🥩 NFTs leak into meat-world.

Apple Rugs BAYC

• The new mobile game released by Bored Ape Yacht Club got derailed when Apple decided at the last minute to pull it from the App Store with no apparent explanation. 

• The game, called “Apes vs. Mutants” is designed exclusively for BAYC owners and plans to feature a leveling system that includes the ability to earn items and powers. 

• While it’s hard to speculate on Apple’s reasoning for pulling the game, it raises questions about what the company’s own web3/crypto plans are. The company is already in the midst of a battle with Epic Games relating to in-app purchases.

What’s OpenSea Gonna Do?

• Rumor’s began circulating this week after OpenSea’s Chief Financial Officer told Bloomberg that “it would be foolish not to think about going public.”

• The comment sparked huge backlash among the NFT community that has long hoped that OpenSea will stay true to Web3 ethos by decentralizing its governance through a token drop.

• OpenSea has since walked back the comment, and now questions will swirl about the future of the platform as it internally debates its path forward. 

Pak’s Record Sale

• History was made this week when Pak earned the record for the highest selling work of art by a living artist, earning $91.8 million through sales of his project The Merge and surpassing the $91 million record by Jeff Koons, set back in 2019. 

• Sales came in the form of over 266,000 shares in the work, which can theoretically be merged into a single NFT, as shares that are traded are burned and combined to create a larger “mass” for the buyer.

• In an interview with NFT Now, the legendary NFT developer/artist talks about his love of token mechanisms, along with his ongoing exploration into burn mechanisms.

Speaking of "new projects"...

Mfers

Designed by @sartoshi as a crudely drawn, but colorful collection of avatars, Mfers has been the talk of the Twittersphere this week. The legendary punk flipper and meme maker’s genesis collection taps into cartoon goodness as a self-portrait of sorts of crypto degens everywhere.

In the Weeds

• The collection is offered as CCO, providing the community with true ownership of the rights to their avatars, a topic of recent debate we’ll expand on below.

• The project has no official web presence, and the community has taken it upon itself to create an “unofficial” discord, website, and twitter profile, providing the project an owner driven life of its own.

• There is no roadmap, however through the discord, members are self organizing and brainstorming ideas on how to expand the project. The future of the project is up to its owners to determine, and we’re sure there will be some surprising things in store. 

Bird’s Eye View: How it fits in larger NFT context

• This week has seen a lot of Twitter debate on the merits of CCO, full and open usage rights granted to owners of NFTs. For some those rights represent a hallmark of digital ownership, for others it stifles an artist’s market potential beyond the NFT world.

• Influencer-initiated collectables projects have a very rocky history, but when the community of owners within a pfp project is willing to take the reins in developing the future of a project, anything can happen.

• Did we mention the community is making a mferverse? There are many project-based metaverse platforms being built, and the NFT community continues to innovate and experiment with virtual spaces. These kinds of pioneering efforts will undoubtedly shape how future, fully mature VR platforms will take shape.

The Dudes

More than a collection, The Dudes is a platform for producing interactive NFTs, a unique idea that blends form and function while signaling a potential new trend in the collectables market. The project comprises two collections, the eponymous “the dudes,” and “the pixels.”  The latter being the first ever interactive PFP NFT, and one which consistently evolves via contract integration that manipulates the pixels of each piece. The former collection is a fully code-generated set of cartoon heads with rarity traits defined on-chain. When viewing the NFT, the avatars’ eyes and head will actually move to track the movement of the mouse. Pretty darn neat.

In the Weeds

• “the dudes” work as tickets that grant collectors access to other derivative projects, with each offering its own utility.

• 100% of the royalties from “the pixels” go towards “the dudes” DAO fund, with owners able to stake their tokens to receive DAO tokens.

• Each of the project’s derivatives explores different means of code generation. “The duds” reveal themselves slowly as time passes, “the abstract dudes” are created by dude owners by interacting with their contracts, and “the dudes factory” is an experimental sandbox of sorts for derivative possibilities.

Bird’s Eye View: How it fits in larger NFT context

• With “the dudes,” interactivity is the name of the game, and it leads us to believe that the potentials for experiments with contracts, codes, and mutability for NFT collections have enormous potential for further pioneering. 

• The team behind the project invites collaboration from artists and influencers alike to build “non-static art”, and strives to become a nexus thinktank for interactive possibilities. 

• The fact that there is just a sole developer behind the project, who aptly goes by “the dude” on Discord, goes to show that sometimes some of the most significant innovations in the NFT space come from singular minds with a vision of what’s possible. 

Since it matters...

NFT Gambling

• In 2022, we’ll be seeing many new industries taking hold in the cryptoverse, not least of which is casino-based gambling. 

• And yes, degens, much of the NFT market might amount to gambling in some form or another, but you can bet the $500 billion gambling industry has the funds and means to not get left behind in web3.

