Brand Activity
Mattel’s Barbie x Boss Beauties
Mattel has launched its own ‘Digital Collectibles’ marketplace on Flow
The two brands are aligned on elevating women and girls around the world and will be donating $250,000 to the Barbie Dream Gap Project and the Boss Beauties Foundation
The initial drop consisted of “packs” that contain multiple rarity tiered assets launched on May 10 and sold out, with a second drop coming on May 18
Rarer assets give perks such as tickets to the “World of Barbie”
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Renault Digital Twin NFTs with Custom Racing Sneakers
Renault is launching a second collection of 960 physical shoes with digital twin NFTs celebrating its 50th birthday with
The shoes will have an NFC chip that when scanned can recover a second NFT
Links:
https://nftevening.com/renault-debuts-digital-twin-nfts-and-custom-racing-shoe5-sneakers/
Spotify Launches Token-Gated Playlists
Spotify is piloting the integration of token-gated features onto the platform and partnering with NFT communities like Moonbirds
For now the token-gating is only available on Android, but those with Moonbird NFTs will be able to access an exclusive playlist called “Sounds of a Digital Renaissance”
While this use case may seem a bit boring, it’s steps towards a larger token based infrastructure at one of the largest brands in the world
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Star Wars ‘Digital Toys’
Announced on “Star Wars Day” (May the 4th be with you…) Cryptoys will be launching a digital collectibles initiative based on the franchise on May 24th
Each Collectible will cost $39.99 and live on the Flow blockchain which is seeing momentum recently
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NFTs
Pudgy Penguins Raise $9M
Pudgy Penguins continues to gain momentum after its IP purchase from founders accused of “rugging” for $2.5M by Luca Schnetzler (Netz)
They have just announced a $9M raise with the goal of scaling the brand and team
Quote:
“We are thrilled to be able to continue the strong momentum we’ve built over the last year, even in a bear market,” said Pudgy Penguins head of investor relations Vi Powils in the press release. “Today’s milestone is a testament to the vision of our strategic partners, who recognized that Pudgy Penguins is not only a Web3 brand for crypto-natives, but also an accessible IP for everyday consumers around the world, as well as our incredibly talented team.”
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Alo Yoga Launches In-Store NFT Claims with Moonpay
Alo Yoga is allowing visitors to claim an NFT anytime they visit on the Polygon blockchain
The digital collectibles are “daily affirmations” and include artwork based on mindfulness
They are deliberating not using “web3 jargon”:
In the press release, Alo said that the daily affirmation NFTs could provide future benefits for holders, such as token-gated access to events or exclusive sales
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Valhalla Battle Bass
Popular gaming oriented NFT collection Valhalla has launched a loyalty program that seeks to reward long-term holders rather than airdrop farmers
The Battlepass is season-based (120 days) and will provide rewards based on the duration of the held NFT + rarity
At the end of a season, the Valhalla NFT will have it’s metadata updated based on the reward
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AI News
Google Bard Update Challenges ChatGPT4
Google launched a major update to Bard, allowing anyone to use it for free at Bard.Google.com (vs. the $20 a month for ChatGPT)
Bard boasts a comparable dataset to ChatGPT4, but also adds a number of features including being connected to the live internet (rather than stuck in 2021)
Links:
https://decrypt.co/139953/google-bard-openai-chatgpt-ai-wars
Bard.Google.com
Google Launches Hybrid Search/AI Product
The product would effectively integrate some features of its AI LLM, Bard, directly into the search experience by showing paragraphs of AI-generated text and a handful of links at the top of the results page, instead of the traditional list of blue links
For users looking for a quick answer, this is no doubt a better system, but website publishers are concerned that this will lead to a decline in traffic to their site (as users won’t bother clicking thru if they have their answer)
This could raise a question on whether publishers that contributed to the AI generated answer should be compensated for doing so as they will be losing out on the “click thru” revenue
Links:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/google-ai-search-could-squeeze-web-traffic-publishers-worry.html
Meta Integrates Generative AI Features into its Ad Infrastructure
The AI tool is focused on helping advertisers adjust a core ad for different formats and audiences
Advertisers will be able to target their content to different audiences and have the copy automatically adjusted to better suit them (while keeping the messaging in tact)
Users will also be able to generate backgrounds via natural language input, and reformat ads for different specs and mediums
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Metaverse / Gaming
Keeping Perspective on The Metaverse
While mainstream media declares the “metaverse” dead, Tim Sweeney points out quite the opposite… (Substack is at war with Twitter so can’t embed!)
“The metaverse is dead! Let's organize an online wake so that we 600,000,000 monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, Sandbox, and VRChat can mourn its passing together in real-time 3D.”
There is a generational divide in views on “the metaverse” which is not frankly how many of those participating in it would describe it anyway… it’s just being online
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Epic Games Invests in Digital Fashion
CLO Virtual Fashion is a fashion design platform that is already integrated with the Unreal Engine
It hosts a marketplace where garment designs can be bought and sold
Quote:
“Bringing high-quality digital fashion into real-time virtual worlds is complex and can be a creative barrier for digital fashion creators,” Kim Libreri, Epic’s CTO, said in a statement. “It is exciting to see how CLO Virtual Fashion’s solutions work with Unreal Engine to help designers across industries make life-like digital fashion garments.”
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Alibaba
Alibaba and the Avalanche blockchain have partnered to provide a launchpad for Alibaba clients to build their own metaverse experiences on the chain
Quote:
“For [Alibaba Cloud], their partners are asking to be a part of web3,” Wu said. “So we will be dedicating resources to make it easy for them to make their own SDKs on top of ours.”
While Avalanche provides the blockchain layer, other partners are contributing to the launchpad with virtual design, event, ecommerce, etc. capabilities
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10KTF Teases Game, Yuga All-In on Gaming
10KTF, recently acquired by Yuga, teased that they are building a game in their Thursday news drop adding yet another distinct game to Yuga’s pipeline
This will likely be tied into Battle.town and their PFP launch (via G-Tags NFTs)
And sheds some light on Yuga’s plans to become a gaming juggernaut (having hired a number of major gaming execs to key roles)
Microsoft X Activision merger held off by British regulators
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocked the Microsoft metaverse-related purchase of Activision Blizzard which has been in the works for over a year
The block was due to concerns over competition in the “cloud-gaming" market which includes live-streamed “metaverses” like Sandbox
Links:
https://nftevening.com/game-over-microsofts-massive-69-billion-metaverse-takeover-halted-by-uk-regulators/
Crypto
$PEPE Coin and the Meme Coin Craze
Digital asset speculators have taken their money out of NFTs and are now chasing a variety of meme coins beginning with $pepe
These meme coins are incredibly volatile as money chases whatever is getting attention at the time
The craze is driving gas prices through the roof and making it very difficult to work on Ethereum
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Deloitte Experiments with On-Chain Digital Credentials
Deloitte is leveraging a Polkadot parachain (parallel chain) for their clients to store digital credentials in one wallet with the goal of making KYC initiatives more efficient
The credentials will serve various use cases, including regulatory compliance for banking and decentralized finance (DeFi), age verification for e-commerce, private logins and fundraising
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