🥩 NFTs Leak into meat-world

Ars Electronica Festival Garden NYC 2021 – September 8-12th.

• The festival is presented by Extended Reality Ensemble (XRE), an ensemble of artists, writers, and curators working within the intersections of art, community, and technology.

• The five-day festival will consist of AR/VR NFT exhibitions, panel discussions, and workshops

• Attendance to the event is “pay what feels right” as the organization runs a GoFundMe page to cover costs of the event and offer fees to participating artists

GameStonk: NFT Edition

• Industry awaits news on GameStop’s much-anticipated entry into the NFT Space

• The investor culture behind the legendary $GME Short Squeeze and the rise of Meme Stocks has its eyes turned toward updates on the company’s Ethereum-based NFT platform, which is sure to trigger huge inflows into gaming NFTs.

• The company stated in May that they were “officially getting into NFTs”, and have been radio silent on the topic ever since. We’ll just keep spamming the refresh button at nft.gamestop.com

• A mysterious Twitter user going by the delicious handle @CroissantEth laid out a tantalizing sleuth-thread that has the Twitter-sphere bumping 

Miami. Rooftop Party. NFTs. Yes please!

• Bit Basel, self-describing as “Miami’s Original Crypto Art Community” is hosting a rooftop party to launch their very own SuperRare Collection on September 7th.

• On the First Tuesday of every month they host NFT gatherings with a revolving programming of talks, music performances, and live art.

• Tickets to the event are found on Eventbrite

Speaking of "new projects"

Have you seen the Creatures?

TLDR: The Creatures Danny Cole’s been painting have made their way online. No rarity, just a cool claiming process and good vibes by a well known meat-world artist.

Bigger Picture

• Brooklyn-based Danny Cole is an artist in the real world and a new maven in the crypto world with @creatureNFT, the crypto collectable based on his IRL painting.

• At just 21 years old, the painter is thrashing the collectables market with widespread community adoption (4.7k owners on a 10k-piece collection, and nearly 15k Discord members), and a rapidly rising floor since its 8/28 debut.

•  His work takes on the character of a 21st century Keith Haring with cartoonish figuration and bold, flat color, and his work has quickly achieved cult-like status with potential to enter the mainstream.

Bird’s Eye View

The future of the collectables market may see deeper penetration by independent artists, and judging by the recent buzz surrounding @HeavenComputer, there has emerged a capacity for deep and loyal community that buy more for the love of the work than for the potential for re-sale

Of course much of the appeal of Cole’s work is the fact that he’s achieved real world acclaim prior to his NFT career with guerilla-like public installs of his work around Brooklyn, a collaboration with Shepard Fairey, and even designing the 2018 Cochella set for headlining act, Portugal. The Man, thus making the case for NFT value surrounding artists with IRL successes.

Keep an eye on the competition heating up between “organic” vs “mechanical generative art collections. Only the future will disclose who wins the value race between purely algorithmic-produced generative projects and those that center on individual artistic identity.

Chick Fatales

TLDR: Influencer-led brands are making their way into NFTs, with @digitalartchick leading the pack. No roadmap, just great art, strong platforms, and built-in distribution.

Bigger Picture

• Beautiful artwork with a definitively high-fashion feel. Fatales features 10,000 depictions of women with a feel that bridges fashion, realism, fantasy, and science-fiction, all expressing the kind of “here I am” gesture that a runway model will hit at the apex of their walk.

• Unsurprisingly, that high-fashion feel struck a note. FashionweekNYC shared the collection with their 500K followers, giving the art itself a little legitimacy. The real world is watching the models.

• Heavy hitter influencers like @digitalartchick can make or break a project. A large platform as well as capital to buy back collectibles off the floor create excess supply, while constricting demand.

Bird’s Eye View

• Fatales is another collectables project adopting commercial usage rights for token owners as a form of utility, but something about the high fashion feel blending with the target demographic hits different.

• Influencer backing for collectible projects has been increasingly a greater asset as the space race for attention intensifies. We’re keeping our eye out for a collectible NFT to drop in the mainstream.

Since it Matters…

Gas prices have been giving us all heartburn lately. Let Coin Bureau on Youtube tell you all about it, and give you some ideas on how to feel it less.

