• The supply is inflationary per player activity to keep some stability, but it cycles back into the player base through gameplay

• $SWAY inflation goes into two buckets: Team & Community

$SWAY inflation is emitted programmatically via a “governor.” Simply put, inflation happens periodically, and the amount comes from either the increase or decrease in how much $SWAY is being used by the player base at a given time. The more usage compared to the previous period, the more that is emitted. If there is less usage of $SWAY in the following period, it goes back to the baseline. 

The big picture

Remember, until April 10th anyone can participate for free in the open beta. There’s no need to download a client, as the game is fully in-browser. It is, however, on Ethereum’s Starknet L2 and requires players to download a wallet to play. 

While the game itself is complex and imaginative, one of its most salient pillars is how it’s built fully onchain, giving players, community, and third-party builders unparalleled access to contributing to and building alongside the creators. There are already close 15 third-party tools, and the game just hit open beta a few weeks ago! Look for more to come, then.

Also, as the game grows, so will its community, from which new ways to play will emerge. On top of this, over 50% of the $SWAY token is being distributed to the community, and some of that allocation is available to earn now through giving feedback, creating content, and completing missions.

Lastly, Influence is one of the first premiere games in the nascent Starknet ecosystem, and with Starknet’s recent announcement of 50 million STRK earmarked for funding gaming efforts, there may be even bigger opportunities ahead here for players and builders alike!

Today’s action steps:

• 🧑‍🚀️ Play Influence: Explore the open beta

• 👾 Read Jean-Paul’s previous guest post: Starknet Gaming Thesis

• 🌐 Catch up on my previous post: Midjourney and the Metaverse

Author bio

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

🙏 Together with 🥳 Consensus 🥳

Consensus 2024

Consensus is celebrating ten years as the biggest and most established global hub for everything crypto, blockchain and Web3.

• 400+ speakers

• 17K attendees

• 100+ countries

• 950 investors with $3 trillion AUM

• Presentations from 20+ key protocols, including ETH & BTC Day

• Summits dedicated to regulation, digital assets’ impact on culture and business, onchain innovation and more

Prices increase 4/11 at 4 p.m. ET. Use code BANKLESS for 20% off.

👉 Visit consensus2024.condesk.com to learn more.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

The rise of the smart open metaverse—what I call the crossroads of AI, crypto, and virtual reality—will lead to an explosion of cultural activity over the next few decades. 

That said, one major star in today’s AI scene is Midjourney, whose tech offers some of the most stunning text-to-image capabilities currently possible. 

Already, though, the Midjourney team is also angling toward VR and real-time world simulations, i.e. generating lifelike digital spaces.

These sorts of generative environments have so many potential use cases and can provide a foundation to scaffold around large swathes of a smart open metaverse. 

Let’s break down what I mean, and some stuff you should be paying attention to here, for today’s post!

-WMP

🥳 Thanks to Consensus 🥳

👉  Consensus 2024 – 10 Years of Decentralizing the Future: Discovery, Dialogue and Dealmaking✨

World Simulations: The Future of Midjourney and the Metaverse?

When it comes to AI text-to-image models, the big three giants right now are DALL·E 3, Stability Diffusion, and Midjourney. 

I tinker around and try to stay up-to-date with all three of these (frankly incredible) tools, and on the Midjourney side of things, one of my favorite follows is Nick St. Pierre, a creative director and AI wiz who’s a great resource for Midjourney tips, updates, and beyond. 

Having said that, one of Nicks’s recent tweets really piqued my interest. In it, he highlighted the Midjourney team’s upcoming plans with a quote from one of their latest Office Hours sessions:

"We're really trying to get to the world simulation. We're building 3D Midjourney, video Midjourney, & real-time Midjourney where things move really, really fast. 

Put them all together, you have a world simulation. The goal is to build each of those 3 things separately, then bring them all together...

...it will be more of a sandbox. People will make video games in it, people will shoot movies in it, but the goal is to build the open world sandbox."

This is huge news, as it offers us a glimpse into the future where complex virtual experiences will be generated on command via straightforward prompting. This “no-code” UX shift will open up and revolutionize how many virtual spaces are made and experienced, leading to an explosion of possibilities for new kinds of metaversal work and play. 

Text-to-image AI models were the first big unlock here. Text-to-video and image-to-video efforts, like OpenAI’s Sora and Midjourney Video, are the next steps. And real-time world simulation is the ensuing holy grail. So the grand question is, can Midjourney pull it off?

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I think so. Midjourney’s open beta started only 20 months ago, in July 2022, and yet the team has already generated +$200M in revenue and racked up over 16 million users. That war chest and traction this early on has given Midjourney great insights and momentum to keep innovating. 

Additionally, Midjourney founder David Holz has considerable experience in the VR and augmented reality fields. He co-founded Leap Motion, a VR hardware play that predated the Oculus headset. This reality, combined with Midjourney’s world simulation plans, suggests Midjourney may eventually release its own Head Mounted Display (HMD) device. 

So while world simulations may become the natural lodestar of all current text-to-image AI efforts, I believe no one in this space is better positioned to go deep and wide than Midjourney right now. If anyone can pull this off, Midjourney can—and I think they will, eventually, and probably faster than most people expect.

Still, that capability is some years away currently. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t already start dreaming about the immersive metaversal possibilities that are to come here. 

For instance, I think world simulations will be a great match with Autonomous Worlds, i.e. games that track their logic and state fully onchain. This architecture supports client-agnostic designs, so anyone can spin up their owner interfaces. Imagine, then, an interface builder that taps Midjourney so you can provide images and then create custom worlds to play through onchain games with real-time visuals. 

This is just one example use case, but the possibilities to come will be limited mainly by our imaginations. Think spinning up an art gallery on command with your favorite NFTs, or creating immersive experiences around real estate in metaverse projects. 

Cinema, education, gaming, virtual events, etc.—everything can be expanded upon in new ways via world simulations, and that’s why I think Midjourney is positioned well to become a pillar of the smart open metaverse. Similar to how AI agents will make it much easier to fill out virtual worlds with human-like intelligences, world simulations will make it much easier to flesh out these spaces with incredible real-time visuals. 

So as the AI x crypto x VR crossroads continues to intertwine and the smart open metaverse comes further into focus, be sure to keep an eye on Midjourney. Their work holds great promise in making the friction of creating large, immersive virtual spaces trend toward zero. The implications here for creators of all stripes are huge, and the entertainment industry stands to be revolutionized accordingly. Take note now, NFTers, and get ready!

Today’s action steps:

• 🎨 Learn about Midjourney: Study the docs

• 📱 Follow Nick St. Pierre: Midjourney insights

• 🔍 Catch up on my previous roundup: Going Multichain

Author bio

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

🙏 Together with 🥳 Consensus 🥳

Consensus 2024

Consensus is celebrating ten years as the biggest and most established global hub for everything crypto, blockchain and Web3.

• 400+ speakers

• 17K attendees

• 100+ countries

• 950 investors with $3 trillion AUM

• Presentations from 20+ key protocols, including ETH & BTC Day

• Summits dedicated to regulation, digital assets’ impact on culture and business, onchain innovation and more

Prices increase 4/11 at 4 p.m. ET. Use code BANKLESS for 20% off.

👉 Visit consensus2024.condesk.com to learn more.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

This week, Electric Capital open-sourced NFT Pulse.

It’s an awesome new multichain NFT market stats dashboard, and it’s much needed, because with NFT activity starting to spread out across so many chains, it’s been hard to find good, solid data aggregated in one place until now. 

My take? The platform shines in helping you track which marketplaces on which chains are having the biggest activity flows at any given time so you can target your focus to the hottest spots if you’re actively trading NFTs right now. 

Anyways, that’s my latest tool tip! For now, it’s that time again—let’s get you up to speed on the past week’s biggest NFT news highlights 👇

-WMP

🏴 Thanks to Mantle 🏴

👉  Visit mantle.xyz to learn more ✨

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Google added support for ENS name searches.

• Juicebox helped raise 410 ETH for Tornado’s legal defense, partly from NFT mints.

• Magic Eden added SPL-404 support.

• meme.market opened memecoin creation to everyone. 

• Noggles launched its $NOGS website.

• OpenSea unveiled Seaport v1.6.

• Pods added Collector Feeds.

• Sinjun intro’d HERE, an onchain clothing brand. 

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• BottoDAO announced a $1.67M raise, led by 1kx.

• Fingerprints is hosting Miragenesi’s The Queue drop next week.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Achi, the dog wif hat meme, auctioned for +1,210 ETH on Foundation.

• CryptoPunk 7804, an alien Punk, sold for 4,850 ETH.

• UMA DAO migrated to Base.

📱 Onchain social

• AdWorld is launching an $APEIN adventure game on Farcaster.

• Bracket Game, powered by $DEGEN, launched on Farcaster.

• Daylight added support for Farcaster.

• Hey, a Lens app, intro’d creator-licensed posts.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Aavegotchi announced Base as the Gotchichain settlement layer.

• Axie Infinity started its Origins Season 8 preseason.

• Baratie, an onchain gaming restaurant, launched on Base.

• Coinbase added support for Ronin’s $RON token.

• Crypto: The Game will maintain spots via NFTs in S2.

• Crypto Valleys announced it’s distributing 100% of its Blast Gold to its players.

• Fren Pet is unveiling a new version next week.

• Immutable announced a partnership with OKX on a GameFi launchpad.

• NIM Network, a new AI gaming chain, launched its token claim.

• ParagonsDAO partnered with Yield Guild Games.

• Parallel added Open Beta referrals.

• STP launched Clique, an AI-powered L3 built on Base.

• Sup previewed blit.net, an online side-scroller creator.

🪙 NFTfi 

• 0xmons previewed a fully onchain NFT orderbook built on sudoswap.

• NFTfi.com announced the NFTfi Foundation.

• nftperp intro’d Degen Draw on Blast.

• Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile drew a $400k loan against Beeple’s “Crypto Is Bullshit” using Gondi.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland rolled out World Categories.

• Chimpers unveiled Chimpers Island in Nifty Island.

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Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups: 

  • 🔥 Dropping a Free NFT with Farcaster Frames

  • 🤖 What’s New with Parallely Colony

  • 🔵 Getting Started with Bountycaster

  • 💫 Spark: Maker’s Rising Star

Author Bio

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

🙏 Together with 🏴 Mantle 🏴

MANTLE

Explore Mantle. It’s time for mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies with Mantle Network, Mantle Treasury, Mantle Staked ETH, and other token holder-governed product initiatives.

👉 Visit mantle.xyz today to learn more about the Mantle ecosystem.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

The best way to release an NFT right now?

In my opinion, it’s through Farcaster Frames.

In combo with apps like Warpcast and Zora, a Frame lets you drop an NFT that people can collect for free, with no wallet transactions, in just one click. 

Making it so easy to collect makes it so easy to reach more collectors. If you’re interested in taking this flow for a spin yourself, I’ve prepped a walkthrough to show you how to get started 👇

-WMP

🏴 Thanks to Mantle 🏴

👉  Visit mantle.xyz to learn more ✨

How to Release a Free NFT with Farcaster Frames

Start with Zora

A variety of apps already support Farcaster Frames, and Zora, a popular NFT creator suite, is one of them. Zora makes it easy to release an NFT and distribute it via a Frames mint, so I’ll use it for this post’s walkthrough demonstration to show you the gist of what’s possible.

Another reason why I like using Zora as an example here is that it gives you lots of options. It supports a range of chains (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Blast, Optimism, and Zora Network currently), free NFT creation (on Base and Zora Network currently), and login via email so you don’t even need a wallet to get started. 

If you’re ready to dive in, head over to zora.co and login or create and verify an account if you haven’t already.

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Prep your collection

Once you’re signed in on Zora, press the + sign in the upper right side of the page next to your profile button. Doing this will bring you to Zora’s Create interface. 

If you haven’t created your own NFT on Zora before, you will first need to create a collection to drop an NFT (and, if you’re making a series, possibly future NFTs) into. 

