NFT ERA

2022-04-16 18:05:41 ​​Emirates plans to launch NFTs and expand experiences in metaverse

Emirates plans to expand the airline’s use of the metaverse and launch NFTs to increase revenue and improve customer service, it said in a statement on Thursday.

The NFTs are designed to be both collectible and utility-based, and the first projects are already underway, with launch anticipated in the coming months, it said.

Emirates added that its Emirates Pavilion at the Dubai Expo 2020 site will be repurposed as a center for innovation and future-focused projects involving the metaverse, NFTs and web3.

CEO and chair Saeed Al Maktoum said: “Dubai and the UAE are blazing the way in the digital economy, having a clear vision supported by practical policies and regulatory frameworks in areas such as virtual assets, artificial intelligence, and data protection.”

He added that the company is “committing a significant investment in financial and resourcing terms, to develop products and services using advanced technologies that will deliver on revenue, brand experience, and business efficiencies.”

The Block reported last month that Binance had become the latest firm to be granted a virtual asset license in Dubai, following FTX. Open / Comment

2022-04-14 18:19:09 ​​Just-In: Emirates Airline Plans To Issue NFTs In Web3 Push

Emirates, the United Arab Emirates’ biggest airline, said on Thursday it plans to launch collectible and utility-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aimed at improving customer interaction and revenues.

The airline also plans to transform its pavilion at Dubai’s Expo for metaverse, NFTs, and Web3 projects. The move aligns with advancements in developing a digital economy in Dubai and the UAE.

Emirates to issue NFT collection

The flag carrier of the UAE, Emirates, has joined the growing crypto adoption in the country after the region announced comprehensive regulation for digital assets. Emirates will be launching its first NFT projects in the next few months, the company announced on April 14.

Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates airline, affirms the digital economic developments in the country, especially in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, supported by clear regulations and policies from the government bodies.

“Emirates has always embraced advanced technologies to improve our business processes, enhance our customer offering, and enrich our employees’ skills and experiences.”

Moreover, the company intends to seek investment opportunities in the metaverse, NFTs, and Web3 technologies to boost its revenue, provide a better brand experience, and improve business efficiencies.

Emirates also plans to repurpose its Dubai Expo’s pavilion into a center for innovation to push metaverse-based experience in future projects. Moreover, the airline plans to hire global talent for working on future projects. The airline is pioneering in adopting new technologies.

Emirates’ flagship A380 aircraft and Boeing 777-300ER Gamechanger aircraft already offer virtual reality experiences to customers. Last year, the airline launched its own VR app on the Oculus store.

NFT adoption rises in non-web3 companies

Emirates is not the only airline exploring the NFT space. Recently, Australian flag carrier Qantas announced releasing digital art collectables as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Moreover, owners of Qantas NFTs will earn Qantas Points and other rewards.

Spanish airline Air Europa partnered with blockchain-based travel firm TravelX to offer NFT airline tickets, called NFTickets.

The moves come amid growing adoption of blockchain technology by traditional businesses. Several established lenders, such as HSBC and JPMorgan, have also made their own forays into the metaverse. Open / Comment

2022-04-13 11:40:00 ​​MetaBlaze (MBLZ) to Join the Ranks of Top Metaverse Coins: The Sandbox (SAND), & Axie Infinity (AXS)?

In 2021, crypto saw an unprecedented level of success. With meme and DeFi coins reaching over 10000% gains by year’s end along with the Metaverse seeing global adoption; a lot of new millionaires were made in this space! It’s now 2022 and there is yet another craze that has taken over – GameFi, which offers something major compared to other cryptocurrencies: A sustainable future.

It’s now 2022, and more & more people are flooding into the crypto space looking to get in on the next big project that is “going to the moon”. MetaBlaze Token (MBLZ) is one new project gaining tremendous traction over the last few months. The company merges GameFi with DeFi to capture the most exciting and fastest-growing elements within the crypto space.

