NFT Sales Drop 7.91% as Buyers and Sellers Pull Back Sharply

September 14, 2024 Bitcoin.com

Nifty News: Yuga Labs to buy metaverse studio, Etihad NFT staking to take off and more

August 1, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Roar Studios will be acquired by Yuga Labs as the latter looks to onboard talent for its still-in-development Otherside metaverse.

Yuga Labs accelerates Otherside plan

Nonfungible token (NFT) conglomerate Yuga Labs has agreed to acquire the metaverse-building startup Roar Studios as Yuga looks to bolster its Otherside metaverse.

Yuga tweeted the news on July 31 saying the impending acquisition was to “execute our expansive vision” for Otherside.

An accompanying release said Roar Studios' founder and CEO Eric Reid will join Yuga as the general manager of Otherside, charged with leading the development and production of the metaverse.

We are proud to announce Yuga Labs is acquiring Roar Studios, a music and metaverse startup led by long-time entertainment Executive, Eric Reid, to execute our expansive vision for @OthersideMeta.

For more, read here: https://t.co/Ll9OMrSwEP. pic.twitter.com/o2FankWun2
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) July 31, 2023

Yuga is also nabbing audio, game and artificial intelligence engineers from Roar’s team which is 14 strong according to LinkedIn.

Otherside has only been glimpsed through a handful of early access demos which started in August 2022 alongside a more recent “vibe check.” It’s unknown when the project will officially launch.

Earlier today we brought together a small focus group of 40 Voyagers in LA to delve into Otherside for a vibe check. pic.twitter.com/fXpyUk81w8
— Othersidemeta (@OthersideMeta) July 28, 2023

In mid-July Yuga chief Daniel Alegre said it's still hard at work building Otherside adding the project will take time as it's “audacious.”

Yuga also scooped up the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections in March 2022 and in November 2022 it acquired the Beeple-founded NFT game 10KTF.

Etihad NFTs to offer priority check-in, lounge access

Abu Dhabi-based airline Etihad will soon take off with an NFT staking loyalty program called “Horizon Club” and is expanding its current NFT collection.

On Aug. 1, 300 new NFTs will be added to Etihad’s EY-ZERO1 collection, which will offer benefits like priority check-in, lounge access in Abu Dhabi and the ability to stake the NFT to earn flight miles.

Introducing ‘Etihad Horizon Club’: one of the world’s first Web3 airline loyalty programs, powered by @arcubenft. Stake your NFTs to earn Etihad miles and spend on travel & web 3 perks.

More miles per day for Etihad: Mission Impossible Livery NFT holders!

Launching in Q3 2023 pic.twitter.com/n6b1GJlvPN
— Etihad NFT (@EtihadNFT) July 28, 2023

Etihad isn’t launching the NFT staking platform until September but a trailer for the product shows users will be able to stake multiple NFTs to earn flight miles which are redeemable for various perks such as flights, upgrades and hotels.

As for the new NFTs, they depict an Etihad aircraft wrapped in branding for the latest Mission: Impossible film which the airline has a promotional partnership with.

NFT service platform Arcube collaborated on the collection and is one of the Web3 partners for the airline.

Lufthansa and Eurowings, two European airlines, have also flirted with Web3 integrations and are seeing how it could apply to their business models.

NFT Now cuts staff as crypto winter bites

NFT-focused news outlet NFT Now is reducing its staff count and restructuring, citing the ongoing crypto market winter.

NFT Now president Alejandro Navia tweeted on July 31 that it over-hired during the bull market and changing market conditions are forcing it to restructure and make cuts.

I have difficult news to share: pic.twitter.com/ufcknaboEO
— ALΞJANDRO (@AlejNavia) July 31, 2023

“Our company experienced rapid growth during the bull run, and we hired to service that growth,” reads Navia’s note.

“However, as we are building the business for the long term, we must adapt to changing market conditions,” he added. “Given the current climate, it is clear that this pace of growth was unsustainable and we over-hired.”

Navia said he takes “full ownership of this mistake” in his role as president. He did not disclose how many staff were impacted by the decision.

Sorare adds fiat in bid to boost adoption

The sports gaming platform Sorare has added support for fiat currencies to purchase its NFT-based digital trading cards, removing the need for users to pay in Ether (ETH).

As part of an update to its wallet users can now use U.S. dollars, euros or British pounds to buy the NFT cards which Sorare said eliminates a barrier to entry, according to a VentureBeat report.

