Morning Drop - Issue #17
Your weekly issue of what’s minting, popping and dropping - straight to your inbox, every Saturday morning.
🥩 NFTs Leak into Meat-World.
Sotheby’s Enters the Metaverse
Sotheby’s drops the hammer down on it’s commitment to NFTs with its recent announcement of Sotheby’s Metaverse, a virtual platform that will serve host to curated collections of blue-chip NFT artists.
We are currently in the midst of its first offering, called Natively Digital 1.2: The Collectors, which contains 53 pieces from the vaults of 19 influential collectors, including NFT Girl, Pranksy, 888, and FingerprintsDAO, among many others.
Expect this platform to become a market-maker in the NFT space, as Sotheby’s will continue to serve as a gateway for traditional art collectors to jump aboard the NFT bandwagon.
Martha Stewart Drops a Kinda Dope Halloween Collection
Lifestyle influencer Martha Stewart reveals a collection of Halloween-themed NFTs as part of a new NFT shop called Fresh Mint.
The first drop includes a variety of artist-commissioned Jack O’Lanterns and costumed Marthas that, we’ll admit, have some serious vibe. Martha Stewart as a blood-stained Naughty Nurse? Yeah, OK!
Of course, it’s not a huge surprise that Stewart is entering the game. We reckon that The Doggfather put her up to it
NFTs Enter The Political Fray
A Texas-based political group that advocates for Progressive causes released an NFT marketplace of their own called Front Row, which is aimed as a fundraising platform for the organization.
The group’s first offering is an animated collection of arrest warrants issued for Democratic lawmakers in Texas who had previously fled the state to prevent a new voting restriction law from being enacted.
We expect MANY more NFT-related fundraising campaigns to appear as we move into the 2022 voting season.
Projects Plugs
Organic Growth: Crystal Reef (OG: Crystals)
Among the throngs of new projects dropping in the collectables market, few seem to venture so far out of the well-worn path as Organic Growth: Crystal Reef does. The collection is a collaborative work by digital artist Danil Krivoruchko and conceptual artist Michael Joo, and features virtual crystals that evolve each time they are sold to a new owner. After two months, the growth state of each crystal is locked, creating a permanent stasis in whatever form of evolution it has achieved.
In the Weeds
OG: Crystals is a collection that actively responds to the wallet activity of their owners, and the evolution of crystal forms is influenced by multiple factors including the amount of ETH in the wallet it exists in, the other NFTs held in that wallet, and the number of past transactions, among other things.
The on-chain, responsive, and dynamic characteristics embedded in each crystal makes each utterly unique, and the artwork becomes more intricate and complex the more transfers of ownership it sees.
The project will culminate with a collective artwork, in which all the pieces of the collection will be integrated into a physical sculpture to be exhibited worldwide.
Bird’s Eye View
As artists and developers continue to gain more sophisticated understandings of smart contracts, we expect to see more and more collections that utilize blockchain mechanisms in more creative ways.
We’re also keeping an eye out for more IRL accomplished artists moving into the NFT space with new innovations that are native to the blockchain, and who may find further ways to bridge the gaps between Meatworld and the Metaverse.
Projects like this also increase the likelihood that curators from IRL will begin to take notice of blockchain artwork, which is needed to pave the way for NFTs to make their way into the public eye via museum exhibitions.
Eponyms
Eponyms launched last week with a unique minting experience that quickly made itself known across the Twitterverse. The collection was created via a collaboration between users and an AI that generated images based upon an owners text inputs at mint. The resulting imagery is a cacophony of unique and unexpected results that range from pure abstraction to representations of flowers, surrealistic portraits, and much, much more. A preview image here just doesn’t do the project justice, so we recommend browsing the OS page yourself to discover it’s delights.
In the Weeds
Eponyms claims to be the “first and largest collectively created art collection,” which gives the project a lofty historical claim. During the minting process, purchasers had the ability to preview the work they were minting, and the option to “refresh” the image if they didn’t like the result.
To further the community curation of the project, the team has introduced a merging mechanism that allows owners to burn two of their Eponyms to mint a new “Gen 2” piece, which gives the project a deflationary property while allowing owners to pick and choose which pieces remain and which are destroyed.
The team has also released all commercial rights to the NFTs, along with creating a website in which owners can download a 7k high def file of the piece(s) they own.
Bird’s Eye View
Similar to OG: Crystals, Eponyms is a collection that allows for interactivity, and presents a mutable collection that is defined by users rather than original creators. Projects like these leave us eager to see how they change over time, an interesting incentive for community engagement
In these pioneering days of the NFT world, there will be many collections to come that claim “firsts” as the innovations continue to churn, but an AI-generated collection based on a quasi-collaboration with it’s participants is the kind of experience that’s hard to forget.