During the pandemic Axie Infinity (AXS) saw astronomical growth with its Pokémon-inspired play-to-earn game, boasting a current market cap just below $3.5 Billion. The Sandbox (SAND) is another market leader with a market cap upwards of $3.5B, and Decentraland (MANA) is the frontrunner with a market cap of nearly $4.5B.

Blockchain is Forever Changing the Future of Gaming

With the advent of blockchain technology, a new era of gaming is upon us. GameFi is at the forefront of this revolution, combining gaming, crypto, NFTs to create the newest gaming experience: P2E (play-to-earn). This is all made possible by Blockchain technology. P2E games can range from simple strategy games and hyper-casual games all the way up to full-blown Metaverse RPG experiences with diverse elements and a wide array of utilities. Blockchain technology is forever changing the way we play games, and P2E is the new dominant gaming model. Instead of just winning or losing, you are now able to get paid in crypto for engagement and fully own your digital assets.

AXS
Up 32,817.60% since launch, Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based game that allows you to purchase, breed, and battle NFT creatures. These NFTs are non-fungible tokens that are stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The game also includes an in-game currency called Axie (AXS), which can be used to purchase NFTs, breed new creatures, or participate in battles. The game has become extremely popular since its launch in 2018, and its popularity has only grown as time goes on.

SAND
Up 4,570.00% since launch, the utility token of The Sandbox gaming ecosystem is currently traded on the most popular cryptocurrency platforms. In early 2020, the company launched its meta-universe, where users can buy virtual lands, create their own neighborhoods, open stores or entire factories, and purchase clothing and accessories for their avatars. Sand tokens act as a payment instrument for this virtual world. In addition, token holders will be able to participate in the platform management and vote for decision-making that concerns the technical development of the meta-universe.

MANA
Up 9,637.52% since launch, Decentraland is a virtual world where players can create heroes, buy land or buildings, produce and sell goods, and offer real-world services. This metaverse uses MANA tokens as its internal currency, and players can use these to make purchases in the virtual world. The Decentraland universe is constantly expanding, and the game offers new challenges and opportunities for players to explore.

MBLZ
MetaBlaze Token (MBLZ) is one of those new crypto projects where one may see meta-massive gains. MetaBlaze Token (MBLZ) is multi-chain built on the Binance Smart Chain with an upcoming version launched on the Ethereum Blockchain. MBLZ will serve as the native currency within its gaming Metaverse. As sales of Virtual Real Estate in the Metaverse rocket to never-before-seen highs, MetaBlaze will take on a vital role in this movement by including property ownership as one element of its game strategy; virtual lands are available to buy, rent, sell, or tax within its gaming Metaverse. Open / Comment

2022-04-12 15:50:00 ​​Controversial Artist Brings Dark Humor to the Metaverse With Colorful NFTs

Joan Cornellà, a Spanish artist, known for his cheerful palette yet dark humorous comic strips, has launched his first-ever NFT project this April in collaboration with digital and physical asset curated platform FWENCLUB.

Dubbed “MOAR”, Cornellà’s collection features 5,555 unique, hand-drawn NFTs, including 50 “legendary artworks” based on the artist’s iconic male and female drawings with over 180 unique attributes.

The collection will revolve around a mansion in the metaverse called MOAR, wherein 5,555 “creatures with their souls minted with the ERC721 blockchain as NFTs”.

74% of the total supply will be offered to the public in the Dutch auction, while the 5% will be kept by Cornellà and FWENCLUB. Meanwhile, a whitelist consisting of the FWENCLUB Discord community, Hanai’s NFT holders, NFT communities, and social boosters will get the remaining 21%.

At the time of writing, MOAR also appears on OpenSea with a floor price of 0.94 ETH. The “Legendary” MOAR #1, the collection’s “most valuable and sought-after” profile picture NFT, currently has a top bid of 3.4 ETH or over $10,800 in the NFT marketplace.

