Welcome to the 14th issue of the DeFi Arts Intelligencer, your weekly source for key happenings around blockchain art, collectibles, and games. Subscribe here.

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For this dispatch:

🎨 Digital Art & Collectibles

• NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway held its first 2 auctions this week. Raúl Cordero’s “It Makes Us Stronger” and Coldie’s “Julian Assange - Decentral Eyes (Gold Edition)” sold for $3,010 and $4,100 respectively.

• Artist XCOPY created new pieces through Pixelchain that are available for sale on the OpenSea marketplace.

• The DCL-Core group held a “Metaverse Fashion Show” in virtual world Decentraland on April 18th. The competition’s judges included NFT artist Josie Bellini, NFT analyst Andrew Steinwold, NFT collector WhaleShark, Axie Infinity team Axiegg, and Decentraland art director Martin Shibuya.

• The latest charity auction hosted in Cryptovoxels raised more than $1,200 for the Humanity Road group.

• Art platform SuperRare is holding a “Stimulus Package Auction” around NFT artworks to help support SuperRare artists amid the ongoing global economic downturn.

• Rocket DAO launched its first loan backed by ENS domain names.

• Artist Matt Kane published “Architects of the Future” on SuperRare.

• The first edition of the First Edition NFT-focused newsletter arrived. Check it out!

• The Meta Factory project unveiled its first bomber jacket auction.

• BlockCities launched its Brooklyn Collection offering …

  BlockCities 🏙 @Blockcities

  The Brooklyn Collection is live✨ - 5 iconic classic buildings from BK - 50 freshly minted, 250 total supply - Today-Friday: Pre-sale auctions on @opensea opensea.io/category/block…

  April 13th 2020

  1 Retweet8 Likes

🕹️ Blockchain Games

• Season 4 of the Axie Infinity Community Alpha begins on April 20th. Moreover, Axie traders are collectively close to having traded more than $1 million worth of adorable Axie monsters to date. ETH is money!

• Gods Unchained, a digital trading card game on Ethereum, just released the second post in the project’s new “Play-to-Earn” Q&A series. This week, the GU team profiled the player GGian.

• Dapper Labs, the team behind the CryptoKitties game, is collaborating with Facebook’s Libra project to make Dapper’s Flow programming language and Libra’s Move language interoperable.

♦️♦️ DeFi News

• Stablecoins on Ethereum reached a collective market cap of $8 billion in Q1 2020, a new all-time high for the stablecoin sector …

  Ryan Watkins @RyanWatkins_

  Q1 2020 was stablecoins’ best quarter ever. Driven by a global flight to safety amidst the coronavirus pandemic, stablecoin issuance ballooned over $8 billion in the quarter. Stablecoins added nearly as much market cap in Q1 2020 as they did in all of 2019.

  April 15th 2020

  11 Retweets67 Likes

• Will Ethereum become the cryptoeconomy’s preferred transaction layer soon? Possibly, especially as the value of Ethereum’s daily on-chain transfers just matched Bitcoin’s for the first time ever.

• Popular lending dapp Compound launched its COMP governance token.

• Ethereum project Gnosis just rolled out the Gnosis Protocol, a decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol that scores high on liquidity

• Overstock.com subsidiary tZERO is working to tokenize $300 million worth of real estate atop the Tezos smart contract platform.

• Atomic Loans introduced its decentralized protocol, which allows users to collateralize bitcoin against automated stablecoin loans atop Ethereum.

• Meet reflex-bonds: a Metacoin-backed effort that is seeking to bring about stablecoin-like low-volatility assets that aren’t pegged to a precise valuation, eg. $1 USD.

• The Uniswap liquidity pool of the bitcoin-pegged imBTC token was drained to the tune of $300,000. An attacker exploited a so-called “re-entrancy” attack vector against imBTC’s ERC777 token design. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, though: ERC777 tokens remain extremely promising.

📰Fresh Content

• “NFT Proof-of-Work - April 2020” - Andrew Steinwold

• “Translating the Art of Hackatao with Eleonora Brizi” - matthew.cent.eth

• “Rather than Banning Stablecoins, Bankers Should Worry About Strengthening Their Own Currencies” - Camila Russo, The Defiant

• “Life in Quarantine #8: Day Five - Staying Healthy” - WhaleShark

• “Upload to IPFS Directly from the ENS Manager with New Tool from Temporal Cloud” - Brantly Millegan

• "Can we do better? And the answer is: Yes, look at Avastars" - Nich.eth

🖌️Extra, Extra

• This week, I bought “Immolation” on SuperRare for 1 ETH from artist Bryan Brinkman. I just found Brinkman’s work, but I feel like I’m already a fan for life. It’s a real treat to be a collector of his stuff this early on. He’s very talented, and I’m excited to track him on a personal level going forward …

  Bryan Brinkman @bryanbrinkman

  Both "Isolation/Immolation" are 💎SOLD!💎 Thanks to @WhaleShark_Pro and @WPeaster for adding these art-siblings to your collections! 🧑‍🚀🔥 For those who missed out, here's some info on the pieces: beta.cent.co/+4zsois

  April 13th 2020

  3 Retweets10 Likes

Thanks for reading, and stay creative on- and off-chain!

Keep an 👁️ out for the 15th issue of the DeFi Arts Intelligencer this time next week, too. Cheers ✌️

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About DeFi Arts Intelligencer

The DeFi Arts Intelligencer is curated by me, William M. Peaster, a professional writer and editor who’s been tracking the Ethereum and Dai beats in recent years.

I’m passionate about art and a DeFi optimist, so putting together this newsletter is both fun and informative for me. I hope others may find the content helpful, too. But be mindful, the information herein should not be construed as investment advice. I’m not a financial adviser, and these are my opinions. Always take care to seriously consider the various layers of risk you face in participating in the still-maturing cryptoeconomy.

If you have a DeFi tip or lead, questions or comments, or would be interested in commissioning me for a writing gig, you can ping me at wmpeaster@gmail.com or on Telegram at @wmpeaster.

If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, feel free to subscribe or have a like-minded friend subscribe as well. Donations accepted at writer.gimmethe.eth, too. Thanks kindly!

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