Gramajo's Newsletter | Is Farcaster The Real Deal Or A Fad?

Welcome to another edition of the 0773H Weekly Report.

What to expect: 1838 words a 8-minute read.

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Creative Corner

GM GM.

I’ve been giving this some thought for a bit but I've decided to move my shenanigan's from this part of the newsletter and moving to my own personal blog. It mostly stemmed from me valuing your time. Most of you are here for web3 roundup news and recap and not necessarily my internal monologue from navigating my thoughts on this media endeavor, my random creative adventures, to debates on how to do things. So a combination of my personal blog and Twitter/Farcaster seemed like the better avenue for my micro blogging writing and experience. Still not sure what to do with this segment or if will disappear completely, I may use it to share some insights from other more established artist but we will see.

Some more housekeeping before we dive in, you may have noticed the name change. I recently went to an IRL event and something struck me as I was meeting a ton of people in real life. And that was that, the name of this newsletter didn’t really feel right as an art focused newsletter. When I initially started this newsletter I did cover pfps and other aspects of degenerate behavior but as I got deeper and deeper into the issues, I switched from pfps and art to mostly art and have stayed there ever since. I personally am shit when it comes to pfp trading and farming for airdrops and there are plenty of other creators focused on that space. So I decided to rename this newsletter to something more inline with my media company name and something more neutral from an art perspective. If you want to read more about the why, how and some of the decision making I did, just read my blog.

Enough of all this, lets get to it.

Knowledge

With the release of Apple Vision Pro, this one seemed appropriate. I am work in the legal industry so I always geek out over this type of stuff. But Apple patented their initial vision of this product back in 2007. I am by no means an Apple fanboy, I used to be a long time ago when they innovated early on. But after a while they stopped innovating and I went to Android for a bit. Now I am back and I am more neutral as a whole on them. But this is crazy stuff to see. They’ve been at this product and its vision for over a decade and now they have released it. And it feels like Apple is back on the innovation front. Although AR/VR goggles are not a new product line, Apple is pushing the boundaries of this space and I am happy to see them. The apps and ecosystem are probably not that great but if you recall, iPhone when it first launched had apps like a lighter and beer app and now you can image your room with LiDar so it is only a matter of time before the apps for Vision Pro take off and we have truly something innovative.

NFT Space

We started off the week strong with a hack from XRP. Ripple was reportedly hacked for 213 million XRP ($112.5 million). The story then changed from Ripple itself not being hacked but the one of the co-founders/executives, Chris Larsen being the one who got hacked. Law enforcement is involved and as of this moment we don’t know how it transpired but never a good look for the space when people are getting robbed large sums of money.

If you’ve been a reader of my newsletter for a bit, then you know I like what Farcaster is doing and have been talking about them for months now. Farcaster the somewhat decentralized social platform that is a mix of Reddit and Twitter has had a CRAZY week. And I truly mean crazy in a bunch of ways. They started off the week with announcing an integration with Privy so now regular folks and those less technically inclined can be onboarded easily. From there they got hugged to death when almost all of crypto Twitter decided to join. Farcaster this past week had over 20k+ Daily Active Users, which is crazy numbers by social media apps but the types of people that Farcaster is attracting is what makes them interesting. The approach Farcaster is using is attracting hardcore builders and crypto native people. This has led to a development of the ecosystem at breakneck pace. Farcaster does not need to be the biggest social media app to “win” there are plenty of niche/big communities that are successful from a DAU, $, really any metric that can be used as examples, from fanfiction websites, to lego building websites and more. And it seems to be working as the space is currently talking about Farcaster more than Solana, which has also been on fire recently. You can follow me on Farcaster here.

Avant Arte is kicking off this month with a limited time drop with Matt DesLauriers. A piece titled Sierra that uses bitmaps and comes with an edition nft piece tied to your physical. For those not familiar, Matt is one of the premier gen art artists, his most notable drop being Meridian’s. Definitely might have to snag one of these pieces to put on the wall (definitely running out of wall space haha).

Claire Silver dropped “corpo | real" digital fashion drop with Braindrops and instantly sold out. The collection is 500 pieces and Claire collected 500eth for this drop. It is a pretty amazing display of AI Art and a fashion look book. The floor is holding steady at 1.25eth as of the writing of this article. Congrats to Claire and the Braindrops team on a dope collection and smooth launch.

