NFT Review 65 - $10m burnt for NFTs
New Singular update, Axie's SLP burn system, SEC investigates BAYC, and more.
NFT Review is a weekly newsletter covering NFTs in the Web3 ecosystem on Polkadot’s side of the woods. The newsletter is put together by Bruno Škvorc and gbaci.
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Dear NFT enthusiast,
While compiling news for this newsletter, we realized that the bear sentiment around crypto and NFTs is not decreasing. In fact, with reports around once popular and expensive NFTs traded for a fraction of a fraction of their record highs, it seems to be growing. While we were tempted to focus on this today, we realized we would be falling prey to social sentiments that do not always reflect the total reality. So if the bear sentiment does not capture the total reality of the times, what does?
Britain’s wealthiest living artist, Damien Hirst, started burning millions of dollars worth of his own artworks as part of his NFT project The Currency, a collection of 10,000 NFTs each tied to a physical oil painting. At first glance, this seems like a gimmick, but upon further inspection, one realizes that this is an unprecedented social experiment that pits physical art against digital art to answer the question–which format is more valued?
Collectors who had bought one of the $2,000 floor-priced NFTs were given one year to decide whether they would keep the NFT or trade it in for the physical painting. The deadline for the decision was reached in July and the results were 5,149 paintings to be delivered as physical pieces of art and 4,851 paintings to exist only as NFTs.
Isn’t that amazing? Almost 50-50. Are we becoming more used to digital value?
Thank you for reading and have a great week.
— NFT Review
📬 NFT News from Kusama & Polkadot
There was a notable update to Singular, ushering in a few cool features.
Parity (tech team behind Polkadot & Kusama) published How we created 50K Unique NFTs for Polkadot Decoded 2022 (in one month).
Proof of Attendance multi-resource NFTs for Polkadot Decoded '22 were minted and distributed.
Evrloot, the dark RPG game built on RMRK, has released some updates.
RMRK announced the #SingularShowcase.
Browse the latest verified collections on Singular.
Bit.Country announced the Xenoform Raw Land Block event.
🗞 NFT News from Ethereum and Beyond
STEPN to sack 100 staff as players step away from the move-to-earn app.
Formula One files ‘F1’ trademarks covering crypto, NFTs and Metaverse.
GameFi could be the answer to unemployment for some: Aussie game studio.
OpenSea officially opened up support for Avalanche and its CFO departed after 10 months in the job.
CNN to shut down its NFT marketplace and issue a 20% refund.
GameFi will become the onboarding point for Metaverse — Animoca Brands CEO.
Metaverse platforms refute ‘misinformation’ about daily active users.
SEC investigates Bored Ape creators.
Gem added support for OpenRarity.
Golden, a knowledge graph and public data NFT protocol, announced its $40M Series B raise.
House of Nouns, a “governance client” for Nouns DAO, launched its v1 app.
Linagee Name Registrar, the recently rediscovered NFT project, saw huge levels of minting activity on Ethereum this week.
Manifold launched Paid Claim Pages and Manifold Gallery.
OpenSea open-sourced SeaDrop, which is NFT drop infra for EVM chains.
Zapper added support for Optimism NFTs.
Art Blocks introduced the details of its upcoming 2.0 system.
Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) received a $100k grant from the Filecoin Foundation to create the The Museum of Crypto Art Archive for its artworks.
SuperRare begins fielding curatorial proposals today for its Space Race #4 program.
Axie Infinity published its October Dev Update and updated its SLP burn system. Its player count fell back to Jan 2021 levels.
Catalog published a playlist of the newest musicians on the platform.
sound.xyz introduced the Sound Developer Docs.
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 or gbaci!