🥩 NFTs leak into meat-world.

Adidas Kicks it in the Metaverse

• Global shoe/apparel brand Adidas made a huge splash into the NFT space with announcements of collaborations with a plethora of high-level brands including BAYC, Coinbase, Sandbox, PUNKS Comics, and @gmoney.

• It appears the company is going all in on its metaverse ambitions, even publishing a web page dedicated to it’s blockchain activities and announcing it had purchased Bored Ape #8774 back in September.

• With Nike, Adidas’ largest competitor, having recently launched https://news.nike.com/news/five-things-to-know-robloxNIKELAND on Roblox, it appears there’s an interesting metaverse rivalry heating up in a race to establish metaverse market share.  

Spiderman’s Web3 Swing 

• AMC’s partnership with Sony Pictures to release Spiderman NFTs turned out to be a pretty good idea. The promotion involved a free NFT mint for those who pre-ordered tickets to the newest spidy film, No Way Home. 

• Ticket pre-sales were so popular that in the rush for AMC subscribers to buy tickets, their website actually crashed. When all was said and done, the promotion led to the 2nd-biggest one-day ticket sales ever for a box office movie, nearly surpassing The Avengers: Endgame. 

• The success of the promotion sends a massive signal to movie studios that film-related NFT collectables might be the next big thing in entertainment,  and we’ll be sure to follow further film/NFT releases as mass adoption begins to take hold.

Wikipedia NFT…What Took so Long?

• Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, announced that he is bringing his very first Wikipedia to market as an NFT to be auctioned by Christie’s beginning on December 3rd.

• The NFT will allow the buyer control over a website that allows users to edit Wale’s original edit (“Hello, World!), only for the page to revert to its original state after 5 minutes.

• It seems fitting for the decentralized spirit of Wikipedia to enter into the NFT fray. The funds raised from the auction will be split between charity and WT.Social, Wales’ donation-based social network that was launched in 2019.

Web3 Report

Wizards & Dragons

Following in the success of Wolf Game, and perhaps learning from its mistakes, Wizards & Dragons opened this past week as a P2E NFT staking game that has NFT degens everywhere “guarding the tower.” With P2E, tokenomics-based strategy games seeming to rise as the next big hype wave, W&D hopes to build a sustainable model that can prove the value of such projects in the NFT space.

In the Weeds

• The game is broken up into 2 types of NFTs, Wizards, which account for 90% of the supply, and Dragons, which account for the final 10%. Each can be staked to earn the game’s native token, $gp, which in turn can be used to mint new NFTs or be burned for unique items that may benefit gameplay in future “acts”. The White Paper provides more detail.

• The project gained a hype following  on Discord with a simple action users needed to take to become whitelisted, which was essentially to spam “!guard” over and over again and hope for the best. 

• As a lesson learned from the growing pains of Wolf Game’s technical mishaps, the W&D team announced public bounties for auditors to find bugs in their contract, and ended up paying out $200,000 in cold USD as rewards for finding and resolving issues that could have compromised the project. The game has taken off to the point where it’s actually surpassed Wolf Game in OS volume.

Bird’s Eye View

• It’s yet to be seen how sustainable any blockchain risk game can become, however for now they offer early adopters enormous rewards, and we see this paradigm as one that can overtake “traditional” PFP collection drops as the new wave NFT degen flip play.

• Many point to projects like Wolf Game, Fox Game, and now Wizards & Dragons as being ponzi-like in nature, and there is no shortage of risk involved in participating. A general rule of thumb for projects like this is that if you’re not early, you’re late. 

• With so much intricacy involved in executing complex contracts required to run blockchain games, coupled with smart and balanced tokenomics, projects like this require very experienced developers to ensure that many moving parts are working in sync. This goes without saying that we should always remain on high-RUG-alert with projects that offer so much financial reward led by anonymous teams. 

WorldWide Web3

The NFT community is waking up to a new and very intriguing project called The Worldwide Webb, an metaverse-based MMORPG game that uses NFTs for in-game avatars, items, and quests. The team behind the project holds a vision of creating a template for community-oriented metaverse play, and the game itself, currently in the first stage of public testing, is conceived in the popular retro/sci-fi and pixelverse aesthetic that has come to define much of NFT culture.

In the Weeds

• The game has been in the works for sometime, with the team having dropped the first batch of avatars for the game, called CryptoWeebs, way back in March. The avatars will allow for additional utility within the game and perks for its owners. 

• The team also recently dropped a land sale, within which owners will be able to host social events and utilize the spaces to sell items and art NFTs, not to mention spawning businesses economized with in-game tokens.

• The true alpha, however, might be the game experience itself. Upon visiting the website and connecting your wallet, you can venture into an old-fashion, rpg-inspired environment where your avatar explores, gets tasked with quests, and even gets to do a little laser battling. It’s pretty awesome,  and we’re amped to see what comes next.

Bird’s Eye View

• There’s a great deal of excitement in these early days of metaverse innovation, and projects like Worldwide Webb that blend gaming, NFT collectables, and using metaverse as a community building platform are the kinds of projects we have our eyes glued to. 

