Web3 Roundup 2.20

A roundup of activity in NFT, Metaverse, Gaming and AI

Brand Activity

McDonalds Lunar New Year Activation

• Interactive commercial that leverages AR to showcase 3D art in your living room in celebration of the Lunar New Year

Karen X. Cheng @karenxcheng

The first NeRF in a TV commercial! It starts with a scene of a younger version of me, and then transitions to present-day me Directed by @nortondirector using @LumaLabsAI for @McDonalds *at least, it's the first commercial that I know using NeRF, if you know of another lmk :)

Rolling Loud Music Festival fails to sell out their first NFT collection

• LoudPunx NFTs provide global VIP entry into every Rolling Loud Music Festival

• Rolling Loud Festival attempted to sell 10,000 NFT’s at a price of 1 ETH but only sold 2,435

• Using an NFT for admission just twice would come close to recouping the mint price.

• Article Link: https://nftnow.com/features/exclusive-how-rolling-loud-plans-to-bridge-hip-hop-and-web3/

Hermes wins lawsuit against copycat NFT Metabirkins

• Mason Rothschild, a California-based digital artist that created and sold the "MetaBirkin”, a collection of 100 NFT’s depicting faux-fur iterations of the iconic Birkin bag. Physical Birkin bags can easily retail for six figures.

• This marks the first NFT trademark trial and could set the stage for future lawsuits

  

• Article Link: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c043ba9c-9541-4727-b398-5d3a9ca30cb9

Reddit X Super Bowl Give Away Themed Traits

• Reddit teamed up with the Super Bowl and allowed users to pick a competing team’s traits to customize their reddit avatar

  

• Traits are modular and can be combined with other collections, as well as equipped at any time with no gas fees

• Over 1 million Super Bowl X Reddit NFTs have been claimed

• Article Link: https://decrypt.co/121087/reddit-million-free-super-bowl-nfts-polygon

Lamborghini preps NFT drop

• Lamborghini is partnering with VEVE to drop its first digital collectible

• Not much more detail is known at this point

• Article Link: https://nftevening.com/veve-x-lamborghini-partner-to-drop-automobile-nft-collectibles/?utm_source=os

Amazon Entering Web3 via Gaming

• Amazon plans to launch a web3 gaming initiative this Spring

• This would be another massive onboarding event

AndrewFine.eth @andrewfine_

Amazon is about to dive head-first into Web3. Will they disrupt the space as a whole? 🧵👇 (1/10)

Louis Vuitton NFT Collab

knv @knveth

louis vuitton will be dropping NFTs in collaboration with an extremely celebrated artist to celebrate their 200th anniversary but have not once mentioned NFTs in single breath - imo this is the way normies can be onboarded, we need to collectively kill the word NFT

NFTs

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s ‘Dookie Dash’ Gaming is Over

• The Temple Run style game put out by Yuga Labs has officially closed

• With a reward for best score this activation saw some strong cross pollination between prominent gamers and streamers and the Web3 native audience

  • In fact, a Fortnite pro logged the top score

• Dookie Dash was a financial success for Yuga with the free mint earning over 2 million USD in secondary creator fees

• However this is not the end- Yuga has revealed that this is the first step in a process that will take months all building up to the mint of their new “Mech” collection

• No one knows the exact nature of future activations though the bar has been set high

  

Check’s Dynamic NFT Art Project Grabs Web3 Attention

• Checks was a free mint in January that explored themes of authenticity and verifiability on the internet

• The art’s metadata was updated many times creating an experience for holders (rather than a static piece of art)

@jackbutcher @jackbutcher

• Article Link: https://nftnow.com/features/jack-butchers-checks-are-burning-whats-next/

• Check’s Website & Overview: https://checks.art/intro

Bitcoin NFTS

• A new process on the Bitcoin blockchain effectively allows for Bitcoin NFTs to exist

• It’s TBD whether this hype will have legs or is more of a fad

• Bitcoin NFTs are inherently less functional than Ethereum smart contract based NFTs and confined to static art as of now

dotta @dotta

A guide to buying Ordinal NFTs for Ethereum people who are Bitcoin-curious:

Blur Airdrop ‘Stimulus’ Rewards NFT Traders for Activity

• NFT Marketplace Blur incentivized users to buy and sell NFTs on their platform with an airdrop of their new cryptocurrency $blur

• The airdrop went live this week providing ‘free money’ to many NFT traders

• Many traders immediately sold their drop while the price remained high

• Article Link: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/02/15/nft-marketplace-blurs-token-reaches-500m-trading-volume-after-airdrop/

AI News

Google $100B in market cap after it’s Bard presentation (ChatGPT competitor) falls flat

• After Microsoft Bing’s integration with ChatGPT, Google is rushing to launch a competing product

• Article Link: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155650909/google-chatbot--error-bard-shares

While AI will disrupt industries and replace jobs, it may create a new one: The Authenticity Industry

• Great thread musing on this subject below

Balaji @balajis

The Authenticity Industry It’s both already here and the next big thing. It’s anti-fraud and proof-of-human. It’s detecting deepfakes and banning bots. It’s computer captchas and Turing tests. It’s proctoring and auditing. It’s the jobs AI creates in lieu of those it automates.

Metaverse and Gaming

Zero10 Launching an AI-enabled feature for users to create their own AR Fashion

• After launching its AR Fashion Platform in November, Zero10 is launching Custom Shop, an AI-enabled feature that helps users create AR fashion

• Article Link: https://www.voguebusiness.com/companies/zero10-wants-to-crack-open-3d-and-ar-fashion-design-for-the-masses

Ready Player Me Launches Generative AI Avatar Creator

• Users can tap DALL-E’s generative AI art platform to use text prompts to create their own avatar outfits

• Article Link: https://venturebeat.com/games/ready-player-me-launches-trial-of-generative-ai-avatar-creator/

Crypto

Crypto ads are ‘banned’ from the Super Bowl

• Jack’s hot take: No crypto companies were buying so why not get a PR win by banning them?

• An NFT company ‘Digidaiku’ did have an ad with a QR code that led to their NFT collection (and saw massive sales as a result)

• Article Links:

  • https://watcher.guru/news/crypto-commercials-banned-from-super-bowl-ads-following-ftx-collapse

  • https://decrypt.co/121152/digidaigakus-super-bowl-ad-baffles-viewers-free-nfts-still-selling-700

Moonpay and Looksrare announce partnership

• Similar to their partnership with OpenSea, Moonpay is introducing an NFT checkout integration with Looksrare that allows anyone to buy NFTs with a credit card.

• Article Link: https://news.bitcoin.com/moonpay-and-looksrare-partner-to-bring-convenient-nft-purchasing-to-the-masses/

SEC comes for ‘staking’ and fines Kraken $30M

• After the FTX fallout, the SEC is taking aggressive action against cryptocurrencies and is regulating ‘Staking as a Service’ in the US which many exchanges offer

• Article Link: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/02/09/us-securities-and-exchange-commission-sues-kraken-over-crypto-staking-services/