🔎 The Right Effort

Artificial Intelligence artworks, Reddit, Blur, and Lord of the Rings...

Hello, hello, hello!

Happy Monday and hope you had a nice weekend. I went on a meditation retreat and did 10h in 2 days — It was really nice and hopefully a kick for me to keep up with my practice more consistently. Tech and mindful practice are unfortunately at odds with one another, so I have been trying to find a healthy balance of keeping up with everything that is happening in the world of politics, tech, and business while giving your mind a moment to relax. In the overly-connected technology-driven world we live in, take time to disconnect from the web and connect with your inner self instead. It’s difficult, but worth it. I’m going to share a concept I was thinking of over the weekend: Right Effort.

How we direct our effort towards what we want, towards our intention is important in what the results bring. Our effort needs to be finely tuned, neither too relaxed, nor too effortful. The Buddha taught that practice should be like a well-tuned string instrument. If the strings are too loose, they won’t play a sound. If they are too tight, they will break. You can let go of what is not serving you, and direct the right amount of effort into your intention. Too much is usually not good.

Headlines 📰

AI vs. the ARTISTS ⚖️👩‍⚖️

Generative A.I. is helping artists produce their next masterpiece, and also allowing regular folks to create beautiful pieces with no expertise. AI has been speeding up with image generation, then moving into also generating text and video. It can create short videos with text prompt, or finish writing your essay once you tell it what you want. While this technology will allow for much creativity, issues such as copyright infringement are coming up. AI creates images using millions of already existing uploaded works by artists, so an opt-in or opt-out system must be created for the artists.

So one could type “Basquiat style painting of two lovers walking down the desert from the movie Dune during sunset as they emerge into being God-like creatures” and “Murakami style painting of two lovers walking down the desert from the movie Dune during sunset as they emerge into being God-like creatures” and two different paintings will appear.

aleyna.eth @aleyna_eth

Basquiat vs. Murakami style "painting of two lovers walking down the desert from the movie Dune during sunset as they emerge into being God-like creatures" @StableDiffusion

Not all those who wander are lost. 🌈

Lord of the Rings is the latest big series jumping into the NFT wagon. Warner Bros is teaming up with Eluvio to launch “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” Web3 Movie Experience. Owners of the NFT can watch the extended version of the movie and access 8 hours of special features. Seems like Warner took a step in the right direction, providing utility that superfans of the series would love.

Reddit sells over 2.5M avatars 🫶

Web2’s emo kid Reddit have been taking steps towards Web3 for months. Its founders have been vocal about their interest in the space, creating $200M initiative with Polygon and launching their own character collection. To onboard a new demographic, they refrained from using crypto vocabulary and are calling their NFTs ‘collectible avatars.’ Well, it’s working. Reddit now has more NFT wallets (3 million) than the marketplace leader OpenSea. 2.5M of those wallets have been used to purchase Reddit avatars.

Blur-red Lines. 🤝

The NFT marketplace that raised $14M from Paradigm, Blur launched to the public on after being in private beta for months. The marketplace is airdropping Care Packages in 3 rarities to ‘everyone who’s stuck around in the bear market.’ There will be another airdrop for platform users, FYI. 😉

quit.q00t.eth @0xQuit

Is airdrop szn back?? It's been a while since we received a proper stimmy, but today Blur announced care packages for all of the degens that were smart (or dumb?) enough to stick around for the bear. Let's talk about it 1/🧵

Changes in UK. 💵

In the last two months, the UK government went through turmoils. With Truss resigned, Rishi Sunak has been elected as the leader of the Conservative party. New UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is known for his crypto-positive attitude.

Blockworks @Blockworks_

The UK Government wants to go paperless, possibly with the help of blockchain

House on the Block(chain). 🏡

A 3-bedroom house in South Carolina sold for 175,000 USDC as an NFT. The sale was facilitated by Roofstock onChain, the web3 arm of the real estate company Roofstock. Using NFTs to remove intermediary parties has the potential to significantly reduce costs, create more transparency, and increase the efficiency of the home buying process. One-click house buys 🤌

Tweet Check. 🐦

SBF @SBF_FTX

1) Whelp, that was an interesting few days. A retrospective.

Speed Round 🕺

• Robinhood added AAVE and XTZ (Tezos).

• The lawsuit against former OpenSea employee is moving forward, possibly creating precedent for future insider (‘alpha’) trading.

• Azuki founders hosted ‘Proof of Skate’ auction for 8 skateboards authenticated by an embedded chip and plated in 24 karat gold. Auction amassed a total of 2.5 million for the 8 skateboards.

• NFT creators earned $1.8 billion in royalties to date. [Galaxy]

• Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood stepped down as CEO of Parity CEO. (company behind Polkadot)

• NFL players became Deadfellaz characters in DraftKings fantasy NFT collaboration.

• Rarible is now indexing listings from 4 other marketplaces. Welcome #Rarible2.

• Bitcoin was added to Guinness Book of World Records as the first decentralized cryptocurrency.

• Bored Ape co-founders want Otherside to be ‘Web3-Native Roblox’ for adults.

To Read. 📚

• “Toppling the Internet’s Accidental Monarchs: How to Design web3 Platform Governance” by a16z

• “Rise of The Collector Economy: How Crypto is Reinventing the Music Industry” by Forefront

Fun Watch. 📹

Eyes Forward 👀

I’ll be at Art Basel! It’s the best time to be in Miami, and guess what - there’s a conference happening right before. Web3 Summits is the first US Web3 women-led conference, happening in Miami on November 30th and December 1st. Snatch your ticket or request a booth for your project/company here!

What do you guys think of the news? Let me know on Twitter.

-Aleyna

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.

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