• The project is also privilating the integration of existing NFT PFPs into its ecosystem, and players can use their punks and apes as avatars, and bring their CrypToadz in as pets. This kind of cross-community integration is what we hope to see in a growing decentralized world, because you just know Disney’s metaverse will only allow their own IP…

• It’s impossible to say if any of these early metaverse platforms will stand the test of time, but praise be to the innovators who build, invent, and shape possibilities into being as part of the grant Web3 experiment.

Since it matters...

The Metaverse Land Grab has Just Begun

• Last week we wrote about Grayscale’s prediction of the metaverse becoming a trillion dollar industry, and it seems that investors and degens alike took notice. This week saw record sales in metaverse land. 

• Headline-driving sales are becoming more and more frequent, with

• acquisitions for mammoth sums have recently occurred on Axie Infinity(2.3 million), Decentraland (2.43 million), and Sandbox (4.3 million). 

• The hot demand for metaverse property has also provided room for metaverse realtors like Superworld and Parcel to enter the fray as less experienced degens (i.e. investment firms) look to get in on the action. 

• In total, last week saw over 100 million in total metaverse plot sales, with Sandbox pacing the market after having seen nearly 10k ETH in OpenSea volume over the past 7 days. 

• The way things are looking, virtual meeting spaces are primed to develop into potentially lucrative economies in which users can buy/sell/rent everything from storefronts to ad space, and virtual fashion, and much more. 

• Those behind these metaverse projects know how to draw an audience. Decentralland’s recent digital festival brought 50,000 visitors to its platform in October, while virtual music concerts are definitely going to become a thing, inspiring more people to jump into the mix.

• Of course, investing in the future of the metaverse remains highly speculative, and it remains to be seen just how much of our waking lives we can spend in a virtual environment. But the VCs believe in it, if that counts for anything.

Feature: Anonymice

Anonymice doesn’t have an official website, it doesn’t even have an API, and the anonymous devs who made the project decided no royalties either. Anonymice, according to a community-built website, was the third PFP project produced entirely on-chain (CryptoPunks and Nouns were 1 & 2). Because of the sense of NFT “pureness” of this project, it’s built a strong, loyal following since its release back on September 16.

Floor: 2.23 ETH  Highest sale: 40 ETH Value Traded: 13.3k ETH

Issues: 10,000 (+2.2k) Unique Wallets: 249 Average Owned: N/A

Fundamentally Speaking

Anonymice was programmed with an entirely unique model in which the first 2000 pieces of the collection were free to mint, and they were required to be staked to receive a token that could be used to mint the remaining 8000. Owners were thrown for another loop when they learned they could burn their NFT and receive a new one, with the hope of receiving rarer traits. This resulted in a whopping 6550 Anonymice that were burned, leaving just 3550 of the original collection.

On the Radar

• It’s hard to say what’s on the radar on this one, as there’s no roadmap. The project just seems to, well, exist. 

• That’s not to say there’s nothing for owners to do, as the project’s staking mechanisms allow holders to earn 1 $CHEETH a day per staked token, and in Mid-October a breeding program was introduced to mint Anonymice babies, again existing wholly on-chain. 

• The breeding requires a 7-day lock-up period along with 50 $CHEETH, and creates a new PFP with combined traits of both “parents”

Technically Speaking

Like most PFP projects, Anonymice floor prices have been on a downtrend since Mid-October peaks. After having achieved an average price of 13 ETH on Oct 7th, the floor has fallen to a nearly 2-week low at 2.23 ETH. Distribution of the core project is “many in the hands of the few”, however the cult-like core community surrounding this project, may not be so paper-handed. Given the broader PFP market downturn, we expect the price movement of Anonymice to move up with broader demand, and to at least maintain buoyancy given its historical nature.

Photographer of the Week

Hannah Whitaker

Hannah Whitaker’s reputation among the traditional art photography world is one of an innovative, playful, and critically-minded photographer who experiments intricately with the medium. Her project Ursula, which dropped this week, is a kaleidoscopic funhouse of portraits, still lifes, and gifs represented with bold colors and forms with a distinctive science fiction vibe.

The project dives into themes of digital servitude, and explores the notion that service-oriented digital programs - AI assistants - are nearly always given female identities. Whitaker used a single model as the subject for all her portraits, using synthetic-looking backdrops, unorthodox lighting strategies, and acid-looking color schemes to render a blending between physical and digital worlds. The series title comes from both the science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and the sex symbol Ursula Andress. 

Whitaker’s drop is represented by Assembly, which has earned the reputation as an NFT entry way for many of the art world’s most respected photographers. Whitaker has previously seen her work published in New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker among many others, and has exhibited her work internationally at galleries and art fairs throughout the world.

Also brewing...

• Investors are in a tug of war when looking at the larger Web3 space, bubble vs bullish?

• Yet another NFT marketplace is coming, this one by Blockchain.com, and they’re looking to make buy and managing NFTs easier.

• Another major hack occured recently with $120 million being lifted from the Defi platform, BadgerDAO…sigh

• We know of Play-to-Earn, and now we have…Wear-to-Earn?

• Elon Musk says web3 is bs…That’s it, that’s the tweet.

• Speaking of Tech Mogels, Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter this week and is doubling down on the crypto focus of Square, which has been renamed Block…we like this

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