You can do this straight from the Create UI by pressing the “Create Collection” option under the “Collection” tab. This will bring up a page where you can input your main collection details and select which network you want to mint on, like so:

Of course, if you already have an existing collection you want to mint into, just select it from the “Collection” dropdown menu here. For my demo today, I’ll be creating a new NFT for my collection of AI sketches, Stable Peasters, so I’ll click that to proceed. 

Upload your NFT media

With your collection ready to go, you’ll now be able to prep your media and NFT details. 

You can click the “Try Canvas” button in the “Upload imagination” UI to make and remix a new piece straight from scratch, or just click on “Upload imagination” to upload your desired media file. Note, there is a 2GB size limit, though a variety of files—from audio to PDFs—are supported. 

Once you’ve got your media in, press the “View advanced options” button underneath the “Create” tab to further customize your NFT’s details, like its description, mint start time, edition size, and more. 

Once everything’s set up how you like, press the “Create” button at the bottom of the page, after which you’ll be prompted to sign a transaction to finish up the creation process. 

Set up a boosted mint for Farcaster

Now that you have an NFT set up, you can prep it for free, one-click mints through a Farcaster Frames drop where you front the ETH to cover your collectors’ mints. To get started here, click on the “Dashboard” button in your profile dropdown menu on Zora, or simply head to zora.co/manage if you’re already signed in. 

At this point, select your target collection (“Stable Peasters” in my case), and then select your newly created NFT. In your NFT’s manager dashboard, click on the “Boost” tab so that the “Deploy Booster” option comes up. Click on this button, which will prompt you to sign a small transaction with your wallet. 

With that transaction out of the way, you’ll be offered a “Grant Permission” option to set up your boosted mint system. Complete the ensuing transaction to proceed. 

Finally, you’ll be ready to add some ETH to your booster. 

For example, as you can see below, depositing 0.021 ETH right now will cover the first ~50 mints, meaning when I share my NFT via Farcaster Frame the first ~50 minters will be able to collect completely for free. This is a great avenue to consider if you want to get your NFT into the hands of many collectors as frictionlessly as possible. 

That said, input the amount of ETH you want to cover gas for here, then press “Send” and complete the deposit transaction with your wallet. Later, if it turns out that not all of your ETH gets used, you can use the “Withdraw” button to sweep back the remaining balance to your wallet. 

Making your Farcaster Frame

Once your mint booster is primed, you’ll see a “Cast your frame” button under the “Boost” tab of your NFT’s manager dashboard. 

Now, assuming that you already have a Warpcast account (the most popular Farcaster app), clicking on the “Cast your frame” option will instantly link you to the Warpcast cast UI where your NFT mint will automatically be prepped as a Frame. Just complete your post with any context you want to add, tag your desired channel (I picked my /metaversal channel) then press “Cast” to publish your Frame like so:

Here, note that this particular Frame functionality turns your NFT link into an interactive mint app, through which collectors can simply tap your cast’s “Mint” button to collect for free and without having to sign a wallet transaction. 

In contrast, if I posted this NFT link on, say, Twitter, it would just be a standard link that people would have to click on to leave Twitter, go to Zora, sign in, then pay for gas by signing a wallet transaction. The NFT drop via boosted Frame method lets you cut out all these extra steps and offer a frictionless collection experience right within people’s Warpcast feeds, which is powerful!

The big picture

Whether you want to release your own art or create a new token-gated community, an NFT dropped via Farcaster Frames is one of the most compelling distribution avenues available to you right now. 

Not only are Farcaster apps like Warpcast teeming with the most hardcore crypto-natives, i.e. the people most inclined to be your early supporters, but flattening down the collecting process to literally just one click is a UX game changer for collectors. The more steps you remove from the process, the more likely people will be to collect. No one wants to jump through a bunch of hoops for anything!

Also, mind you that a boosted NFT mint isn’t the only Frames use case, and Zora isn’t the only minting platform that’s integrated with Frames. The Zora + Warpcast combo is just a great early example of how slick Frames can be for NFT creatives, so don’t sleep on it!

Action steps:

• 📱 See the demo mint: 103 on Warpcast

• 🔍 Play catch up: An Intro to Farcaster Frames

• 🤖 Read my previous write-up: Parallel Colony Updates

Author bio

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

🙏 Together with 🏴 Mantle 🏴

MANTLE

Explore Mantle. It’s time for mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies with Mantle Network, Mantle Treasury, Mantle Staked ETH, and other token holder-governed product initiatives.

👉 Visit mantle.xyz today to learn more about the Mantle ecosystem.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

Parallel, a sci-fi trading card battler, is one of crypto’s leading games. 

And while it is the flagship of the Echelon Prime gaming ecosystem, it’s being joined in this universe by a highly-anticipated second title: Parallel Colony.

An AI-driven survival simulation game, Colony will center around humans collaborating with AI avatars that can learn and adapt and autonomously transact over time to stack resources and battle other players for dominance. 

The builders, Parallel Studios, just dropped the official whitepapers for Colony and Wayfinder, with the latter being a new type of AI protocol that will help underpin Colony’s gameplay. 

There’s a lot to unpack from these papers, so let’s get you up to speed on everything you need to know here for today’s post!

-WMP

🏴 Thanks to Mantle 🏴

👉  Visit mantle.xyz to learn more ✨

Understanding the New Parallel Colony Updates

The Basics of Parallel Colony

The 101: With a public alpha slated for as early as Q4 2024, Parallel Colony is centered around Colony Avatars, which will be deployed on Solana. Powered by large language model (LLM) tech, these AI avatars will be semi-autonomous AI agents acting per players' generalized instructions rather than direct control. 

Why this matters: Colony’s AI setup will allow the avatars to retain memories, learn from experiences, and influence each other through conversations. Sometimes, the avatars will even defy their human player's suggestions based on their unique personalities and experiences accumulated over time. As such, Colony is the first title to go all-in on the crossroads of generative AI and blockchain gaming. 

Money machines: With each one tied to a dedicated Solana wallet, Colony Avatars will conduct their own transactions around buying and crafting resources, a dynamic that will actualize a real economy in the game. Commerce and combat will lead to shifting tides and shifting resources, and colonies that amass the most wealth at any given time will become bigger targets for both trade and warfare.

An avatars expansion: While there will be a free-to-play mode, the main gameplay will see players create Colony Avatars by paying in PRIME, Parallel’s native currency. Starting out, the creation process will require holding a Parallel Avatar NFT on Ethereum, but a Parallel Universal Avatar series that involves a breeding mechanism may eventually be introduced on Solana. This update would make the game more accessible and expand the avatar count well beyond the existing 11,000 unique NFTs.

What to expect: The core Colony gameplay involves undertaking tasks to enhance an avatar’s skills and the overall wealth of their colony. As colonies flourish, they can mount defenses against incoming raids or launch their own attacks against neighboring colonies. A typical game session starts with players consulting their avatars and deciding which goals to pursue, from accumulating valuable items to running for political office, after which their avatars will start pursuing these objectives. Like in the main Parallel game, Colony players will also be able to earn PRIME rewards for in-game achievements.

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The Rise of Wayfinder

An onchain map for AI: Built on Solana to underpin Parallel Colony’s AI gameplay, Wayfinder is a new protocol designed to bring the power of AI agents onchain. In short, the system allows AI agents, referred to as “Shells,” to navigate through blockchain environments, perform transactions, and interact with decentralized apps. 

At its core, then, Wayfinder is like a map and toolkit for AI agents to use when they're moving around blockchains. Just like you might use a map app on your phone to find the best route to a new restaurant, Wayfinder provides AI agents with "wayfinding paths." These paths are a set of instructions that help the agents find their way to specific goals onchain, like making a trade on a decentralized exchange or minting an NFT. 

An omni-chain tool: While Solana will be the home base for Wayfinder, its architecture and the development of "wayfinding paths" allow it to seamlessly work across a wide range of blockchains. The protocol will initially support the most popular chains, like Ethereum, Solana, and Base, but additional networks are expected to be added via governance over time. 

A new AI token: The Wayfinder whitepaper proposes PROMPT as the utility and governance token within the Wayfinder ecosystem. Its roles are multifaceted, including governance facilitation, paying for the creation of AI agents, and paying for gas fees for transactions around the Wayfinder ecosystem. It will also be possible to stake PROMPT to propose new wayfinding paths, with stakers earning a share of the transaction fees generated when their paths are used. 

The PROMPT distribution: PROMPT is set to have a 1 billion maximum supply. The distribution strategy, once officially approved, will see tokens allocated to various stakeholders, including the Wayfinder Foundation, developers, and users. Notably, 40% of all PROMPT tokens will be distributed as awards over a 3-year period to people who “cache,” or stake, their PRIME within Wayfinder. Accordingly, not only will Parallel Colony be a powerful new deflationary sink for the PRIME token, but PROMPT rewards will also undoubtedly drive up demand for PRIME for the foreseeable future. 

The big picture: Wayfinder has been created to underpin Parallel Colony, but its infra will be open and can be used toward a variety of different use cases in both gaming and non-gaming contexts. For example, onchain games could use Wayfinder to spin up their own autonomous AI agents or to manage the discovery and distribution of scarce in-game resources. The protocol could be used for creating smart trading or NFT minting bots or even AI customer service agents. The possibilities ahead here are limited mainly by our imaginations, and any project interested in onchain AI capabilities should take note accordingly. 

Zooming out

Personally speaking, it’s hard to explain just how bullish I am on the Parallel ecosystem, and Parallel Colony is a huge keystone in that equation. I’m an avid gamer myself across every genre really, and Colony represents new terrain as far as the AI x gaming crossroads goes. Count me in, I love the prospects of pioneering here! 

And moreso than just my bare excitement, I think Colony has a sensible design that can actually be fruitful both for its gamers and the wider Parallel ecosystem. If nothing else, this is one of the biggest ongoing gaming experiments, not just in crypto but in all of gaming, and you should be tracking it accordingly. That’s the bottom line. 

As a PRIME holder myself, and narratively speaking, one of the things I like about Colony is how it now exposes the Parallel ecosystem to all the dominant chains in the cryptoeconomy. The main Parallel TCG covers Ethereum and Base, Colony covers Solana, and Wayfinder covers any chain you can conceive of, from Cosmos appchains to Ethereum L2s and everything in between. 

More importantly, the Wayfinder Protocol is not just an engine for Colony, but the wider crypto AI scene. Soon, projects of all stripes will be able to tap into the Wayfinder system to bring AI into their onchain processes. I believe this is going to prove a major boon to PRIME and the wider Parallel ecosystem, not to mention AI x crypto projects at large!

Action steps:

• 📚 Read the whitepapers: Colony and Wayfinder

• 🪰 Side quest: Mint XCOPY’s Base NFT (1 day)

• 💎 Catch up on my previous roundup: Will ETH NFTs Rally?

Author bio

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

🙏 Together with 🏴 Mantle 🏴

MANTLE

Explore Mantle. It’s time for mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies with Mantle Network, Mantle Treasury, Mantle Staked ETH, and other token holder-governed product initiatives.

👉 Visit mantle.xyz today to learn more about the Mantle ecosystem.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

When it comes to market performance, many Ethereum NFT collections have been having a rough go of it lately.

Why the bleedout, especially when the wider cryptoeconomy has been heating up recently?

Well, a large amount of capital remained in Ethereum NFTs since the 2021 bull run. And over the past few months, new metas have surged to the fore. Think AI tokens, the Bitcoin Ordinals boom, the explosion of memecoins on Solana, the return of airdrop hunting, and the rise of Farcaster-driven L2 mints like Onchain Gaias on Base. 

This target-rich environment has nudged more than a few people to sell from their existing holdings, like Ethereum NFTs, to try chasing these newer, hotter metas. 

All that said, though, the Ethereum NFT scene still has a premium status and a bright future. New opportunities around crypto social and NFTfi will help ensure that. The recent Dencun upgrade also paved the way for more readily using L1 NFTs in L2s, a dynamic that will lead to all sorts of new powerful utilities. 

