Popular NFT brand, Bored Ape Yacht Club, is in talks with venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, to lead a funding round of about $5 billion to raise their valuation, according to the Financial Times. The deal is still a work in progress as no terms have been agreed upon but will surely be one to watch out for.

 

Although BAYC has yet to comment on the negotiations officially, they have previously said they plan to create a strong brand and hand it over to the community. Another source, NFTNick.eth, told his Twitter followers that this would likely be huge for the NFT industry as it will validate the NFT business model if this deal comes to life and the news gets out.

 

Crypto companies generally utilize funding to expand their businesses and scale their operations globally. For example, back in 2013, When Coinbase was valued at $143 million, it received about $20 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. It is currently valued at $86 billion. Even successful brands like BAYC require external funding to grow faster than what investments from their own profits can achieve. BAYC receiving VC funding will allow the brand to expand its business, and you will expect its valuation to increase in the future as the demand for BAYC NFTs continues to grow.

 

Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 uniquely generated cartoon images of ape NFTs, went viral in 2021 even before prominent celebrities like Eminem, Stephen Curry, and Jimmy Fallon, amongst others, bought them. The frenzy does not end with merely acquiring a Bored Ape NFT, as ownership connects you to many celebrities and popular influencers who are members of this club. The number of celebrities ‘aping in’ is increasing every week.

 

Bored Ape NFTs, which were minted on the Ethereum blockchain, has recorded more than 393,000 in trading volume and have at least 6300 owners on OpenSea, with the lowest priced Bored Apes selling for about 18.5 ETH at the time of writing. Yuga labs, the team behind BAYC, has remained committed to growing the BAYC brand even further, and this potential deal with Andreessen Horowitz is a testament to their resolve.

 

 

Who is Andreessen Horowitz?

 

Andreessen Horowitz is an investment company based in Silicon Valley, California, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009, commonly known as A16z. The company has more than $28b in assets, with investments spanning from Crypto and Fintech to Healthcare.

 

A16z invests in companies across different stages of growth, from seed to startups, mid and late stages. They boast of a strong track record of having backed highbrow companies like Coinbase, Airbnb, Github, and Slack, transforming the then small businesses into giants.

 

A16z are not newcomers in the crypto space. In June 2021, the company announced a $2.2 billion fund to invest in crypto founders, teams, and networks. In addition, the Financial Times reported on plans by Andreessen Horowitz to raise more than $4.5 billion for crypto investments this year, doubling last year’s figures. A16z has been investing in crypto since 2013 and has shown interest in decentralized finance, Web3, creator funds, and the next-generation payment methods.

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The heist of the Chiptopunks began with one of the most anticipated generative art drops in recent memory. Last Friday afternoon, Chiptopunks was poised to reveal their remarkably unique 3D animated NFTs for a frantic fanbase of anxious collectors.

 

On its official site, the countdown clock to start minting Chiptopunks expired without incident. That’s when chaos erupted, and within that very minute, an angry mob of crypto town-criers descended upon the Discord group. With their tiki torches ablaze and their knives out, they stormed the ChiptoStage, hurling insults and accusations at a pair of disoriented developers.

 

Even accidents can become art on the blockchain. The Chiptopunks Discord prophesied controversy before the drop ever happened. Unlike most generative art projects touting 10,000 collectibles, only 512 Chiptopunks NFTs were minted, with at least 8 Chiptopunks spoken for before the drop went live. Bored Apes and Cryptopunks accounts were tweeting about the Chiptopunks at least a week beforehand, while the Chiptopunks Discord grew 4x more members than the number of NFTs minted. This didn’t discourage countless collectors who were ready to chip in, knowing they had little or no chance of getting one. Everyone in the drop party was ready and waiting to rush the secondary market before the floor rose too high.

 

“How many people are pissed when they’re standing outside a Supreme store waiting for a t-shirt drop?” LordNefty ranted. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an inside job—it’s not, and I know that for a fact,” he emphasized. Although LordNefty claims to have exploited a weakness in the Solidity contract and absconded 150 Chiptopunks by “accident,” proof he owns the transacting wallet has yet to be provided. 

 

So what really happened? How is it that so few collectors managed to secure a Chiptopunk? And how did a single wallet bag 150 NFTs when a single transaction limit was set for 3-mint max?

 

 

 

“I can say without a doubt they made an error in their code,” says Ryan Satterfield, owner of Planet Zuda, a cyber-security company specializing in information security and hacking the internet of things (IoT). “I would love to applaud them on the work they put into security, but, in this space, every character matters,” Satterfield emphasized. “I would not make such a statement without having fully reviewed their contract that’s publicly available.”

 

A Solidity contract is a collection of code (its functions) and data (its state) that resides at a specific address on the Ethereum blockchain. You can think of it as single slots in a database that can be queried and altered by calling functions of the code that manages the database. “Solidity looks deceptively simple, but it’s much much harder than it looks,” says Dimitrios Kouzis-Loukas, Fintech Senior Engineer/Architect at Bloomberg LP. Kouzis-Loukas is responsible for leading teams of engineers that develop tools and infrastructure to ensure that Bloomberg’s systems are up and stable. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “People do an excellent job, but still. Smart contracts and solidity are so new, and people are still trying to figure them out.”

