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📰 Top Story
Otherside mint craziness
Yuga Labs much anticipated Otherside metaverse land sale went down Saturday night. All in all the 55,000 Otherdeeds generated $320M for Yuga, but the mint certainly did not go off without a hitch.
Yuga Labs issued an apology/non-apology/weird flex via a Twitter thread for basically taking down the Ethereum.
What happened??
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The Otherside mint was the largest NFT mint ever – by a lot
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The gas surge crashed the blockchain explorer, Etherscan
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60,234 ETH ($166.2M) in gas fees
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Some people spent thousands on gas and were still unable to mint but are reportedly being refunded
Big takeaway
ApeDAO stated that it is evident that ApeCoin will eventually need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale.
Andrew had a few words to say on this:
👤 Social
Akutars gives refund
The AkuDreams team will refund 863 ETH to Akutar Pass holders that bid on the project’s botched dutch auction. Akutars is the pfp collection for the AkuDreams project led by former Major League Baseball player Micah johnson. The team issued holders Akutar mint passes along with a dutch auction for new collectors.
What happened?
One line of code cost $34M.
@0xBender wrote a great thread on what went down
Meebits are getting new utility
Yuga labs’@GordonGoner tweeted that the Meebits project, which Yuga now owns, is on the verge of receiving new utilities.
Pudgy Penguins rebrand
The project, now under new ownership, has elicited the help of the Miami-based design studio Bureaux to undergo a visual rebranding.
🎮 Gaming
VaynerSports signs NFT gamer
NFT gaming content creator Brycent has signed with GaryVee’s sports agency, VaynerSports, to lead the buildout of its NFT gaming arm.
Ronin publishes a postmortem
Axie Infinity’s blockchain, Ronin, published a postmortem of the $600M+ Ronin bridge hack.
Details:
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A Sky Mavis employee was compromised by an advanced spear-phishing attack
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The attacker leveraged that access to penetrate Sky Mavis IT infrastructure and gain validator node access
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The attacker abused Ronin’s RBC node to get a signature for the Axie DAO validator
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Ronin added more validator nodes to fix the vulnerability
Sega’s “Super Game” project may include NFTs
The company filed a trademark for “Sega NFT” back in January
“It is a natural extension for the future of gaming that it will expand to involve new areas such as cloud gaming and NFTs.”
-Sega executive VP Shuji Utsumi
NFT worlds avatars mint
The NFT Worlds Genesis Avatars collection is 15,000 NFT avatars playable within the NFT Worlds ecosystem. The collection has some pretty interesting perks for its holders:
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25% share of all $WRLD spent on the marketplace with distributions relative to the avatar’s scarcity.
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Exclusive access to wearables and additional drops.
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Exclusive access to future NFT Worlds features
Square Enix sells IP and studios to invest in NFT gaming
The game publisher has sold three game studios and the IP to Tomb Rader to help its pivot into blockchain gaming. The sale will net Square Enix $300M to launch new AI, blockchain, and cloud computing businesses.
Yield Guild Games partners with BreederDAO
To meet the growing demand for in-game Metaverse assets, Yield Guild Games has established a partnership with the in-game asset production factory BreederDAO.
YGG will acquire $400K worth of BrederDAO’s recently launched token.
🌎 Virtual Worlds
Decentraland and Degree host the first-ever metaverse marathon
The partnership was made to increase awareness of the need for more diversity and representation in the Metaverse. The event also included Paralympic medalist Blake Leeper, Grammy-nominated recording artist Fat Joe, para-snowboarder Amy Purdy, and pro-footballer Hector Herrera.
🎨 Art
NFT art gallery pop-up in SoHo
SuperRare is hosting its first-ever pop-up gallery from May 19 – Aug 28 in SoHo, NYC.
Pplpleasr Cannes film festival
Digital artist Pplpleaser has released a collection of 75 NFTs granting access to in-person events at the Cannes Film Festival from May 17 to May 28. The proceeds will go towards the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative accelerator to support up-and-coming female content creators.
The project has three tiers: bronze, silver, and gold which are described on the project’s website.
🎶 Music
3LAU explains the value of music NFTs
The DJ and NFT collector has become synonymous with the nascent music NFT industry, recently raising a $55M Series A from a16z for his music NFT marketplace. 3LAU appeared on the Chain Reaction Podcast to discuss the value of music NFTs.
Takeaways:
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Intrinsic value – copyright ownership
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Emotional value – owning a scarce asset associated with an artist you love
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The copyright is what’s scarce, not the audio itself.
Bobby Shmurda dropped a single on Sound.XYZ
The song, “They don’t know,” was Shmurda’s first release since becoming an independent artist.
They try to dim your light when they put you in those dungeons. They try to make the time hard, but I knew that one day I’d be free again.
An updated music NFT landscape
💸 Funding
Live Bash ($21M) – Platform that converts live performances into digital collectibles and NFTs. Investment from “successful fintech pioneers.”
PROOF ($10M) – A Web3 media startup behind PROOF Collective and Moonbirds. The round featured participation from Seven Seven Six and True Ventures.
Flowty ($4.5M) – A peer-to-peer collateralized NFT lending platform on Flow. The round was led by Greenfield One and Lattice and included participation from Sfermion, Dapper Labs, Luno Expeditions, Tiny VC, Red Beard Ventures as well as angels Andy Chorlian, Bob Meese, James Carlini, Chris Cable, Daniel Roelker, Glorious 101, GreekFreak, Ivailo Jordanov, Jack Settleman, Jason Nguyen, John Sabat, Peter Jennings, Peter Overzet, Quickrider, Roham Gharegozlou, and TSF Space Cowboy.
Metakey ($3.5M) – Interoperable web3 utility creator. The seed round’s investors include Sfermion, Animoca Brands, Digital Currency Group, Block 3 Ventures ( B3V ), SkyVision Capital, Double Peak, Spartan Group, Everest Ventures, Kenetic, Hillrise Capital, MHC Digital Finance, MaxStealth, AngelHub, Kharis Capital, Sparkle Ventures and angels DeFi Dad, Sebastien Borget, WhaleShark, Agus Ferreira, Gabby Dizon, 888, Adam De Cata, James Ho, Angela Ho, and Cooper Turley.
SoundMint ($1.7M) – Generative platform for music NFTs. The round included participation from Animoca Brands, Sfermion, Castle Island Ventures, Focus Labs, SkyVision Capital, Tess Ventures, and Goodwater Capital.
📈 Market
Recession?
📚 What we’re reading
475 articles on human collaboration, tech, crypto, and digital culture
The ownership economy 2022 by Variant
NFT subscriptions are better than paywalls
Dragonfly Capital’s QuirkyQwerty on crypto gaming
👀 Alpha
Pixel Kodas – #1 in sales on Icy Tools to start the week
Crypto Unicorns – Game launched Monday (5/2)
🎙Zima Red Podcast
Yury is the founder of SuperDAO, a platform for creating DAOs and DAO-related infrastructure. Essentially SuperDAO wants to become the one-stop-shop for all things launching, operating, and expanding DAOs.
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How Yury worked on DAO and web3 based technology before bitcoin existed
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In which ways DAOs are better than companies and in which ways they are not
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The major pain points around DAOs
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How DAOs can co-exist with government regulation
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How investing is a new form of social connection and tribalism And why we are at the very beginnings of the DAO revolution
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