The 7th article from our Crypto News series is here!
The article highlights the importance of credibility and due diligence, as well as the lessons learned from a recent project announcement. It also covers various news and updates from the industry, including NFT integrations, meetups, and funding rounds. We've also mentioned some of the projects in the MultiversX ecosystem and provided updates on their developments.
Read on!
Contents
๐ Macro - The most expensive NFT: credibility;
๐๏ธ Last week's news - Blur, Binance, Tokero, Little Red Book;
๐ฐ Investments/Financing - Australian Open, Fungify, Cohort, YGG Japan;
๐ฃ Projects news/Updates - BullsOnTheBLock, Frontier Wallet, Gnogen, ElrondDucks, Women of MultiversX;
โ๏ธ Legal - class action lawsuit against Logan Paul & CryptoZoo;
โ๏ธ Tools - Sukuthis;
๐ Veefriends, by FreeFly - VeeCon Viper 2022 Proof of Attendance Plaque;
โ๏ธ NFTility, by Mtk - Gallery of Digital Assets (GODA);
โ nftX, by Alex Cฤlin - Drifters, Raji launch;
๐ Dictionary - PFP, MEME;
๐ธ Sale of the week - Punk #9092;
๐ Macro
For several months now a bunch of us, the Metaventis frens community, have been finding several things that have kept bringing us together. Among them are the daily editions of Daily Dose. A movement on Twitter around #NFTeducation, led by Ryan Carson, a man with a background in both Web2 and Web3. Twitter Spaces editions with several thousand participants daily. Among the guests? Some of the most well-known people in Web3, from the founder of 9gag, to Zeneca, j1mmy.eth, etc. Ryan started the culture of collecting POAPs (yes, the ones we also offer). Proof in the blockchain that you were there and did that. He also did some FOMO on the usefulness of these POAPs. He was planning to launch an NFT project, with 999 NFTs, of which 200 were to be offered to investors, advisors, family, etc, and the other 799 were to be offered for FREE, to those who collected these POAPs, based on ranking.
Communities were started worldwide (including Daily Dosers Romania), and people met IRL, everything was fine and dandy.
The other day, Ryan announced more details about the project ("Flux", a Web3 fund), including who the investors are. Nothing wrong with that. It's been practiced. Especially since the investors have been asked beforehand if the information that they are investors can be made public.
THE PROBLEM? The fund had not been closed. The funds needed for the project (the $10 million) are far from being raised, along with a link where prospective investors could book a call with him to find out how they can become investors.
Ryan got a lot of backlash for that. In short, several of those who had announced their intention to invest in his project were disappointed because they felt their name was being used as bait to raise $10 million. Ryan had a space here where he explained where he went wrong, and in this Twitter space, the DailyDose Romania community talked about just that.
Lessons?
- Credibility, which we keep invoking, is so hard to build and so easily lost!
- Haste makes waste! Unbelievable how much potential the project had. How organically it had become appreciated by the whole industry (Daily Dose is considered the number 1 Web3 Space in terms of impact, audience, etc.).
- Nothing is guaranteed. Never! Anyone, no matter how great is, can fail! That doesn't mean Ryan can't recover. But the momentum was clearly lost!
- What did DYOR mean? We all invoke the need for our own research. If after so many months of seeing public endorsement from some of the best-known people in Web3, and now we realize that even they didn't do proper due diligence and many "signed blindly", what else can we say?
- The good stuff? It brought us a little closer together on this project! We discovered POAPs. We've gotten more used to #NFTeducation! LFG!
๐๏ธ News from last week
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To celebrate the launch of their own token, BLUR, will be giving away $50k worth of NFTs during Spaces they will be hosting with partners this week. Speaking of which, there's still time to qualify for the $BLUR airdrop. All you have to do is bid for NFTs on the platform.
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Little Red Book, the Chinese version of Instagram, enables an NFT integration that could catalyze mass adoption of digital collectibles.
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Are you from Cluj? Passionate about crypto? Binance organizes the first meetup in this beautiful city, at the Grand Hotel Napoca, on February 7th. Tickets (free) here.