 

 

“The NFT contract for Chiptopunks was published 6 hours before the drop, and someone was able to write a custom contract,” says 0xFloop. “The way the Ethereum blockchain works is when you’re calling internal functions from a contract, you don’t have to wait for each one to go through. Someone did 33 buys of 3 each, and that goes through in one transaction. That’s what knowing how to code and actually understanding Solidity allows you to do.”

 

“The contract is vanilla,” claims LordNefty. “They copied and pasted their contract, and filled in the blanks,” he asserts. “This project has been on my radar for some time, knowing I was going to use the contract to buy more than 3,” he claims. Yet and still, there’s no proof that LordNefty actually did the ‘bundling’. “One by one, I’m going to send them to the burn wallet,” he said.

 

Burning them all doesn’t affect the current market as it exists; there would be no market dump or supply-side disruption. It was suggested that LordNefty raffle them all at a set price. He could also make a contract that allows a re-drop of 150 NFTs and set the mid-price like an auction, but that could result in thousands of people attempting to buy 150 NFTs, with no guarantee the same thing wouldn’t happen again. However it is yet to be verified that LordNefty is in fact the owner of 150 Chiptopunks, so all of this may still be speculative by the time this article is published.

“GaperArt could potentially use the Ethereum self-destruct function to dynamically update the code, or use it to make the current contract non-operable in the future while transferring everything to another contract,” Satterfield suggests. “The opcode SelfDestruct can be used to update contracts already on the blockchain or redirect the contract to a new contract. However, SelfDestruct in itself is also dangerous to most contracts on the blockchain because anyone can update or delete the code of any project if it isn’t protected against SelfDestruct.” This is because the opcode doesn’t require consent to be used against a contract. However, you can use SelfDestruct to update patching contracts from being exploited by SelfDestruct, as long as that function hasn’t been removed from the Ethereum version you’re using. “Vitalik” Buterin, the Russian-Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum, wants to remove this opcode.

 

 

“I’m an artist at heart,” Cam Taylor professed. “Gaper.eth wrote the code. Our intention was to provide something unique and special, something different from a lot of the stuff that’s out there right now and we’re fucking bummed,” he apologizes. We didn’t want it to go this way. All the comments saying we know it’s a scam like we’re in on it couldn’t be further from the truth. We care deeply about this project. Honestly, I just wanted to create the most badass fucking 3D punk heads possible for y’all, and we’re fucking pissed that this happened,” Taylor said.

 

“This is not how we intended the drop to go,” says gaper.eth. “All we wanted was to build community and to have a solid drop. We had no intention of one whale buying 150 of the supply.” 

 

“This isn’t even how you build community, though,” ab7#5635 lamented on Discord. “Building a community would start at a really low price to give people the opportunity to get into your project. The art is really fucking good. Chances are they’re gonna hold. It really sucks there’s a lot of people that were priced out, to begin with,” she regrets. 

 

Adding insult to injury, OpenSea initially verified the wrong contract, leading some collectors, including myself, to purchase illegitimate NFTs. One such collector purchased at least 5 of them. So when you search for Chiptopunks NFT on OpenSea, be sure it’s the collection with 512 items. Some of them are available on the secondary market, and despite everything that went wrong, there’s always an upside.

 

“We haven’t settled on the exact percentage or amount yet, but we are going to take a portion of the profits, and we are going to be purchasing iPads with Procreate, or possibly laptops. We’re giving them to underprivileged children who would like to be able to make art,” Taylor promised. “We’re gonna figure out the right organization to work with, and we want to make it transparent to show that we believe in art and technology. We want to give back in some way.”

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The Sad Frogs District collection has been delisted from Opensea following a copyright claim from the original creator of the Pepe meme, Matt Furie. This has consequences for NFT projects to consider and may have far-reaching legal consequences. It also forces the consideration of the centralization of marketplaces in the decentralized NFT space.

The Sad Frogs District (SFD) project launched somewhat controversially on August 9th, selling out 7000 Sad Frogs each priced at 0.05 ETH in less than 5 minutes. Central to the artwork was a frog character. The project saw success and was verified by Opensea on the 12th of August, and things seemed to be going well enough. Enter: Matt Furie.

Furie has been in the NFT space for a while, he is the creator of the successful PEGZ NFT project. He is also no stranger to DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) claims, having filed copyright claims multiple times in the past, having won a lawsuit for $150,000 from Infowars, the show hosted by Alex Jones. Matt has become proficient at hunting down uses of his caricature and filing claims against them. Claims that often stretch the limits of intellectual property law. Initially, Furie targeted exact replications of his meme, but with his pursuit of SFD, Furie is attempting to lay claim to the artwork of frogs that bear very little resemblance to his own.

 

 

US copyright law allows for the “fair use” of intellectual property such as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research,” among other things. Furthermore, works that are considered “transformative” in that they recreate the original work in a substantially different way are often not considered infringements of copyright at all. Copyright owners are allowed to submit DMCA claims which centralized organizations tend to comply with. This marks the beginning of a potentially long and expensive legal process.

Opensea has been known to comply with the DMCA in the same fashion most legacy companies would. They have delisted several projects imitating the famed CryptoPunks collection to varying degrees, even without known DMCA claims against them. As the largest NFT marketplace, Opensea has a lot of power, all of which appears centralized contrary to the tagline on their homepage. Their motivation is to be as compliant as possible to appease existing and future shareholders.

