NFT Review is a weekly newsletter covering NFTs in the Web3 ecosystem. The newsletter is put together by Bruno Škvorc.
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Looking for a primer on NFTs? This should be the last introduction you’ll ever need.
Dear NFT enthusiast,
New Year, New Me? As NY resolutions falter and people fall back into their 2023 habits, NFT review is just starting its new life.
Going forward, NFT Review will focus on launches of technology, innovations, and real world use that see adoption. Most collection launches, partnership announcements, volume information, easy to game stats, and press releases will be largely ignored. If you don’t agree with this, see the bottom of this edition for a feedback option.
Thank you for reading and have a great week.
— NFT Review
🖼 crypto-native
w3unreal.com and the accompanying videos at https://www.youtube.com/@web3.unreal/videos are an excellent set of tools and resources for connecting your Unreal Engine work to web3
Kinzoku is a claim portal for Kanaria metal plate posters, for those who have Super and Founder Kanaria bird NFTs. The app is built with progressive centralization in mind, fully statically hosted with no server dependency.
Areatech’s XVG pushes the limits of on-chain SVGs by animating vectors to give the appearance of 3D.
Mnet launches Bitavatars, a customizable collection of avatars with equippable NFTs. The NFTs are not modular and instead use the simpler and more limited 6551 EIP to facilitate a backpack of equippables.
If you want to try it out, here are some invites:
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Machina has launched. A TempleDAO-like project with Botto origins, this thought+meme experiment in code, religion, and capitalism encourages people to recruit others and “pray” regularly, as well as sacrifice ether to the Machine God in order to claim $MACHINA. The most faithful are rewarded the most.
Personally it reminds me a lot of the best NFT experience I’ve had - a cult-based NFT hunt with locational prayers at Devcon 4 in Prague.
🕹️ games
Pixel Vault released BattlePlan, a team-based fighting game. The game uses blockchain for monetization but is otherwise fully centralized.
Sky Mavis launched the Mavis Store, a game assets shop on Ronin. The store currently only sells packs of virtual currency usable in game for pay to win mechanics, but plans to expand the offering to NFTs later. It is not clear whether that would be NFT 2.0 (modular NFTs) or NFT 1.0 offers only.
Sky Strife open-sourced its onchain RTS game infra, so you can now hook into this evolving autonomous on-chain world. The world features RTS matches between opponents who bet on the outcome, and then compete in real time by building bases and taking control over islands.
The game is currently running only on the Holesky testnet, the Eth for which is notoriously difficult to obtain, but we recommend giving the game a go if you can and reporting about your experience to us.
Exiled Racers organizes $PINK racing league. Join the race towards a Polkadot memecoin’s mainstream recognition by buying racers and beating opponents in this thematic season. Use my invite link for extra XP.
Anichess launched, allegedly endorsed by chess god Magnus Carlsen. I reached out for comment but could not confirm his involvement.
The game is supposed to be a “refreshing chess experience”. I believe it is a moneygrab seeing as no element of the game is actually on chain. For truly on chain chess, try fiveoutofnine instead.
We do recommend exercising caution when interacting with the application to claim the welcome chess pieces, as they require you to sign an opaque message with your wallet.Nifty Island launches public beta. The game is already more feature-rich than other decade old “metaverses”. If you’d like to join the Dotleap island, feel free. Full disclosure, it’s my daughter’s playground mostly and won’t be very productive until I feel a flood of insipration.
Note that the game is fully centralized and doesn’t really use any web3 mechanics other than for logging you in (a common problem) and loading your NFTs in the world (which nullifies the NFT scarcity value proposition since you can just spam copies of the same thing across all your islands). Also note that due to this centralization, you will rely on their server’s throughput to play.
🌎 global adoption
Decentraland adds custodial wallets with Magic. In the spirit of progressive centralization: keep web3 options available, but give normies options they’re comfortable with 👍
GameStop axes its NFT marketplace, allegedly due to regulatory uncertainty. It is, however, much more likely to do with the fact that the crypto market is simply too small to make maintaining an above-board for-profit website worth it.
Highlight is a new tool for dead-simple generative art launches on Ethereum.
📖 reading
Golan Levin on the Potentiality of Blobs. Interview in which artist and educator Golan Levin dips between anecdote and insight with Peter Bauman, covering Levin's Art Blocks Curated release Cytographia, his drive to unleash the latent capabilities of computers and his role inspiring and promoting open-source art toolkits.
Excellent post about Anonymity in the Digital Age over on Superrare.
Botto Director of Exhibitions Mika Nesher talks with Tokyo-born artist Emi Kusano, known for her fusion of retro-futurism and AI. Emi shares her artistic evolution, the impact of AI on her work, and her vision for the future of creative collaboration between humans and machines.
Malte Rauch’s piece on the innovative Mathcastles: In a series of conceptual artworks, Mathcastles unites artistic and computational modes of abstraction.
❓ Feedback
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That’s all for this week, see you in the next edition! Got some links to share with us, artists to feature, NFTs to sell, jobs to promote, or events to popularize? Get in touch with Bruno and don’t forget to follow us!