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Web3 News

Moonbirds NFT collection launch with over $281 million in sales this weekend

Pixelated birds officially took over NFT Twitter this weekend with the release of Moonbirds. Hype for this project has been building up for weeks now, particularly because of the group, Proof Collective, around it.

Built by Kevin Rose and Justin Mezzell, the Proof Collective features holders such as Beeple, Gary Vaynerchuk, and NFT influencer Zeneca33. Holders of the Proof Collective project received 2 free Moonbirds as well as the ability to mint additional birds. With 1,000 Proof passes and a 90 ETH floor price, most people did not get access to the NFT collection this way.

Instead, users were able to mint Moonbirds through an allow-list raffle to avoid pricy gas wars. With a high mint price of 2.5 ETH, a raffle system to gain access, and weeks of hype building around the project, it's no surprise that the collection entered record sales this weekend. Additional features for the NFT project include "nesting", or staking, which will accrue benefits for the holder. More information on this will come within the upcoming weeks.

Kevin Rose has been clear that they are raising money with this high mint price, and with $75 million in minting sales and a handsome royalty on every secondary sale, it'll be interesting to see the direction of this project.

Raising money through NFT sales isn't uncommon in this space. Yuga Labs, creators of The Bored Ape Yacht Club, have done this previously with their Mutant collection. A leaked investor deck even showed their upcoming LAND drop as a method of additional funding as well.

Meta plans to take nearly 50% on all metaverse sales

Earlier last week, Meta announced that they will allow a select number of creators to make and sell digital assets in their Horizon Worlds virtual reality platform. A few months ago, Meta allocated a $10 million Horizon Creators fund to provide resources for creators and it seems that they are announcing their first steps towards this goal.

This sounds promising. Creators can sell fashion accessories, access to new parts of their world, and other items. Additionally, Meta is rewarding creators with their Horizon Worlds Creator Bonus program for those in the US. Creators who have high participants in their world can receive additional monetization in the form of bonus payments.

Unfortunately, Meta fails to mention in their post that they want a 47.5% cut on every sale in their virtual world. Yep. 47.5%. Just a few months after they criticized Apple for charging 30% fees on their Appstore, Meta states they will take a 30% hardware fee and a 17.5% Horizon World fee from each sale in this metaverse.

Web3 has been known for giving power back to users. OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, has been criticized for even taking a 2.5% cut on all transactions. Decentralized marketplaces such as LooksRare redistribute their 2% cut through tokenomics, which were airdropped to millions of users.

Punk6529 announces OM, Open Metaverse

One of the most incredible things about Web3 is how much power is given back to individuals. Decentralization, public/transparency, and equal rights. It's even cooler when a single individual contributes more to this than the internet giants.

Punk6529, a pseudo-anon NFT/Web3 influencer with his hoodie CrypoPunk as his identity, has long been advocating his idea of an "open metaverse". After building in stealth for the past 8 months, he recently announced his launch of the project OM.

The goal is a decentralized open metaverse that can scale up to 100 million people. 10 cities with 10 million people each. Currently, this metaverse has an open invitation and a manual process of joining.

There's a lot to go over, so I highly recommend checking out the Twitter thread which includes demos, 6529's thought process, and links to Discord groups to join!

Pokemon Go to Launch Potential NFT Successor

Niantic, creators of the wildly popular AR game PokemonGo, announced their successor Peridot. While the game is set out to release in the next coming weeks, senior producer Ziah Fogel did not dismiss the possibility of integrating NFTs into the game and that Niantic is "obviously looking at".

With the game being in development for over 2 years, it's not surprising that the team is pushing a release without the NFT integration yet.

Other Web3 News

• Activision sent out a survey to gauge interest in NFTs. Blizzard President did try to respond to this speculation by tweeting "No one is doing NFTs".
• After the anticipation of an early merge, Ethereum 2.0 update will be delayed until the second half of 2022. Despite the delay, Ethereum developers have confirmed that the merge is successful in their shadow fork test
• Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum, is facing lawsuits for unregistered offers and sales of digital tokens
• Epic Games, the studio behind Fortnite, raised $1 billion in funding to build out the metaverse
• AMC allows payments for concessions and tickets using DogeCoin and Shiba Inu on their mobile app

NFT Floor Update

This week's floor update is highlighted by the launch of Moonbirds by Proofxyz. This collection has 10k total NFTs available and was minted @2.5 ETH primarily through allow-lists where users would enter a raffle and if picked could mint an NFTs.

Within 48 hours of the launch, the floor price of the collection has skyrocketed to nearly 20 ETH!

Another project that has been slowly pumping today has been Cryptoadz, which is up 32% since last week and is primarily seeing volume today. Speculation around this pump is most likely from a tweet today where projects featured in Yuga Lab's Otherside trailer would receive an allow-list spot in their upcoming mint for LAND.

NFT Project Update

Bored Ape Yacht Club / ApeCoin DAO

• Yat Siu, the initial proposer of the staking proposals and board member, released a timeline regarding implementing the smart contracts for the proposals.
• Yuga Labs Otherside launch and LAND mint are coming up this month. Stay notified as Yuga isn't shy to have unannounced drops and plans!

MoonBirds

• Moonbirds launched last weekend and are the complete talk on NFT Twitter. Details for their utility, nesting, are planned to release later this month. This insane amount of volume and support cements the project as one of the next "blue-chips"

Azuki

• Azuki's recently teased the artwork for their secondary collection, Beanz, which was airdropped to holders during their Azuki Garden event. The reveal for all NFTs in the collection will happen soon

Cool Cats

• Cooltopia was recently launched and the team was instantly hit with backlash. Users complained that the game felt clunky and the team quickly responded with patches to improve this!
• In their latest townhall, the team behind Cool Cats also announced that they were raising the royalty fees on secondary sales from 2.5% to 5%.

Other NFT Project Updates

• Jenkins the Valet hires ThreadGuy.eth as a Director of Vibez. His role will be to work on social, content, and partnerships for existing and future projects! With most of NFT projects existing through Twitter and Discord, I think projects will begin to hire more aggressively for role similar to this.
• New Doodles proposal to fund 25 ETH towards content and community

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