Marketplace Madness

OpenSea, RaribleX, Yuga... + the history of collecting...

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Forefront
November 06, 2023

Happy Monday!

Welcome to edition 165th edition of the Forefront Newsletter. If you’re new here, we give you a weekly roundup of the best news and insights at the intersection of crypto, culture, and community.

This week we’re covering:

Let’s get into it…

Week’s Highlight

Collecting has been a fundamental human activity for centuries, serving as a means to preserve history, demonstrate wealth, or simply for personal enjoyment. Ancient collectors sought rare items to demonstrate power, while others pursued stamps or artifacts to create personal narratives connected to the larger historical context. Collectibles' value was traditionally derived from their rarity and historical relevance.

The digital revolution initially challenged the collectibles market, with digital items lacking the physicality of traditional collectibles. Yet as digital content became more integrated into everyday life, new forms of digital collectibles emerged, such as in-game items and digital art. The issue of duplication cast doubt on their value until blockchains introduced NFTs. NFTs proved game-changing by establishing verifiable uniqueness and ownership, making digital assets as collectible as physical ones.

For those of us who have worked or participated in crypto for a while now, we understand NFTs and their current and potential impact on commerce and culture at large.

However, how are NFTs positioned within the larger history of collectibles? How do we expect the digital collectible market to evolve, and can we learn from history to see what aspects of this activity will repeat itself, and which will prove net new and world changing?

This is an exploration we’re on at Forefront today… keep an eye out for an exciting new drop from the Forefront team.

What’s Poppin’

Marketplace Frenzy: OpenSea layoffs, Yuga Labs collab, and RaribleX

This week we saw a barrage of news on the NFT marketplace front. OpenSea had massive layoffs, dropping 50% of their staff in light of a new “OpenSea 2.0” launch. Rarible released RaribleX, their marketplace-as-a-service tool. And Yuga Labs announced a collab with Magic Eden on an Ethereum-based NFT marketplace, claiming that “this will be the first major ETH marketplace to honor creator royalties for all ETH NFT collections.” The NFT marketplace ecosystem is highly cyclical, with players making changes in order to stifle competition with little long-term thinking. It’ll be interesting to see how the market plays out given these announcements from major players.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on Thursday of stealing from customers of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange in one of the biggest financial frauds on record, a verdict that cemented the 31-year-old former billionaire's fall from grace. A 12-member jury in Manhattan federal court convicted Bankman-Fried on all seven counts he faced after a monthlong trial in which prosecutors made the case that he looted $8 billion from the exchange's users out of sheer greed.

This post discusses the potential for communities within the Nouns ecosystem to enhance their world-building efforts by incorporating a concept of cultural memory into a shared onchain space. This memory is created through the funding of art, movies, and technology, filling the Nouns' digital landscape and defining its culture. However, the current state is fragmented, with protocols interacting in isolation, making it difficult for new projects to be discovered and integrated into the community's cultural canon. Wiz suggests a shift towards a community operating system that could unify these experiences, with art and content contributing to the measurable cultural value onchain. They propose using game frameworks like MUD, which provide infrastructure for such a system, to enable secure sharing and accumulation of cultural memory, thereby encouraging innovation and content discoverability within the community.

On October 31, 2023, Drawtech was launched as the first-ever mobile onchain game, marking a historic day for the crypto community beyond the anniversary of Bitcoin's whitepaper. This crypto-economic drawing game, which rewards players with ETH for coloring a shared grid, rapidly gained traction with substantial player investment. Developed by Small Brain Games as a Progressive Web App, it circumvents traditional app stores and integrates a non-custodial Privy wallet, pointing to significant implications for the mobile gaming industry. Despite some technical hitches and aggressive pricing, Drawtech's innovative approach and engaging mechanics underscore its potential to revolutionize onchain gaming.

In the “Treehouse of Horror XXXIV” episode titled “Wild Barts Can’t Be Token,” which aired on Sunday in the U.S., Bart was accidentally “digitized” into an NFT. The special episode featured references to many iconic NFTs and artists, including the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Beeple. The show also poked fun at the speculative nature of certain NFTs, with Homer initially devastated by Bart's digitization but later ecstatic over the $1.5 million value of the Bart NFT.

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