Plus, considering this current crypto bull market seems like it’s only just beginning, it’s no stretch to assume Ethereum NFTs will rally hard pretty soon. Plenty of collections here look like bargains right now, so it may be a great chance to sweep some floors!

In the meantime, get prepared by staying up to date—let’s get to the past week’s biggest NFT news highlights 👇

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Achi, the real-life inspiration of the dog wif hat meme, is the star of a new 1/1 NFT auction on Foundation.

• Dune intro’d new ERC-721 and ERC-1155 balance tables.

• Magic Eden launched Diamond claims for Ethereum NFT users.

• Metaplex published its February recap.

• RMRK outlined its modular NFTs roadmap.

• Story Protocol partnered with AI network project Ritual.

• Swamp DAO, a collective aiming to buy Shrek’s music royalty rights, launched on Juicebox.

• The Pudgy Penguins purchased Noun 1029.

• The USPTO published a study on NFTs and IP law.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Delivery at Dawn, a short film backed by Nouns and raising funds for Ethereum devs, dropped on Zora.

• Distributed Gallery unveiled Aside, a time-lock protocol for digital art.

• fxhash opened to the public on Base.

• Highlight intro’d Highlight Studio, a tool for gen art testing.

• Jack Butcher announced Status, a new 1/1 in the VV Rare collection.

• Kraken NFT added support for Art Blocks.

• Optimism announced the winners of its We ❤️ The Art contest.

• Sound unveiled a Channels feature.

• Zora Network saw mint costs plummet post-Dencun.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Base dropped a commemorative EIP-4844 mint.

• Matt Furie released his Peplicator collection.

• Sup unveiled new craftable Logos characters.

• Truth Arts opened $SWIO aidrop claims for Goblintown holders and beyond.

📱 Onchain social

• Drakula, an onchain social media app, launched on Base.

• Family unveiled in-wallet messaging.

• Lens enacted protocol fees and hit +250k profiles.

• Memeland intro’d Stakeland, a social staking protocol.

• Nouns launched its Weekly Retro Rd. 5 on Warpcast.

• The Yellow Collective dropped a Based hoodie via Farcaster Frame mint.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Arbitrum DAO proposed a $400M growth initiative for gaming.

• CTG: Anon Island is launching on Base next month.

• Immutable is preparing to kick off The Main Quest.

• MUD joined forces with CCP Games on Project Awakening.

• Parallel published the Parallel Colony and Wayfinder whitepapers.

• Ronin hit 1M daily active addresses.

• Treasure added support for bulk listings.

• WAGMI Games announced its deployment on Base.

🪙 NFTfi

• ArcadeDAO is considering a proposal to enable $ARCD transferability.

• NFTfi.com raised a $6 million Series A1 funding round.

• Tensor intro’d the $TNSR token.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland DAO announced a Community Content Creators pilot program.

• Forgotten Runes dropped a new Nifty Island map.

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Today’s action steps:

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups: 

  • 🔥 Bullish on Nouns

  • 🔵 What’s New in Base NFTs?

  • 💫 Exploring Astaria on Base

Author bio

William M. Peaster has been with Bankless since January 2021, now serving as senior writer. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he pens the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art onchain in his free time.

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KRAKEN NFT

Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

CryptoPunks is, of course, the most legendary NFT collection on Ethereum. 

But when you measure out across aesthetics, community, cultural potential, and technical quality, one project lords above the rest here in my opinion, and that’s Nouns DAO.

The Nouns are an onchain collective that fund creative efforts to build up Nouns as a decentralized brand and as a memetic force for good.

All that said, it’s a project worth keeping tabs on, so for today’s post let’s catch up on the current pulse of the Nouns ecosystem to see where it stands.  

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

The State of the Nouns

Collection Basics

Since launching on Ethereum in August 2021, the Nouns protocol has generated 1045 Nouns and counting, with the average settling price of the last 10 daily Nouns auctions being 5.7 ETH. 

As for secondary markets, around a dozen Nouns, or ~1% of the entire collection, is currently listed across Blur and OpenSea, with the lowest floor price being 6.9 ETH. 

Surviving the 1st Nouns Forks

The recent Nouns V3 protocol release introduced the Nouns Fork functionality, the first DAO-native version of forking in the cryptoeconomy.

The Verbs team within Nouns DAO created this system to offer a structured, automated approach for groups to diverge over differences of vision in the Nouns community peacefully. 

This mechanism has been used three times to date, with nearly 600 Nouns NFTs representing 57% of the 1045 Nouns created so far relinquished back to the Nouns treasury in these departures. 

These forks notably offered a release valve for early Nouners looking for liquidity, disillusioned DAO members, and arbitrage traders keen on raiding the DAO’s ETH treasury. 

Now that the dust has settled around these cathartic forks, there has been a return to a “business as usual” vibe in Nouns DAO. The group’s treasury ceded a significant chunk of ETH to the exiters, but its current holdings still stand at ~ $22M, which is plenty for its various ongoing cultural and development efforts. 

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The Rise of Prop House

Incubated within Nouns DAO, Prop House is a public good designed to help the Nouns or any other NFT communities deploy capital. The system lets groups create funding rounds in which builders propose ideas, and then community members vote on these proposals. The gist here is you can “bid with ideas for ETH,” i.e. the proposals that receive the most votes in a round win ETH. 

As such, Prop House is an excellent open resource for community building, and it demonstrates the kind of tools Nouns DAO can build for the cryptoeconomy. To date, projects using this infra have awarded more than $3M across +8,000 proposals and +300 funding rounds.

Notably, Nouns DAO itself has been increasingly using Prop House to great effect. 

For example, the collective is currently running a Nouns x Farcaster funding round to incentivize the creation of a Nouns-centric Farcaster client, with the top 3 contributing teams earmarked to earn 100,000 USDC each. Accordingly, this system is now a great avenue for the DAO to support creative efforts in a targeted way outside of the main Nouns governance process. 

Propagating the Nounish with Nouns Builder

Built and later handed off by the Zora team, Nouns Builder makes it easy for people to create and run Nounish-style, auction-based DAOs on Ethereum, Optimism, Base, or Zora Network. So far, over 200 collectives have been launched with this infra, like Purple, a DAO for expanding the Farcaster protocol, and The Yellow Collective, a DAO for supporting artists on Base. 

The big ideas? This deployer infra has helped further popularize the Nounish approach in the Ethereum ecosystem, and it’s created a flywheel effect, as some of the projects made with Nouns Builder now offer a cut of their earnings as tributes to Nouns DAO. 

If you’re in the market for making your own DAO, then, Nouns Builder is now a leading contender here alongside other deployer solutions like Aragon, Party, and Tally. 

The Nouns Farcaster Revival

During the recent bear market, Nouns DAO shuttered its Discord server to move away from having a centralized web2 communications channel that it solely controlled. 

Against that backdrop, an interesting new development has been the Nounish community’s passionate embrace of crypto social tech, namely Warpcast, the leading Farcaster client. 

Indeed, the /nouns channel, now one of the largest on Warpcast, has become a de facto crypto-native replacement for the sunsetted Discord and is teeming with Nounish discussions, news, mints, and more. The aforementioned Nouns x Farcaster Prop House round will also undoubtedly produce at least one client that will go on to rival or surpass Warpcast’s Nounish user base. 

All in all, then, this client work, the onchain nature of the Farcaster stack, and the ease of NFT minting via Farcaster Frames makes the Farcaster ecosystem an ideal home for everyone Nounish. If you want to stay current with the Nouns, this is the place to be for the foreseeable future. 

Recent Nouns Proposals

When I wrote about the Nouns in August 2023, the DAO had already voted on ~350 proposals through its main governance process. Today, that number stands at over +500. In that span, Nouns has backed a range of efforts including: 

• 🍺 A beer brand

• 👾 A video game

• 🎮 An esports team

• 🎨 A BasePaint collab

• ☕️ An LA coffee shop

• 🐤 A cute Nounish IP project

• 🛹 A skateparks overhaul campaign

• 🎄 A Christmas party for kids in need

• ⚖️ A donation to Tornado’s legal defense

• 🎥 A short film for Ethereum devs

These projects, while just a sample of the current work around the Nouns ecosystem, demonstrate how the DAO can be a powerful cultural engine and a force for good, both onchain and in real life. In this regard, Nouns DAO is one-of-a-kind in the cryptoeconomy right now and a hub where fun and kindness can mix with crypto in unprecedented ways. 

Zooming Out

Going forward, look for Nouns DAO to continue backing interesting efforts and supporting new resources, like Farcaster clients. Ethereum’s recent Dencun upgrade has also paved the way for the DAO to embrace Layer 2 (L2) voting, so expect some innovation here. 

Lastly, keep an eye out for Nounish content making breakthroughs into the mainstream. For instance, the Nounish Quack account now has 1.6M Instagram followers, and Nouns Esports just signed the #1 Melee player in the world, which makes them instant heavyweights in the competitive Smash Bros scene. Taken altogether, I think right now no NFT project has the potential to reach more people over the long-term than the Nouns, so make sure you’re not sleeping on them!

Today’s action steps:

• 🎊 Mint the latest Nouns drop: Delivery at Dawn

• 📰 Stay up to date: Subscribe to the Nounsletter

• 🔵 Catch up on my previous post: Base NFTs

Author bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal — a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He also serves as a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter.

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KRAKEN NFT

Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

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Dear Bankless Nation,

One of the biggest success stories in our space right now is Base. 

A Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution incubated by crypto exchange giant Coinbase, Base has surged and become home to one of the fastest-growing app scenes in the cryptoeconomy in short order, having publicly launched in August 2023. 

That said, this blooming has helped Base foster a teeming NFT scene that already rivals that of virtually every other L1 and L2. 

For today’s post, then, let’s check up on the pulse of Base and survey its contemporary NFT landscape to get a feel for what’s possible here and what could be coming in the months ahead. 

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

The Base NFT Landscape

The pulse of Base

With over $1.3B USD in total value locked (TVL), more than 1.3M monthly active users, and hundreds of apps deployed, Base is among the largest and most teeming networks in the cryptoeconomy today. 

Much of this activity comes from Base’s already robust DeFi scene, but a considerable portion of it stems from the L2’s rising NFT ecosystem. 

So far, the network has facilitated the minting of +95M NFTs, putting it in the top 4 chains for total NFTs created to date behind only Polygon, Ethereum, and Solana. Additionally, Base is currently accounting for ~6% of all NFT transactions on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains. 

The main pillars of Base

The growth of Base has been buoyed by two main tech pillars: Coinbase’s umbrella of infra offerings and the OP Stack. 

Of course, the main Coinbase exchange platform is among the oldest and most trusted in crypto, boasting millions of global users. Combine this port of entry with Coinbase Wallet and smart wallets, and you get arguably the best onchain onramping avenue in existence today. 

Indeed, over this most recent bear market, I onboarded a handful of family and friends to crypto via Base. In transferring directly from Coinbase to Base, they skipped the time and costs of bridging from the Ethereum L1 and were able to dive straight into apps. 

Additionally, in being an L2 built on Optimism’s OP Stack “Superchain” tech, Base offers fast and cheap UX and is interoperable with, and downstream of, Ethereum’s and Optimism’s advances. For example, when Ethereum activates EIP-4844 in the Dencun upgrade tomorrow, Optimism plans to quickly implement it, a move that will help ax gas costs on Base by as much as 98% in some cases. 

This UX foundation and its prospects for even further improvement is a big deal. 

Anecdotally speaking, the people I onboarded to crypto this cycle found the Coinbase Wallet + Base experience virtually indistinguishable from the Phantom + Solana experience, and Solana is famed for its fast and cheap transactions. As Base continues to evolve, it can become that much more dominant in the DeFi and NFT app scenes accordingly.

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An overview of the Base NFT ecosystem

The Base team has created a great initial platform for facilitating and actualizing onchain enterprises of all sorts. Some of the key projects building in and around the early Base NFT ecosystem today are as follows. 

Wallets 👛

Coinbase Wallet, Rainbow, and MetaMask have become leading choices for many Base users, and Rabby Wallet has gained traction here recently, too. 