The early popularity of Eponyms due to it’s user-controlled outcomes may bring inspired a wave of new projects down the line, and has some collectors keeping high hopes for the potential of the project.
Since it matters...
Facebook Making its Own Metaverse
Facebook recently announced that it’s going all-in on the metaverse, sharing news that it’s hiring 10,000 workers in the EU to develop the company’s own branded virtual world within 5 years.
The news marks a massive signal that Web2 is ready to begin its evolution, although given endless controversies surrounding Facebook itself, the announcement was met with some ice-cold responses across the Twittersphere.
In the announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped some ideas on what his metaverse could entail, including VR concerts, classrooms, and workplaces. Of course we also expect a very robust NFT marketplace to commoditize it all.
Given all this there seems to be a great battle on the horizon. On one side, the traditionally corporate world defined by centralization of power and governance, and on the other, a new generation of digital natives developing greater appreciation for a decentralized world.
If the prospect of a “Zuckerverse” spooks people, it’s likely justified by the company’s history of controversy in a number of areas, including information control, misuse of user data, privacy violations, and a running list of criticisms about the company’s policies that’s so large it has its own Wikipedia page.
The company is reportedly even planning to change its name to prepare for it’s new identity as a VR world, likely to help shed the poor reputation of its brand to start from scratch
We’ll be keeping our ears to the ground for other corporate entries into the MetaVerse. Will Disney be next?
Feature: The Humanoids
The Humanoids made a strong splash when it debuted on Sept. 30th when it sold out in a blazing three minutes. Among the project’s bragging rights is a discord community approaching 50,000 members, a Twitter gang of over 25k, and just good old fashion unique artwork.
Floor: .4 ETH Highest sale: 22 ETH Value Traded: 9.7k ETH
Issues: 10,000 Unique Wallets: 5300 Average Owned: 1.88
Fundamentally
The Humanoids features Cryptopunk-inspired 3D renderings that call to mind plastic action figures straight out of a bizarre Pixar movie. And the photorealism of the artwork is so strong that it feels like at any moment the avatar may turn its head and say hello. It’s an aesthetic that is instantly distinguishable amid the packed house of the collectables market, and has us wondering if metaverse avatars or physical 3-d pieces might exist in this project’s future.
On the radar
The team plans to launch a merch story after the new year, and will be releasing 4k renders of the Humanoids for their owners to enjoy.
The project received some pretty notable influencer endorsements, including Bobby Hundereds and Linken Park frontman, Mike Shinoda both aping in.
Owners are also granted a non-exclusive license to use their Humanoids in whatever way they see fit
The game plan for the project so far isn’t necessarily breaking new boundaries, but in the race among collectables to innovate with new ideas, utilities, and community engagement strategies, sometimes it’s nice to settle in with a project that isn’t overpromising.
Technically Speaking
Humanoid Technical have been on a steady decline since after-mint rocket peak on October 4, reaching average sales prices of nearly 1.6 ETH. It currently sits at a .4 ETH floor, which may be partly attributed to the market-wide slowdown following the ETH rally in recent days. With over 50% ownership distribution, along with its massive social following, the project is well-rooted in the market place and fits comfortably within a position of staying power.
Photographer of the Week
Fernando Gallegos
Earlier this week, Mexican photographer Fernando Gallegos dropped a new project on Foundation called A/A, a unique body of work inspired by a poem by W.H. Auden called, The Question. The project is a 37-image collection of lyrical photographs that forms “A poetic narrative about the things we do and the places we go to forget ourselves.” Photographed in dual mountain locations of the Andes in Argentina and the Alps in Switzerland, the work enters into a relationship with Auden’s poem that the photographer describes as being written with a troubled mind musing on life’s complexities.
In A/A, Gallegos is interested in the way narrative can be formed through photographs. He uses an innovative system of image titles, naming each picture in the series after a single letter that appears in a passage from the poem:
“and ghosts must do again
What gives them pain.”
The photographer is also well-known for his partnership with Alejandro Cartagena, with whom he previously released a collaborative and lyrical photographic project titled, End of the City.
Also brewing...
Reddit just shared news that its developing it’s own NFT platform…should we upvote or nah?
After a crazy hack of the Creaturetoadz Discord sent Twitter into a frenzy, the project successfully launched with ambitions to bring the communities of CrypToadz and Creature NFT together, we’ll be following closely
POAP continues to crank great ideas into the NFTsphere, and we’re peeping their upcoming POAPathon, a hackathon bringing artists, Defi degens, and DAOs together for a little bit of fun.
After TIME Magazine dropped their TIMEpieces, we expected more big-name publications to join the fam. The Economist has just entered the chat.
Binance revealed it’s plans for an NFT platform solely for music…sounds good!
NFT NYC is drawing nearer, and it’s getting the crew pretty amped.
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We’ll feature the most interesting entries in our release next week, and send you something for the trouble. We heard it’s rare.
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