• Some NFT casino platforms are already here. Decentral.games has a presence in the metaverse, while Monkey Bet, and Sherbet are integrating PFPs into their gaming ecosystem, with the former even including a DAO that allows PFP owners to “co-own” virtual casinos.

• And in mainstream news, Motley Fool recently shared info on protocols and tokens in the gambling ecosystem to its readership of traditional investors, while DraftKings locked in a deal with the NFL for betting and fantasy football integration.

• The elephant in the room is the traditional gaming corporations (and their massive lobbying power) who may feel threatened by the introduction of this new form of gambling that might eat away their market share. We will keep an eye on traditional casino conglomerates and their decisions to either join web3 or attempt to stifle new competition.

• And of course, the gambling world has long faced rather stiff regulatory measures to ensure fair (or fair enough) play. Some platforms, like one called Sorare, have already faced a crackdown.

• However it shakes out, you may like to know that an NFT conference is coming to Vegas in March. Degens, please don’t bring your hardware wallets to the high-stakes poker rooms.

Feature

Rumble Kong League

In the NFT space there are few collections and/or play-to-earn projects that are more intriguing than Rumble Kong League, and while first appearing as just another BAYC derivative, the project offers much, much more. The premise of the project is for avatars to compete in a 3 vs. 3 basketball “experience”, combining collection mechanics with P2E functionality. The project has notably been adopted by high-profile NBA players, including Steph Curry, Andre Iguodola, JaVale McGee, and Paul George, who is currently rocking his Kong as his PFP. And with a Discord community of 56k members, this seems like a project that’s here to stay.

Floor: 2.05 ETH  Highest sale: 25 ETH Value Traded: 11.4k ETH

Issues: 10,000 Unique Wallets: 3k Average Owned: 3.3

Fundamentally Speaking

The collection is made up of hand-drawn pieces by digital artist @sickpencil, with the artwork offered with complete commercial license while being uploaded to both IPFS and Arweave for permanence. Trait features of the collection are standard fare, with a mix of facial expressions, outfits, and accessories that allow any collector to find a piece they vibe with. Each PFP comes with a set of randomly generated attributes in the form of Defense, Finish, Shooting, and Vision that carry over into the gameplay for the project.

On the Radar

• The game for Rumble Kongs allows players to earn money via prize-pools, sponsorships, and advertising, and players can build their own teams or join clubs to participate. The dev time on the game seems to have become drawn out a bit, but we have high hopes for the quality and artwork to pace the market for NFT gaming. 

• The team also released a collection of Rumble Kong Sneakers, recognizing the strong overlap between basketball and sneaker culture. The collection was airdropped to existing Kong owners, incentivizing holders and building community loyalty. 

• Once the game is released, expect new expansions to begin. The team has expressed interest in several initiatives, from building a basketball arena inside The Sandbox, to producing animated player cards, allowing player rentals, and allowing players the ability to run their own tournaments.

Technically Speaking

Despite a lagging market for collectables in recent weeks, Rumble Kong League has demonstrated resilience and sustained growth in sales volume. The project is now sitting at all-time highs in anticipation of the game release, and has a relatively small ownership distribution due to the requirement of needing 3 Kongs to build a full team for the game. The project isn’t the flashiest in the collectables market, nor has it seen astonishing flashes of volume, but since it’s late July release it has proven to hold a durable presence with steady growth. The success of the project hinges on the quality of the game, and currently exists in a high-risk, high-reward state.

Photographer of the Week

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah’s project Behold the Ocean has a unique presence in the NFT photo world. It is a collection of 4444 generative photography works, complete with rarity traits, of ocean scenes overlaid with oceanographic data and color gradients. Minting price is .07 for one of the pieces, and the collection serves as a fundraiser to organize an ambitious climate research expedition to produce further photo work alongside scientists and researchers.

The project opens interesting conversations about the relationships of NFTs/blockchain and the environment, while the images themselves are rich with beautiful synergies of color forms and visual data, creating a marriage of hard science and artistic expression. 

Adu-Sanyah is an internationally exhibited artist and documentarian, and has been published and exhibited widely, including presence in Bloomberg, NPR, Centre Photographie Geneve, and Photoforum Pasquart among many other venues.

Also brewing...

• There’s a NFT museum opening in Seattle next month, who wants to be a docent and explain cryptopunks to normies?

• What’sApp is apparently testing the ability for users to send crypto to one another.

• CryptoPunk #4156, 1 of 24 apes in the collection,  just sold for over $10 million.

• Apparently gamers really, REALLY hated Ubisoft’s announcement of its first NFT project. 

• Study shows 1 in 4 NFTs bought during minting result in profit, hey we’ll take those odds!

• And crypto CEOs dropped into Congress to lobby for industry regulations, which degens might worry about, but what also bring much needed stability to the cryptoverse.

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