September 2, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Former CFTC commissioner Christopher Giancarlo resigned from BlockFi’s board of directors after only four months.

  • Twitter might soon enable users to tip creators with Bitcoin.

  • Coinbase Bitcoin reserves have sunk to December 2017 levels.

  • Jane Street, a quant firm, joined the Pyth network.

  • Former President Donald Trump thinks cryptocurrencies are “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”

  • FTX.US met with the CFTC before its LedgerX acquisition announcement.

  • SEC chair Gary Gensler appeared before the European Parliament yesterday to exchange views on crypto regulation.

  • Franklin Templeton, a $1.5T asset manager, is looking to hire employees to execute bitcoin and ether trades.

  • The SEC filed an action against Bitconnect, its founder, and its top U.S. promoter, and his affiliated company for allegedly defrauding retail investors out of $2 billion.

  • Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said that Binance.US could go public in the next three years.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Loot, a new type of NFT, has arrived on the market via Dom Hofmann, founder of Vine, who launched the project last week. Hoffman dropped the 8,000-piece NFT collection with little warning and without a mint price (though he did reserve 222 NFTs for himself as compensation).

The text-based NFT collection quickly caught on. In roughly five days, Loot has done over $45M in volume and currently has a market cap of $150M+, making it one of the more popular NFTs on OpenSea.

Rather than a standard JPEG or PNG, the 8,000 Loot NFTs contain walls of text detailing specific eight characteristics, randomly generated for scarcity. Each token was minted with a different combination of weapons, chest armor, head armor, waist armor, foot armor, hand armor, necklaces, and rings.

The idea, presumably, is for Loot NFTs to act as a base layer for other games and protocols to interpret. Essentially, any play-to-earn or web3 game can plug into Loot, download the characteristics, and then spawn its interpretation of a Loot NFT in its game.

Loot is designed to unlock NFT interoperability, which promises to make NFTs exist across the metaverse without being stuck to one game, blockchain, or centralized entity. It’s a bet that less is more, and that for NFTs to be truly interoperable, there needs to be a sense of artistic interpretation between games across the metaverse.

Loot already has a healthy ecosystem popping up around its text-based NFTs, with multiple apps building on top of the NFTs, as shown out in the chart below.

At a 5.5 ETH price floor, Loot NFTs are most likely out of the price range for the average degen, but the concept is certainly worth looking into. As with most things in crypto, success breeds competition and copycats, so there will no doubt be more examples to catch a text-based NFT project on the ground floor — if you are so inclined.

Recommended Reads

  • The Defiant on Yearn Finance’s latest metaverse investment:

  • Paradigm’s Dave White on NFT derivatives:

  • Here’s a thread that will help you stat up to date on crypto slang:

On The Pod…

How Pplpleasr Helped Fortune Magazine Sell More Than $1 Million in NFTs

Pplpleasr, the artist behind Fortune magazine’s recent crypto cover and Uniswap’s V3 announcement animation, talks about her crypto journey and how NFTs are changing the game for creators. Show highlights:

  • how not getting a job at Apple changed her life forever
  • how the Pplpleasr-Uniswap collaboration came about
  • what goes into her creative process
  • how Pplpleasr got hired for the Fortune magazine cover
  • why she chose to represent anon-avatars on the Fortune cover
  • why Pplpleasr was surprised by Fortune’s response to her artwork (and crypto in general)
  • what sort of crypto personas are represented on the Fortune cover and why
  • how NFTs are changing the paradigm of monetization for creators compared to the traditional art world
  • what pplpleasr is looking forward to in future NFT smart contracts
  • why NFTs are still limited right now
  • why institutions, like Budweiser and Visa, are suddenly interested in NFTs
  • what Fortune is doing to grow its NFT collection
  • how DAOs are changing art curation and collecting
  • why Pplpleasr was surprised that a DAO (bearing her name) purchased the Uniswap V3 animation
  • where Pplpleasr thinks the NFT space will go in the next year or so

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Jan. 18. Pre-order it today!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians