Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & collectibles

Dear Bankless Nation,

Coinbase announcing its own Optimism-based L2, Base, was definitely this week’s biggest headline. 

Right now only a testnet, Base Goerli, is live. Yet that hasn’t stopped eager NFTers from hopping over to the testnet early to learn the ropes. 

You know what that means … once the Base mainnet is live, we’re in store for a boom of Base NFT mints. There will be a lot of junk at first, just like we’ve seen with Canto and Ordinals, but the inaugural seeds of a new NFT scene will be planted, too. 

We’ll have to see how that scene shakes out from here, but it’ll certainly be a big thread to track through the rest of 2023. In the meantime have a great weekend everyone, and for now let’s get you up to speed on the past week in NFTs ✌️

-WMP

🙏 Thanks to our sponsor MetaMask Learn

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🧠 The big picture

For the 6th week in a row the cumulative market cap of the NFT space has climbed, this time from 9.36M ETH to 9.46M ETH for a climb of 1% since the previous Friday recap. That’s not a tremendous inflow but growth’s growth, and it’s just our latest reminder that the NFT ecosystem has been steadily expanding all year. 

📊 This week by the numbers:

It was a massive volume week for the top blue-chip PFP collections. In the BAYC and MAYC sphere, we saw huge blooms of sell pressure and buy pressure effectively cancel each other out. Moonbirds saw another big 7D volume run, in part propelled by some traders selling their holdings upon the PROOF of Conference cancellation news. 

🔝 7D top collections by volume

🛒 7D NFT marketplace stats

To understand just how dominant Blur is in the NFT trading scene right now, check out these graphs. The left one shows Blur facilitated over 80% of the NFT ecosystem’s trading volume on the week compared to OpenSea’s 14%, while the second shows Blur accounted for over 57% of all trades during that same span. Love it or hate it, Blur’s decidedly the king activity-wise right now. 

🛍️ 3 biggest buys this week

There’s been a lot of ‘Punks and Apes transactions in the top 3 biggest weekly sales lately, but in recent days we’ve seen more variety up at the top. Namely, the fresh faces this go ’round were a Ξ390 resale of Fidenza #157 and a Ξ242 resale of FOMO by OG cryptoartist XCOPY. 

📰 General news

• 0N1 Force, an Anime NFT project, was bought out by a group of investors including Binance and YGG. 

• Blur announced +300M $BLUR of further incentives for its Season 2 campaign. 

• Flip added ENS support. 

• PartyBid unveiled new features, including Party Sweeps. 

• Reservoir V2, a new and flexible open-source NFT marketplace system, has arrived. 

🏆 Digital collectibles

• fRiENDSiES announced plans to pause the project, leading to community anger and rugpull allegations.

• Pudgy Penguins partnered with Retail Monster for an upcoming Pudgy-themed toyline. 

• Yuga Labs introduced Toad Mode, the latest installment in the wider Dookey Dash event. 

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• Art Blocks expanded its secondary marketplace functionalities.

• Infocalypse, a generative series created with author Neal Stephenson in honor of the 30th anniversary of Snow Crash, is going live next week.

• Spotify is piloting token-gated playlists.

• Zora dropped its creator fees to zero in favor of a new, small flat-rate collector fee. 

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• DEGEN WAR$, an onchain PVP card game, is preparing to launch.

• Hiroba, an NFT aggregator custom-built for gaming NFTs, arrived out of stealth. 

• Yield Guild Games just raised a $13.8M round and is launching its own venture fund.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Webaverse rolled out the alpha launch of its AI Character Studio.

• Worldwide Webb raised a $10M Series A round. 

🪙 NFTfi

• Mugen Finance is launching an NFT yield router system.

• sudoswap DAO voted to make $SUDO transferable.

• Uniswap added support for buying NFTs with any ERC20 token. 

🎆 Mint spotlight: Base, Introduced

To commemorate the introduction of its new Base L2 and the Base Goerli testnet launch, Coinbase dropped this celebratory free mint on Zora. 1 mint is allowed per address, and over 115,000 have already been minted so far. At the time of publication there’s still over 48 hours left on the drop so consider snagging one if you feel like joining in on the celebration! 

llihwerd.eth 🏴 (📜,📜) 🦇🔊 @llihwerd

just minted 1 copy of BASE[D], Introduced zora.co/collections/0x… #zora lets fucking go

zora.coBase, IntroducedMeet Base, an Ethereum L2 that offers a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build decentralized apps. Min…

2:27 PM ∙ Feb 23, 2023

🔭 Mint watch:

• The Wizard’s Hat — A Nounish animation and the second-ever open edition release from Nouns DAO, this Ξ0.05 premiere mint commemorates the decentralized creation of this fantasy short about a young wizard named Harriett and her mentor Grummelot

• Bold Ones — Created by artist, CC0 remixer, and Nouncil member Greta, the Bold Ones is a collection honoring trailblazers in the NFT space; the allowlist mint begins on Feb. 28th for Ξ0.0099 each with an ensuing public mint priced at Ξ0.0123 a pop

Greta mother of mash-ups.⌐◨-◨ @Greta_gremplin

GM Bold Ones!! Until now I only shared some of the boldest ones (1/1)… so here is a preview, of some more common ones. #bebold

4:04 PM ∙ Feb 22, 2023

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🙇 3 insightful threads weekly to level up your NFT knowledge!

1. Freddie Farmer on how NFT creators can adopt a “Creator-Owned Liquidity” strategy via sudoswap:

Freddie Farmer @FreddieFarmer

How Creator-Owned-Liquidity (COL) puts control back in the hands of NFT Creators in a market destined to kill off royalties 🧵

6:16 PM ∙ Feb 24, 2023

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2. cygaar, creator of the ERC721A standard, on a suggested “ideal” NFT mint smart contract:

cygaar @0xCygaar

Several people have asked me how I would write the “ideal” mint function in an NFT contract, so here it is. This demo code uses ERC721A, is gas efficient, and prevents users from minting more NFTs than allowed. I added more context in the thread 🧵:

7:05 PM ∙ Feb 20, 2023

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3. K!NGSLEY on why artist Kevin Abosch’s OPEN EDITION series is seeing lots of activity lately:

K!NGSLEY | kingsl.eth @ckingsley

OPEN EDITION by @kevinabosch is worth some of your attention. The next Checks? No. Something different built on the same meta and cultural primitives.

10:36 PM ∙ Feb 22, 2023

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✨ My NFT tool of the week: Harvest.art

If you find yourself wanting to clean up the unwanted NFTs from your wallet, consider Harvest.art. This app will buy any NFT from you for 1 gwei each, which is also great for harvesting losses as needed. Use the project at your own risk because the tech is experimental, but I’ve personally tried it before and found the process smooth. 

harvest.art @HarvestNFTs

Just… take out the trash ffs @ harvest.art

5:14 AM ∙ Apr 13, 2022

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💥 A new free testnet faucet…

If you’re a builder type or on an NFT project team, chances are you know how much of a pain it can be to simply source gas for testnet transactions. The good news is the Coinbase Wallet Faucet just arrived, so it’s a new avenue to get daily faucet drips across eight different testnets including Ethereum Goerli, Base Goerli, and Polygon Mumbai. Keep it in mind for your onchain experiments going forward!

Coinbase Wallet @CoinbaseWallet

Big news for web3 builders! 🚧 You can now get FREE testnet ETH, MATIC, AVAX, BNB, and FTM all in one place. Let these faucets drip…🚰👇 coinbase.com/faucets

coinbase.comGet your drip with Coinbase Wallet FaucetGet testnet funds for Ethereum Goerli, Polygon Mumbai, Optimism Goerli and more ……

6:26 PM ∙ Feb 21, 2023

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😜 fRiENDSiES tHe NeXt BlUe-ChiP…

More than a few people called out the fRiENDSiES project as sketchy from the start. Of course, bagholder interests got in the way of a meaningful community response at the time, which helped the project tread water until its “pause” this week: 

Rooshy.eth @ILikeNFTs

Friendsies TLDR;

6:34 PM ∙ Feb 22, 2023

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Action steps

• 🆕 Read Unpacking the Coinbase L2 Opportunity in Bankless

• 🌱 Watch Building Regen Web3 with David Phelps on Green Pill 

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

  • ✧ Become Your NFT

  • ✧ Emblem Vaults Explained

  • ✧ How to Mint a Bitcoin NFT

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also recently been contributing content to Bankless, JPG, and beyond!

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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.