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Tokero announces through Marius Morra & co a series of meetups in the country. If you're from Cluj, Oradea or Timisoara, then Friday, Saturday or Sunday, (February 10th, 11th, 12th respectively), then this link is for you.
๐ฐ Investments / Financing
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The Australian Open, through Tennis Australia (TA), is opening the doors to seven sports technology startups in its AO Startups incubator, giving the companies resources and exposure to develop and sell their products.
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Fungify raises $6M to build a new NFT lending system. Using NFT floor prices from Chainlink, Fungify offers instant NFT sales, guaranteed NFT loans and a yield-bearing blue chip NFT index.
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Cohort is raising โฌ3.2 million in seed to reinvent the way brands interact with their customers. Founded in March 2022, the company has signed over 15 clients in France and the US, demonstrating the tangible benefits Web3 can bring to the marketing industry.
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YGG Japan, a blockchain gaming platform, has completed a funding round of approximately $2.95 million from 18 companies, including Sega.
๐ฃ Projects news / Updates
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Frontier Wallet, a non-custodial wallet, has also integrated the MultiversX ecosystem, thus including NFTs from this ecosystem.
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Gnogen, one of the important projects in MultiversX, is taking an important step in testing GNG token mining, involving the community.
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For those of you who have NFTs from the BullsOnTheBLock collection and have grabbed mint pass for the Bulls and Apes Project, you can already claim your passes. For those of you who have whitelisted, you can mint an Ape on February 8th.
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An interesting Twitter Space about MultiversX NFTs hosted by ElrondDucks.
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Women of MultiversX, a project that aims to guide women in navigating Web3 is looking for a Community Manager.
โ๏ธ Legal
Remember the Logan Paul and CryptoZoo NFTs scandal, specifically the Rug Pull accusation publicized with the help of Coffezilla's investigation, which garnered 20 million views (part I, part II and part III)? Well, on February 2nd, 2023, plaintiff Don Holland, a Round Rock, Texas police officer, filed a class action lawsuit against Logan Paul, CryptoZoo, and others alleging that they stole millions of dollars of buyers' cryptocurrency through a "fraudulent venture".
"As part of Defendants' NFT scheme, Defendants introduced CryptoZoo NFTs to buyers by falsely claiming that, in exchange for transferring cryptocurrency to purchase CryptoZoo NFTs, buyers would subsequently receive benefits, including, among other things, rewards, exclusive access to other cryptocurrency assets, and support of an online ecosystem to use and trade CryptoZoo NFTs," the complaint states.
It is also mentioned that, in fact, shortly after completing the sale of all CryptoZoo NFTs, the defendants, along with others, transferred millions of dollars worth of buyers' cryptocurrencies to (among other things) digital wallets controlled by the defendants. Oops!
The lawsuit was filed by attorneys at Ellzey & Associates and Attorney Tom and Associates, the latter being the law firm run by famous YouTube influencer Attorney Tom (also us, Web3 lawyers stay up to date, too). Well, Brother Tom announced 2 weeks ago that he is going to file a lawsuit.
This lawsuit comes despite Logan Paul's promised $1.5 million refund plan for unhappy investors.
โ๏ธ Tools: Sukuthis
The tool is developed by the folks at @Suku_world and allows anyone to mint their own tweets (and others), like #NFTs. Some tweets are worth immortalizing and @Sukuthis lets you do that easily right from the Twitter interface.
To mint a new tweet, just tag @Sukuthis and the mint will automatically take place behind the scenes. The image of the minted NFT is a screenshot of the tweet. You can mint an existing tweet, which may be your own or someone else's, just by replying with the @Sukuthis tag. If you chose to mint a tweet created by someone else then the creator of the original tweet will own the NFT, and you will be recorded in the NFT metadata as the one who minted it.
The folks at @sukuthis also provide a browser extension called Web3 Connect that lets you see all the tweets that have been minted and allows you to trade them on Opensea. In order to log in to Opensea and get access to the minted NFTs you need to click on "Trade your collectibles on Opensea" in the Web3 Connect extension. The login page on OpenSea will open and you will see a new Connect with Suku option.