SFD may or may not be an infringement of Furie’s copyright, and the SFD team has reportedly already submitted a counter-DMCA, beginning the process of appealing the decision. While this process continues, SFD token holders aren’t able to sell their NFTs as freely, with the main option left available being risky private sales (which can be overcome with p2p trades). This obviously has negative repercussions on token holders pending the resolution of the dispute.

 

Photo Credit Sad Frog District

 

Beyond reducing liquidity for the project and making it difficult to buy and sell, such actions on behalf of Opensea can seriously impact a project’s reputation. Opensea are seen as arbitrators of the NFT space, deciding on no firm basis which projects receive their blue verification check (which SFD did). These actions impact thousands of people and should not be taken likely by Opensea. Considering the livelihoods involved, the very least Opensea could do is stop enforcing DMCA claims automatically.

 

In the SFD case, Furie has ten to fourteen days upon receipt of the appeal to hire legal counsel and respond with a lawsuit if he so chooses. This choice could have far-reaching consequences. If Furie chooses to go to court, any determinations made as part of the ruling could impact copyright law generally and the NFT space specifically, and may be used as precedent in future rulings.

 

Photo Credit: TylerOSU

Asked for comment, SFD stated that their work is substantially different from Pepe the Frog. Their belief is that Furie’s actions represent a grave overreaching on behalf of Furie, and that he is not entitled to lay claim to every frog on the internet. They have voiced concerns over their community and ~1900 token holders, and are not looking for further escalation. 

 

There is also a fair chance that a court will concede that their artwork is sufficiently transformative, invalidating Furie’s claim. Nonetheless, this will be a long legal battle for which Furie is far better financially equipped, indicating a settlement or personal benefit could be the intention behind this claim. Furie can spend more on legal fees to get a deal out of the SFD team, putting them at a disadvantage.

 

Photo Credit: Sad Frogs District

On the bright side, Furie may choose to advance and allow freedom of expression and not press charges. It would not detract from the value of his PEGZ collection. There can be more than one frog on the internet, and the advances of an original creation only add value to that original creation. Just look at the value of Cryptopunks as an example; it increases with each variation that spreads its legend further. 

 

NFTs are all about circumventing gatekeepers and allowing equality of opportunity and expression. Copyright is not in conflict with these ideas and should certainly be respected, but should not be applied so strictly as to infringe on our core values. Furthermore, centralization of a decentralized space enables legacy systems and automatic DMCA responses to significantly hurt growing initiatives. These systems need to be rethought to nurture innovation in the NFT space.

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WTF is a Fluf? Bad-ass 3D bunnies on the blockchain are positioning themselves organically to become one of the top NFT projects in the space. As soon as I saw this super cool 3d rabbit bobbing his head on Fluf.world, I immediately knew something special was being made with this project.  I knew nothing about the team, or the project, only that what I saw was intuitively many levels above what I have seen so far in the space. So I have personally been waiting patiently for this project to drop.

 

Initially, they were set to launch on Aug 5th, on the same day as the EIP1559 update to the Ethereum blockchain, and due to some issues with gas spikes on the network, the team let the community vote on whether to delay the launch for 2 days or not- and the community voted in discord to delay the drop. Much to my frustration because I just wanted my damn rabbits. 

 

Fluf World Bunny Rabbit NFT
Photo Credit: The Cheetah Cowboy King @MetaverseWorld

 

The Fluf world project has set a new bar when it comes to avatar collectible projects in every aspect of what great execution looks like. The team handled challenges and issues that came up during the launch with transparency and a level of care for their community that was impressive to me as an observer.   I spent my Saturday night on Clubhouse with the team and some other excited future Fluf owners waiting for technical smart contract issues to be worked out.  They spoke about the issues in real-time and were very transparent during the entire drop.

Within 40 minutes of the public launch, they were completely sold out. And the project immediately climbed in value as the eyes on this project understood something was special about Fluf World in fact, before public minting was initiated, some of the limited presales for early supporters were being sold on the secondary market for nearly .5 ETH, this was another indicator of what was to come.

 

Within just a few hours of the project launch, there was a 25 ETH sale on the secondary market for the single rarest fluff which, at the time, was nearly $75,000 USD. This was yet another indicator for me that there was some serious energy behind this project. 

 

 

Alex and the team over at Fluf world have built something incredible. The next level for avatar-themed projects has arrived. There is much more than meets the eye with this project and the road map is absolutely insane: from breeding, NFT staking, full access to 3d files, music, and multiple metaverse file formats; there is so much to be excited about.   It is important to note that anyone can write a good roadmap, and many teams can create some super dope art. But the combination of all the right elements has come together with this project in a particular and very organic manner.  

 

Within 24 hours, the floor price of Flufs jumped up to 1.78 ETH at one point on the Sunday after launch at a mint cost of .09 ETH.  They have blown past nearly every other project on the charts in just 2 days and the momentum does not seem to be letting up. While this is not financial advice It would not be a bad idea to take a deeper look at this project, as I personally believe there is something special going on here.

You can see everything transparently on the blockchain using Etherscan where I was able to see in realtime during the launch what commands the team was sending to the smart contract, how many flufs were being minted during the presale, and even tracked how many till they were sold out after the public launch. You can also see how many wallets have over 100 flufs, which at the time of this article’s release is only 4. Learning how to read Etherscan is a highly underrated skill for looking at what’s really going on with a project. Another good resource is Opensea’s Stats page where Fluf has climbed into the top 5 projects in record time selling over 6.8K ETH in volume in just a few days. 