Saving ETH Gas Fees & TOP TIPS to Profit!! ⛽️💰

• High gas means many emerging artists and collectors can be priced out of their initiations into the space, while blue-chip projects remain relatively un-fazed by established collectors trading high-ticket collectables - paying $50 in fees is a lot easier to swallow on a trade at several ETH, than it is at a fraction of one.

• Even Free Mint models are being affected by gas fees upwards of $200, leading to unstable floor values for new projects

• If you want to be strategic about your gas expenditure, avoid minting or buying during peak days and times when NFT activity is at it’s highest. This includes avoiding activity during new collection releases, and even waiting until the wee hours of the morning to sign that contract.

Check pumpmygas.xyz before your next shopping trip to brace yourself for the damage. You can wait till you’re out of peak hours, but you’ll need to make hard choices… are you headed to bed late, or getting up real early?

Feature: #TreeHuggers

MintForest launched on August 16th with a combination of unique, dramatic tree art and a social mission: to plant 100,000 trees in IRL. The NFT’s feature a photo realistic model of a unique Redwood tree and comes with 5 different files: a 3D model GLB file, 2 4k png images and 2 HD animations. The trees are meticulously rendered and the photos show the drama of such a large tree up close. While the animations put the viewer right next to a tree and demonstrate the awesome size of these trees in IRL.

The artwork is unique in the NFT space. There have been other flora NFT projects (zenft) and even other NFT projects donating money to plant trees (Incrementum), but mintForest art really does turn heads.

busymichael.eth, the man behind the art, renders each tree in 26 minutes (that’s 10,000 trees - 36 minutes each!) on a high end dual GPU workstation. The roadmap includes dedicating trees on the blockchain, an augmented reality version of each tree for owners, plus a digital world where trees can be planted and explored.

mintForest has partnered with One Tree Planted (https://onetreeplanted.org) to plant 10 trees for every tree sold. The trees will be planted world-wide, in forests that are in most need of reforestation.

Like a sapling, the community is small but mighty. Collectors are beginning to take notice after Baron Von Hustle minted the last 6 trees to close out Release #1 of 250 tokens. Less than 24 hours later as of this writing 103 of the 250 mint collection from Release #2 have already been scooped up and we’re seeing a live view of the project picking up steam.

Valueless collectibles

One of the most interesting applications in DeFi is the idea of borrowing against collateral with no value to anyone except its owner. Here’s what we’ve been looking at.

Have you heard of POAP?

POAP is a protocol that allows anybody - from big corporations to your degenerate friends - to mint bookmarks for your life.

• Completely decentralized: Does anyone remember Foursquare? POAPs are a lot like Foursquare stickers. The key difference is blockchain technology; unlike Foursquare and their precious servers, POAPs are stored on the blockchain. Nobody can take your POAPs.

• Immutable social proof: Specific POAPs are issued specifically by approved issuers - your POAP collection is a reflection of who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, and who was there to see it.

• Also, they just look cool. Nice art, free mint. What more can you ask for?

POAP has been running live for a while, with a mobile app to show your POAPs off to your friends available on the App Store and Google Play. Additional functionality around chat, raffles, and other cool stuff exists… but step one is just to get yourself a POAP.

Spectral is building something quite cool: a protocol to track credit-worthiness friendly to the “Pseudonymous” community.

• Collateralize your history: DeFi may not have defaults, but it does have liquidations. Spectral proposes to use asset liquidation as a proxy for credit worthiness - basically, how responsible are you as a borrower?

• Non-fungible credit: Spectral makes credit a little spicy. They propose the ability to collateralize your transaction history across one or more wallets, to use it as an asset to borrow against.

• Collateralized social proof: We hear it from a bird that some early beta testers have been using POAPs as collateral, which is deep when you think about it. POAPs may not have value to the lender, but for the borrower, they act as a living CV that blends social, professional, and sentimental worlds.

For now, the details are under wraps and the Discord channel remains a blank slate, but more information should be arriving in the weeks ahead.

Also brewing...

This week: Some changes in editorial staff!

Next week: Our regular programming, plus a little something cool for everyone that’s been following along (but especially our members). Thanks for supporting the drop.

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