📱 Solana is making a smartphone
Is Bored Ape Yacht Club created by neo-nazis? 🦍
Gm Gm!
As you know, you didn’t get an NFTimes last week. This issue has news from the previous two weeks, and you are also getting an NFT NYC special issue today.
Solana announced that it is developing a smartphone to speed up Web3 adoption. I’m excited to see what this will look like.
The top story in people’s minds is whether Bored Apes are neo-nazis. You can find the original video by Philion here, and a take by the Defiant later in the newsletter. Yuga Labs later filed a lawsuit against Ryder Ripps, accusing him of scamming consumers with fake Bored Apes. People are divided here. I don’t think I should make up my own mind before hearing from enough people in the affected groups. We’ll see how the story and lawsuit unfold.
Dive in👇
🎨 NFTs
A couple of weeks after starting to accept crypto, TAG Heuer is allowing its new smartwatch to display NFTs.
Kraken CEO Jesse Powell reiterated its mission of financial freedom and inclusion while announcing that they are continuing to hire.
Truth Labs revealed themselves as the team behind the project sweeping the market, Goblintown.
Spirit Bomb is a new project where you can mint your own virtual artist label. It is the brainchild of Strangeloop Studios (names behind The Weekend’s NFT), and is a record label for decentralized virtual avatars.
Women and Weapons Season 2 is minting — available for everyone, no max number of NFTs. It’s a great way to include more people into their ecosystem, which I’m very bullish on! (also on Sara Baumann)
LooksRare added a ‘conditional listing’ feature, where you can list 2 NFTs for sale, and when one sells, the other listing is instantly canceled.
Doodles is launching its second collection.
🔮 Metaverse News
Check out “How L’Oréal is gearing up for the metaverse” on Glossy.
Forgotten Runes shared a demo of their upcoming ‘create-to-earn’ metaverse.
TIME is partnering with The Sandbox to build ‘TIME Square’ in the metaverse.
$SAND gained 20% after the announcement of something called the Metaverse Standards Forum.
💃🏼 Fashion
Lacoste launched NFTs that enable holders to co-design its apparel.
Gucci owner Kering said they want to be Web3 ‘pioneers.’ Gucci soon after this bought $25,000 worth of $RARE tokens as an investment to join the SuperRareDAO.
YSL Beauty is dropping social tokens drop on p00ls_ with the artist iamKITTENS, with the goal of fighting intimate partner violence.
Salvatore Ferragamo opened an NFT Booth in their Soho location in NYC.
🎵 Music
Snoop Dogg and Eminem dropped a music video where they turn into Apes. Damn that’s a cool music video.
⚽️ Sports
Soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo is partnering with Binance to make multiple NFT collections.
🔥 What else is hot?
Celsius abruptly announced that it was pausing all customer withdrawals, swaps, and transfers last week. Their token price fell more than 70% after the announcement and took other cryptocurrency prices down with it. They hired restructuring advisers from advisory firm Alvarez & Marsal to advise on a potential bankruptcy filing.
OpenSea moved to Seaport Protocol, cutting gas fees by 35% and enabling more various types of digital asset transactions.
There is beef between pussy riot and the co-founder of UkraineDAO. See the threads here. I am leaning into siding with Alona as she actually is from Ukraine, and doesn’t have the celeb power that pussy riot is using right now to call someone out like this (esp. for $2k/month when PR definitely got so much press from UkraineDAO.)
eBay bought KnownOrigin. CEO of eBay Jamie Iannone said that KnownOrigin is “a perfect addition to our community of sellers and buyers.”
ApeCoin hit an all-time low. Bored Ape prices also went below $100k for the first time since August.
Bill Gates called crypto and NFTs ‘100% based on greater fool theory.”
Arcade is a new company giving loans to users who collateralize their NFTs.
Castle is a new smart wallet for NFT collectors.
dYdX announced that it wants to leave Ethereum and instead launch on its own chain in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Uniswap Labs acquired Genie.
1confirmation launched a $100M NFT fund.
Avalanche Subnets allow anyone to build custom, app-specific blockchains to boost Web3 scaling.
📖 Reading List
“Social Tokens as Creative Capital” from CityDAO
“How a DAO for a bank or financial institution will look like” by CoinDesk
“Are ‘decentralized autonomous organizations’ the business structures of the future?” by the World Economic Forum
“NFTs in a Recession” by Meagan Loyst
🧵 Threads
Tell me what you’re working on in the discussion thread! I’ll make sure to check it out, and you might get a feature in the next NFTimes edition!
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Follow NFTimes on Twitter here & you can follow the Author here.
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Disclaimer: Investing in NFTs comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. This newsletter is strictly educational and nothing we offer is financial advice. We are not professionals or licensed advisors. Views my own and not any other company I’m affiliated with.
I believe open sea has also ended their initiation fee which was expensive .