 

Photo Credit: Oncyber.io/fluf

 

The project is led by a superstar team out of New Zealand and if you check the bottom of the website you will see, Nonfungible labs, Centrality, Universe, and ASM.

It’s important to pay attention to different aspects of a project, like how they respond to their community and handle unforeseen issues, from my observations I have a high level of confidence that this team can continue to execute and do what they say they will do though this is always subject to change- so remaining involved in the community as a collector is always a good idea.

Aside from the massive success of this launch that has many whispering, that this is the next Bored Apes level moment in the NFT space, I absolutely love the artwork, the animations, the music, the energy, and the community.  I am admitting my complete bias here and my support for this project, however, I do believe there is much to be learned from this launch and this project in general.  

 

Fluf World Bunny Rabbit NFT
Photo Credit @NFTYFARM

There is a new standard for how to execute, what the community wants, and how to treat that community for other creatives in this space.  For collectors, you now also have a record of what kind of things can signal or indicate that a project will potentially be successful after a launch.

In my opinion, nine times out of ten it boils down to the community.  If I have learned anything about successful NFT projects, I believe that creators who can shift from acquiring customers to creating community will win in the long term. The bonds being formed human to human are very real and this level of connection to the various NFT project communities is one of my favorite aspects of NFTs in general, outside of the game-changing societal shifts non-fungible tokens will power into the near and long term future.

Show me your Fluf!

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You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you that 70 years ago, your government rounded up homeless kids and then started using them for scientific experiments before blasting them off into space. Of course, this never happened, yet it did happen to man’s best friend. Exactly 70 years ago today, the first attempted flight to space carrying two such dogs returned them both safely back to earth, while other launches resulted in canine deaths. Nearly 100 dogs have been to space from different programs, and in 1957, Laika (nicknamed a “Muttnik” in reference to her being mixed-breed and the first spacecraft, Sputnik) became the first living being to die orbiting the earth. Laika’s involuntary act of courage is commemorated today with Cosmic Paws, a generative art collection of NFTs celebrating the illustrious history of dogs in space.

“This is all about the love of two things, art, and space,” says Mike Mongo, astronaut teacher and author of the children’s book, The Astronaut Instruction Manual. “The Muttniks led us to space. They get to be part of our future as well as our past,” Mongo emphasized. An official ambassador of ULA-supported Johnny Appleseed in Space and founder of The Humannaires Initiative, Mongo has owned and trained dogs since he was a child and loves space as a source of inspiration. “Creators are collectors,” he said. “We don’t get to generative NFTs and collectibles without comic books and trading cards,” Mongo reminded us. “I collected comic books and Garbage Pail Kids. I will always collect street art and stickers,” he said.

 

Cosmic Paws
Cosmicpaws.io

 

 

The Cosmic Paws project team consists of Mongo, subtractive, TSStarfish, giovignone, and friends cryptotts (NFTs-for-good), @rogersdev, @buildestroy7, @withaerial, @PurpLeTariat, @kas__vegas, and @QuantumVariant. Inspired by Moebius and Final Space, the creative team spent a lot of time and consideration for the visual aspects, like lines in the background and color differentiation. In addition, the dog’s mouth, teeth, and ears were inspired by Laika herself. “All of who have been working on it, we’ve been working together for over a decade, and well all love each other’s work,” he said.

If randomly generated collectible NFTs were rated by their visual aesthetics alone, Cosmic Paws would certainly vie for Best in Show. Noteworthy differences that separate this project aesthetically from many of the other randomly generated NFT projects are that Muttniks aren’t 8-bit designs; they’re also female. “This is something I haven’t seen much of, which is a very female point of view,” says Kyle Schember. “I think it’s really fun. Let’s hope the art speaks for itself.” Each Muttnik will cost .06Ξ each, and none of them will be gifted or given away; this is an entirely random collection that affords anyone a fair and equal shot at something rare, even if it takes a year to sell all 10,000 of them.

 

Cosmic Paws
cosmicpaws.io

 

Another interesting aspect of this sales process is that each potential collector can perform a REgeneration to discover what their Muttnik will look like in advance of minting the NFT to the blockchain. Until now, collectors typically purchase randomly generated NFT collectibles sight-unseen at the point of minting, or they’re forced to patiently await the NFT reveal date. For Cosmic Paws, you can generate a different Muttnik over and over until you like something. You might generate a Muttnik you love—spin again anyway, and get a Leika you don’t like very much. “When a Muttnik is REgenerated and not claimed, there is practically zero chance that version will be seen again,” Mike Mongo emphasized. You may really like your Leika even if it doesn’t look rare, yet nobody will know if it’s rare until the entire project is revealed. This strategy can captivate collectors as they continue to calculate the supply of rare based on the scarcity of Muttnik attributes that have already been minted. Unknown possibilities present an intriguing gaming aspect for crypto art flippers to become collectible art REgenerators.

