🗽 Here's What Went Down At NFT.NYC

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Table of Contents

📰 News

NFT.NYC recap

Thousands traveled up to the Big Apple last week for NFT.NYC. Despite the market, the vibes were still super positive and people were as exuberant as ever.

While there is too much to cover everything, here were the main themes:

The NFT.NYC conference

🗽 Here'S What Went Down At Nft.nyc | Nft News

NFT.NYC has become less focused on the actual conference and more on a slew of side events, parties, and happy hours occurring concurrently around the city throughout the week.

We, like many, were in New York last weekend but did not attend the conference. Of those that did, many expressed disappointment.

Blue chips go all out

Basically, every blue-chip threw a massive party for its holders. Obviously, there was Ape Fest; a three-day extravaganza clad with A-list performers and celebrities.

Also, people are reselling just about everything from it.

The Doodles event was reminiscent of a big tech product launch. CEO Julian Holguin delivered what most likely was the first-ever NFT keynote. While all of these collections are using these large-scale events to amplify their brand, Doodles’ approach of appearing a little more polished was interesting. But they also still threw a party and an immersion as well.

Cool Cats put on a highly interactive gamified quest for merch called Cooltopia.

The Azuki Alley party was apparently one of the best parties of the entire week.

Goblintown threw a grungy party where they gave out cheeseburgers and Beeble wanted posters. They seemed to have benefitted the most with their floor growing 43% post-party.

There was still a lot of cringe + fake Snoop Dogg?

Magic Eden becomes the newest crypto unicorn

The Solana-based NFT exchange, Magic Eden, raised $130M at a $1.6B valuation. The company is only 9 months old and completely dominates the Solana NFT market.

Even after OpenSea launched support for Solana, Magic Eden still routinely does equivalent or better sales volume. They also have over double the number of active users and still crush everyone in daily transactions on Solana.

One of the company’s founders also shared an inspiring story of how he went from being broke and living on a sailboat to starting Magic Eden.

eBay acquires KnownOrigin

eBay has been looking to expand into NFTs for quite some time and the acquisition of KnownOrigin and their team will certainly accelerate those efforts. KnownOrigin has been around since 2018 but has flown a little under the radar focusing on 1/1 art from prominent artists instead of PFPS.

Shopify adds new crypto features

Shopify is implementing NFTs into its platform through a new initiative called Tokengated Experiences.

It will essentially give brands the ability to make a store that requires an NFT to enter. Projects like Cool Cats and Doodles are already using it to offer exclusive access to merch and events. It will also allow brands to mint custom NFTs to list and sell right from their stores.

This is really cool because it won’t just be siloed off to large projects like Doodles and Cool Cats. Soon this technology will be available to thousands of small businesses using Shopify, hopefully accelerating the industry’s adoption.

Not Boring’s Packy McCormick interviewed Shopify’s Alex Danco about some of their plans for tokengated commerce and it’s worth a read.

📉 Market

The state of the NFT and crypto gaming market through June 2022

The NFT market is down awfully bad since January. Daily trading volumes sit at $20M, off 98% from their peak of $1B.

Looks Rare’s share of the NFT exchange market has dropped to 20% – from 70% in January. There is also a big Looks token unlock slated for July.

ETH gaming weekly active users have dropped from 12k in November to 2k now. Decentraland and Sandbox still hold the lion’s share of users. Most games have watched their user base drop 30-40% in the last 6-10 months, except Sandbox which is only down around 3%. Gaming tokens are all down 60% at least.

More takeaways from the NFT market in 2022:

ETH and NFT floors have been tightly correlated
NFTs are momentum assets, meaning that floor prices are more likely to go up today if they went up yesterday but will go down most days
Floors of most airdrops have been down or flat
The idea that lower ETH is good for NFT floors has been a myth

👤 Collectibles

Yuga Labs sues Ryder Ripps

Yuga alleged that Ryder Ripps has infringed on their unregistered word and design marks by essentially selling a knock-off Bored Ape collection. He created a “re-contextualized” version of BAYC called RR/BAYC by re-minting Apes and listing them on Foundation. The RR/BAYC collection looks identical to the original and racked up $3.5M in sales volume on OpenSea before it was removed from the platform following “a claim of intellectual property infringement.”

So Yuga has enlisted the help of famed SF law firm Fenwick & West to bring Ryder Ripps to justice. The key allegation is that Ryder Ripps is using Yuga’s word and design marks to sell NFTs – which he is.

Brian L. Frye wrote a great thread further breaking down the case as well as Ryder Ripps’ possible defense.

“This is no mere monkey business”

– Yuga Labs actually wrote this in a legal document

More Yuga News

The company’s founders released a blog post rebuking claims that they are secretly Nazis.

Big Doodles announcements

Doodles took the stage at NFT.NYC to announce the project’s next phase:

Reddit co-founder (and Serena Williams’ husband 🎾) Alexis Ohanian’s VC firm Seven Six Ventures will lead Doodle’s first round of outside funding.
Music legend Pharrell Williams is joining as Doodle’s Chief Brand Officer and a board member. He is also the executive producer for Doodles Records: Volume 1.
Doodles are launching a second collection

Doodles 2

The project’s second collection is aimed to scale and lower the barrier to entry for the Doodles ecosystem. The NYC announcement focused on the key differences between Doodles 2 and the Genesis collection.

Scarce —> Accessible
Thousands —> Millions
JPEG —> Audio/Visual
ETH —> Not ETH??

There will be millions of mass-market, identity-focused Doodles 2 NFTs able to be customized using wearables, animated characters, fully-licensed music, and more without gas fees.

Dooplicator

The announcement also shed light on the Doodles Dooplicator. CEO Julian Holguin said that the Dooplicator will provide “perpetual utility” and that duplicating traits from the original collection [over to Doodles 2] is “not the only, but the first use case.”

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🕹 Gaming

GTA 6 P2E

Many are speculating that GTA will implement a cryptocurrency ecosystem within GTA 6. Much of the speculation stems from an article published by Screen Rant that includes this quote:

Other popular rumors surrounding Grand Theft Auto 6 include the game featuring multiple playable characters (including the first playable female protagonist in the history of the GTA franchise), the introduction of a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency system, and intercontinental travel across multiple time periods.

This is certainly big-if-true but at this time it’s just a rumor.

Cases for and against crypto gaming

Messari researcher Kel Eleje did a write-up examining the cases for and against crypto gaming.

Cases against crypto gaming

Cases for crypto gaming

Massive TAM
Crypto games have so far been one of the best drivers of growth for blockchain ecosystems
Many of the cases against crypto gaming can be removed or mitigated with an improvement to mechanism design