NFT maximalists 🧙 – by William M. Peaster

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & collectibles

Dear Bankless Nation,

Anecdotally speaking, it seems like a lot of NFT power users escaped direct exposure to FTX’s collapse. 

Why’s that?

Well, a lot of people doubled down in crypto the past couple years through NFTs.

That matters because many of these same folks didn’t care about complex financial stuff like trading derivatives or trading with leverage on a centralized exchange — they just wanted to play around with digital items. 

That said, you need your own wallet to trade on NFT marketplaces, so the recent NFT boom has served as a pipeline for immediately getting many people into self-custodying their ETH and other digital assets onchain and not holding them in a CEX’s offchain database. 

Of course, self-custodying comes with significant responsibilities. Your keys, your crypto right — but the buck stops with you. We’ve seen the ugly side of this with all the stolen Bored Apes and so forth. 

Yet we can get better about educating and building guardrails here, and we will. In the meantime, it’s heartening to see there really is a new wave of settlers making their ways around the onchain frontiers. That’s worth applauding.

As for the task at hand, let’s now get caught up on the major headlines of the week. Thanks for reading everyone ✌️

-WMP

🙏 Sponsor: Sorare – Collect, Play, Win. Own Your Game.✨

• Bored Ape Yacht Club trading activity this week pushed the BAYC floor price below 50Ξ for the first time since Dec. 2021. 

• Wassies wrote off 60% of the creator team’s treasury as a result of the FTX collapse. 

• Yuga Labs donated CryptoPunk #305 to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami as the first initiative of the Punks Legacy Project. 

  • Yuga Labs also acquired WENEW, the NFT content company behind the 10KTF collection, and gained Beeple as an advisor as part of the deal. 

• Nike unveiled .SWOOSH, a platform for the athletic apparel giant’s virtual creations. 

• NonFungible.com launched its virtual HQ in Decentraland. 

William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also recently been contributing content to Bankless, JPG, and beyond!

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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.