A Sorare-affiliated account tweeted on July 31 that the rollout of what it calls the “Cash Wallet” will progressively start on Aug. 1 with more fiat functionality coming in September.

Cash Wallet Update

Cash Wallet is almost here! Over the next several days and weeks, we'll be rolling out functionality that enables Managers to easily buy, sell, trade cards and receive rewards in cash.

Here’s what to expect on or around the following dates:
-Monday, July…
— Sorare Support (@soraresupport) July 31, 2023

Other Nifty News

Two U.S. lawmakers stung Apple CEO Tim Cook with a letter asking for information on if its App Store’s guidelines are dampening the growth of blockchain and NFT technologies due to it limiting the functionality of Web3 apps.

A computer scientist and an archaeologist have developed a Web3-based verification-as-a-service model for recording the authenticity of cultural artifacts as NFTs.

NFT Collector: Interactive NFTs the future for sport, Vegas Sphere excites

NFT Sales Drop 5.4% to $193M, Ethereum Dominates with $107M in Sales: Weekly Recap

March 25, 2023 Bitcoin.com

NFT Fantasy Game Sorare Partners With Premier League for Multi-Year Licensing Deal

February 1, 2023 Bitcoin.com

Premier League gets Ethereum-based digital cards with Sorare partnership

January 31, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain

Sorare seals partnership with the English Premier League to issue Ethereum-based digital player cards for its popular fantasy sports platform.

Blockchain-powered fantasy sports firm Sorare has sealed a deal with the English Premier League to mint Ethereum-based digital player cards on its platform.

Sorare has driven an interesting use case for Ethereum-based fantasy sports and digital card trading in recent years, offering fans the ability to mint, collect and trade various player cards with other users across a variety of nonfungible token (NFT) marketplaces.

Cointelegraph reached out to Sorare to clarify details of their latest deal, bringing the Premier League to the fingertips of football fans. While the partnership was officially announced on January 30, a Sorare spokesperson said discussions between the league and the company had been ongoing for a lengthy period.

*Premier League player cards are available on Sorare’s platform, with some “super rare” cards already valued at over $100 or more.*

Sorare began to make moves within the Premier League network in 2019, signing West Ham United as its first English club as a partner of its platform. Cointelegraph has learned that the League and Sorare have agreed to a four-year deal, with the value of the partnership undisclosed for contractual reasons.

The company spokesperson also broke down the deal’s structure, with Sorare making an upfront downpayment to the league for licensing rights. From there, digital card sales result in a percentage split between Sorare and the Premier League.

Sorare mints digital cards of players from the Premier League on the Ethereum blockchain. The platform has long used ERC-721 token standard for its NFT player cards, which fans can collect and trade and use to play on the platform’s free-to-play fantasy sports league.

The Premier League digital cards will be available for initial purchase on Sorare before being available for trading on compatible marketplaces like OpenSea. The fantasy sports platform continues to be a proponent for connecting fans, players and organizations with blockchain technology:

“For Sorare, this underlying technology is the means, not the ends, to connecting users with their favourite clubs, and we welcome it powering the next generation of sports fandom and entertainment.”

NFTs, including digital trading cards and highlights from various sporting codes, have become popular collectibles in recent years. NBA Top Shots exploded in popularity in 2021, while the football world has continued to see synergies with blockchain-based platforms.

NBA Extends Partnership With Meta to Bring Basketball Games to the Metaverse

January 26, 2023 Bitcoin.com

NFT Sales Drop 59% in Second Week of 2023; Ethereum Dominates Top 20 Blockchains with 75% of Sales

January 15, 2023 Bitcoin.com

2023 will see the death of play-to-earn gaming

December 31, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Developers have been focusing more on tokens than on making fun games. As a result, GameFi has been dying.

Play-to-earn gaming enabled by blockchain technology has grown exponentially over the few years.

Gamers have embraced the opportunity to collect cryptocurrencies or nonfungible tokens (NFTs) that have been produced in blockchain-based games.

Through the advent of this new technology, players have been able to generate income by selling in-game NFTs or earning cryptocurrency rewards, both of which can be exchanged for fiat cash.

Because of this, according to data from Absolute Reports, the estimated value of the GameFi industry will grow to $2.8 billion by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.4% over the same period. But such predictions may well prove to be unfounded.

