NFTs Weekly News #73 – Ecosystem: Binance Half Year Report 2023 – Part 3

Are you ready for some NFTs news?

We've prepared a new article that covers the latest news and updates in the world of Web3 and NFTs. Read them below!

Contents

📈Macro – Binance Half Year Report 2023. NFTs, part 3;
🗞️ Last week's news – Bitcoin blockchain for Guatemalan presidential election, UK x metaverse x Web3, OpenSea, Pokemon;
💰Investments/Financing – Proof of Play, Blockchain Capital, Oak Grove Ventures;
📣 Projects news/Updates – Stoner Cats NFT, Pudgy Penguins, Mercedes Benz NXT, Yuga Labs, Otherside, Moonbirds;
🗽Brands/Celebrities – Animoca Brands Japan, Walmart, Gucci, Citigroup, BAYC x BAPE, Hitachi;

📈 Macro

Last weeks we talked about the Binance Half Year Report 2023. NFTs, part one. We had a Market Review, we looked at NFT Marketplace Competition and NFT Lending. This week we summarize Bitcoin NFTs.

4.Bitcoin NFTs

Bitcoin NFTs, specifically Ordinals, were the hot topic of discussion about NFTs in Q1 2023. In addition to innovation, intense discussions were sparked among the Bitcoin community as Ordinals prompted a significant demand for blockspace, leading to increased tx fees.

Ordinal Theory assigns a unique identifier to each village on Bitcoin. Moreover, these individual sats can be "inscribed" with arbitrary content, such as text, images, or videos, to create an "inscription", i.e. a native Bitcoin digital artifact. Or an NFT. Bitcoin NFTs emerged in December 2022, when the first Ordinal Inscription was minted.

To date* (according to Binance's report), over 14.4M entries have been minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, with the daily rate reaching a record high of 400,000 in May. According to data from Dune Analytics, today, at the time of writing, there are 32,458,179 total entries.

The initial use of Ordinals focused on image-based NFTs; these are similar to the PFP NFTs most of us are familiar with.

When we think of NFTs today, Ethereum usually comes to mind, given the size of the ecosystem. However, there are interesting differences between Bitcoin Inscriptions and Ethereum NFTs. In some cases, it might make sense for creators to consider minting collections on Bitcoin:

• Fully on-chain. The entries are stored directly in the Bitcoin L1 chain. A criticism of Ethereum NFTs: ERC-721, is that the metadata for many of them are stored off-chain on platforms such as IPFS, Arweave, or sometimes on fully centralized Web2 servers;
• Immutable. They cannot be changed or deleted even by the contract owner;
• Ordering. Having inscriptions on individual sats using Ordinal Theory means that each inscription is technically ordered. There is the inscription with the number 500, the inscription with the number 9999, etc. This is a unique feature that could be very attractive to collectors, for example, those who collect inscriptions below the number 100,000;
• Scarcity. Bitcoin blocks can store up to 4 MB of data. This puts an effective upper limit on both the size and number of Inscriptions that can be written to Bitcoin in general.

🗞️ News from last week

• Guatemala uses the Bitcoin blockchain to detect attempted fraud in the presidential election, using Bitcoin timestamps to ensure the integrity of election documents.
• The UK's national priority is developing the Web3 industry and building a blockchain-based digital nation. The vision for the blockchain and Web3 industry is to make the UK an attractive hub for founders, developers, developers, and Web3 companies, according to Natalie Elphicke, UK MP and chair of the new Parliamentary Group for Blockchain Technologies at a 51-nation gathering.
• The UK has passed an online safety law that applies across the metaverse, forcing companies to establish whether children may encounter harmful content in virtual worlds and provide the necessary protection.
• 100M wallets have interacted with NFTs this month alone, a Web3 Academy report shows. That's an all-time high 👀

• OpenSea has announced an upcoming collaboration with Twitch under the name OpenSeaGG, which involves streaming on the Twitch platform.
• A study of NFTs shows that almost 95% of digital collections have become worthless. The study, which analyzed over 73k NFT collections, also shows that 79% of NFT collections have not been sold. However, this market analysis can be skewed, as almost anyone can issue their own NFT.
• OpenSea announces its new Creator Studio, which provides creators with a wide range of tools for launching, managing, and analyzing projects on its platform.

💰 Investments / Financing

• NFTs might have problems, but blockchain gaming doesn't. Proof of Play has announced that it has raised $33M in funding, aiming to revolutionize blockchain gaming. The company was founded by co-creator FarmVille and is backed by major investors such as Balaji, Naval, a16z and Emmett Shear (co-founder of Twitch).

• Blockchain Capital has raised $580M to launch two new funds focused on sectors including DeFi, CeFi, infrastructure, gaming and social.
• Oak Grove Ventures is launching a $60M Web3 investment fund. The fund will focus on early-stage investments in Web3, artificial intelligence and biotech. The Oak Grove Ventures team in Singapore includes notable figures such as Sally Wang of Sino Global Capital (now Ryze Labs), Ethan Wang, former tech lead at Libra, Shawn Shi, co-founder of Alchemy Pay, and Michael Li, former VP at Coinbase.

📣 Projects News / Updates

• Mila Kunis' NFT Stoner Cats were banned from the OpenSea, Rarible and Blur marketplaces after the SEC settlement. These actions follow last week's SEC announcement that accused the creators of selling unregulated securities.
• Pudgy Penguins has released a new cryptic roadmap titled "A Brave New World" without announcing any further details. Stay tuned!

• Mercedes Benz has rescheduled the NFT MercedesBenzNXT collection mint date for September 26, starting at 7:00 PM ET. The company experienced connectivity issues with its cloud provider, which led to a temporary disruption of the mining process.
• Yuga Labs has announced new strategic partnerships with Faraway, Bad Rhino Studio, Hadean and AccelByte to drive the growth and development of the Otherside metaverse.
• Otherside has revealed that the Legends of the Mara Season 1 beta will launch on September 26, and Koda owners will get early access.
• Also, Otherside introduces "Odas," the Otherside inhabitants, who can evolve into Kodamara when paired with a Mara.
• Moonbirds announce their collaboration with MNTGE for the grand finale of the Diamond Exhibition at Foundry by PROOF.

🗽 Brands / Celebrities

• Animoca Brands Japan is partnering with Honda, Gryfyn and GET Protocol to offer exclusive commemorative NFTs at the FORMULA 1™ Honda & Red Bull Japan event in Tokyo and at the Honda stand during the F1 2023 Japanese Grand Prix.
• Walmart and POCLab, a Web3 creative studio are collaborating to launch "The Cultureverse," a metaverse experience that will bring together more than 25 creators and artists to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop music.

• Gucci has released a virtual recreation of its recent Milan Fashion Week show in the metaverses Roblox, Zepeto and QQ.
• Walmart's Walmart Land and Universe of Play divisions will launch more Roblox gaming experiences.
• US banking giant Citigroup has introduced tokenization services for institutional clients, using blockchain and smart contracts technology for institutional cross-border payments and liquidity.
• Bored Ape Yacht Club has announced its latest collaboration with Japanese streetwear brand BAPE (A Bathing Ape).
• Hitachi has developed metaverse-based technology that allows skilled workers in Japan to conduct remote demonstrations using VR equipment.

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