👀 What are generative art NFTs? 🚫 Royalties for creatives 🤯 The FTX hit matters


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Web3 Creator

The next internet era.

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It's Wednesday!

Even though the crypto winter has yet to thaw, digital artists are enjoying new relationships with top art museums👇

After decades as outcasts, digital artists are receiving a warm reception from curators at major museums looking to embrace new audiences and retain wealthy donors from the NFT boom.

Over the past year, MoMA curators and trustees have quietly met with several blue-chip NFT artists like Mike Winkelmann (known as Beeple), Justin Aversano and Dmitri Cherniak. And during a recent event at the museum about how artists are using new web technologies, curators provided attendees with a free NFT they had commissioned by the artist Stephanie Dinkins.

In this newsletter, you'll find:

👽 Reddit's crypto family

🚫 Royalties for creatives

🤯 The FTX hit matters

👀 What are generative art NFTs?

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What happened in Web3 this week?

🤳 Nike's .Swoosh metaverse platform is here.

🕶 Apple’s AR/VR headset will reportedly include a 3D video service and its own ‘metaverse’.

💸 Meta ($META) stock drop leaves company with VR conundrum.

👀 FTX contagion victim Deepak.eth puts NFT collection up for sale.

🦊 MetaMask launched a bridge aggregator.

🖼 Drift became the first artist to sell out an NFT drop on Instagram with the 50-edition release of Learning to Handle Change.

COMMUNITY

Reddit welcomes 2.5 million crypto customers WITHOUT mentioning NFTs

In just three months, Reddit has onboarded 2.5 million crypto wallets through its NFT marketplace without using any jargon. In fact, throughout the process, the word NFT has hardly been used at all.

In jargon’s place, “collectible avatars” has been the central focus. Similar to Reddit’s typical, profile-pic avatars, these avatars go one step further in including unique benefits which are backed by blockchain technology (voilá here is where the NFT element comes in). Such benefits include owners having full licence to use the art of their avatar on and off the platform, and owners’ profiles will also feature their tokens in a visible way, similar to Twitter’s NFT integration.

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NFT platforms are reducing Blockchain royalties for creatives

Sadly for us creatives, some marketplaces are starting to remove the requirement to pay royalties on NFTs!

For those unfamiliar, most blockchains, until now, give a cut to creatives every time their NFT is sold—often between 5% and 10% of the sale price. For creatives this is great because no matter what turn your career takes, you’ll always make money from resales.

However, last month, popular Solana-based marketplace Magic Eden made paying royalties optional, which struck fear into the wallets of NFT creators. They now have more reason to worry after OpenSea’s cryptic message on Monday. The marketplace wrote in a Twitter thread that its team is still thinking about whether it will add on-chain enforcement for royalty payments to existing NFTs and plans to announce plans on December 8th.

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CRYPTO

What the FTX hit is and why it matters

If you open the spaces tab on Twitter, you’ll find a plethora of conversations about the crypto collapse – clearly the hot topic of this past week. So what exactly is going on?

FTX is a crypto giant and the embattled cryptocurrency exchange has filed for bankruptcy in the US, seeking court protection as it looks for a way to return money to users. Former boss Sam Bankman-Fried has also stepped down as Chief Executive, the company said.

In just over a week, his FTX empire has collapsed, shaking confidence in the already troubled crypto market.

As one of the largest advertisers in the crypto space, FTX has garnered mainstream attention via sports sponsorships, celebrity ambassadors and national TV ads. The company has naming rights over the Miami Heat’s home arena, a payment partnership with Reddit as well as commercials with Tom Brady, Steph Curry and Larry David. Ad Age named FTX as a top 10 marketer of the year in 2021.

Continue reading (3-min. read)

What are generative art NFTs?

Generative art is a distinct form of art that often uses autonomous systems or algorithms to randomly generate content.

An artist will input a set of rules (for example, a range of colours and patterns) against a number of iterations and randomness. The artist then lets the computer generate the artwork within this framework.

In 2014, digital artist Kevin McCoy minted what is considered to be the first known NFT, titled “Quantum,” which used code to create an abstract image that was registered on an early blockchain network.

A number of similar experiments soon followed, including Autoglyphs by Larva Labs, which has been hailed as the first on-chain generative art project built on Ethereum. Today, some generative art NFT projects make use of a blockchain’s smart contract to execute randomized, computer-driven code when certain conditions are met, generating a unique piece of art for the NFT holder once minted.