Aside from the digital assets, holders will earn airdropped raffle tickets for a chance to win a 3D avatar in the metaverse, access to Cornellà’s physical and virtual exhibition, and exclusive purchasing rights to the artist’s physical and digital art – consisting of toys, sculptures, paintings, and other digital assets.

The MOAR NFT drop is just the tip of what’s to come according to the FWENCLUB website. Ahead of the “grand opening” of the MOAR metaverse slated in November 2022, a mini-game will be launched and special rewards will be doled out to engage the community in May and June, respectively.

“By trying different things, I can express myself through my works in different mediums. It’s always good to try new things and here comes my first-ever NFT collection. I believe working with FWENCLUB can bring new interesting creations.”

Joan Cornellà is notorious for his unsettling and surreal dark humor artworks shared on Web2 social media. Regardless, the cartoonist has gained international recognition for his satirical social commentary illustrations, exhibiting his work in various art epicenters such as New York and Hong Kong. Open / Comment

2022-04-11 16:10:00 ​​China’s Sichuan province launches NFT marketplace

The cultural and tourism authority in Southwest China’s Sichuan province built a non-fungible token (NFT) trading platform to “encourage the music industry to actively adopt modern technology.”

See related article: China’s Shandong TV to build NFT marketplace

Fast facts:
The Sichuan government Thursday said a number of music companies are using blockchain technology to safeguard their copyright.

Sichuan has emerged as a hotbed of modern Chinese music.

Many companies in China refer to NFTs as “digital collectibles” following state media’s denouncement of the market frenzy.

However, the Sichuan authority did not shy away from using the term “NFT” in its Thursday statement.
The department that released the statement told Forkast the NFT platform project was outsourced to a local blockchain company.

Meanwhile, some Chinese state media are also building their own platforms.

Shandong province’s state-run television station last week said it plans to build a “digital collectibles” trading platform.

The Economic Daily, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, called for stricter regulation of “digital collectibles” last week. Open / Comment

2022-04-10 20:00:13 ​​Coinbase's Upcoming NFT Platform Has 4 Million People on Waitlist

Using MasterCard to pay for an NFT is one of the options anticipated.

NFTs might someday overtake the cryptocurrency market according to Coinbase CEO.

More than 100 content creators have met with Coinbase NFT – the account for Coinbase’s planned NFT marketplace — to collaborate on launching their new NFT marketplace on March 14. Coinbase is a major crypto-exchange platform with a large user base. It’s most popular in the United States. Nearly 90 million distinct accounts are registered on the platform’s official website and many people are eagerly awaiting the debut of Coinbase NFT.

Many new features have been speculated, including some that have never been seen before. Using a MasterCard to pay for an NFT is one of those options. Unfortunately, only Ethereum-based NFTs are supported when the platform becomes live. So even though one won’t need a wallet to store their asset, one will still need a crypto wallet that supports NFTs to keep it safe.

High Anticipation Among Participants
More than 4 million people have signed up for the queue as of right now. Because you’ll be the first to know when it will be released, you’ll be able to view the market before most other people. However, there has been no formal announcement of a launch time. Market participants may expect a slew of new features, including those not yet available on the competition’s platform.

Coinbase’s new “social function” that they believe will be their most distinguishing feature, enabling them to build a community of artists that will develop exponentially. NFTs might someday overtake the cryptocurrency market, according to Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, which is why they’re working on a marketplace that delivers a more immersive experience like Instagram or Facebook. Open / Comment

2022-04-07 14:45:00 ​​China’s Communist Party wants to regulate NFTs

The Economic Daily, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, called for stricter regulation of “digital collectibles” as investors continue to speculate in non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Fast facts:
The Economic Daily argued against treating NFTs as cultural and creative products, calling instead for the asset class to be regulated as a currency, commodity and/or a security.

The phrase “digital collectibles” is a euphemism for “NFTs” as China frowns on speculation in the emerging asset.

