DeFi Arts Intelligencer - Feb. 1st, 2020

Welcome to the 3rd 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

• SuperRare’s newest artist ALGOMYSTIC sold their first tokenized piece, “A certain kind of happiness,” for 14 ETH.

  ΛLGΘMΨSΓIC @algomystic

  Yippee! sold my first ever #CryptoArt piece for 14 ETH ~ USD $2480! 🎉🤩💖 @SuperRare_co 💎 superrare.co/artwork-v2/a-c…

• Artist duo Hackatao sold the piece “Nude Veritas” to the collector WhaleShark for 23.69 ETH. In doing so, they returned to the top of SuperRare’s artist earnings leaderboard with 169.7 ETH earned to date.

  

• Want to learn how to build NFTs? OpenSea’s Devin Finzer has you covered.

• NFT Scribe has been upgraded. Powered by a smart contract, the service allows users to add on-chain annotations to ERC721 tokens. It’s a great in-progress tool for NFT artists and collectors.

• Mark your calendars if you’re in the New York area: the NFT.nyc event is coming up on February 20th.

• The KnownOrigin NFT art marketplace is keen on embracing rDAI to generate interest for covering its users’ transaction costs.

  Peter ($MAGIC) @pet3rpan_

  KnownOrigin (@KnownOrigin_io) looking to stake in @rDAI_dao to cover the cost of their user's meta transactions through DeFi interest. Glad to see it come together team KO ✨

  

  medium.comPleaseRelayMe — truly free meta-transactions for dApps and usersLeveraging DeFi building blocks like rDAI, Kyber along with the Gas Station Network with the goal of providing free transactions and…

• Tokenized fine wine will soon be available for trading on OpenSea.

🕹️ Blockchain Games

• No-loss lottery game PoolTogether had a breakout week, hitting $1 million in underlying funds and a $1,400 weekly prize.

  Spencer Noon @spencernoon

  Congratulations to @PoolTogether_ for crossing the $1m Dai milestone! 🎉k

  

• Earning Dai in Axie Infinity? The feature looks like it’s dropping soon.

• Sometimes in life you just get lucky …

  Patrick @Patrick081295

  I managed to breed a pure frosty Xmas Axie on my last chance with a chance of about 3,33% 🙀 @AxieInfinity #XmasAxie #AxieInfinity #Lucky333N

  

• One mystic Axie just sold for 1.42 ETH.

♦️♦️ DeFi News

• 50 million Dai are now locked in the Dai Savings Rate (DSR) smart contract system. Wow! Just over 100 million Dai currently exist.

  👹Mariano Conti | conti.eth @nanexcool

  50 Million Dai locked in DSR! 🚀 That's: 46.74% of total Dai or about 50 Dai per blockstack user! ❤️ daistats.comj

  

• The value of stablecoin transfers has flipped the value of ETH transfers on Ethereum.

  Ryan Watkins @RyanWatkins_

  1/ Stablecoin transfer value has now flipped ETH on Ethereum 👀V

  

• Synthetix, the on-chain synthetic assets project, released its 2020 roadmap.

• “Improving NFT market efficiency helps property digitalization,” said Alex Masmejean, one of the minds behind NFT collateral project Rocket, which just issued its first NFT-backed loan.

• DeFi Dad offered a great list of resources for tracking big DeFi projects.

  DeFi Dad [formerly Crypto Dad] @DeFi_Dad

  Bookmark all these, #DeFi Fam. Daistats.io mkr.tools DeFiPulse.com @ConsenSysCodefi Compare DeFi Score tracker.kyber.network/#/ Dashboard.synthetix.io Pools.fyi defistats.io/#/ TokenSets.com

  

  Anthony Sassano | sassal.eth @sassal0x

  What are your favorite trackers/tools for keeping your finger on the pulse of Ethereum's overall network activity and growth (DeFi, DAOs, NFTs etc)?

• Gitcoin Grants Round 4 was impressive. If you’re an up-and-coming Ethereum project that needs more funding, keep your eyes on Round 5!

  Vivek Singh @vsinghdothings

  Through growing pains, Gitcoin Grants Round 4 was a huge success. The $344K ($144K from 1K unique contributors) reminds 230 projects that the community supports them - literally. The results, top 10 projects, and future @gitcoin plans below 👇🏽 gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-g…

  

  gitcoin.coGitcoin Grants Round 4 Results - Gitcoin’s BlogWow. What a past few weeks. Gitcoin Grants Round 4 saw unprecedented support from the community, lots of Twitter activity, and ultimately — radical results. Let’s dive in. Round 4, By The Numbers As a reminder on the structure, there were two pools of funding to allocate in Gitcoin Grants Round 4 us…

• Happy birthday to the Görli testnet!

📰Fresh Reads

• 2020 Art Market Predictions - Jason Bailey

• How to make money on digital art - Bankless

• Axie Infinity Starter Guide! - The Jiho

• On a Creative Trip With @ClayCal303 - matthew.cent.eth

• What are you missing? Using basic machine learning to predict and recommend NFTs with OpenSea data - Takens Theorem

• Burn Signal, Gitcoin Grants, and Finding Consensus Amid Evolution - me

🖌️Extra, Extra

My favorite possessions are now on Ethereum. This week I used OpenSea to buy a few pieces from Jason Bailey’s excellent SuperRare SAMOGAN series, which relies on a generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on Jean-Michel Basquiat and a dash of The Simpsons.

The results have been sublime, and I’m grateful to have found them; I would’ve enjoyed them with no context, so the fact they’re on Ethereum — and the ensuing possibilities around that — makes them that much more fascinating to me. They seem to stand tall at the threshold of a whole new era of art, in several ways. For instance, as Bailey noted in his “2020 predictions” piece listed above:

“In addition to their concerns over climate change, Millenials/Gen-Zers are also the most technologically fluent generation we have seen. Given their interest and comfort with tech, I believe that the market for generative art — art generally created in code using autonomous, automated systems — will explode in the next two decades.”

That means there may already be masterpieces among us … maybe …

SAMOGAN 10 by Jason Bailey

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

Keep an 👁️ out for the 4th 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. 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.

This particular newsletter is a labor of love, but if you enjoy the work and want to support it, feel free to subscribe, have a like-minded friend subscribe as well, or buy some of my crypto art on OpenSea! Thanks kindly!

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“Bay Day” - by me, generative/mixed media

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