Zima Red gives readers the weekly pulse on the biggest news around NFTs. Join our community and take the journey with us by subscribing here:
📰 Top Stories
Coinbase NFT
Coinbase debuted the beta for its much anticipated NFT marketplace.
What you need to know:
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The big differentiator from the likes of OpenSea is the added social component that allows users to follow, track, and comment on different accounts.
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The product is only available if you have an invite code. These are dished out based on your position on their waitlist.
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For now, it will only offer support for Ethereum NFTs
What’s next?
According to Coinbase’s blog, we can eventually expect support for:
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drops
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minting
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token-gated communities
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credit/debit payments
BIG3 Ownership NFTs
Ice Cube’s BIG3 basketball league announced that it will fractionalize ownership of its 12 teams via NFTs. A portion of each team’s ownership will be split into:
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25 “Fire” NFTs – $25,000 each
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975 “Gold” NFTs – $5,000 each
All NFT owners receive benefits like voting on team matters, tickets to all BIG3 games, VIP experiences, and exclusive merchandise. Owners of the Fire tier get the added benefit of intellectual property and licensing rights allowing them to create and sell league-approved merchandise.
Other future benefits include strategy calls with Ice Cube and league commissioner/NBA great Clyde Drexler.
BIG3?
If you aren’t familiar with the BIG3, it’s pretty entertaining – especially if you’re a long-time NBA fan. The game itself is actually quite different from traditional basketball:
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Half-court 3-on-3
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First to 50 wins
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Filled with former NBA stars like Joe Johnson, Jason Terry, Josh Smith, & Glen “Big Baby” Davis
The most important element of the BIG3 is that the league currently owns all of the teams. This makes them a uniquely great fit for the fractionalized ownership model compared to other sports leagues with already established franchise models.
Good to know:
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If they get a sell-out, the BIG3 will net $66M
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The league also retains a percentage of secondary sales
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NFT communities like BAYC, Punks, VeeFriends + others get WL access
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You can get a WL spot in other ways explained here
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The mint should be in May 2022 but the exact time/date is TBD
In related news:
The NBA botched its first official NFT collection. They planned to release 18,000 “The Association” NFTs to its fans for free. However, a smart contract bug allowed users to exploit the drop and mint the entire collection in under 1 hour.
BAYC X Coinbase film
Coinbase is releasing a new interactive film series called The Degen Trilogy and is asking for BAYC owners to submit their Apes for casting.
The series is no doubt a brand awareness play for Coinbase and its new NFT platform. This is evident as the company continues to use content to push NFTs and crypto into the cultural zeitgeist. However, according to Coinbase’s entertainment and culture marketing director, William Swann, it goes beyond brand awareness. Swann believes that this series allows Coinbase to show off the utility of NFTs.
Which, for The Degen Trilogy, includes the opportunity to vote on their favorite ape’s storyline.
Check out the initiative’s site for more info. FYI you need a Coinbase Wallet to enter.
OpenSea acquires Gem
Gem is an NFT aggregator popularly used by collectors to sweep the floors of projects. Its product allows users to buy NFTs across multiple marketplaces in a single transaction. Gem additionally allows users to use many non-ETH ERC-20 tokens to buy NFTs. They advertise that their users can save as much as 40% on gas fees compared to using an NFT marketplace like OpenSea directly.
*Disclosure: Andrew Steinwold’s venture capital firm, Sfermion, is an investor in Gem*
🐴 This week’s Zima Red is sponsored by Game of Silks
Sfermion has acquired NFTs in Game of Silks which is minting their genesis avatar collection tomorrow (April 27th). We also intend to invest in their upcoming round.
Game of Silks is the first derivative P2E metaverse that mirrors the real world of thoroughbred horse racing. Each year Silks tokenizes every thoroughbred horse born and registered in the US into a derivative NFT that tracks the IRL horse’s lifecycle and productivity.
What has us so excited about Silks is the NFTs utility – if you own the NFT of a horse that just won $1M in an IRL race you receive token rewards of similar value.
The Silk economy goes much deeper than just the horses as you can also buy land, stables, develop horse farms and estates.
You can still sign up for early access on their site till EOD today. To get early access to the Silks Genesis Avatar Mint and learn more about the project, we encourage you to visit the Silks website, whitepaper, and their discord.
📈 Market
Presumably, in preparation for this Saturday’s (4/30) land sale, all Yuga projects are smashing ATHs
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BAYC at ~142ETH
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MAYC at ~41ETH
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BAKC at ~13.4ETH
The Land sale is all allowlist btw.
👤 Social
ApeCoin staking isn’t really staking
Crypto writer and podcaster, Cobie, recently wrote on the death of crypto staking. In the piece, he explains that staking is a technical term dealing with being rewarded for using tokens to secure a blockchain (i.e Eth 2.0). This term has been corrupted by the likes of ApeCoin to mean getting paid interest to lock up your tokens.
The argument is that this process has no actual token functionality and is instead essentially just bribing holders to not dump their tokens – artificially lowering the sell pressure.