The article criticized NFT trading platforms for operating resale markets, warning buyers that the “rug could be pulled” anytime.

Ironically this comes amid state-run television stations themselves launching NFT marketplaces.

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP, and Shandong TV have their own marketplaces with Shanghai Securities’

NFTs surging in second-hand sales.

Meanwhile, China’s tech giants have self-regulated amid the regulatory uncertainty, with Alibaba imposing a 180-day lock-in before a resale. Open / Comment

2022-04-05 13:20:00 ​​Ethereum Makes it to Reddit Places

The ethereum logo has been featured on a new experiment by Reddit that has attracted close to 4 million subscribers.

Reddit places provided a blank board where anyone can place a pixel every five minutes.

These simple rules were enough to create waring tribes where artists fight on flagies – the ones that just draw flags – with streamers torpedoing both while little communities become collateral carnage.

To survive, eth heads aligned with WallStreetBet ‘apes’ to carve a little corner for themselves as pictured above.

Alas that didn’t last with the canvas now completely transformed as bots laugh at the inefficiency of man while drawing a medieval waring knight carrying a Russian flag.

So we reject this usurpation and in protest of bot rule, we have frozen the canvas as far as we are concerned and have made it an NFT for eternity.

The NFT of the featured image above was fairly easy to do, and remains from now on the forever more true Reddit canvas. All others are fake.

Not least because it looks very pop art and an embodiment to some extent of some online culture.

The rowdy messy one, yet orderly with plenty of creativity and plenty to see.

The fun one where people collaborate for better, rather than the bot war nonsense where small communities are not respected.

So the experiment succeeded, for about one day, and successfully failed as Trustnodes got a fairly cool image and NFT out of it.

While Reddit Places therefore might worsen and worsen, the blockchain will stay at its best, at least for now, as humans keep staying a step ahead of these bots that Reddit seemingly loves to host. Open / Comment

2022-04-04 15:05:00 ​​How the $35M Fractal Just Raised Could Rock the NFT Space (Op-Ed)

The announcement came on April 1, but it was no joke. Neither was the amount raised, $35 million USD, a tidy sum. Justin Kan dropped a hint of what was ahead for Fractal last month, tweeting, “Yeah, I built Twitch, it has millions of users & gaming NFTs are way bigger.”

Ten days before launching the NFT marketplace on Dec 30 last year, Fractal announced the launch, and by the time it went live, the Fractal Discord had accumulated some 107,000 followers, according to Kan in an interview with GamesBeat.

Paradigm and Multicoin Lead $35M Seed Round
Along with Menlo Park, California-based Andreeson Horowitz, Solana Ventures, Coinbase, Animoca Brands, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital, TerraForm CEO Do Kwon, Tim Ferriss, and the founders of Ramp along with many others joined the round.

Kan, however, took to Twitter to remind stakeholders in the Fractal and NFT community, as well as any start-up entrepreneurs looking on that, “it’s not the size of your seed round it’s what you do with it.” With the crypto market in bloom with echoes of NASDAQ in the late 1990s, it’s an important admonition for both crypto-investors and startups.

Here’s what Kan says Fractal has in the works with the fresh infusion of private capital raised three months from launching:

“Crypto never sleeps. We’re building stuff super fast, very product-driven, it feels like we’re defining how value’s going to be created on the Internet again. So if you haven’t been following along, Fractal is a marketplace for people to buy and sell and discover gaming NFTs. We’ve been hard at work at it for the last three months. It has been going pretty well. We’ve been working with a lot of gaming partners to drop sold out NFT collections, and we have a ton more in the pipeline…”

A press release from Fractal Friday specifies further:

“Fractal is building a trust layer in the web3 gaming ecosystem. NFT marketplaces are still the wild west right now, with many teams failing to deliver on their promises. We are working with the best AAA gaming studios with large communities to bring the coolest game experiences to players.”

