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Welcome to another edition of the Weekend Degen Report.
What to expect: 1511 words a 6-minute read.
TLDR: onchaint meta, algo bro, maybe new ripcache? Pokemon and Chimpers evolve and more.
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. Lets dive in!
I recently put the final touches to my blockmon event that is happening this week. You can register here if you want to be reminded/want to check it out. A couple readers have used the code “rekt” on my store to get 10% off and there are four slots left.
I dropped my Nishe piece last week, you can read it below in case you missed it.
Lastly, I dropped a new youtube video over the weekend which has a giveaway tied to it. Just make sure to leave a comment and you’re in. 44 weeks in and feeling real good about where I am heading.
When Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was tragically consumed by flames, Ubisoft, known for their Assassin's Creed game series, played an unexpected but pivotal role in its restoration. Having intricately mapped Notre Dame for their game "Assassin's Creed Unity," they pledged €500,000 for the cathedral's reconstruction and offered their detailed research, the result of over 5,000 hours of study by their team. Maxime Durand, the historian behind the game's accuracy, who had spent four years ensuring a precise representation of Notre Dame in the game, found the tragedy deeply personal, initially doubting the fire's authenticity when first seeing the images. (Note: it does appear there is controversy around this statement just fyi).
A heavy week of news, definitely could not fit it all. It seems that some of the biggest news this past week was more NFTs on-chain. FXHash recently teased an on-chain mint. For those that aren't familiar with FXHash, it's similar to Artblocks but for Tezos. They have a very popular marketplace for generative art on Tezos. Recently, it's also started allowing minting in ETH. It wants to be the go-to place for all gen art Tezos and ETH.
Additionally, a user named Oxdiid was able to work independently on an interface on top of Manifold that lets you fully mint on-chain all your art. Great job to Oxdiid for doing this work. One of the projects that I've been really working on, I wanted it to be on-chain, so this is definitely extremely helpful. Love to see it. Make sure to check out his/her work and support them.
Some other big news is Chimpers recently announced Chimp Evolutions. Basically, there'll be three types of gems: a tier 1, a tier 2, a tier 3. There's only a certain amount of evolutions that are allowed to happen. This isn't a whole separate new collection. This is more of a reimagining of Chimpers that didn't get minted. It's a way to reward the people that have been in the ecosystem, supporting it and doing all the quests.
There are about 89 tier 1 gems, 172 tier 2, and 294 tier 3, all based on rarity. In their Medium article, they went into the distribution based on people that did adventures, some that are being kept by the team, and the Chimp Evolution. Your Chimper will evolve into a new Chimper based on the relevant gem tier. The original Chimper token image and metadata will be updated to show that it's been evolved, and then the gem will be returned back to Master Chimpo. They even go into the downsides and upsides (thank you).
Some other big news on the development side again is Props announcing a new suite of tools for creators. One of the teams behind some of the biggest projects in 2021 like Deadfellas, Woodies and more recently AlphaDogg used Props for their Degen civilization. It's going back to the roots of why we came into Web 3, which is all creators deserve to be paid royalties and have more control over their work.
Instead of allowing third-party marketplaces dictating the terms, you can create your own space. The cool thing about this is that you're able to create a landing page. It's the whole infrastructure: the web page, the delivery of the NFT, it's multi-chain (ETH, Poly, Base, Goerli) it allows allowlist, segments, there's even frientech involved, you can mint on behalf of, there's collection and metadata management. It's the whole suite of tools that you would want as a creator.
One of the first users to use this new suite of tools is, MendezMendez, who's been on my podcast, has a new site and a new project called Cubique that just went absolutely nuts. He was able to use this new suite of tools to customize his mint store.
MendezMendez, had an open edition for about 48 hours. There were 10 unique artworks that would be minted blindly and serialized by edition after review. There was also a raffle for people that had a set of 10 to win a 1/1 minted on SuperRare. Mendez was able to use Props tools to do a pay-what-you-want. Really got to see this tool at its full power and it looks like it lived up to the hype. A total of 1167 pieces were minted. Congratulations to MendezMendez and the Props team.
In other news, a new company called Fileverse has raised 1.5 million in pre-seed money. It aims to be a decentralized version of Notion, with notable backers like Safe, Artweave, and Balaji, the ex-CTO of Coinbase and more.
However, the pros and cons of transitioning from a private server, like Notion, to a decentralized one are not clear yet. I asked them why IPFS couldn't support or create a similar wrapper, but received no response. Still, it's exciting to see new technology like this and I'm keeping an eye on it.
Farcaster, a decentralized social media protocol, has been gaining traction. Someone named Slokh created a Farcaster interface called Flink, and Vitalik conducted an AMA there. The setup is more akin to Reddit, which works well for AMAs. Make sure to check out the Vitalik ama on there, it is way easier to read/follow along.
Courtyard released their Halloween packs last week. Each pack cost $100 and there were 500 available. They sold out in less than a minute. Courtyard has been doing well recently and there's another drop coming soon for holders or collectors. I’ll be dropping a premium article and youtube video on them shortly as they have been on a tear recently.
Ledger has created two Pepe editions of their Nano X. This started as a joke, but the meme took over and it became a reality. It will be interesting to see if Ledger releases a Pepe version after the Grant Yun Cow versions. Let me know which one you prefer, the Cow version or the Pepe version.
Lastly, Lucrece announced his new drop, titled “The Oozer” which you will need to burn a Jack to get. So far about 26 people have burned, and people will have about 12 hours from when this lands in your inbox to burn so you can get the piece below.
The Zealy.io word for this weeks read is, “algobro”. Make sure to get in on the fun and giveaways.
Xcopy continues staying hot. Bangers and Mash sold for 17eth.
A corruption serum was purchased for 11,111tezos or about 4.26eth.
Sketchbook A mint passes settled for $10,777 each. Which is about 689k in total sales for Verse x Mapan. Congrats to all winners and the couple people who caught some paperhands sell for less than final price hours after closing.
Someone put a bid of $1.7M USD on this alien CryptoPunk. Looking forward to seeing if it gets accepted.
Looks like TransientLabs is cooking some heat, might be a ripcache.
Looks like next month will be ACK x Avant Arte. I am hyped to see what the image is.
Monster Month keeps going over at the Lucrece server and things are getting spicy in the carving contest. Looking forward to see if anyone can top this beauty (crafter gang!)
Lastly, after manifold launched their onchain tool, xcopy dropped this bad boy titled “AlgoBro”. Looks like Pixelvault collection is about to have some company in the onchain xcopy world (I am beyond hyped).
Have a great rest of your week!
CIAHOAD-Rick James
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