Given the rate of exponential growth over recent years, one might think that there was absolutely no reason to believe the trend would not continue well into 2023 and beyond. Right? Wrong.

As we have seen with the ignominious case of former crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried and the implosion of FTX, a castle built on a flimsy foundation of sand can be easily washed away when the tide comes in and goes back out again.

Or, as legendary investor Warren Buffett liked to put it: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

We may be about to learn who these people are. The fact of the matter is the play-to-earn gaming industry is not built on firm foundations. The foundations are fragile and flimsy, and this could well spell trouble in 2023. The whole edifice looks set to come crashing down.

The structure of the current GameFi market is token-centric and this can create a number of issues. Project owners issue their tokens which are listed on exchanges first before they announce that they are going to build games. Games are a utility of tokens they issue. So tokens come first, and contents later. This is why the quality and design of games in the blockchain space are so underrated.

*Unique active wallets (UAWs) that used decentralized applications (DApps) in 2022. Source: DappRadar*

An environment has been created in which the players are not all that interested in games themselves, which is a strange state of affairs for a gaming industry to find itself in. More and more of the players are, in reality, investors who want returns on investment.

The current structure creates the wrong kind of incentives and this is one of the reasons why the system is not working as it should. I would argue that DeFi Kingdoms, which is one of the better-known play-to-earn blockchain games out there, has been screwing with its tokenomics relentlessly by creating perverse incentives.

By now, generally speaking, the token market is in a downtrend and the speculative trading market is dead. An industry can survive for a certain amount of time on promise, expectation and unjustified hype. But, it can only do so for so long. Eventually, people begin to notice that they haven’t received what they have been promised. Patience starts to wear thin. They get angry, they get frustrated and they begin to withdraw. This begins as a trickle of the savviest players, but that can soon become a flood.

Those who have planned to secure funds by listing their tokens will have to reassess. Many will be forced to close their projects due to insufficient funds. The situation is becoming so acute that even hitherto bullish crypto venture capitalists (VCs) are also pausing new investments.

So, who is going to survive this investment drought? It looks unlikely that GameFi will. However, other blockchain gamings might do so.

One example is the Ethereum-powered, NFT-based fantasy football league operator Sorare has become a Web3 unicorn. While many of its competitors struggle, Sorare keeps on increasing its users and revenue during the darkest period. Their daily auction volume is impressive, at around 300-400 Ether (ETH), and the number of users keeps increasing.

Though its back end relies on blockchain, users do not perceive it as a GameFi project. They do not provide their native tokens, but they do provide their content first on Ethereum, which very much looks like the way to go for the industry at large.

So GameFi may well die in 2023, but that does not mean that all is lost. Death is a necessary part of evolution. From it, new life may already be beginning to emerge.

Shinnosuke “Shin” Murata is the founder of blockchain games developer Murasaki. He joined Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co. in 2014, doing automotive finance and trading in Malaysia, Venezuela and Bolivia. He left Mitsui to join a second-year startup called Jiraffe as the company’s first sales representative and later joined STVV, a Belgian football club, as its chief operating officer and assisted the club with creating a community token. He founded Murasaki in the Netherlands in 2019.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Soccer Superstar Lionel Messi Joins NFT Game Sorare as Investor and Brand Ambassador

November 11, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Nifty News: LooksRare the latest NFT market to sack royalties, Twitter’s tweeting tiles and more

October 28, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain

LooksRare joins the lineup of NFT marketplaces that have abandoned default creator royalties but says its replacement solution is “competitive.”

Nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace LooksRare is the latest in a string of NFT markets to do away with enforcing creator royalties by default, following the likes of Magic Eden and X2Y2.

The platform tweeted on Oct. 27 that it would not be supporting creator royalties by default, instead choosing to share 25% of its protocol fees with NFT creators and collection owners. Buyers can still choose to pay royalties when purchasing an NFT but it will be on an opt-in basis.

Explaining the changes, it said 0.5% of its 2% protocol fee would go to collections, as long as that collection has a receiving address for the funds.

LooksRare said the willingness of buyers to pay royalties has “eroded” as a result of many NFT markets now moving to a zero-royalty model adding that these disadvantage creators by removing a source of passive income

For this reason, it says it wants to create a “competitive solution” through its fee-sharing model with creators.

