Welcome to the 28th issue of the DeFi Arts Intelligencer, your weekly source for key happenings around Ethereum art, collectibles, games, and more. Subscribe here.
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For this dispatch:
🎨 Digital Art & Collectibles
NFT marketplace OpenSea just passed the 20,000 user mark. Bravo!
Artist Trevor Jones officially crossed over $100,000 in total sales volume on Nifty Gateway 🔥🔥🔥
Collector WhaleShark purchased Jose Delbo’s “The Last Son of Krypton Fights for Humankind” for 27 ETH, which set a new sales price record for art marketplace MakersPlace.
Artist Jason Bailey of Artnome started a new 3-part “Chromatophore” series on SuperRare …
Artist Carlos Marcial had his Nifty Gateway debut this week for Drop 13. Cheers Carlos!
On Async Art, bidding is now live on artist Fabin Rasheed’s “Chromology,” a “generative, participatory, and interactive artwork intended to create a collaboration between the artist and the audience.”
Avastars has a new community update out (by me 😊). Notably, the project just notched the ~$500,000 mark in all-time volume to date. Also, some particularly high-scoring Primes have been minted in the ongoing Gen1 Series 2 release so far, like Avastar #7694, whose score is 88/100, pictured below. Nice OpenSea hat!
This week art marketplace KnownOrigin highlighted the work of one of my favorite rising artists, Ann Ahoy. Check out some of her pieces!
lil bubble of “All Time Lows” fame was on the lookout for NFT experts …
The grand opening of the Nifty Pride Centre for the Arts took place on July 28th in Cryptovoxels 🏳🌈
The NFT markets data team at NonFungible.com announced an indefinite delisting of market history for the Rarible art marketplace “due to massive wash trading efforts.” For context, Rarible recently started distributing $RARI tokens to buyers and sellers on its platform. “We are blocking wash traders from [the] marketplace every day,” Rarible responded. “It’s tough to be [an] open platform.” Still, NonFungible.com is standing firm in the meantime.
Artist duo Hackatao sold “THE archetype” to WhaleShark on SuperRare for 20 ETH …
🕹️ Blockchain Games
Fuel Labs, the team behind the Fuel optimistic rollup implementation, has revived the “Ethereum Plays Pokemon” game project with, you guessed it, Fuel support. The move comes as Fuel v1 is now live on Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet. Scaling is coming! Scaling is coming!
Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin, a.k.a The Jiho, was a guest on the Into the Ether podcast this week. Don’t miss this one! I was particularly interested when the convo turned to Ronin, the Ethereum sidechain the Axie team is building.
As of this week, fantasy soccer game Sorare had 25% more active wallets than CryptoKitties or Axie Infinity.
♦️♦️ DeFi News
Uniswap facilitated $126 million in trade volume between July 29th and July 30th 🦄🦄🦄. As Qiao Wang put it on Twitter: “This is 1/3 of Coinbase. 1/2 of Kraken. More than Gemini, Polo, and Binance US combined … Pretty incredible TBH.”
The Synthetix protocol is now under the control of 3 separate DAOs: grantsDAO, protocolDAO, and synthetixDAO.
DeFi lending giant MakerDAO now secures over $1 billion dollars’ worth of assets.
MANA, Decentraland’s native token, is now a supported collateral type in the MakerDAO.
MakerDAO’s Dai stablecoin is now the “exclusive stablecoin” of Polyient Games’s upcoming $PGFK NFT sale.
Augur V2 launched. The decentralized prediction marketplace now supports Dai-denominated markets among other improvements.
Lending project Aave is looking to pivot to Aavenomics, a program to decentralize the Aave protocol and update its tokenomics.
Decentralized brand factory METAFACTORY rolled out first-edition YFI SUPPLY hoodies.
📰Fresh Content
“Exploring Non-Fungible Token Business Models” - Andrew Steinwold
“SuperRare Weekly Art Market Report 8” - An Rong
“Interview with Collector: Cao Yin” - SuperRare
Thanks for reading, and stay creative on- and off-chain!
Keep an 👁️ out for the 29th 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. I have NFTs open for offers, too, or you can tip me at wmpeaster.eth. Thanks kindly!
Thanks for the latest issue! I really like quick, digestible "don't bore us, get to the chorus" bullet point format. Keep up the good work.