Privy’s embedded wallets and easy login system have also proven key to growing Base’s early mobile apps scene, with pioneering users like friend.tech and FrenPet.

Safe now offers multisig deployments on Base as well, which is great for personal or collective treasury security, and there are also portfolio hubs like DeBank, Zapper, and Zerion for tracking assets across Base and other networks simultaneously. 

Bridges 🌉

Many people bridge into Base directly from Coinbase, which is the cheapest and fastest way to do so. 

There is also the main Base Bridge for those interested in transferring ETH or stablecoins from Ethereum. Deposits are relatively fast, but this canonical bridge enforces a 7-day withdrawal period as a security measure. 

There are third-party alternatives here that offer fast deposits and fast withdrawals, though. Some of the standouts among these providers include Across Protocol, Bungee, Celer Network’s cBridge, Connext, and Hop Protocol.

DAOs 🧱

The Base ecosystem has a growing array of tooling for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), like Aragon, Nouns Builder, Party, and Tally, which all offer ways to deploy and manage onchain collectives on the L2.

For example, Based Management, a DAO deployed via Nouns Builder, has spun up its own Party to collect Base assets, from ERC-20s like $DEGEN to NFTs like BasePaint open editions, as a group. 

On the periphery of these main solutions are additional resources like Prop House and JokeRace that make it easy for onchain collectives to deploy funds within their communities atop Base. 

Marketplaces 🛒

OpenSea is a notable early adopter of Base and has become a hub for secondary markets around the L2’s NFTs. Another rising force here is Reservoir, which offers a Base NFT API so that other platforms can create their own Base NFT marketplaces. 

On the NFTfi (NFTs x DeFi) side of things, sudoswap allows creating or trading through liquidity pools of Base NFTs, with onchain enforcement of royalties. Another project to keep in mind is Astaria, a marketplace for crypto loans on Base that recently facilitated its first NFT-based loan.

As for trading fungible ERC-20 tokens that are associated with NFT projects, Uniswap’s Base deployment is a main avenue. For example, the AdWorld team just released Ape In, a DN-404 PFP collection on Base that automatically drops an NFT to your wallet upon purchasing 1 $APEIN token on Uniswap. 

Art 🎨

Base has an impressive constellation of creator-centric platforms. 

Zora is the most notable do-it-yourself minting platform here today, but new contenders like Highlight, which just facilitated the largest generative art collection ever, and mint.fun, an NFT collecting and creator hub, are also ones to watch. On the music front, Sound and Catalog Radio are early Base standouts. 

More experimental projects also abound in the Base creative scene, like BasePaint (collective pixel art), Hypersub (NFT-based subscriptions), meme.market (memecoin + memes creator hub), and TITLES (an AI-friendly remixer app).

Social 📱

Farcaster has taken the crypto social scene by storm this year, and the /base channel on Warpcast, the leading Farcaster app, has become the largest on the platform with +120k followers. 

Beyond Warpcast becoming a huge conversation center for the Base community, the app’s slick UX and the recent Farcaster Frames rollout have made it a major center for minting activity on Base, too. Aux Aubres by Zancan, which just became the largest gen art collection minted to date, was able to become as big as it is largely thanks to the Base + Warpcast + Frames combo making the minting process so easy and so open.

Web3 publishing platforms like Mirror and Paragraph also support Base mints and Frames, so we’ve recently seen a growing number of blog posts being collected on the L2 via Warpcast. 

A couple of other miscellaneous projects to watch right now are Bountycaster (a web3 gigs platform) and Unlonely (livestreams + NFT clips). 

Gaming 🎮

Another promising area for Base is its gaming scene. The biggest player here currently is the sci-fi trading card game Parallel, which has many of its cards as NFTs on Base. The team is also exploring creating a Layer 3 (L3) on top of Base for its AI game, Parallel Colony.

As for more experimental titles, the aforementioned FrenPet, a Tamagotchi-style adventure game that recently released its V3, is an early standout here. Other upstart efforts to watch include Land, Labor, Capital (LLC), speedtracer, and YONK by Small Brain.

The future of the Base NFT ecosystem

From infra to gaming and everything in between, the early Base NFT scene has a little bit of everything, and this foundation is already way more teeming and varied than what most L1s and L2s have to offer around NFTs.  

The Base team’s mission is to onboard +1B people onchain, and the rising appeal of NFT use cases combined with Coinbase’s offerings and the OP Stack makes this mission seem realistically achievable over the next decade or two. 

Of course, Base hasn’t even passed its first birthday yet, so it will evolve much further from here. The next of these evolutions will happen tomorrow when proto-danksharding arrives via EIP-4844, drastically dropping gas costs for Base transactions. Later, the arrival of full danksharding will cut these costs even further. 

As gas costs trend toward zero accordingly and new L3s are built atop Base, we’re poised to see an incredible boom of NFT experiments and cross-pollination of ideas that weren’t possible before. And with Base decentralizing and advancing toward maturity, the L2’s already impressive NFT scene seems ripe for continued growth going forward.

Today’s action steps:

• 🔵 Explore Base: Check out the Base ecosystem

• 🎨 Catch up on my previous roundup: AI Art + Zora

🙏 Together with 🔮 Kraken NFT 🔮

KRAKEN NFT

Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

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Dear Bankless Nation,

The crossroads of AI x NFTs is an area I’m really excited about, so it’s cool to see that Zora just launched AI support in the Zora Canvas NFT builder.

Underpinned by text-to-image Stability Diffusion tech, this new functionality lets creators make visual layers via prompts that can be remixed in the Canvas interface. 

There’s even an in-built splits system here, so that a model’s host and the model itself receive 10% cuts each of any accrued ETH from mints. Only the base Stability Diffusion model is available for now, but more models are coming. 

It’s a super neat implementation, and it’s perfect for the Zora ecosystem, so I’m looking forward to all the creativity and innovations that will be coming out of this mashup. 

In the meantime, let’s get you up to speed on the past week’s NFT news highlights 👇

-WMP

🟢 Thanks to SynFutures 🟢

👉  Trade perps on SynFutures V3 and earn TRIPLE airdrop rewards ✨

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Kevin Owocki released his new book “Exploring Mycofi” on Zora.

• Phantom intro’d support for Ledger x Bitcoin.

• Zerion added support for Zora Network.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Art Blocks paused project releases to refine its self-publishing studio and the Art Blocks Curated selection process.

• Aux Arbres, released by zancan on Highlight, became the largest gen art collection in history.

• Fidenza #49 and Fidenza #667 resold for 496 ETH and 290 ETH respectively.

• Jack Butcher announced Opepen v2 is coming March 20th.

• Nouns DAO is voting on funding Efficax 2.0, an onchain art deployer.

• Sotheby’s auctioned XCOPY’s “data_lords” for +$330k.

• Privy added support for onboarding via Spotify.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Bitcoin Pizza Ninja #1 was auctioned for 2.23 BTC at Sotheby’s.

• Bored Ape #830 resold for 500 ETH on sudoswap via Machi’s AIP-304 proposal.

• CryptoKitties #95 resold for 33.68 ETH.

• CryptoPunk #3100 was purchased for 4,500 ETH, the 2nd-biggest onchain ‘Punk sale to date.

📱 Onchain social

• Ethereum Follow Protocol pushed back its Q1 2024 launch plans.

• Grid, a drawing experiment built atop Warpcast, launched.

• Hyperloot released a Dungeon War minigame on Farcaster.

• Lens has amassed more than $500k in revenue since going permissionless.

• Warpcast intro’d transaction frames.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity rolled out new app.axie features.

• Base dropped a referral code for two free Parallel card packs.

• CyberKongz kicked off their Ronin migration.

• Immutable unveiled the Immutable Minting API.

• Nouns Esports signed Cody Schwab, the world’s #1 Super Smash Bros Melee player.

• Parallel reduced the cost of creating Echos.

🪙 NFTfi

• Astaria facilitated the 1st NFT loan on Base.

• Blast saw its TVL reach $2.4B.

• Enjoy kicked off its Airdrop 1 claim on Zora Network.

• NFTfi.com facilitated +$12 million in loans last month.

• X2Y2 intro’d Buy Now Pay Later support.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland added multichain support to its wearables marketplace.

• Nifty League is hosting a tournament series in Nifty Island over the next month.

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Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect this post on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups: 

  • 💧 The EIP-4844 NFT Revolution

  • 🙊 The NodeMonkes Bitcoin Takeover

  • 🟠 8 Bitcoin L2s You Should Be Watching

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He also serves as a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter.

🙏 Together with 🟢 SynFutures 🟢

SynFutures

SynFutures is Blast’s largest perps DEX with 140,000+ users. Backed by Pantera, Polychain, Standard Crypto, and more, V3 introduces oAMM, an onchain order book with a CLAMM. Stack Blast and SynFutures rewards while experiencing the most capital-efficient trading in DeFi derivatives.

👉 Get started on the SynFutures V3 today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

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Dear Bankless Nation,

It’s not every day that one of the biggest blockchains in the world undergoes a major evolution.

That’s why all eyes are on Ethereum right now, as the leading smart contract platform is undergoing a huge upgrade next week that will intro an unprecedented mechanism: blobspace. 

The arrival of blobs on Ethereum is set to usher in the first golden age of Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions, which in turn can kick off a revolution in how builders and users approach NFTs.

For today’s post, let’s run back a quick refresher on EIP-4844 and blobspace and some things to keep an eye on here going forward!

-WMP

🟢 Thanks to SynFutures 🟢

👉  Trade perps on SynFutures V3 and earn TRIPLE airdrop rewards ✨

Preparing for EIP-4844 and Blobspace NFTs

The 101: The upcoming Cancun-Deneb, a.k.a. Dencun, hard fork upgrade, set for deployment on Ethereum on March 13th, 2024, heralds the network’s shift into its Surge era, which is aimed at doubling down on improving scalability. 

At the heart of Dencun is the introduction of EIP-4844, which will actualize proto-danksharding, i.e. blobspace, a groundbreaking innovation designed to help Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem march toward 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). 

Why it matters: Blobspace is poised to revolutionize the Ethereum ecosystem by significantly lowering gas fees. This gas reduction is particularly critical for Ethereum L2 solutions and will make transactions on them drastically more affordable, thereby supporting their growth and increasing their appeal to a wider user base.

How blobspace works: At its core, blobspace introduces a new method of handling transaction data through blobs, which are temporary chunks of transaction data stored efficiently on the blockchain. 

This system departs from traditional block storage, utilizing a separate pricing mechanism known as "blob gas" that is independent of Ethereum's main gas market. 

Blobs are created by splitting data into smaller pieces, which are then mathematically transformed into a unique identifier for storage and later retrieval. This process not only optimizes data storage on the blockchain but also ensures transactions can be processed more swiftly and cost-effectively.

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What happens next: With the Dencun upgrade's implementation, Ethereum L2s will need to manually integrate this new tech to reap the benefits. Optimism, for example, plans to launch its Ecotone upgrade closely following Dencun's deployment to enact blobspace in its Superchain ecosystem, e.g. on Optimism, Base, Zora Network, etc. 

While complete integration work may take several months across all the various L2 platforms, the overall expectation is for swift adoption throughout the Ethereum ecosystem, thus beginning a new era of efficiency and scalability for the leading smart contract network. 

Estimating the savings: The Optimism community has developed the Superchain Savings Estimator, a tool designed to preview the potential reductions in gas costs on Optimism's Superchain L2s following the adoption of blobspace. 

With this tool, examples like swapping on Uniswap on Base or minting Zora NFTs on Zora demonstrate a dramatic drop in transaction fees—in some cases, up to 98%. Some explicit examples, based on average recent Superchain transaction assumptions, are as follows:

🦄 Uniswap swap on Base:

• Previous Cost: $0.5822

• Estimated Cost: $0.0106

• Percentage Drop: 98.18%

💫 Zora NFT mint on Zora Network:

• Previous Cost: $0.3013

• Estimated Cost: $0.0061

• Percentage Drop: 97.98%

🪞 Mirror NFT mint on Optimism:

• Previous Cost: $0.2032

• Estimated Cost: $0.0128

• Percentage Drop: 93.70%

🎉 Mint.fun NFT mint on Zora Network:

• Previous Cost: $0.1476

• Estimated Cost: $0.0037

• Percentage Drop: 97.49%

🔃 Send USDC on Base:

• Previous Cost: $0.1758

• Estimated Cost: $0.0037

• Percentage Drop: 97.90%

An NFT revolution: Blobspace is set to revolutionize the NFT ecosystem by drastically reducing gas costs associated with NFT activities on L2s. This change paves the way for projects to potentially cover all transaction costs for their users, similar to practices around server costs in Web2 platforms. 