That’s why we’re choosing to lead the charge in this new landscape, by creating a competitive solution that still benefits creators: diverting protocol fees directly to creators.
— LooksRare (@LooksRare) October 27, 2022

The reaction from the community was mixed, with some praising LooksRare for the revenue sharing model, but well-known Twitter NFT statistician, the aptly named NFTstatistics.eth, said he doesn’t see the benefit.

“The average royalty paid is around 6%” they tweeted, “I wouldn’t say that giving artists 0.5% [...] is a competitive solution that benefits creators.”

“I do get that everyone is trying to survive in this race to the bottom,” he added.

Twitter’s testing token tweeting tiles

Twitter’s development team announced on Oct. 27 that it’s testing “NFT Tweet Tiles” with some links to NFTs showing on the platform with a larger picture along with details of the NFT and the name of its creator.

Now testing: NFT Tweet Tiles

Some links to NFTs on @rarible, @MagicEden, @dapperlabs and @Jumptradenft will now show you a larger picture of the NFT alongside details like the title and creator. One more step in our journey to let developers impact the Tweet experience. pic.twitter.com/AkBisciB1i
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) October 27, 2022

Supported NFT marketplaces, for now, include Rarible, Magic Eden, Dapper Labs and Jump.trade. It comes after the platform rolled out NFT profile pictures in January, but only for its paid subscribers on Apple iOS.

The new feature could be a move to appease its most active users, as leaked internal Twitter documents show it found the topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users of the platform have shifted over the last two years, with one of the highest-growing topics now being cryptocurrencies.

There are also circulating rumors that Twitter is developing a crypto wallet, but so far, the claim hasn’t been backed by evidence nor confirmed by Twitter. Regardless, speculation abounds that it could be in the works with the takeover by crypto-friendly Elon Musk.

EPL lines up $35M NFT deal with Sorare

The top English men’s professional soccer league — the English Premier League (EPL) — is working on signing a nearly $35 million, or 30 million British pounds, NFT deal with Ethereum blockchain-based fantasy soccer game Sorare, according to Sky News.

Sorare is a fantasy soccer league trading card game where players buy, sell and trade NFTs player cards to manage a team. The team can then enter contests and earn in-game points based on the actual on-pitch performances of the corresponding players.

The EPL will hold discussions with its 20 clubs regarding the reported multi-year contract on Oct. 28. The deal will allegedly focus on static images of EPL players assigned to NFTs, which of course, will allow fans to buy, own and likely trade them.

In March, it was reported that the EPL tapped blockchain firm ConsenSys for an NFT deal allegedly valued upward of $300 million. Still, Sky News reports that a slide in NFT prices had ConsenSys renegotiating to lower the price of the agreement, which made Sorare’s offer more attractive to the league.

A separate deal between the EPL and blockchain developer Dapper Labs is reportedly also under discussion.

New NFT market gains on leader OpenSea in 24-hour trading volume

The new NFT marketplace and aggregator Blur hit a record high of 1,610 Ether (ETH), around $2.5 million, in 24-hour trading volume on Oct. 26, according to Dune analytics, placing it only behind the largest marketplace, OpenSea.

It topped its rivals LooksRare and X2Y2 in terms of market share on the day, taking to Twitter to celebrate the milestone.

In the last 24 hours Blur became the #2 NFT marketplace by volume (excluding wash trades)! Blur is also the #1 aggregator.

This is a huge win for the entire Blur community who will eventually be majority owners of Blur. It's only day 7 and we're just getting started! pic.twitter.com/YpvywTdU5H
— Blur (@blur_io) October 26, 2022

The Ethereum-based platform launched a beta version on Oct. 19 with an airdrop of its native token BLUR to anyone who had traded NFTs in the last six months. It says it targets “pro traders” and offers no trading fees and optional royalties.

On the same day, NFT marketplace X2Y2 tweeted that it would like Blur “to stop using our listings on your website” and subsequently blocked Blur from its platform, claiming it violated X2Y2’s terms by using multiple application programming interface (API) keys.

More Nifty News

NFT marketplace myNFT will showcase its first-ever physical NFT vending machine at the NFT.London event slated for Nov. 2–4. It will allow eventgoers to buy an NFT by purchasing a displayed envelope, scanning a code to create a myNFT account and receiving the NFT in their newly created wallet.

Monkey Drainer, the pseudonym of an alleged phishing scammer, has reportedly stolen $1 million worth of ETH so far this week through creating copycat NFT minting websites, and its possible the scams may have stolen over $3.5 million in total so far.

Sorare