He predicts that over the next decade, blockchain assets will enable a bigger shift in online gaming than the deployment of the Twitch platform did. Kan has set a lofty goal of onboarding some 100 million cryptocurrency users by powering its NFT marketplace for blockchain-supported digital gaming assets.

Will Solana-powered Fractal Make as Big a Splash in NFTs as OpenSea?
Fractal is powered by the Solana blockchain, a third-generation blockchain that utilizes proof of stake (POS) to qualify nodes to validate and secure actions on the network. That allows it a high degree of scalability and the ability to handle a large volume of transactions in a trustless peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Its proprietary PoS method is dubbed proof of history (PoH) by Solana.

Protocol’s Tomio Geron reported Friday that Solana’s super-fast blockchain platform needs a killer app to break out into the mainstream, speculating Fractal’s NFT marketplace could be that app. The key to success in this endeavor is quality. VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi reported Friday that Kan says Fractal carefully vets applications from web3 games, and currently has an acceptance rate of only 5% of applications for their tokens to market on its NFT clearinghouse.

Some notable games currently listing NFTs on Fractal include House of Sparta (real-time strategy), Tiny Colony (multimode), Yaku (racing), and Cinder and Nekoverse (MMO RPG). Open / Comment

2022-04-03 17:28:03 ​​Wexford releases full-length studio album as NFT on SkyHut, first album to land on Neo N3

Wexford is minting its first full-length studio album, OK Suburbia, on the Sky Hut NFT marketplace. The album is stored on NeoFS and is the first to be released as an NFT on Neo N3. Minting began at 2:00 p.m. (UTC) on Friday, April 1, 2022. Each album costs 6 GAS to mint, and there is a total supply of 200 that can ever be minted.

Wexford is an alternative rock band based in Huron, Ohio, US. The three members – Dave Mueller, Randon Walter, and Andy Kohlmann – united during the lockdowns that resulted from the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The band pre-released the song Those Eyes on YouTube, and Less than Alone, which recently aired on 95.3 WLKR, a radio station in Ohio, US.

The band collaborated with Rachele Liba, an artist out of Los Angeles, California, US, to create a piece of unique album art for each of the 12 songs included in the OK Suburbia NFTs. After minting an album, the purchaser will receive one NFT for each song and its associated cover art.

Once all 200 albums are minted, Wexford will airdrop 10 Neo ecosystem NFTs to random wallets. The airdrops will include TOTHEMOON Character types, a ForTheWin RUNE, and Humswap BOWLs, Tigers, ANS, and ANC NFTs.

What are Music NFTs?

An NFT is a unique digital item held by one wallet address at a time. They are minted using smart contracts and typically include metadata, such as a URL that links to a place where content (such as an image or other media file) can be downloaded. NFT prices vary, especially in secondary markets where they can be seen as investments or speculative vehicles.

In recent years, musicians have created NFTs of their songs and sold them directly to their fan base via NFT marketplaces. This process can enable a more exclusive relationship between the musician and their supporters. Instead of listening to a song through a streaming service that will distribute minimal royalties to the artist, the fan can purchase a copy directly from the artist. This can give musicians more control over distribution and sales.

Once the NFT is purchased, the owner can download the song or album, and any other content made available within the metadata of the NFT. If it’s an audio file or a full-length album, downloaded files can then be played in a music player such as iTunes. The NFT can also be put up for sale or auction on a secondary marketplace, but the original owner can still maintain copies of any songs or images on their hard drive after they’ve sold the NFT.

Artists that issue content as NFTs can also bake in royalty fees, which would be paid to the artist upon future sales of the NFT. This can create a new revenue stream for the artist beyond the initial sale.

The music NFT space is nascent, and artists are still exploring potential use cases for their NFTs. Examples of unique uses can include discounted concert tickets, meetups with the artists, access to special events, and other unique perks. Open / Comment