Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, and more!

Dear Bankless Nation,

Today, I published a post in the main Bankless newsletter called Is AI Bullish for Crypto?

See what you think. The tl;dr is that AI will have huge implications for every field, and the web3 space and NFTs are no exceptions. 

From NFT smart contracts made “very smart” by machine learning to web3 games where players deploy their own AI agents to accrue in-game resources, everything is about to change here. 

Ready? I’m not sure if any of us really are  

For now, though, let’s keep things simple and get you caught up on the past week in NFTs. Thanks as always for reading everyone and hope you enjoy your Memorial Day weekend

-WMP

Sponsor: Uniswap Labs — Better Prices, More Listings: NFTs on Uniswap

The big picture

For prices it was a super steady 7-day stretch in the ecosystem. In ETH terms, the floor-based market cap of the NFT space stayed flat at 8.08 million ETH on the week, although in USD terms we saw a slight climb from $14.68 billion USD to $14.74 billion USD thanks to a small 7-day rise in the ETH price.

7D top collections by volume

General news

• Stealcam rebranded to friend.tech.

• Zora introduced a burn-to-redeem feature. 

Digital collectibles

• Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult unveiled The Loracle, a chatbot trained on the Forgotten Runes Book of Lore.

• Milady NFTs were at the center of a liquidation spiral on Blur.

• Nike sold +55k virtual sneakers in one day via .SWOOSH.

• Nouns DAO released 100 Nounish Things, its latest open edition mint produced by the Nounish production team. 

• Reddit launched free Rabbid collectibles. 

Cryptoart & music

• Opepen Set #003 by the artist batz just dropped.

• ripcache unveiled their latest onchain art series, Public // Private.

• Sound is getting ready to roll out L2 support for all its artists. 

Decentralized gaming

• Axie Infinity launched its Axie Avatar Forge.

• Gods Unchained published its new roadmap.

Virtual worlds

• Metaverse land prices are way down from their 2022 peaks.

NFTfi

• Astaria, a novel NFT-backed lending protocol, launched. 

• Binance is working on an NFT lending service.

• Blur Lending added support for new collections like BAKC, Clone X, and Pudgy Penguins. 

• Caviar rolled out its V2 protocol.

• Uniswap now lets you copy NFTs to your clipboard. 

Mint spotlight: sporeᵒⁿᵉ

Created by the Spore team, sporeᵒⁿᵉ is an NFT-based immersive audio remixer, with its first season release featuring music from Daniel Allan, LATASHÁ, Mija, Reo Cragun, and beyond. This app, currently mintable on Zora for the next month for 0.01 ETH each, lets you remix the preloaded tracks and mint your own remixes as new music NFTs! 

New insightful threads to level up your web3 knowledge!

1. cygaar on his latest zkSync x LayerZero NFT quest.

2. Guild on pins, the service’s new soulbound NFTs. 

3. Matti on identity in web3.  

4. Polynya on onchain game engines with large worlds. 

My NFT tool of the week: A Safe multisig

A “multisig” wallet created via Safe is arguably the best way for most people to store their long-term crypto and NFT holdings today. That’s because Safe lets you deploy smart contract wallets that are extremely customizable and can be tailored precisely to your needs, from requiring multiple key signatures for transactions (e.g. 2 of 3 wallets you’ve added into your Safe), setting spending limits, creating account roles, and beyond. If you’d like to launch your own, see my full write-up Playing it safe with a Safe multisg out in Bankless this week! 

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Make up your minds, degens…

Action steps

• Read Is AI Bullish for Crypto?, ETH Power Balancing, and Top 10 Hidden DeFi Gems in Bankless

• Catch up on my other NFT write-ups from this week: 

  • ✧ Exploring the New Zora

  • ✧ Keeping up with the Nouns

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal — a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter and a contributor to NFT curation platform JPG!

A Bankless Citizen ⚑ turned $264 into $6,077 last year. A 22x ROI in a bear market!

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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter 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.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.