But wait—where’s the utility? “What we do know, is how to write on the blockchain, and we figured out the random generator, which was really, really tough,” says subtractive. To reward its community and cultivate a creative arthouse of space dogs, the first 5,000 Muttnik token holders will begin a voting process to select a remix artist from the community while a “Paws in Space” selection committee of top collectors considers the next project from a list of dog space heroes. The winning community artist is announced and onboarded to use the Muttnik regeneration platform for a Laika V2 Muttnik remix. “We will onboard them to do their own collection, through our platform, then wash, rinse, and repeat again,” says subtractive. “ We can work with artists who don’t know how to do this so artists in our community can be the next in line to produce the next round,” he said. “You have full permission to print, do t-shirts, do whatever you want with it.”

 

Cosmic Paws
cosmicpaws.io

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With the super hot NFT collectible drop hype cycle going on right now, many in the community are apeing into NFT project after project.  From fucking pickles, bananas, rats, misfits, camels, strawberries, ducks, and now some undead monsters to boot, there is an emerging trend in collectible drops.

We have a large number of NFT drop examples to pick from and many in the community are letting it be known what they don’t want to see more of.

Take this tweet from one of the most vocal on-chain evangelists J1mmy.eth,  founder of NFT42, Nameless, and Avastars

Obviously, there are pros and cons to any line of logic, and J1mmy himself notes that there are some useful reasons to use a delayed reveal mechanic in certain situations, but not in the way we are seeing it used for the sake of pumping the floor price before a reveal.  This is a trend that I agree, we as a community should push back on.

To be contrarian for a moment to J1mmy.eth’s point, instantly revealing when a collectible NFT is minted, whales often have a serious advantage over us mere mortals who would like to participate in certain drops. We must find a solution that keeps things pointed towards a more egalitarian outcome,  in my personal opinion. 

Then there is this rather concise summary of what many in the community are not liking about these recent collectible NFT drops:

I would agree with all of these points.

While I do understand that projects are all working to extract attention from a rather modest NFT-aware userbase, as we slowly creep towards mass adoption. The FOMO mechanics of many of these projects are merely trying to replicate what they have seen work in the past.

If every NFT project team is replicating what they think will sell out the fastest, raise the most funds, or create the most hype and attention then we will keep getting more of the same repeat mechanics in future NFT drops. 

I will not lie and say I don’t fall victim to the collectible hype, but I think we as a community should become more thoughtful in what we vote on supporting with our participation and spending.  In full transparency, I own at least one of each of the NFTs I mentioned earlier( besides a banana).  This is all mostly due to my efforts to diversify which projects I currently own, but low key because I am still butthurt that I didn’t get a few Bored Apes when I had multiple chances to.

For me, bonding curves will keep me out of a project. Anonymous developers just feels like trouble, and no real utility being added to a project just spells a HARD no for me. Now, fun and novelty can be an underestimated utility especially if there is strong community involvement.

 

NFT Collectible Drop by Cake’d Bored Apes
“I Think We Did Too Much” Caked DMT Monster by Cake’d Bored Apes

 

This commentary is mostly referencing these newer NFT collectible drops and not just crypto art that I like or supporting artists that I connect with.  I don’t necessarily buy all NFTs because I think they may be worth more in the future, I will buy something that I really love, if I can afford it at the moment, or if it’s from an artist that is someone I really want to intentionally support because of who they are as people and/or if their work is just really dope.

This would bring me to my next major gripe, especially around Avatar NFT projects. I want to pick what my avatar looks like, and not just randomly receive something I may not like at all. I see the outcome of this quite often when people start dumping avatars they don’t like on Opensea for lower prices than they paid for them. 


Now I understand there are issues with letting everyone just choose what they want, but I am putting it out into the universe. If someone can come up with a novel method that protects the masses from gas wars and whales from just taking over while allowing us to build out avatars that we can love, then I think we would mostly agree: that would be cool!

Perhaps without revealing the rarity of those physical aspects that are ‘choosable’ then we would have a win-win, or if rarity was not tied to only visual attributes but instead non-visual attributes to allow for customization. I know technically this could just be wishful thinking, at least for right now, but if we can send chunks of silicone and metal to Mars I think we can at some point figure out how to let me buy an avatar NFT that I fucking love before it hits the secondary market or I get priced out of what I want.

 

NFT Collectible Drop #6812 by Boring Bananas co.
#6812 by Boring Bananas co.

 

Many projects are thinking in the short to medium term and not thinking about their futures, where new technical possibilities can and will exist. This is where the on-chain gang argument really does shine with merit. Being able to reference things on-chain in the future will be a really powerful asset and boost the longevity of the projects that keep that future-focused mentality. 

I spoke with Michael Keen, founder of NFTcatcher.io, that is building a really fantastic platform that aggregates the most significant upcoming NFT drops in a comprehensive and useful way. I asked him about what he does not like to see in NFT drops because, honesty, he probably participates in and is aware of more drops than any single person that I know. 

Michael echoed many of the similar points listed above with some additional nuance:

He told me “I don’t like to see metadata leaks before a reveal, any issues with the smart contract implementation really scares buyers” and he “doesn’t like to see the developers hiding and not answering questions”

I would like to second the metadata leak issue as there were early rumors that were later confirmed during the Misfit University drop, which can be exploited by the technically gifted over the average user to mint the token ids with the rarest traits.

Crying eyes and duct tape drama debacles aside, a responsive team can work through issues with the community as they arise. I personally watched as NFT Twitter wanted to burn the devs of the Misfit University project at the stake, with the alleged rape culture references, but they were responsive and listened to the community and arrived at a solution that in many ways has saved that project, at least to live or die another day.

