gm Bankless Nation, regardless of market volatility, new onchain apps are still launching at a steady clip. Let's dive into four fresh projects worth exploring!
gm Bankless Nation, Regardless of market volatility, new onchain apps are still launching at a steady clip. Let's dive into four fresh projects worth exploring!
Today's Issue ⬇️
⚖️ Culture News: Nike's NFT Lawsuit RTFKT NFTs catch a class action.
👟 Nike Faces $5M NFT Lawsuit. Investors are suing Nike, alleging the company hyped RTFKT NFTs as unregistered securities and executed a “soft rug pull” after abruptly winding down operations in late 2024.
❎ Sky Mavis Ends Ragnarok Partnership. Sky Mavis cut ties with Ragnarok Monster World developer 0x& over a breach of agreement, including secretly signing with another blockchain.
⛓️ Clone X Migrates to Arweave. After last week's Cloudflare disruption, RTFKT’s flagship Clone X collection has fully migrated to Arweave for onchain storage, with 100GB of data transferred via ArDrive.
Even though crypto markets have been a rollercoaster this year, one thing has remained constant, and that's the steady flow of new onchain apps.
Some of these fresh arrivals are playful, some ambitious, but all are experimenting with what's possible when anyone can build in the open.
That said, here are a handful of projects I’ve personally been tracking lately that feel worth a closer look.
👍 Immutable Ratings
I used to work at NFT curation platform JPG, and I have a soft spot for the curatorial, i.e. the organization and preservation of what matters in a sea of information.
I think online spaces are hurting for better curatorial tools, and this is even more potently true in crypto, where most infrastructure skews explicitly financial.
But onchain tech has tremendous coordination potential in general. And you can put this potential toward more squishy curatorial ends, like surfacing and transparently recording public sentiments.
That's what the IR team is attempting with ratings.wtf, a new onchain ratings app on Base. The vision is to become a decentralized likes/dislikes layer across all web platforms.
For now, X, Warpcast, and Wikipedia links are supported. If you want to try the app, you can 👍 or 👎 existing cards with a single click, or paste an URL into the search bar to create a new rating card on the spot.
Each rating mints a small amount of either $TUP (ThumbsUp) or $TDN (ThumbsDown) tokens to an URL's hashed Ethereum address, in turn creating a permanent ledger of public sentiment.
Keep in mind, there is a small ETH fee per rating (about $0.11) to help prevent bots and support the project, with a portion donated to Ethereum core devs via Protocol Guild. If you want to dive deeper, check out the docs here.
🧠 Memory
If Immutable Ratings is about curating public sentiment, Memory is about curating your personal story and owning it.
This new protocol and app stack lets you link your wallets, social accounts, and favorite content to build a portable map of your online identity. Instead of your history being fragmented across platforms, Memory lets you assemble it all into a single “Memory” you control.
Your followers, posts, likes, purchases, etc. can move with you across the internet, not just stay trapped inside individual app silos. Over time, you’ll even be able to earn $MEM tokens when platforms request your data here, meaning you can benefit directly from your profile.
Right now, Memory is in alpha and available only to early supporters, but public access is just around the corner. If you want a peek at what the future of user-owned data can look like, it’s worth getting Memory on your radar now.
🎊 Panic.fun
Remixing and second-order creation are another reason why crypto's open composability can be so powerful. And a new app demonstrating this truth in style is panic.fun.
The coin becomes a remixed derivative of the original artwork, and some of the supply plus ongoing trading fees are automatically forwarded to the NFT's original artist without any effort on their part. It's a new avenue for permissionless onchain royalties accordingly.
What I like here is 1) how Panic uses coins to extend provenance, ensuring NFT creators are anchored to the value their works inspire, and 2) it largely shifts the burden of coining experimentation onto collectors, which I think is an interesting and smart twist.
In that sense, Panic is also remixing how we think about attribution, liquidity, and cultural ownership onchain. That's the kind of stuff I love to see.
👓 Chonks Marketplace
In my opinion, Chonks was one of the best NFT collections to drop in 2024. Not only is it fully onchain and CC0, but this Base PFP project was also one of the earliest adopters of ERC-6551, i.e. Token Bound Accounts (TBAs).
TBAs allow NFTs to operate as smart wallets, i.e. capable of doing anything a full-fledged smart contract account can do. This includes the ability for an NFT to hold other NFTs within itself.
In Chonks, we see this dynamic come into play as the project's Body NFTs hold the collection's trait NFTs within themselves, giving way to customization and tradability. Want to swap your look? Just buy new traits and suit up onchain.
The catch with this architecture? There's an edge case via traditional NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Magic Eden where Chonks sellers could technically strip their traits out at the last second, duping buyers out of what they thought they were purchasing.
To address this pitfall, the Chonks team built their own custom marketplace from scratch, the Chonks Marketplace. It's designed to prevent front-running risks by automatically delisting any Chonk whose traits are transferred or individual traits when they're moved, too.
On top of this, the Chonks Marketplace offers bespoke UX for trait traders, real-time metadata updates, and lower fees compared to the bigger NFT marketplaces. If you want to get a taste for customizing your own Chonk, or just to try TBAs in general, this new platform is a great starting point.
Unlock the power of Unichain – a fast, decentralized Ethereum Layer 2 network built to be the home for DeFi and cross-chain liquidity. To bridge tokens to Unichain and start swapping today, get started with Uniswap Labs' web app or mobile wallet.
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
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