Additionally, the lower fees will foster the development of new applications and cross-pollinations within the NFT app scene space that were previously unfeasible due to cost constraints, and this should lead to an explosion of new NFT innovations over time.

“Cheaper, faster transactions are absolutely critical for continuing to enable innovation and unlocking nascent use cases—such as onchain gaming and closed limit order book exchanges,” the Base team just noted. “They will also make it more practical to apply developing ideas from the rapidly advancing fields of cryptography and AI within onchain apps, leading to entirely new application classes yet to be conceived.”

Of course, beyond cost savings, blobspace will also open up a new design space for NFTs, from storage use cases to creating “headless” NFT marketplaces that exist entirely within blobs. New paradigms here are just around the corner accordingly!

NFT quests: If you’re like me, once L2s start integrating with the Dencun upgrade you’ll be keen to try some apps around the ecosystem to see for yourself just how big the gas savings are. Some activities I plan to experiment with, and that you might want to explore too, include:

• 🎨 Collecting a BasePaint daily open edition (Base)

• 🔑 Buying and selling friend.tech keys (Base)

• 📝 Collecting or publishing writing NFTs on Mirror (Base, Linea, OP, Zora Network)

• 🎴 Creating a free mint drop on Zora (Arbitrum, Base, Blast, OP, Zora Network)

• 🎉 Minting a trending NFT on mint.fun (OP, Base, Zora Network)

• 🧹 Sweeping or pooling NFTs on sudoswap (Arbitrum, Base)

Note, there will also be some commemorative mints dropping next to celebrate the arrival of blobspace. For instance, I’m excited to collect Delivery at Dawn, a short film NFT created as a collaboration between Nouns, Line, and Stateful Works, with proceeds going to Protocol Guild to reward Ethereum core contributors. That’s just one example, so get ready for more mints!

Today’s action steps:

• 🙊 Catch up on my previous write-up: The NodeMonkes Takeover

• 💦 Estimate your blob savings: Superchain Savings Estimator

🙏 Together with 🟢 SynFutures 🟢

SynFutures

SynFutures is Blast’s largest perps DEX with 140,000+ users. Backed by Pantera, Polychain, Standard Crypto, and more, V3 introduces oAMM, an onchain order book with a CLAMM. Stack Blast and SynFutures rewards while experiencing the most capital-efficient trading in DeFi derivatives.

👉 Get started on the SynFutures V3 today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

A new force is reshaping the NFT landscape on Bitcoin. 

The project? NodeMonkes. 

Over the past month, this Ordinals collection has surged to prominence, quickly becoming a flagship collection for Bitcoin and now rivaling top NFTs on other chains. 

For today’s post, let’s get you up to speed on the blooming of the Nodes and some things you’ll want to keep an eye on here!

-WMP

🟢 Thanks to SynFutures 🟢

👉  Trade perps on SynFutures V3 and earn TRIPLE airdrop rewards ✨

The Incredible Rise of NodeMonkes

NodeMonkes as Bitcoin-native PFPs 

With its first inscriptions made in February 2023, NodeMonkes are hailed as the first original, i.e. non-derivative, 10k profile picture (PFP) collection minted via Ordinals. Bitcoin Punks and OnChainMonkeys had earlier inscriptions, though these collections sprang from already existing projects. 

Aesthetically speaking, the NodeMonkes collection has a pixel art style similar to retro video game graphics with large, blocky pixels and exaggerated, minimalist features.

Each character is an abstract monkey, with some more abstract than others, so the interpretation of their faces is largely left to the viewer’s imagination. Overall, the stylistic approach here reminds me of Nouns, one of the most iconic pixel art NFT collections on Ethereum, but more explicitly tailored to the Bitcoin scene.

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Becoming the top Bitcoin NFT collection

Bearing no roadmap and created by an anonymous duo, NodeMonkes kicked off in December 2023 with a public Dutch auction that ended up fetching 0.03 BTC (~$1,260 at the time) per NFT. 

The months of anticipation leading up to the mint, combined with the Bitcoin NFT scene recently swelling from surging interest around Ordinals, BTC ETF approvals, and Bitcoin L2s, has led to incredible early momentum for the NodeMonkes. 

Now, they’ve risen to become not only the biggest NFT collection on Bitcoin but also among the most valuable collections in the entire NFT space. Their current 0.81 BTC floor price—a 2,600% increase from the 0.03 BTC mint cost—puts the Nodes behind only CryptoPunks and Pudgy Penguins when it comes to floor value right now. As for market caps, the Nodes (~$500M) are second only to ‘Punks (~$2B) at the moment. 

The main trading hub for NodeMonkes has been multichain NFT marketplace Magic Eden, where over 2,795 BTC (+$190M) worth of NodeMonkes have traded to date. Impressively, this volume level already makes the collection among the top 30 most traded NFT projects of all time, and the trading has only been picking up lately.

For example, over the past month, the Nodes were at the center of more than $86M worth of trades, and $11M of those trades came in the last 24 hours alone. In fact, the trading around Nodes has become so frenzied that it’s helped push Magic Eden into pole position as the leading NFT marketplace by volume in recent days. 

Big NodeMonkes sales coming in hot

With NodeMonkes increasingly being hailed as the “CryptoPunks of Bitcoin” by some, the collection has unsurprisingly seen some large sales lately thanks to big NFT collectors piling in. 

For instance, the first Node to crack the $1M sale mark was the alien #2769, which resold over the weekend for a whopping 16.6 BTC. That sale also happened to mark the second-largest Ordinals purchase in the cryptoeconomy so far. A handful of other recent buys have also occurred above 8 BTC, namely around Nodemonkes #9255 (10.54 BTC), #5605 (9.95 BTC), #3315 (9.17 BTC), #10 (8.83 BTC), #3361 (8.82 BTC), and #4791 (8.7 BTC). 

The big takeaway here? Well capitalized collectors are moving in and securing the rarest and most desirable Nodes on the market. This action, combined with the fresh 4,500 ETH buy of CryptoPunk 3100, shows that whales are back out in force in NFT land.

The big picture

While NodeMonkes are now decidedly out of the price range of the vast majority of people, their rise is emblematic of the surging popularity of the Bitcoin Ordinals scene, and they’ve catalyzed an interest boom toward Magic Eden and other more affordable Bitcoin NFT projects. 

Ethereum has CryptoPunks, Solana has Mad Lads, and now Bitcoin has a flagship PFP collection in NodeMonkes. The Ordinals space is so early that in time it’s entirely possible that some other project will become king of the hill on Bitcoin, but for now and the foreseeable future that title is firmly in the grasp of the Nodes. Let’s see where they go from here!

Today’s action steps:

• 🙊 Explore NodeMonkes: Browse on Magic Eden

• 😄 Catch up with my previous roundup: Memecoins with Memes

🙏 Together with 🟢 SynFutures 🟢

SynFutures

SynFutures is Blast’s largest perps DEX with 140,000+ users. Backed by Pantera, Polychain, Standard Crypto, and more, V3 introduces oAMM, an onchain order book with a CLAMM. Stack Blast and SynFutures rewards while experiencing the most capital-efficient trading in DeFi derivatives.

👉 Get started on the SynFutures V3 today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

This week, meme.market caught my attention.

Created by the minds behind mint.fun, this new platform pairs memecoins directly with picture memes via ERC-1155 NFTs. 

The idea here, of course, is to bridge the gap between meme-themed tokens and actual memes. 

Deployed on the Base L2, the platform acts as a marketplace and creator hub where people can buy and sell memecoins + memes along bonding curves and create and earn from new memes in existing markets. 

My opinion? Keep an eye out here, as meme.market not only adds depth to the memecoin concept but also pioneers a new model for digital creativity in the cryptoeconomy. It’s worth keeping on your radar accordingly.

For now, though, onto the past week’s NFT news highlights! 👇

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Delivery at Dawn, a short film NFT mint for core Ethereum contributors, is coming March 11th.

• $ENJOY, a memecoin for Zora users, is launching on the Zora L2.

• Justin Drake released an NFT Orb for AMAs.

• Magic Eden unveiled its Ethereum marketplace.

• Mint, a new NFT L2, rolled out its testnet.

• VanEck launched a new NFT marketplace, SegMint.

• Zora delivered over $1M worth of creator rewards this month.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• BasePaint released BasePaint Masterpieces.

• diid published On Compressionism, a new look into a rising onchain art movement.

• fxhash unveiled buso by Patakk, the platform’s inaugural Base drop.

• Jonathan Mann launched Song a Day subscriptions via Hypersub.

• XCOPY 10, an old PixelChain mint, resold for 10 ETH.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• CryptoPunk 3100, an alien punk, received a 4,250 ETH bid, which was then shifted over to fellow alien ‘Punk 7804.

• Goblintown creators Truth Labs is offering equity to its holders.

• Inscription #2, the 2nd Bitcoin Ordinal ever minted, resold for 24.48 BTC.

• Yuga Labs sunsetted support for marketplaces that don’t support royalties.

📱 Onchain social

• Lens launched permissionless signups and reached +200k profiles.

• Paradigm unveiled Frog, a new framework for building Farcaster Frames.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Arbitrum announced the Arbitrum Arcade campaign.

• Axie Infinity kicked off Origins S7 Final Era.

• BattlePlan plans to migrate from Arbitrum Nova.

• Crypto The Game allowlisted all S1 players for S2.

• Gods Unchained unveiled mobile support.

• Guild of Guardians released its $GOG token migration portal.

• Immutable reached +200k Immutable Passport users.

• Influence launched its pre-release gameplay.

• Parallel unveiled its open beta.

🪙 NFTfi

• Blast rolled out its mainnet.

• Fungify announced info for its ve404 NFT mint.

• NFTfi.com facilitated a real estate-based 70,000 USDC loan.

• Uniswap intro’d a browser wallet extension, limit orders, and charts.

• X2Y2 rolled out support for Pandora ERC-404 lending.

• Zora added support for Blast and Uniswap.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland is preparing for Decentraland Art Week ‘24.

• Otherside conducted its Apes Come Home demo event.

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Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect this post on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups: 

  • 🎴 Playing the Parallel Open Beta

  • 🙊 What Yuga Should Have Built

  • 📱 Lens vs. Farcaster

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He also serves as a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter.

🙏 Together with 🔮 Kraken NFT 🔮

KRAKEN NFT

Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use, and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

Yesterday, the first issue of the new ETH Investors Club (EIC) magazine went live digitally, with physical copies redeemable via NFTs on the way. 

The EIC effort is focused on spotlighting Ethereum’s current landscape through high-quality essays, and I’m honored that my piece, The Infinite Story Machine, was featured in the inaugural “Culture Corner” section. 

In this essay, I lay out my overarching view of Ethereum as a novel kind of cultural engine for storymaking. 

This concept largely informs how I approach the NFT landscape, so for today’s post I wanted to share this piece with you here in case it can help anyone else expand how they philosophically approach Ethereum and NFTs!

-WMP

🏴 Thanks to Mantle 🏴

👉  Visit mantle.xyz to learn more ✨

The Infinite Story Machine

Storytelling is fundamental to human culture. 

Stories are how we pass down our beliefs and values. They’re how we teach lessons and form communities, how we express our desires and entertain ourselves. 

I have another more expansive conception of the word stories, though. It might be more accurately called “storymaking,” which I see as the universal becoming of things into reality and then into history, on and on. 

I think it’s useful to consider Ethereum as a novel type of medium for both these senses of stories. This framing offers a new complement to traditional methods of valuing the network. 