If we want to see better NFT Collectible Drops with less of what we don’t want and more of what we do want then we as a community should be having these conversations with the developers and creators of these projects. Above all, we should be putting our crypto where our mouths are and voting with our fungible token spending.

 

NFT Collectible Drop
Image by Strawberry.WTF

 

Main Featured Image Credit: Remix of Slacker Duck & Arabian Camel by Albert Polanco

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Strawberry.wtf is a series of collectible NFTs that were freshly mutated by the strawberry supermoon, which wasn’t fully visible in North America until last Thursday evening when the sunset and the large golden moon ascended into view. That’s when 10,000 mutant generative strawberries overwhelmed an unsuspecting rural town, which in reality could happen almost anywhere because strawberries are the most widely grown fruit in home gardens.

Similar in scope and generative process to other well-crafted NFT collections like CryptoPunks and the Bored Ape Yacht Club, there’s an endearing narrative backstory to inform, entertain, and engage a community of collectors. Yet unlike those sizable projects produced by corporate teams, Strawberry.wtf was masterfully launched by two talented and ambitious independent visionaries with the enduring support of an NFT crypto art hivemind. What makes Strawberry’s NFTs remarkable is their unique utility: an 8-bit nod of nostalgia in the form of a platform game that was literally built to the limitations of a 1989 Gameboy; a throwback to his notoriety as a world-class retro gamer.

 

“It’s devilishly fun, and evil, and all of the spirit of vintage gaming,” Strawberry said. Loosely based on his own life, each level of the game is a bit more challenging than the last. “It starts out hard, and it’s just hard the whole time,” Strawberry admits. There isn’t a physical cartridge yet, but NFT HODLers will have access to this 6-level game by connecting their wallet in a browser that confirms each verifiably unique ERC-721 token. Strawberry hasn’t beaten his own game, yet he says it is definitely beatable. In fact, you can go from the front to the back, and then play your way back through all 6 levels to the front if you want, because different things may or may not happen each time you play. “You’re not rewarded for playing, but it feels fun, and it feels good when you beat it,” Strawberry said.

 

Strawberry WTF
Strawberry.WTF

 

Strawberry.wtf NFTs are meant to be tradeable, giftable, and fun to make derivatives from—so expect to see Strawberry jam sessions. If you collect at least 20 NFTs and hold them until at least July 9th (1 week after the reveal) you’ll be rewarded with a golden strawberry AirDrop, if you’re also among the top 100 collectors on the leaderboard. “That’s when you automatically become a Big Farmer,” says CryptoSpaces1. “But if you sell one on the secondary market and drop below 20 NFTs in your wallet, you lose your status,” he cautions. A leaderboard will keep collectors competitive, and an active Strawberry Discord includes “Strawberry Preserve,” a space to talk and trade vintage video games. There’s already a limited collection of 6th generation strawberry floppy disk collectibles from taylor.wtf that grants 100 collectors access to an external hard drive of digital assets on discord.art. “I’m gonna have a ton of strawberries on the hard drive available for all the disk collectors to make derivatives of,” taylor.wtf said.

 

Taylor.wtf

 

The first 100 Strawberry.wtf NFTs are reserved; 0-4 are for auction; 5-99 are for DeFi friends and giveaways; 100-9,999 will be made available to the public on OpenSea. Up to twenty NFTs can be minted at a time with a flat cost of 0.025 ETH each; the cost of a Gameboy in 1989. Strawberry.wtf allows its community to make iterations to the game until the Gameboy cartridge is full. By sharing its pipeline sprites, assets, and maps, the community can make changes by editing and even adding new characters for everyone with a Strawberry token to experience. 

“I met Strawberry the other night at the NFT event in Venice, and I was so impressed,” says FinkeLand, who discovered Strawberry.wtf NFTs on CryptoVoxels’ homepage. “He showed me the game he developed and it was way over my head,” she laughs. “But he took the time to explain everything.”

 

Metabit Broker CryptoVoxels

MetaBit Broker CryptoVoxels

The derivative market is sure to be teeming with wildly creative Strawberry patches. Derivatives galvanize the NFT artist community around fellowship, FOMO, flipping, and artist collaborations to create more NFTs. cryptowizard77 wants to 3D-print a strawberry pie. fiyahmarshall wants to add his original music. NFT_ish wants a feminine-looking derivative with a cigarette. Almost anything these collectibles inspire is possible because they’re CC licensed. “With projects like this, when you’re allowed to take the entity that you own, and create new works based on derivative works, and then actually sell them for commercial use, that’s kind of a big deal,” AaronHaber said. 

Designing a 10,000-piece art collection of fruitful abominations is no small feat. Each verifiably different NFT has been generated at random, except for the first 100 NFTs, which are reserved for auction, DeFi friends, and giveaways. CryptoSpaces1 assures us that no more strawberries were cherry-picked; they all go through the same pipeline that will randomize each visual element.

 

The process began with Strawberry, who created 20 different characters. Each of the characters has 8 different pixel parts: visual elements that were handed off to CryptoSpaces1, who created the script to mix and match the visual elements based on different levels of predetermined rarity. The script auto generates Strawberry.wtf NFTs; mixing and matching 8-pixel parts like a delicious strawberry smash cocktail of backgrounds, bodies, berries, eyes, noses, mouths, stems (hair), and an extra category. The first 100 tokens also have a special quality to them that’s specific to each DeFi friend; a trait each grateful recipient may consider rare and valuable in this regard. 