The MagicEden team recently launched an NFT wallet. They’ve done a great job with other parts of crypto that I am sure they will do well at this, but I do wonder if they are spreading themselves a bit too thin with the DAO, their marketplace and now this when Phantom is doing a great job.

Tezos and Objkt decided to wake up from their slumber and dropped a nice piece of news. They have created technology to create a Decentralized Autonomous Gallery. So wtf does that mean? The way I interpreted their tweet, as an example I can curate a pixel art theme galley. I make an open call and invite artist to contribute to this collection/curation. As a curator, I build the hype. you bring the piece/art to sell. We agree on the % on sale ahead of time. All done via a smart contract, the holding of the art, the % cut we agreed on and anything else we need to have a “show”. Essentially making a curated gallery like in real life but Web3.

Lastly, tiffatronn dropped a really good looking an edition of five piece titled Some Kind Of Identity Crisis. For most of her pieces, I really enjoy the colors she uses but some of my favorite pieces of her are more “neutral” pieces or ones with less color. They make the colors pop more imo and they work well. I did not win the raffle to buy one of these, but tiffatronn took the time to reward those who have been collecting and participating in her space consistently on top of reaching out to say sorry for not winning. And I wanted to take the time to applaud this behavior. Sometimes the space feels like collectors are just piggybanks and in the middle of a bear, tiffatronn is doing everything right to make sure her collectors are respected and stick around. Thank you for being a kind person in the space.

Notable Sales

Sotheby’s did not waste any time after their ordinals drop by dropping a new lot titled “GRAILS: Starry Night”. Highlights in this drop included Grant Yun, Beeple, ACK, XCOPY, Dmitri and more. Notable sales from this drop include but not limited to:

til death do us part by ACK for 165k, absolutely going Super Saiyan 3 on the estimates.

CITIZENS! by XCOPY sold for 203k.

And my personal favorite other than the ACK one. Red October by Dmitri Cherniak | Helena Sarin sold for 69k.

One of the biggest, if not the biggest sales on Courtyard to date took place. 1st Edition Alakazam Holo PSA 10 just sold for $9,000. Notably, this is around a 50% discount from previous sales. Congrats to the buyer on scooping up a legendary card.

1999 Base Set #1 Alakazam - 1st Edition Shadowless Holo (PSA 10 GEM MINT) just sold 🎉

v from Ripcache sold for 30eth, ~69k USD this past week.

Blood Bubble by xcopy sold for 16eth. Notably included due to Sotheby’s selling one less than 48 hours earlier for 1eth cheaper.

On the heels of Bedtime selling for 69k, Truckstop Diner by Grant Yun went up for auction and sold for 32eth.

Upcoming

Things I am looking forward to.

Grant Yun will be dropping his first piece on Sol later this year around April/May.

I personally love shooting with film and looks like Derech is exploring double exposures on film which is always fun. Lets see if we get a film drop by Derech in the future, hoping that we do!

It appears to be collab season because we have a decent amount of collabs in the future. Most notably, Die With The Most Likes is teaming up with Luis Ponce and Xer0x to probably create that craziest shit we have ever seen the day before Valentines Day. So grab that KY jelly and prepare.

Ledger and Paypal seem to be teaming up on something. It could be a cold storage solution and education with PayPal but who knows. Even if you are not a fan of PayPal or Ledger for their practices, PayPal does have a ton of Web2 people it can help onboard with the help of Ledger.

LexDoom and Sunken0x are teaming up for a collab that we will get more details later this week. LexDoom is known for his pixel work so I am curious to see how this team up will play out but definitely intrigued by the fusion of the styles.

The gamma team seems to be cooking something real big on there end which we should see before the summer ends. The team has done a fanstastic job with Stacks and BTC ordinals so I am curious to see what else they have up their sleeve.

Collectibles

As mentioned in previous issues. I personally love g-shock watches. Doodles and G-Shock are teaming up to drop a collectible watch. And it appears there is a cypher or some kind of message to crack inside of this video. Looking forward to seeing the images of the watch.

Formula 1 has been dropping more and more Lego collabs, from the McLaren and Mercedes ones in recent years. This one featuring Ayrton Senna McLaren is one I definitely plan on picking up.