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Welcome to another edition of the Weekend Degen Report.
What to expect: 1515 words a 7-minute read.
You can support me on Patreon or subscribe to premium below. I also encourage you to check out my archives and podcast for more interviews and writing.
GM GM.
Dropped a segment of the podcast last week and the reception has been positive. Give it a listen below or you can watch it on Youtube.
This week I will also be writing a premium article for all the shitheads. This one is going to be insightful and hilarious. I have been toying with the idea of using Snapshot to put to vote what content I should do next with community input this would be deep dives, premium articles and YouTube. What do you think about that? If you’re interested drop your eth wallet below if you wanted to be added to the community to vote.
Lastly, I recently created a Pokemon Collection tracker built on top of Notion in case any of you want to track your collection with this. You can view it on my store. Lastly, I am running a black friday special on my store where you can use the code degen2023 to get 15% off.
If I were to ask you how a cashew nut looks like in the wild not many could point it out. I recently found out in the last couple of years that cashews grow like the below image. What is crazier, is processing these is mostly done by hand. Whole cashews get a higher premium than mismanaged ones, so till this day it a manual process as each nuts in unique in its shape so a machine cant be made that can help with all unless you are willing to throwaway money. Nuts (literally)
Noble Gallery will be doing a drop with Michael Hafftka. Thanks to Mike from the Noble community for noticing this. Hafftka’s work is represented in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and more.
This past week, Pop Wonder released a new piece, a 1/1 called The Comedown, in collaboration with Infinite Objects. It comes with an Infinite Objects piece as well. It sold for 3 ETH. I highly suggest you check out the animated piece which is really nice. Congrats to the winner!
It's been a crazy week for CryptoPunks. There was a wallet that hadn't been active for 100 plus days. It loaded up in 500 ETH and spent it all on CryptoPunks all in one go (thanks for the tip Mondoggg). Also, congratulations to Mondoggg and OG, readers of this newsletter, on picking up their punks. Punks are definitely on a hot run right now.
Going over to the Courtyard side, I recently dropped a new youtube video this time covering Courtyard. For Thanksgiving, Courtyard is partnering up with a couple Web3 communities and projects. One is Privy, which does a lot of the background infrastructure for Courtyard. Chimpers which is a PFP project. Courtyard as well will be involved in these giveaways. They're going to be bringing some special mystery packs, no fees, all fun, November 13th-17th.
Manifold has been on a tear for quite some time now. They had two pieces of big news this week. They finally gave us more information on their Getting Physical feature. It's going to be a digital pop-up shop basically. They're going to make it really easy for creators to leverage physical items with NFTs. It's going to be done through Shopify (heavy hitter in small business world). Some features on what we can do Payment methods include:
• Burn an NFT
• Pay with Crypto
• Holding an NFT
• Fiat 🔜
We make selling physicals as easy as minting an NFT. First drop was with Fuck Ender called Responsibility. And Lucrece looks like he wants to use this with his new plushie drop.
The integration between SuperRare and Manifold is a little bit tighter now. You can now import contracts on SuperRare either from Transient Labs or from Manifold. Basically, you can mint on either of those platforms and then list on SuperRare. It gives more continuous sovereignty and you are in control. You don't have to be on a shared contract with SuperRare or anything of that nature. Manifold seems to be killing it recently. They deserve all the recognition for their work.
Jake Fried had a drop as well called North Star. It was 100 editions sold for 1 ETH. You can change the type of art that it is as a holder. It's built on the Doppelganger contract from Transient Labs (the tech driving owners the ability to do this). North Star holders are able to select and update the artwork on their editions as often as desired.
Kraken, another crypto exchange in competition with Gemini and Coinbase, is looking to build their own Layer 2 blockchain. Very similar to what Coinbase is doing with Base Layer 2. It'll be interesting to see how Kraken will differentiate itself from the other crypto exchange Layer 2s or any other Layer 2. In the past, Kraken has taken the approach of taking privacy and tech a bit more serious than Coinbase so maybe it will focus on those attributes on its Layer 2 but that is speculation from me.
I've been experimenting again with decentralized protocols. Skiff, an email provider that's trying to compete in the privacy-centric email provider space with ProtonMail and Tutanota, is supporting Farcaster support. Farcaster Profiles.
A company called MailChain is working on a tighter ENS integration. This means you'll be able to have an email-like experience with web3 messages. You can send an encrypted email to another ENS wallet and they'll be the only ones able to decrypt and read it. It's using hashes to encrypt it and then you've got to use that hash to decrypt it.
We have a little bit of this right now too with PGP keys with Protonmail support and a couple other ones. This may be a more streamlined version of this. So, it's great to see companies developing tech for us. It's like using the infrastructure in place from Web3 and leveraging it well, making it more of a user-friendly experience. Everything's going to open up on that front for all of us.
It looks like on top of having a Bitcoin ETF, BlackRock is also trying to do an ETH ETF. This could obviously have big implications for the whole market.
As soon as this news dropped on Forbes and a bunch of other media sites, the price of ETH went up like 10% right off the bat from $1,800 to $2,100. We'll see when we will get these ETFs approved. This might be the catalyst that we need to get into a bull market for crypto.
The Zealy.io word for this weeks read is, “punks”. Make sure to get in on the fun and giveaways.
Algobro seems to have cooled off a bit but sales still continue to happen with a couple sales between 6.9eth and 7.74eth.
Glitch by Ripcache sold for 27.2eth. One of my favorite pieces by Ripcache, congrats to Punketo on getting this one.
Someone got a green afterburn for free (3.5eth).
As a predominantly film shooter, I am looking forward to seeing some film work from Alex Mack.
Someone just listed a banger of an Xcopy piece from early 2019 for 200eth. Curious to see if anyone will scoop it up or if it will sit for a bit.
The Lucrece plushies mentioned above, I think this may a preview of the new smaller sized ones. I suspect manifold will also accept Lucrece’s request to use the new manifold feature so I get to experience that workflow soon enough.
Lastly, Pokemon the company is exploring anticounterfeiting methods with new cards. Hopefully someday in the future we can get some blockchain powered items to counter the counterfeits.
Have a great rest of your week!
CIAHOAD-Rick James
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