Moonbirds Fomo + Ryan Carson steps down
If you scored a Moonbird, cheers 🍻 because the project is nearing a 30 ETH floor. We wrote about them here & here if you need to brush up.
More on Moonbirds:
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Critics are claiming that they are sucking all of the liquidity out of the NFT market—causing other projects to underperform.
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Others say that the project actually brought in a ton of “new” money into NFTs given co-founder Kevin Rose’s Sillicon Valley connections.
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The floor price of the project’s associated NFT collective, PROOF, has grown to over 120 ETH.
Speaking of PROOF Collective
Ryan Carson has stepped down from his position as PROOF’s COO to start his own NFT Fund, 1.21 Gigawatts. The fund advertises that it will generate returns for its investors by:
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Commissioning 1/1’s by top NFT artists
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Securing allowlist spots for the hottest projects
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Acquiring blue chips based on their floor-to-rare ratio
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Having an information advantage
Keep scrolling for the drama 👀
Bored Ape Yacht Club has its Instagram hacked
The hacked account posted a link to a copycat website promising a fake airdrop. The airdrop tricked victims into signing a “safeTransferFrom” transaction that transferred their NFTs over to the attacker’s wallet. BAYC’s co-founder Garga.eth revealed that four Bored Apes, six Mutant Apes, three Kennels, and other valuable NFTs were among those stolen.
🎮 Gaming
How people are making $300-$400 per day walking
A new web3 app called STEPN is capitalizing on play-to-earn mechanics, with an added twist. The startup has emerged as the top move-to-earn start-up in the field. According to its Chief Business Officer, STEPN has 100K DAUs on more than 1M downloads.
Nat Eliason gave a fantastic breakdown of everything you need to know about STEPN.
Here’s the TLDR;
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You need at least ~12 SOL (~$1200) to buy your first NFT and get started.
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You earn STEPN’s token GST for walking or running.
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You can buy different NFTs that are optimized for either walking, running or a hybrid version of the two.
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1 entry-level shoe allows you to make ~$20-$30 per day (in $GST), but you can reinvest your earnings to level up your NFT or buy more NFTs to earn more.
*Disclosure: Andrew Steinwold’s venture capital firm, Sfermion, is an investor in STEPN*
BreederDAO token public sale is today – April 26th
The token will power the BreederDAO Factory and allow entry and membership into the DAO.
*Disclosure: Andrew Steinwold’s venture capital firm, Sfermion, is an investor in BreederDAO*
🎶 Music
Snoop Dogg’s Web3 plans
Snoop went on the Full Send podcast to chat about how he plans to incorporate web3 into Death Row Records.
Here are the takeaways:
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He wants his fans to be able to own and profit off of his music.
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Snoop believes that he is the first mainstream artist to truly embrace web3 because he owns his label. Other artists have many more hoops to jump through.
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Record labels are just now beginning to ease into web3 and are still worried about how it could impact their bottom line.
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He wants Death Row to become the first NFT label.
In case you were wondering, Snoop Dogg also revealed that he charges about $250K for a feature.
🕺Culture
Dolce & Gabbana releases its NFT collection
The project minted for 1.224 wETH on UNXD and is now available on secondary for ~2ETH.
Benefits:
🤫 Rumor Mill
On special occasions, we will break out the rumor mill to discuss NFT industry gossip
Many believe that the reason Ryan Carson “left” PROOF is that he was let go by the team. Some point to a part of the reason for this being that he snagged a bunch of rare Moonbirds post reveal in a form of NFT “insider trading.”
💸 Funding
GENIES ($150M) – A metaverse avatar technology company. The round included participation from Silver Lake, Bond Capital, Tamarack Global, and NEA.
Context ($19.5M) – The platform allows users to monitor other people’s wallets and transactions through an Instagram-style feed. The round includes participation from Variant, Dragonfly Capital, Sam Altman, Lachy Groom, Dom Hofmann, Adam D’Angelo, Tess Rinearson, Jack Altman, Trevor McFedries, Jacob Horne, David Rudnick, John Palmer, Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, Andy Chorlian, and Meltem Demirors.
Swoops ($3.5M) – Blockchain and NFT-powered strategy basketball game. Its round features participation from Gary Vaynerchuk, Courtside Ventures, Alpaca VC, Jason Robins, Slow Ventures, and Red Beard Ventures.
📚 What we’re reading
A spreadsheet of Web3 salaries
👀 Alpha
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Minted this weekend
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The floor is up 500% but it’s still under 0.1ETH
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Created by writer and artist John Januzzi
🎙Zima Red Podcast
My guest today is Baek Kim. Baek is a general partner at the web3 investment firm, Hashed. If you want a crash course in how to operate one of the top investment firms in web3, then you have to dive into this episode.
We chat:
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How they grew Hashed from $700k to $4b in assets under management
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Why the best strategy in crypto is buy and hold
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Building a web3 venture studio
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Why they are so excited about web3 gaming
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Why being a multifaceted investment fund is the only way to manage the ever evolving web3 markets
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The inventive ways they add value to their portfolio companies
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And so much more
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