 

“Earlier this week, we’ve been making sure that everything aligns; the assets align, and we actually got some really fun, good, happy accidents,” says CryptoSpaces1. Each smart contract will have a seed hash and a base to the provenance hash so the system is transparent. Strawberry has no interest in seeing his NFTs until they’re actually created. He thinks everyone should just enjoy the surprise. 

“I definitely got some feedback from foodmasku,” Strawberry said. “I put some strawberries in their discord and they offered some suggestions. And I was able to create a better distinction between the more feminine and masculine traits.” While some of them will be burly masculine, there’s no real gender to them, and there are some nice feminine qualities,” he mentioned. “I was trying to aim in a direction where they’re gender fluid in a lot of ways. It doesn’t have to be, you can be whatever strawberry,” he added. “You made a big point to make it inclusive,” CryptoSpaces1 recalls.

Darko R

Darko R

You can’t be mad at a strawberry—hence his moniker—as both a world-class retrogamer and now NFT crypto venture capitalist. Strawberry has been a well-known figure in gaming circles and especially World of Warcraft for more than a decade, and in recent years he’s been extremely competitive. Aggressive gaming is like a day job, and “Strawberry” has always been his avatar handle. When he downloaded Clubhouse and met people like snack_man and steviewilliams_, he was all-in with @rarepizzas and the promise of a collaborative NFT artist community. That’s when the gaming Discord groups he’d been part of for years collided with the world of NFTs like a celestial event; his own Strawberry moon was like a cosmic shift. “I will keep the name Strawberry forever. I love the name,” Strawberry says, despite the rumour that if all 10,000 NFTs sell out, he’ll change his legal name to “Straw Berry.”

While Strawberry.wtf NFTs started minting last week, the visual reveal for each unique NFT in the collection, as well as the platform game, happens on July 2nd.

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A new world record sale for a CryptoPunk recently took place at Sotheby’s Natively Digital auction that ran from June 3 -10th 2021.  

This ultra rare 1 of 9 alien CryptoPunk #7523 was won by Shalom Meckenzie, the largest shareholder of sports-betting outfit @DraftKings, and went for a whopping $11.75 Million dollars.

This CryptoPunk was first minted on June 23rd 2017 by Larva Labs and is 1 of only 10,000 original CryptoPunks in existence.  CryptoPunks became the genesis NFT collection, and thereby poster-child  of the Ethereum blockchain, and has inspired the ERC-721 token standard that is the underlying technology that powers today’s digital collectibles. 

While technically only 24 x 24 pixels in size with a very simple 8-bit style, there are no two punks that are the same, much like the owners of these rare and valuable NFTs. 

CryptoPunks have come to symbolize the very early days of the blockchain space and embody the energy and spirit of challenging the status quo; at the intersection of what is considered art, technology, and traditional methods of collecting and appreciating art.

 

NFTs enable a whole new model for ownership of art and collectibles, and this Sotheby’s auction proves this to the world yet again – on the heels of mainstream media sources claiming the NFTs were dead no less. 

You may have seen CryptoPunks used as avatars all over twitter and anywhere you can add a profile image. The incredibly passionate community that has formed around CryptoPunks has seen members identify with their CryptoPunk NFTs so much that they use them as  consistent digital representations of themselves. 

Collecting art has largely been reserved for private spaces like the home or some other type of gallery and is a way that collectors can show their appreciation of culture and how they fit within their world.  With the advent of digital collectibles like the CryptoPunks, collectors can now digitally flex who they are, and their place in the Crypto ecosystem. As owners of one of the pioneering technologies that, in my opinion, will lead to the mass adoption of blockchain technology – using what we now know as non-fungible tokens. 

This $11.75 Million dollar sale not only solidifies the value of the CryptoPunks project as a whole, it further legitimizes the innovation that NFTs bring to the world.  This historic moment is not limited to art alone, as many who look from the outside at this 24 x 24 pixel CryptoPunk still miss the bigger picture behind what this technology truly means. 

Digital ownership, transferability of assets, authentication and access. From this minimalistic piece of Crypto history, will spring a wealth of innovations that will touch nearly every sector of our lives. Most people will never have any knowledge or idea that non-fungible tokens have anything to do with the infrastructure behind the services, technologies, applications, and experiences they will be using in the not too distant future. CryptoPunks, in many ways, will be the genesis of a new digital paradigm, regardless of their value, measured by monetary means.

I had the chance to ask SillyTuna the owner of CryptoPunk #7523 that sold at the Sotheby’s auction, what was next for him? he responded with “Focus on my own projects (games, nft’s), do some donations later this year, and think about how to deal with the Mccoy artwork.” which just made me smile, as I personally love to see good humans, win in this space and  witness the awesome things they go on to do.

Congrats again to SillyTuna and the whole CryptoPunk community on this incredible sale, as we see more evidence that NFTs are not in fact mortal and can not be “dead” for very long.

 

SillyTuna

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Just when people were saying that the NFT collectibles market was grinding to a hault, along came the Bored Apes. Over the course of several days, Bored Apes Yacht Club has sold 10,000 NFTs and has grossed over 3,000 ETH and marks the second most liquid generative art collectible on Open Sea to date.  On April 18th, 2021, the Twitter account @Boredapeyachtclub began promoting a new collection of Cartoon Ape NFTs.  Similar to Cryptopunks, the company promoted the fact that each Ape was “unique and programmatically generated from 172 possible traits, stored as ERC721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain” opening up for presales a few days later on April 23rd.