Of course, Ethereum has its own history, which Camila Russo did an amazing job chronicling the early days of in her book The Infinite Machine. I really love that title. And when I think about Ethereum philosophically today, my slight remix would be: Ethereum is an Infinite Story Machine.

This metaphor operates on multiple levels. 

Firstly, Ethereum, fundamentally a ledger technology, is increasingly becoming like a new giant Book of Everything. The passing of its blocks are the filling and turning of its pages. Who did what and when. It’s like Borges’s Library of Babel begun in the real world. 

The network’s far from encompassing all things yet, and navigating its early happenings can be labyrinthine, but no book’s organized instantly. And DeFi and NFT pioneers have already pointed toward a future where going onchain becomes much more common, so many more pages are certainly coming. 

Furthermore, consider how Ethereum has become an open foundation for supporting external story machines—think L2 scaling solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism, which can in turn support their own L3 rollups, so on and so forth—while also being home to an ever-growing number of little story machines, i.e. app smart contracts. 

For example, at the app layer one of my favorite projects is Zora. Zora has previously nicknamed its NFT creator suite, which is underpinned by Ethereum contracts, the Magic Machine. Beyond it’s technical architecture, it’s become a creative nexus of imagination and desire; put your art or memes or music or videos or writings in, i.e. your personal stories, to record and offer them up for ETH and for posterity. 

In fact, Zora is also a hyperstructure, a crypto protocol that “can run for free and forever, without maintenance,” making it a great example of what I called a little story machine earlier. Its smart contracts will continue facilitating stories and storymaking atop Ethereum indefinitely, always having the potential for energies and dreams to flow through it and out of it in basically all directions. 

Here, I’ll clarify that a set of contracts doesn’t have to be directly linked to creative efforts or NFT projects to be involved with storymaking. The ongoing facilitation and recording of DeFi protocol transactions and things like DeFi DAO votes are 100% storymaking, too, in that philosophical sense. It’s happenings made into history, on and on, onchain. Zora’s just a potent example since people directly use its smart contracts to create and share new cultural assets, i.e. stories. 

All that said, Ethereum as the Infinite Story Machine with its ceaselessly churning landscape of smart contracts is ripe for fostering hypercultures, which LGHT has defined as a “crypto culture that can grow freely and forever [...] once it has entered the collective mind.” LGHT’s also asserted that “every creative entity that can put it’s context onchain has the opportunity to birth a hyperculture,” which I 100% agree with.

Think about it: Ethereum metaphorically provides the pages that bind protocols like Zora together, Zora then helps birth hypercultures, and then hypercultures birth more content and protocols, for example Nouns Builder, and this eventually leads to more new cultures and more new content and new protocols, ‘round and ‘round. A single creative act on the right smart contract can ripple out very far—that’s the cultural power of the Infinite Story Machine. 

Zooming back out some to the level of people and groups, I’ll also note that Ethereum has literally become a hub for novel storytelling experiments, ranging from art to games and everything in between. Some have already come and gone, like the Cellarius worldbuilding project, or Chainspace, which was originally envisioned as a “cinematic wrapper” for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Yet some of these storytelling experiments are alive and well and poised to be around for a long time. I’m reminded here of the mesmerizing onchain virtual world sculpture Terraforms, which is an example of runtime art. This means the world itself is generated entirely at the level of its code + the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and so it will live for as long as Ethereum lives.

That art is interactive, as its code beckons collectors to participate in the world’s story. They have the ability to shift their parcel NFTs into “Daydreaming” mode, which can slow or altogether stop the project’s hardcoded obliteration. As Terraforms specialist Astrostl has previously explained: 

“The smart contract code is set to begin a decay and eventual destruction of the castle unless ‘enough’ parcels are Daydreaming [...] Each Daydreamer forestalls this event by 10 years. If or when there are 500 dreamers, the collapse is forever prevented. Yay! At the time of this writing there are already 481, so this is delayed by 4,810 years and only needs 19 more to be safe for as long as the Ethereum blockchain exists.”

Another great but very different example would be Nouns DAO, which is creating a CC0 brand from the ground up. They’re forging their brand’s story by funding and deploying other stories, e.g. art, books, games, music, videos, etc. and they use Ethereum as their base of operations. 

The Nouns are arguably the foremost collective storytelling experiment on Ethereum today, not to mention how their open, CC0 style has led to countless aesthetic and technical spinoff experiments at this point. The storytellers beget new stories, and those new stories beget new storytellers, and those new storytellers beget new stories, onward and outward evermore. 

And with the world always evolving around us, the ways that Ethereum facilitates stories will evolve, too. As more people onboard to metaverse spaces in the decades ahead, Ethereum will underpin much of the associated cultural and economic activities therein. As AI agents become more commonplace, more onchain storymaking will come via virtual agents interacting with smart contracts, other AI, and humans. And validity proofs and coprocessors will likely see 1,000s of chains bloom atop Ethereum over time, the becoming of an ultimate machine of story machines. 

Why is this conception of Ethereum as a new technological medium for stories and collective storymaking worthwhile, then? Because it hones in on and takes into account Ethereum’s immense creative, qi-like power in a way that other traditional framings—think “Ethereum as an alternative financial layer” or “Ethereum as a new internet of value”—haven’t. 

Additionally, this understanding leads to two new ways to see Ethereum as valuable, one economic in nature and the other political. With regard to the former, stories and storymaking are like oxygen to people. We’re all weaving our own stories constantly or watching others do the same. This is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. 

That said, recall the old sales axiom, “sell aspirin, not vitamins,” as people always need aspirin but only periodically buy vitamins. Ethereum’s aspirin, then, is storymaking. Its blockspace sells because of the need for storymaking, which is basically all-encompassing and will never go away as long as humans exist. We do, and we’re going to do more and more onchain. So ETH can gain in value if Ethereum can continue to widen as a gravity well of storymaking in the world. In my opinion, that blackhole’s already been opened. 

As for the political dimension, consider how traditional institutions—from cable TV to the U.S. Treasury Department—colonize our desires, they colonize the ways we can experience stories. In other words, they constantly hail us into their status quos and call on us to experience the world on their terms. 

Fair enough, but Ethereum in contrast is neutral, opt-in, and like a giant “choose your own adventure” computer, constantly churning, constantly open. It’s a Shakespearean foil to domineering institutions. 

As such, Ethereum as an Infinite Story Machine is fundamentally a liberational technology. It offers us flights of escape from top-down, heavily-managed mainstream storymaking to bottom-up, liberated storymaking, whether personal or collective. It’s a juke out of the constant interpellation by corporate and state actors, which are fine in many cases but nightmarish in the worst, into new territories of freedom. 

And here on the other side, here in open Ethereum, things are more untamed and experimental and remixable. As ClubNFT’s Artnome recently put it, “When you allow everyone to [create] whenever they like and as frequently as they like, without curation or censorship, you encounter all kinds of fascinating and unpredictable art.” 

Accordingly, unpredictable media leads to multiplicitous cultures, and multiplicitous cultures lead to more storymaking proliferating out atop Ethereum in all directions, and on and on and on the new Book of Everything expands along. 

In this way, yes, I see Ethereum as an Infinite Story Machine, and I see this machine as like a rising rhizomatic structure, akin to the roots it metaphorically resembles. Each of its points of connection have the potential to branch off and proliferate into new directions. Instead of a centralized hierarchy, it instead presents a vast, interconnected web of narratives that grow organically and intertwine. Each transaction, each smart contract is a node in this sprawling structure, ceaselessly leading to new collaborations and unexpected offshoots. 

Here we become nomads, wandering the living machine, living our lives. Another major wrinkle of intrigue here is the ownership potential—what Chris Dixon calls the new Read Write Own paradigm—for us nomads along these infinite pathways of storymaking and interaction. Everything from collecting an Art Blocks NFT to aping into the GROK memecoin occurs along these ways, and while there may be onchain dangers here and there, the machine offers us that awesome freedom to try. 

In the meta sense, this movement to build out something different in Ethereum, this kind of technology as a story of stories, is something I find noble. It’s the good fight, and advances the interests of people everywhere. And this conceptual framing helps me better see Ethereum for what it is, a titanic, productive engine of financial and cultural creation. 

Ultimately, then, Ethereum will be a success so long as many people are storymaking on it. Like with Terraforms, a minimum number of folks dreaming here will prevent Ethereum’s collapse forever. Beyond that, I believe the ceiling is infinity.

Action steps:

• ✨ Check out the full EIC01 issue: Read for free

• 🔰 Grab a copy: Mint to redeem a physical issue later

Author bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He also serves as a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter.

🙏 Together with 🏴 Mantle 🏴

MANTLE

Explore Mantle. It’s time for mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies with Mantle Network, Mantle Treasury, Mantle Staked ETH, and other token holder-governed product initiatives.

👉 Visit mantle.xyz today to learn more about the Mantle ecosystem.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

The Parallel trading card game (TCG), where players take control of unique factions to clash in strategic sci-fi battles, is an early star in the crypto gaming scene.  

Take note, then, as Parallel is launching its open beta this Thursday, February 29th.

That said, it’s a great time to dive into the basics of the game and prepare for your first matches if you haven’t played before. 

For anyone just beginning here, today’s guide will cover all the main basics of Parallel to get you ready for dueling and earning $PRIME, which just hit a new all-time high price over $15 this morning!

-WMP

🏴 Thanks to Mantle 🏴

👉  Visit mantle.xyz to learn more ✨

A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Parallel

The basics of Parallel gameplay

Parallel is a strategic trading card game where players compete to reduce their opponent's life points from 30 to 0. 

The game is played with a deck of 40 cards, and players start with a hand of 5, although with drawings there can be a maximum hand size of 8 cards at any given time. Before a Parallel match begins, players have the option to perform a “mulligan,” where they can shuffle any number of cards from their hand back into their deck and draw that many cards in return.

The different game modes

Parallel's open beta offers various game modes designed to cater to players at different stages of their journey:

Rookie Mode

Aimed at new players, this mode kicks off after completing the tutorial. Players start with 1 out of 3 Paragons, which are leader units with passive deck effects, unlocked for each of the 5 Parallel factions: Augencore, Earthen, Kathari, Marcolian, and The Shroud.

The goal here is to achieve wins with each Parallel, unlocking rewards along the way. The rewards for the first five wins with each Parallel include new Paragons, Common and Legendary Apparition (non-NFT) card packs, and an Apparition Starter Deck. Successfully winning 25 matches across all Parallels rewards additional Apparition Packs you can use to supplement your base (NFT) cards. 

AI Mode and Unranked Mode

After unlocking your first Rookie Deck, these modes become available. AI Mode is ideal for testing different cards and combinations without affecting your rank or win/loss ratio. Unranked Mode offers a similar non-competitive environment where players can experiment with their decks freely.

Ranked Mode

For those ready to compete and earn their rank, Ranked Mode involves playing 10 placement matches to determine your starting rank. In this trial phase and beyond, this mode allows players to earn $PRIME, the in-game currency at the heart of Parallel, based on wins. 

Note, the amount of $PRIME earned from ranked wins can increase with a higher rank and is influenced by factors like the number of NFT cards held in the winning deck, win-streaks, holding a Parallel Avatar, and more.

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The main gameplay mechanics

In Parallel, a player's turn consists of two main phases:

1. 📇 The Draw Phase — In this initial sequence, a player draws a card from their deck.

2. ⏩ The Turn Phase — During this period, players can play cards from their hand, attack with their units, and use abilities. Players can perform as many actions as they want and can afford based on their available energy.

When it comes to playing cards, there are four foundational card types to be aware of in Parallel:

• ⚔️ Unit Cards — These cards represent the creatures or characters that fight for the players. They have attack and health stats.

• 🪄 Effect Cards — These cards have immediate effects when played but do not remain on the field.

• 🏺 Relic Cards — Relics provide ongoing effects or abilities that can influence the game in various ways.

• ⏫ Upgrade Cards — Upgrades are attached to unit cards to enhance their abilities or stats.

