NFTs Weekly News #45- Ecosystem: The EU AI Act was voted

Are you ready for some NFTs news?

We've prepared a new article that covers the latest news and updates in the world of Web3 and NFTs. Read on to stay up-to date!

📈 Macro - 2880 frens. 54% Average open rate! In just 8 months!
🗞️ Last week's news - Arcade.xyz, recursive inscrriptions, Ethscriptions, Animoca Brands, Fortnite;
💰 Investments/Financing - Mnemonic, Poko, Lightningworks, Collectibles, GameOn;
📣 Projects news/Updates - Pudgy Penguins, Gucci, .SWOOSH OF1, Proof Collective, Yuga Labs;
⚖️ Legal - Metaverse Lawyer writes about 5 major implications of the EU AI Act;
🐈 Veefriends - VeeFriends Cards;
⚙️NFTility, by Mtk - BBHMM;
📚 Dictionary - RugPull, Cold Wallet;
💸 Sale of the week - Ringers #879 aka 'Goose';

📈 Macro

We just wanted to say: THANK YOU!!! Here's why! Interact. Tell your friends that #cefaciaziconteaza!

🗞️ News from last week

Arcade.xyz facilitates loans by tokenizing assets, bringing real assets into the DeFi domain. See here how two Rolex watches were used as collateral for a 14.5k USDC loan.
News in the Bitcoin NFTs space. Recursive inscriptions transform BTC file inscription, enabling efficient data storage, references to previous inscriptions, dynamic communication, and cost-effective art promotion.
What about Ethscriptions have you heard of? It's Ethereum's new protocol that allows digital objects to be inscripted and shared on ETH, similar to Ordinals inscriptions.
Animoca Brands and Rarible launch Mocaverse Marketplace, a marketplace of NFTs with zero commissions and custom features exclusive to the Mocaverse collection.
New 'Airphoria' collaboration between Fortnite and Nike to add .Swoosh items to the game, provides significant exposure to NFTs for its 240M active users. 20 June, stay tuned 👀

💰 Investments / Financing

Mnemonic has secured a $6M funding led by Salesforce Ventures to develop an AI-enabled data analytics platform for web3 and NFTs.
Web3 payments startup, Poko, has received $4.5M in funding from investors such as Y Combinator, NAZCA, Global Founders Capital to simplify web3 payments.
Lightningworks, a company that combines comics, interactive games and NFTs, has secured $2.5M in funding from its founder Geoff McCabe.
Collectibles closes $5M funding round to develop marketplace for web3 collectors and include more collectibles.

GameOn, a web3 gaming platform, has raised $1.7M in funding from Lightning Capital and Flow, the blockchain startup from Dapper Labs, creator of NBA Top Shot.

📣 Projects news / Updates

Pudgy Penguins introduces the soulbound MVP Token, a form of recognition for outstanding community members, replacing the Penguin of the Week award.
Gucci and Yuga Labs announce that they will soon distribute physical versions of KodaPendant NFTs to owners.
Nike's .SWOOSH OF1 boxes have been unveiled, allowing owners to access their virtual sneakers. Have you opened yours?

Proof Collective, the community behind NFTs Moonbirds and Grails projects, is opening an innovation hub in Los Angeles that combines art, Web3 and entertainment, synchronizing with the launch of NFT's Mythics collection.
Yuga Labs confirms the release of HV-MTL in the next two weeks, with users getting access to The Forge for the evolution of HV-MTL NFTs.

⚖️ Legal

The EU AI Act was voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming majority, but the final version is likely to look a little different.

Last week was important for tech policy at the EU level, with the European Parliament voting to approve its draft rules for the EU AI Act on the same day that EU lawmakers filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Google. Oh well, a hot one and a cold one, as we've come to expect.

The vote on the AI Act passed overwhelmingly and was announced as one of the world's most important developments in artificial intelligence regulation. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola described it as "legislation that will undoubtedly set the global standard for years to come".

However, don't expect immediate clarity. The European system is a bit complicated. Next, European Parliament members will have to work out the details with the Council of the European Union and the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, before the draft rules become law. The final legislation will be a compromise between three different drafts from the three institutions, which vary widely. It will probably take about two years before the legislation is actually implemented.