Though it took several days for the pieces to catch on, aside from the unique aesthetic collectors began to be drawn into the drop because of its unique membership ‘club benefits’:

“Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card and grants access to members-only benefits, the first of which is access to THE BATHROOM, a collaborative graffiti board.” The Bathroom “contains a canvas accessible only to wallets containing at least one ape. Like any good dive bar bathroom, this is the place to draw, scrawl, or write expletives. Each ape-holder will be able to paint a pixel on the bathroom wall every fifteen minutes. Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the crypto sphere. A members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto Twitter.” 

This is just one of the many examples of the unlockable content that come along with these particular NFTs.  Others include the ability to join a private “club,” access to exclusive drops, and (most significantly) the rights to use the images of the apes one buys commercially in perpetuity.  This is quite a rare offer in the NFT space and has been something that many artists have been drawn to, with NFT staples such as JR Artspace, Taylor Wtf, and many others pumping out several popular artistic remixes of their own apes over the past few days.

However the momentum really picked up between the 24th of April and culminating in May first when @Pranksy and @J1mmy.eth collectively bought over 250 apes.  From that moment alone, the Bored Ape Yacht Club went from 500 pieces minted to entirely sold out in less than 10 hours…

According to investor Mike Damazo: “It definitely went crazy when @Pranksy picked up 250 before secondary.  Then Farokh came in at the secondary market. “  From there, “someone tweeted at Gary V which led him to the discord. Then “3LAU held two giveaways in his discord group.” 3LAU doing this giveaway referenced one of his own earliest NFT related stunts.  Several years ago he famously gave away free NFTs at various music festivals by way of a QR code he would have physically with him on his personal cellphone.

But, celebrity associations aside, why did initial investors bite?  According to a conversation we had with @J1mmy.eth: “the pricing was fair and approachable and the narrative of the site and being a part of the club drew me in. The community has been great as the project has started to pick up steam!”  This low and consistent pricing was very important to the Bored Ape Yacht Club team, often cited as calling popular NFT pricing systems such as ‘bonding curves’ quite pointed names such as “Ponzi schemes.” But the incentive to buy went far beyond this. According to @J1mmy.eth: “bored apes make great personal profile pictures.” Jimmy also wished that the collection was “on-chain” but still insists that the apes that he bought “still captured my attention despite that deficiency.”

It seems as if the issue of the apes being minted on open sea, and not an “on-chain” platform, such as Rarible with integrated IPFS, or an equivalent.  Though the Bored Ape Yacht Club did include an IPFS certificate with each ape included in their unlockable content, this still wasn’t enough for many staunch collectors.  To quote an analysis on HackMD: “the company/entity minting is paying Google [for hosting] those server-less functions to service the actual JSON metadata.” Calling this a “huge single point of failure.”

Despite this, all Apes sold out in the primary market We asked @Pranksy about his monumental purchase of Apes and he also mentioned that “They were fairly priced, unlike recent projects using FOMO price curves, and the art for me passed the ‘profile picture’ test.” It is interesting how much collectors both resonated with the stable, and relatively low, initial price; as well as the ‘profile-picture-ability’ of the collection. Similar to Cruptopunks, Cryptokitties, Poklamons, or other popular collectables – most buyers, in the initial market at least, simply seemed drawn to to the Apes they liked the best aesthetically.  Wanting to use them as profile pictures, add them to virtual art galleries, and more. Because they were relatively cheap people could mint many multiples until they got the one they aesthetically liked the most or match their profile. On top of that buying into a club and the promise of all of the unlockable content, this seems to be a major driving factor in the minds of buyers.  However, it would be a shame not to analyse some of those cool features that was released throughout the sale.

Since all of the pieces are now in the secondary market, it’s also worth going through the Bored Ape team’s landmark incentives.  At 20% sold, they released “the Caged Apes tokens held back from the initial sale which [were] airdropped to random Apeholders.”  At 40% sold, BAYC launched “its own YouTube channel, BAYC LoFi Radio.”  At 60% sold, a “Member-Exclusive BAYC Merch Store got unlocked, featuring Limited Edition tees, hoodies, and other goodies.”  At 80% sold, “The clubhouse image [became] interactive and the ‘Mysterious Note’ [became] legible, beginning their treasure hunt.”  According to the Bored Ape Yacht Club team: “The first to solve the mystery will be rewarded 5 ETH and a Bored Ape.” At 90% sold, The Bored Ape team initiated their own liquidity pool.  And finally, when the collection sold out 100%, “The Mutant Ape (NFT Breeding) Arcade Machine gets fixed” thus allowing owners to “cook up new ways to ape with our friends.” At this point all of these incentives have been released, making the secondary market for these pieces quite volatile.

So what is the future of these apes? Well as of today (May 3rd, 2021), one of these Apes has been sold for an incredible 21 ETH ($69,080.76 USD).  According to Kevin Wu, This makes this ape sale on par with some low-priced Cryptopunks, a staple in the NFT collectable community.  Despite this momentous secondary sale, it seems as if things aren’t slowing down, with owners reporting bots constantly attempting to buy their apes!  It will be interesting to see how these collectables continue to grow in the coming days and weeks.

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