With the basics of cards and turns down, it’s important to work on understanding the main gameplay concepts you will encounter in battles. These concepts include:

• 🔋 Energy — Used to play cards. Each card has an energy cost.

• 🏦 Banking — A strategy where players set aside cards for future turns.

• 💫 Muster — The triggering of a specific effect when a card is played.

• ❌ Pacifist — Units with this trait cannot attack.

• 🧱 Shielded — An effect indicating protection from initial damage.

• ♻️ Salvage — Allows players to retrieve cards from the waste pile.

Taken altogether, these main mechanics lead toward some fundamental strategies. 

For instance, balanced deck building is key. In order to be competitive, your deck should have a mix of unit, relic, effect, and upgrade cards for handling different situations. Energy management is also important. Be very mindful of your energy levels, and plan your moves and cards around the energy you have available. 

Additionally, banking cards and placing your units well are vital for success. The banking mechanism can prepare for future turns, ensuring you have the right cards when you need them, and positioning your units strategically and deciding when to attack or defend based on your opponent’s field can make or break your battles. 

As you start getting more experienced with Parallel gameplay, you’ll notice that your game sense will become more advanced and you’ll find yourself getting better at predicting your opponent’s moves and maxing together powerful card combos, so keep practicing and you’ll eventually find your stride. 

🧠 If you need a refresher on any of the concepts mentioned above in the future, be sure to check out the Parallel FAQ, the Parallel Cheatsheet, or the Parallel Game Manual. 

Building and managing a Parallel deck

You don’t have to buy any Parallel NFT cards to start playing Parallel, as you’ll earn a rookie deck simply from completing the game’s Rookie Mode campaign. 

However, after that, you will need to win or acquire additional cards to enhance your capabilities or create multiple decks. 

Parallel has cards deployed with associated OpenSea secondary markets on both Ethereum and the Base Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution, and it’s possible to “echo” cards from the former to the latter. That said, buying cards listed on OpenSea is one straightforward way to nab assets you want for your deck building efforts, though soon it will be possible to rent cards via groups like ParagonsDAO, too. 

First, though, it makes sense to begin by focusing on a single Parallel faction that you want to try building a deck for. Each of the five factions has its unique strengths. A short summary of each, with links to general deck guides by Parallel wiz Alliestrasza, are as follows:

• 🟠 Augencore — Excels at attaching enhancements to units, boosting their abilities and stats.

• 🟢 Earthen — Emphasizes board control and strategic use of Defender units.

• 🟣 Kathari — Strong at generating clones for a control-centric playstyle. 

• 🔴 Marcolian — Focuses on an aggressive playstyle, aiming to deal damage quickly to the opponent's health.

• 🔵 The Shroud — Aims for banishing units, removing them from play to prevent opponents from utilizing their full resources.

As you start to dive in deeper here, you can use resources like the main Parallel Cards dashboard, ParagonsDAO’s Priming explorer, or app.paralleldecks.xyz to identify, trade, and manage your cards. Parallel also just released Boxes and Binders for better organizing your decks. 

An overview of $PRIME

$PRIME is the core utility token for Parallel universe, which includes the Parallel TCG and Parallel Colony, an AI-powered game that’s currently in development. 

Players can earn $PRIME through gameplay by winning ranked matches in the Parallel TCG. As mentioned earlier, the amount of $PRIME earned per win is influenced by several factors, like a player’s matchmaking rating, win streaks, and more. 

Note that there is currently a daily cap here, such that players can earn $PRIME from their five best 5 wins per day. On average, right now if you won 5 games per day for a month, you’d earn just over 10 $PRIME, which amounts to ~$150 USD at the current exchange rate. Not bad!

With your $PRIME earnings in hand, you can hold, sell for other assets like ETH, or spend on various Sinks, i.e. products and services, around the Parallel ecosystem. Some of these Sinks include Artigraphs (limited edition, signed Parallel cards), Glints (in-game currency for non-NFT purchases), and Cosmetics (equipable skins and emotes). 

When $PRIME is spent on Sinks, a portion of it is redistributed to various components within the ecosystem, such as the Gameplay Pool, Sink creators, and others. This process is designed to facilitate a continuous flow of $PRIME back into the game's economy for a sustainable play-to-earn model over time. 

The big picture

This Thursday, anyone will be able to download the Parallel game launcher to start playing the open beta. 

This opening is the beginning of a new era for Parallel and offers a glimpse into the future of digital collectibles and gaming economies. Indeed, while Parallel’s gameplay itself is deep and fun in my opinion, one of the most exciting aspects here is how Parallel has thoughtfully integrated NFTs and the $PRIME token into its universe. 

This dynamic makes players not just participants but real stakeholders. As Parallel continues to grow, these players will be well-positioned to capitalize on the game’s burgeoning economy, complete with its own unique market dynamics, trading strats, and investment opportunities.

Looking further out, the expansion of the Parallel universe, including Parallel Colony and other potential future games, also hints at a teeming ecosystem where $PRIME will serve as the lifeblood for connecting and facilitating different gaming experiences. This interconnectedness can offer a blueprint for games that not only share a common currency but that also contribute to a shared economy and narrative universe.

Ultimately, though, the true success of Parallel and its model will depend on its community’s engagement, the balance of its play-to-earn mechanics, and the continued development of its universe. If it can keep building on these pillars, breakout success may be just around the corner!

Action steps:

• 🎮 Play Parallel: Download the game Feb. 29

• 🤖 Study Parallel Colony: See my recent guide

• 💎 Catch up on my previous weekly roundup: Creativity Pays in NFTs

Author bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He also serves as a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter.

🙏 Together with 🏴 Mantle 🏴

MANTLE

Explore Mantle. It’s time for mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies with Mantle Network, Mantle Treasury, Mantle Staked ETH, and other token holder-governed product initiatives.

👉 Visit mantle.xyz today to learn more about the Mantle ecosystem.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

There are many reasons to be creative around NFTs, like exploring new artistic ideas, experimenting with new tools, and reaching new audiences.

Yet this space also has a way of rewarding creativity and curiosity. 

For example, this week alone I made +$4,000 from my personal artistic efforts: 887 $OP from the latest Optimism airdrop to NFTers, as I’ve released various collections like Stable Peasters on the Superchain, and 0.42 ETH so far from my Inglows mint on Highlight.

You don’t have to be a super acclaimed artist or anything like that to dive in here. 

Tap in, experiment, and see what opportunities flow from your creative explorations. Share on Warpcast where likeminded people are most likely to find and appreciate your work. Just mint it, and going forward you can gain new friends, new knowledge, and new streams of income. 

For now, though, it’s roundup time! Let’s catch you up per usual by recapping the most significant NFT events from the past week 👇

-WMP

🏴 Thanks to Mantle 🏴

👉  Visit mantle.xyz to learn more ✨

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Magic Eden is holding a Diamond drop for anyone who traded ETH NFTs between 2017 and 2024.

• Phantom added support for the new WNS NFT standard.

• Uniswap unveiled uni.eth subdomains for users of its mobile app.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Fountain brokered an OTC sale of a full Autoglyphs set for 5,000 ETH.

• fxhash launched on Base.

• Sound rolled out a new homepage flow.

• TASCHEN intro’d On NFTs, a book that surveys the history of NFT art.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• AdWorld released a DN-404 collection, Ape In.

• The Based LP launched on sudoswap.

• Pudgy Penguins intro’d a new toy line to Walmart.

• Syncus announced an airdrop for holders of Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, Pudgy Penguins, Sappy Seals, and Rektguys.

• Yuga Labs handed the CEO reins to founder Greg Solano.

📱 Onchain social

• Bello added support for Farcaster analytics.

• Botto intro’d the Botto Frame, which allows users to mint a Botto Access Pass.

• Farcaster added support for Solana addresses.

• Manifold now allows minting on Warpcast via Warps.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Champions, a new puzzle game, launched on Ronin.

• Axie Infinity opened pre-registrations for Classic Guilds.

• Parallel intro’d Boxes and Binders for better organizing your Parallel cards. 

• Pizza Ninjas inscribed a Nintendo 64 emulator on Bitcoin.

• Proof of Play announced Multichain, a constellation of chains built on Arbitrum Orbit for Pirate Nation and beyond.

• War, a fully onchain MMO, is coming to Blast.

🪙 NFTfi

• Arcade concluded its Clash of Claims event.

• Nftperp unveiled its V2 alpha.

• Uniswap Foundation proposed turning on the UNI fee switch.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland celebrated its 4th birthday.

• Forbes announced a “permanent presence” in The Sandbox metaverse.

• Yuga Labs is hosting its first Apes Come Home event in the Otherside next week.

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Don't miss the next one 👇

Start hunting!

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect this post on Mirror

• 🆕 See the other latest Metaversal write-ups: 

  • 🎮 Immutable Games

  • 👾 Intro to Solana NFTs

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He also serves as a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter.

🙏 Together with 🏴 Mantle 🏴

MANTLE

Explore Mantle. It’s time for mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies with Mantle Network, Mantle Treasury, Mantle Staked ETH, and other token holder-governed product initiatives.

👉 Visit mantle.xyz today to learn more about the Mantle ecosystem.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

Some crypto gaming ecosystems are giants in the making. 

Ronin and Parallel come to mind as contenders, as does Immutable. 

That said, I last covered Immutable in March 2023, and a lot has changed since then as the Immutable gaming scene has recently been heating up like never before. 

For today’s post, let’s catch up with a quick refresher on the Immutable stack and ecosystem and how you can dive in here!

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

An Intro to Immutable Games

The Immutable stack 101

Immutable is a gaming tech stack in Ethereum's Layer 2 (L2) scaling scene. This stack currently boasts two flagship L2s:

• ❎ Immutable X — An NFT-friendly "validium" built via StarkWare tech that's currently the 9th-largest L2 per its $314M in total value locked (TVL). The solution, originally launched in April 2021, supports near-instant and zero-gas transactions, though it lacks general smart contracts. 

• ⚡️ Immutable zkEVM — A new gaming-centric zk-rollup L2 compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that is being developed in collaboration with Polygon to support advanced gameplay mechanics via smart contracts. Early access for Immutable zkEVM launched in January 2024. 

Going forward, the plan is for Immutable X and Immutable zkEVM to coexist side by side as the foundation for the products and platforms built around the Immutable ecosystem. The Immutable Passport and Global Orderbook systems, which I’ll explain further in the section below, will serve to unify assets and liquidity across these L2s. 

Immutable’s X factors

The Immutable team has developed a series of central products to enhance player experiences around its L2s. Two of the main pillars here include:

• 🏪 The Global Orderbook — A digital asset liquidity system that addresses UX fragmentation by connecting the wallets, marketplaces, and chains across the Immutable ecosystem for seamless trading, listing, and royalty enforcements. 

• 🪪 The Immutable Passport — A gaming wallet solution designed to simplify web3 interactions. It streamlines user onboarding with passwordless, one-click social logins and automated wallet creation. It’s also integrated with the popular Unity and Unreal SDKs, allowing smooth crypto interactions within games. 

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The Immutable IMX token

$IMX, which is currently trading around the $3.40 mark and is up 233% over the last year, is the native token of the Immutable ecosystem. 

For every transaction atop Immutable, 20% of the 2% protocol fee must be paid in $IMX. If users don't have $IMX, the fee is automatically converted by purchasing $IMX on the open market. 

All $IMX fees are pooled into Immutable's "Staking Reward Pool," and by staking $IMX users can earn rewards from this pool. Additionally, $IMX functions as a governance token, allowing users to vote on future developments and expansions of the Immutable networks.

How to stake IMX

If you’re interested in staking IMX to try capitalizing on the growth of the Immutable ecosystem, the process is straightforward. 

After you’ve acquired some IMX, you’ll first need to visit the IMX Staking hub and press “Connect Wallet” to link your Ethereum wallet with an Immutable X wallet. Then after you’ve deposited some IMX to your Immutable wallet, you’ll be ready to head back to the IMX Staking hub interface, which looks like so:

At this point, you’d input the amount of IMX you want to stake in the UI, press “Stake,” and confirm the deposit transaction with your wallet. First, though, there are two important things to keep in mind before diving in: 

1. IMX staking occurs over two-week “epoch” cycles, so you’ll receive rewards at the end of each cycle. Additionally, when you unstake through this UI you’ll receive your funds after the current cycle. 