Here are 5 major implications of the EU AI Act:

1. Banning AI emotion recognition. The draft proposed by the European Parliament bans the use of AI that tries to recognise people's emotions in police, schools and the workplace. Manufacturers of emotion recognition software claim that AI is able to determine when a student doesn't understand a certain subject or when a car driver might fall asleep. The use of AI to perform facial detection and analysis has been criticized for inaccuracy and bias, but has not been banned in the other two institutions' draft text, suggesting a political fight is coming.

2. Ban real-time biometrics and predictive policing in public spaces.* This will be a major legislative battle, as different EU bodies will have to decide if and how the ban will be implemented in law. Police groups are not in favour of a ban on real-time biometric technologies, which they say are necessary for modern policing. Some countries, such as France, even plan to increase the use of facial recognition. *Predictive policing is the use of mathematics, predictive analytics and other analytical techniques in law enforcement to identify potential criminal activity.

3. Banning social scoring (social scoring or what you see in China or Black Mirror, season 3, ep. 1 - "Nosedive"). Public agencies would be banned from using social scoring or the practice of using data about people's social behaviour to make generalisations and profiles. The practice of using social behavior data to rate people is common in mortgage lending and insurance rate setting, as well as in hiring and advertising.

4. New restrictions for Generative AI. This draft is the first to propose ways to regulate Generative AI and prohibit the use of any copyrighted material in the LLMs training set, such as OpenAI's GPT-4. OpenAI has already come under the scrutiny of European legislators because of data privacy and copyright concerns. The bill also requires AI-generated content to be labelled as such.

5. New restrictions on recommendation algorithms on social networks. The new draft assigns recommender systems to a "high risk" category, which is an escalation from other proposed bills. This means that, if adopted, recommender systems on social media platforms will be subject to much more scrutiny on how they operate, and tech companies could be more accountable for the impact of user-generated content.

🐈‍⬛ Veefriends

We've mentioned Veefriends Cards before, and it's time to learn more about it! This week, VeeFriends launched a detailed blog about VeeFriends Cards! After VeeCon 2023 and "Card Night", VeeFriends Cards have been a hot topic in the community. From VeeFriends Series 1 Premium Trading Cards, VeeFriends Series 2 "Compete & Collect" Trading Cards, to the VeeFriends UNO deck, all the information we need to start learning about VeeFriends cards, such as understanding the rarity of the cards, how they are played, where they can be bought, at what prices they have already traded on the secondary market can be found here.

⚙️ NFTility, by MTK

On February 9, the song "Bitch better have my money" was converted to an NFT and split into 300 units. The sale of these took place on the platform anotherblock.io, at the ETH equivalent of US $210. This platform is also where token management takes place, because in addition to some benefits quite common in this space, such as whitelisting for future projects, exclusive access to discord or access to private events, it offers royalties to the holders.

In the case of this initiative, owners collectively received, for life (read for the duration of the copyright term), 0.99% of the revenue from some streaming platforms. That's 0.0033% per NFT.

The collection quickly minted, but soon became a topic of debate for a few reasons:

It wasn't Rhianna who created it, but one of the track's co-producers, Jamil "Deputy" Pierre. This means that the royalties due to the collectors were calculated at his contractual percentage, of which he gave up 0.99%. It is rumoured to be less than 5% of the total streaming royalties.
The track was stopped from trading on @opensea for a few days due to ambiguity of information, to protect those who wanted to be part of the project.

Platforms such as anotherblock, Catalog, sound.xyz, Royal or SoundMint have the potential to create a culture where the connection between artists and fans can be direct, honest and together they can participate in enriching the creative act...The important thing is to get it right.

Until next time, build sustainably.

📚 Dictionary

Rug pull - A rug pull means the action of pulling someone's rug, which is exactly the intention from the beginning. Whether we're talking about NFTs or crypto projects, a rug pull generally involves emptying wallet after mint and disappearing the team. Especially if the founders were anonymous/undoxxed;
Cold Wallet - A wallet/wallet that is not connected to the internet and therefore has a much lower risk of being compromised. These wallets can also be referred to as offline or hardware. The most commonly used are Trezor and Ledger. Be careful: it is very important to buy them from official websites. The community asks questions on Telegram in general before making a decision.

💸 Sale of the week

Who needs a real goose when you can have a digital one? One worth $6.2M!!! Ringers #879 aka 'Goose' is the most valuable - in ETH terms - Art Blocks generative artwork ever sold. 3,743 ETH to be exact. Kind of like a goose with golden eggs 🤔

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