Zima Red
📰 Top story
Former OpenSea employee gets indicted for insider trading
Nate Chastain has been arrested and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. The charges carry with them a max penalty of 20 years in prison. This means he can get 40 years for front-running Jpegs.
What happened:
Nate was an early employee at OpenSea and the company’s head of product. His position gave him some insider knowledge regarding which NFT collections would be featured on the front page of their website.
He would buy a few NFTs from those collections and then flip them once after the price went up. This process allowed him to routinely bank a 2-5x profit per flip.
Nate secretly did this for a couple of months using random OpenSea and wallets. His efforts weren’t enough as all it took was one blockchain sleuth smart (or bored) enough to track his wallet activity…
After getting busted, Nate admitted to his wrongdoing and lost his OpenSea shares.
The case seems pretty singular to Nate’s – not the kickoff of a wide regulatory crackdown on NFTs that many initially thought.
📉 Andrew’s Market update
Is the bottom in?
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The market is 100% controlled by the Fed’s actions
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The Fed is doing two of the most bearish things it can do which are:
With that being said, NFTs are holding up surprisingly well. While they are obviously being devalued in USD terms, many have held steady or even increased in base crypto terms (ETH, SOL, etc.) This is a great time to be loading up on crypto that you are bullish on long-term.
🔮 PfP’s and Collectibles
Goblintown mewns
The markets going to goblintown essentially means that they are going to be down 80%+ akin to past bear markets – hence going straight to goblintown.
The meme stuck and Goblin Town has already done an incredible 30K+ ETH in volume.
🕹 Gaming
Method gaming guild
Method, one of the world’s most renowned World of Warcraft guilds has entered the world of NFT gaming.
Dr.Disrespect’s gaming studio is collaborating with Polygon
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Midnight Society launched an NFT Founders Access Pass & received over 400k signups in 7 days
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All applicants received a survey asking if they believed that in-game items should be directly owned by gamers – 97.5% said yes.
Gala games strike a partnership with Epic Games
Blockchain gaming platform Gala Games has reached a deal with Epic Games to publish Gala’s titles on the Epic Games store. This partnership will expose the 194M+ Epic Games store users to Gala games and web3 gaming. Gala’s battle-royale title, GRIT, will become the first to hit the Epic Games store.
Andrew on Realvision
Andrew came on Realvision to chat about:
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Introduction to crypto back in 2013
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First blockchain start-up in the Middle East
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Another startup tracking property taxes using blockchain (fill in blanks here)
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Lessons learned from the Polynexus Capital crypto fund
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The expansion of niches within Crypto
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Entry into NFTs back in 2017
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NFT gaming
& why NFTs will become the world’s largest market…
🎶 Music
Kanye enters web3
🌐 Virtual Worlds
What makes digital real estate valuable?
Digital real estate has conceptually been around for decades –
Blockchain technology facilitates a huge shift in digital real estate ownership –
Valuable metaverse land will be worth MUCH more than valuable physical land
The metaverse won’t be winner take all –
⬇️ More great stuff
Zora API
ENS’ has a record-breaking month
NFT.NYC side events
Avalanche put together a great repository of NFT.NYC side events
🎙 Zima Red Podcast
Mack is the founder of Big Head Club, an NFT production studio. Mack was also on the Axiom Zen team which was the company that created CryptoKitties and the company that eventually became Dapper Labs.
Our conversation has it all, we discuss:
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How the ERC721 standard was created
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The ideation and launch of CryptoKitties
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The creation of Dapper Labs
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His NFT production studio Big Head Club
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How the Oni Ronin NFTs are pushing the boundaries
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The issues with the NFT space
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Why he is not a huge fan of Play-to-Earn
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And so much more
An awesome conversation with someone who is not afraid to speak their mind!