2. You have to trade at least one NFT per epoch via the Immutable Global Orderbook to qualify for your IMX staking rewards. Some marketplaces that support this orderbook include the Immutable Marketplace, Rarible, and OKX. 

The Immutable games scene

The Immutable gaming ecosystem is blooming. It boasts some of the most recognizable titles in crypto-native gaming, like Illuvium and Gods Unchained, and supports a stable of +200 games in development. See the full list of games building on Immutable here.

Immutable is also increasingly being embraced by mainstream gaming giants like Ubisoft and TapNation, suggesting breakout potential going forward. With some 70% of major gaming studios investing into web3 gaming projects, Immutable’s stack seems well positioned to field more mainstream partnerships in the months ahead. 

If you’re interested in testing the waters of Immutable games, I’d recommend beginning with the Epic Games store, which recently relaxed its content policy to allow blockchain games. Illuvium and Gods Unchained are already listed on Epic Games and more Immutable titles are coming, so playing through here is not only straightforward but also signals to Epic that there is real demand for more web3 gaming support. 

Setting up an Immutable Passport

With the Immutable zkEVM now live and gas-free until September 2024 for Immutable Passport holders, it’s a good time for Immutable newcomers to set up a Passport. 

To get started here, head over to immutable.com/gamers/passport and press the “Sign up to Passport” button. In the ensuing pop-up, sign in with your email or your Google or Apple account. After this, press “Yes” to authorize Immutable to make transaction requests.

Then back on the Immutable Passport page, you can press the “Login” option to sign into your Passport account, and that’s it! At this point, you’ll be ready to tap into the rise of the Immutable ecosystem as more games come online. 

Looking ahead

This year, Immutable is aiming to rollout appchains around the Immutable zkEVM for game studios that want to customize their own scaling solutions. I’m assuming this appchain functionality will kick off in Q3 or Q4, so be on the lookout for that because it can grow the Immutable ecosystem to new heights. 

Beyond that, the other big thing to keep your eyes on in the near future is new games launching on Immutable, like Illuvium Overworld, Capsule Heroes, and Pixelmon. With so many titles on the verge of launching, expect to hear plenty more here soon!

Today’s action steps:

• 🪪 Get started on Immutable: Set up a Passport

• 👾 Catch up on my previous post: Intro to Solana NFTs

🙏 Together with 🔮 Kraken NFT 🔮

KRAKEN NFT

Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

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Dear Bankless Nation,

A couple months back, I wrote about how 2024 was shaping up to be big for the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana NFT scenes. 

And while I’ve written extensively on the Ethereum NFT ecosystem and a good bit on Bitcoin’s, I’ve yet to do a primer on the Solana NFT space. 

So with today’s post, let’s change that! 

Accordingly, here’s a quick beginner’s guide that will walk you through the basics of Solana NFT standards, top collections, and how to get started 👇

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

A Beginner’s Guide to Solana NFTs

The Solana 101

Intro: Like Ethereum, Solana is a smart contract blockchain that facilitates general applications, from DeFi to NFT use cases and beyond. Where Ethereum and Solana fundamentally differ is in their design philosophies. 

Monolithic: Ethereum employs a “modular” approach, balancing its decentralization, security, and scalability needs via external data availability (DA) and Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions. In contrast, Solana uses a “monolithic” approach in handling all its execution, data, and security demands. There are tradeoffs both ways, with Solana’s main differentiator being how it optimizes for speed within a single shared global state. 

Ripe for NFTs: Because of Solana’s architectural choices, the chain is designed to support many 1,000s of transactions per second (TPS). Additionally, Solana transactions don’t have “gas prices” as the network hasn’t introduced usage-based pricing yet, so currently there is a fixed-rate cost of 0.000005 SOL per Solana transaction. This speed and affordability have fostered fertile ground for the network’s rising NFT scene.

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Understanding Solana NFT standards

Just like Ethereum has the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards and Bitcoin has Ordinals for NFTs, Solana has its own unique NFT standards. I recommend Part 3 of Andrew Hong’s “Solana Analytics Starter Guide” series if you want to dive in deeper here, but the basics are as follows:

• Legacy: Solana’s original NFT standard was developed by Metaplex, a creator studio platform, and built as an extension of Solana’s SPL standard, which is roughly akin to Ethereum’s fungible ERC-20 standard. Example project: Claynosaurz. 

• pNFTs: Programmable NFTs, also developed by the Metaplex team, is a token standard that introduces enforced royalties, rules, and more for Solana NFTs. Example project: Solana Monkey Business.

• cNFTs: Compressed NFTs make use of Solana’s state compression upgrade to squeeze down lots of data efficiently into onchain storage. This capability allows projects to save big on mint costs. For example, it currently costs 1 SOL to mint 2 million cNFTs. Example project: Tensorians. 

• xNFTs: Executable NFTs aren’t quite a token standard on their own but do allow projects to attach apps to their collections. For instance, the Backpack team used the xNFT system to offer a Mad Lads staking program within the Backpack wallet. 

The Pulse of the Solana NFT ecosystem

An NFT major: Over 192 million NFTs have been minted on Solana to date, putting it behind only Polygon and Ethereum right now when it comes to total NFTs created so far. As of February 2024, Solana had also facilitated ~$5 billion worth of NFT trading volume, making it the 2nd-most active chain for NFT trades behind only Ethereum currently. 

Top collection: While Solana doesn’t presently boast as many major NFT collections as Ethereum does, it has its own giants. The largest collection on the network today is Backpack’s aforementioned Mad Lads project, which is trading around a 206 SOL floor price (~$22k) and is presently the 4th-largest NFT collection by market cap behind only CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and Pudgy Penguins on Ethereum. In ascending to this height, Mad Lads holders have now notably become airdrop targets for new multichain projects alongside Pudgy Penguins and Bad Kids on Cosmos. 

Other top collections: While Mad Lads are out of many people’s price range, there are plenty of other collections on Solana that are less expensive and that have gained considerable traction too. Some current standouts include:

• 👾 Tensorians (80.5 SOL floor)

• 🦕 Claynosaurz (34.4 SOL floor)

• 🎓 Degen Ape Academy (14.4 SOL floor)

• 🙉 Saga Monkes (3.9 SOL floor)

• 🐸 Froganas (3.7 SOL floor)

Getting started with Solana NFTs

Collecting NFTs

You’ll need to set up a Solana wallet and acquire some SOL to buy Solana NFTs, just as you need ETH for Ethereum NFTs. The easiest way to get SOL is to buy some from your crypto exchange of choice, e.g. Coinbase, and then transfer it out to a personal wallet. 

As for making your first wallet, you can’t go wrong with Phantom, Magic Eden Wallet, or Backpack. Phantom and Magic Eden both notably offer multichain support, e.g. Ethereum and Polygon wallets, while Backpack is optimized for interactive xNFT experiences. 

Once you have some SOL in hand, you’re ready to start minting directly from NFT drops, e.g. on Metaplex, and browsing Solana’s NFT marketplaces. The most popular marketplaces today are Tensor and Magic Eden. Here, the purchasing experience will be similar to what you’re used to on Ethereum: select an NFT you want, click the “Buy” option, and approve the transaction with your wallet to finish up. 

Additionally, Solana also has free mints that allow you to collect NFTs at no cost besides transaction fees and any associated platform fees. For example, one early popular platform here is DRiP, which lets users collect free limited-edition pieces from their preferred creators every week. 

Listing NFTs

If you have a Solana NFT you want to flip or move on from, you can use Tensor or Magic Eden to list your NFT for sale. Again, the experience will be close to what you’re used to on Ethereum marketplaces. Select the NFT you want to sell, click the “List” option, input your desired sale parameters, and then approve the listing with your wallet. 

Creating NFTs

If you’re interested in creating your own NFTs, consider checking out Metaplex Studio, which makes it possible to release 1/1s, open editions, and collections on Solana. Unlike Zora, Manifold, and Highlight on Ethereum, I haven’t personally tried Metaplex on the creator side of things yet, but it’s unquestionably the leading choice in the Solana NFT scene today. 

Zooming out

Solana has joined the ranks of Ethereum and Bitcoin when it comes to the cryptoeconomy’s biggest NFT ecosystems. To be sure, Ethereum’s NFT scene is deeper and wider, especially if you count L2s, and with more varied and more teeming niches spanning from conceptual art to real world assets. Yet Solana’s NFT ecosystem has seemingly reached escape velocity, so it’s poised to grow deeper and wider in time as well. 

What happens going forward, then? The scenario that seems most likely to me over the next few years is that Ethereum remains dominant in NFTs but that all the majors, including Bitcoin, Solana, and perhaps even Cosmos, experience significant growth around NFTs in parallel. That said, I think it’s worth experimenting with all these networks right now to prepare for what’s to come!

Today’s action steps:

• ✅ Catch up on my previous weekly roundup: Minting $COIN

• 🪂 Explore Solana quests: Check out Airdrop Hunter

🙏 Together with 🔮 Kraken NFT 🔮

KRAKEN NFT

Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Subscribe now

Dear Bankless Nation,

Over time, all media will likely go “onchain” to some extent. 

That’s why in these early days, advances in new directions here offer a taste of what’s to come. A prime example? This week Coinbase dropped its latest earnings report highlights as an NFT mint.

This crypto-native approach by Coinbase is an early showcase of NFTs, and, again, also signals a future where communications of all types will lean on blockchain tech for greater transparency and engagement. 

That’s the future to come, and it’s closer than you think. In the meantime, though, let’s look back and catch you up on the rest of the past week’s biggest NFT happenings!

-WMP

🔮 Thanks to Kraken NFT 🔮

👉  Kraken NFT is built for secure NFT trading ✨

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• DN-404, an optimized adaptation of ERC-404, launched. 

• ENS helped set up a donation address, irc.eth, for humanitarian efforts in Gaza.

• Magic Eden is launching its ETH marketplace on Feb. 27th.

• Zora streamlined its secondary marketplace UX.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Fingerprints is hosting the release of Figure’s latest collection, LINE.

• remnynt released Proscenium on Art Blocks.

• The Yellow Collective hosted its 1st artist edition drop, Chief Noggles by Cory Van Lew.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Pudgy Penguins maestro Luca Netz appeared on Bankless.

📱 Onchain social

• Orb launched its V2 on Lens.

• Pinata launched Photocaster, an image-centric Farcaster client.

• Syndicate intro’d Frame Chain, an OP Stack L3 for Farcaster frame developers.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity rolled out an update to its Axie Origins juggling policy.

• Influence is kicking off early access on Feb. 21st.

• Illuvium: Overworld is launching in Q2 2024.

• Pixelmon is migrating to Immutable.

• The Foundry published a primer on Parallel’s play-to-earn system.

🪙 NFTfi

• Arcade is kicking off its ARCD airdrop next week.

• MetaStreet launched ASCEND, a gamified contributor system.

• Nftperp added support for Concentrated Liquidity.

• Priming intro’d Sleeves, a DeFi vault system for caching Parallel cards.

• Uniswap is launching on Zora Network.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland added prebuilt templates to its SDK7.

• OpenAI intro’d Sora, a text-to-video AI model, which can prove big for generative environments in the metaverse going forward.

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Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect this post on Mirror

• 🆕 See the other latest Metaversal write-ups: 

  • 🎨 2024 Digital Art Trends

  • 😲 The Rise of Avant-Garde NFTs

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He also serves as a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter.

🙏 Together with 🔮 Kraken NFT 🔮

KRAKEN NFT

Kraken NFT is one of the most secure, easy-to-use, and dynamic marketplaces available. Active and new collectors alike benefit from zero gas fees, multi-chain access, payment flexibility with fiat or 200+ cryptocurrencies, and built-in rarity rankings. Learn more at Kraken.com/nft

👉 Visit Kraken.com to learn more and open an account today.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.