๐Veefriends
VeeFriends along with Rally prepared a surprise gift for VeeCon attendees outside the U.S., as they were not eligible to register for a share of VeeCon Viper, the original physical design fractionalized by Rally and distributed at VeeCon to eligible attendees. The VeeCon Viper 2022 Proof of Attendance Plaque, a POAP in physical format, a gold-plated and enameled approx 12 x 7 cm plaque, can only be claimed until 8 February, 16:00 EET. The claim can be made from the veefriends.com account, with the registered conference attendee's wallet, and only by international attendees.
Another surprise, this time for VF1 holders, namely, those who own NFTs in the Just Art category will be able to claim JAS Book Games. The claim window will open this month, and these JAS-marked NFTs will have special utility in the VeeFriends ecosystem.
โ๏ธ NFTility
If we do a little recap, we can see that since the beginning of NFT summer, the market has diversified quite a lot, helped by the energy generated by a large number of users. With the drop in volume caused by the bear market, a good chunk of the audience disappeared, and with it, the noise.
So we see that genuine artists are finally getting the courage to express themselves more and more through blockchain technology. The best part is that they are being seen or heard, which could be a signal that art-focused NFTs (visual or otherwise) could dominate this space in the coming period.
The founders of Gallery of Digital Assets, or GODA, understand this. Their project manifests itself as a platform where traditional artists can interact with the digital space in a friendly, safe, and creative genius-enriching way.
But that's not all. The team (trust me, you want to hit the "Team" button after you use the blue text above) creates partnerships with art galleries around the world where they organize exhibitions of digital art (in physical format) through which they make this movement known to the general public. And while weโre on the โTeam" subject, the name Nick Adler we found it also in the position of the founder of the project featured in the last newsletter. Perhaps it doesn't hurt to follow his work over the long term.
The GODA Mint Pass collection contains 1,000 tokens, and holders get exclusive access to artists and priority on future releases of their digital collections.
The utility that holders receive is very small compared to what the entire space receives through the expansion of collective creativity through this initiative.
Until next time, we hope you enjoy the art!
โ nftX
Launching Raji (888 NFTs x 300USDC), the third collection of the Drifters project (founded by HenryZ), thought it would be a good opportunity to write about this interesting project in the MultiversX ecosystem.
Drifters launched their first collection, Innovators, on the ETH network in Nov 2021, but because things didn't go as they hoped, the supply was reduced from 11111 to 3000, of which only 1000 NFTs were minted.
In January 2022 the project migrated to the MultiversX network and launched the Voyagers collection, which quickly sold out, although there were some problems at the mint phase. In March 2022 Innovators became the first collection to bridge from ETH onto Elrond. The two collections have in total, on all Marketplaces, a volume of about 25k EGLD, ranking 3rd All-time.
In short, Drifters aims to create Aevitas, a metaverse (to be released in alpha in Q1 2023, built by Alchemist, a video game studio) that will be a hub for Anime art and artists. According to the roadmap, the next step is to create Driftopia, a self-sustaining community living in an eco-village.
Drifters can currently be staked, i.e. sent on 28-day missions which, depending on the traits of the NFTs and the collection they come from, produce DKM (dark matter), which will be convertible into AEV, the Aevitas token.
Over the years they have partnered with FrameIT, Symbiosis, Krogan, were also part of GnogenDAO for a few months, and are recognized as a project that constantly is consulting with the community.
๐ Dictionary
PFP - You know it stands for Profile Picture. But what if it meant Pay for Product? Hmm...
MEMES - There's probably no better explanation than the funny (or not) images we show you in every post of our newsletter. Memes are ideas or concepts that spread organically from person to person. They can be pictures, videos or even words or phrases. We're talking about a culture, one of which easily sends a feeling. You can't really explain a meme. You either understand it or you don't (it's the most successful)! MEMES are probably the most representative element of Web3 culture.
๐ธ Sale of the week
What do you do when you have $1 million? You split in half. With one half buys you ETH and then you buy a punk. And if itโs common to see punk with a hoodie, then pirate punk with a hoodie is rare. This punk #9092 was bought for 314 ETH and is the most expensive transaction of the week.
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Creative Tim
Metaventis
