⬇️ Is the bottom in?
Zima Red gives readers the weekly pulse on the biggest news around NFTs. Join our community and take the journey with us by subscribing here:
📰 Top story
Former OpenSea employee gets indicted for insider trading
Nate Chastain has been arrested and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. The charges carry with them a max penalty of 20 years in prison. This means he can get 40 years for front-running Jpegs.
What happened:
Nate was an early employee at OpenSea and the company’s head of product. His position gave him some insider knowledge regarding which NFT collections would be featured on the front page of their website.
He would buy a few NFTs from those collections and then flip them once after the price went up. This process allowed him to routinely bank a 2-5x profit per flip.
Nate secretly did this for a couple of months using random OpenSea and wallets. His efforts weren’t enough as all it took was one blockchain sleuth smart (or bored) enough to track his wallet activity…
After getting busted, Nate admitted to his wrongdoing and lost his OpenSea shares.
The case seems pretty singular to Nate’s - not the kickoff of a wide regulatory crackdown on NFTs that many initially thought.
📉 Andrew’s Market update
This is a new section of Zima Red where we synthesize and share Andrew’s thoughts on the NFT and crypto markets. You can follow these thoughts and musings live on Twitter.
Is the bottom in?
Macro/crypto market billionaire thought leadooooor Arthur Hayes says that the crypto market prices have bottomed out. But have they?
Well, two things are true:
The market is 100% controlled by the Fed's actions
The Fed is doing two of the most bearish things it can do which are:
raising rates
continuing with quantitative tightening
With that being said, NFTs are holding up surprisingly well. While they are obviously being devalued in USD terms, many have held steady or even increased in base crypto terms (ETH, SOL, etc.) This is a great time to be loading up on crypto that you are bullish on long-term.
🔮 PfP’s and Collectibles
Goblintown mewns
After the Terra collapse, Crypto Twitter formally announced that we have all collectively entered into “Goblin Town” (we’re not sure who exactly coined the term but we’re going to give credit to Sassal bc that’s the first place we heard it.)
The markets going to goblintown essentially means that they are going to be down 80%+ akin to past bear markets - hence going straight to goblintown.
Out of the goblintown meme, goblintown.wtf began minting. It had no road map and an anonymous team. All anyone knew was that it was CC0 and free to mint 1 + gas.
Due to the project’s timing, execution, and solid smart contracts, many speculated that it was being led by NFT veterans. Rumors began to circulate about its founders as being anyone from Beeple to Yuga Labs.
The meme stuck and Goblin Town has already done an incredible 30K+ ETH in volume.
🕹 Gaming
Method gaming guild
Method, one of the world’s most renowned World of Warcraft guilds has entered the world of NFT gaming.
Dr.Disrespect’s gaming studio is collaborating with Polygon
Dr.Disrespect’s Midnight Society game studio is collaborating with Polygon to develop a trading platform for in-game items.
Midnight Society launched an NFT Founders Access Pass & received over 400k signups in 7 days
All applicants received a survey asking if they believed that in-game items should be directly owned by gamers - 97.5% said yes.
Gala games strike a partnership with Epic Games
Blockchain gaming platform Gala Games has reached a deal with Epic Games to publish Gala’s titles on the Epic Games store. This partnership will expose the 194M+ Epic Games store users to Gala games and web3 gaming. Gala’s battle-royale title, GRIT, will become the first to hit the Epic Games store.
Andrew on Realvision
Andrew came on Realvision to chat about:
Introduction to crypto back in 2013
First blockchain start-up in the Middle East
Another startup tracking property taxes using blockchain (fill in blanks here)
Lessons learned from the Polynexus Capital crypto fund
The expansion of niches within Crypto
Entry into NFTs back in 2017
NFT gaming
& why NFTs will become the world’s largest market…
🎶 Music
Kanye enters web3
Later has come.
Kanye has filed for 17 new trademarks around his YEEZUS brand including NFTs and blockchain currencies in addition to amusement parks, toys, & campaign buttons.
🌐 Virtual Worlds
What makes digital real estate valuable?
Scott Kominers from the a16z Crypto team wrote a great piece on how to evaluate digital real estate. You can read the full thing here.
Takeaways:
Digital real estate has conceptually been around for decades - We just call it “ad space” right now.
Blockchain technology facilitates a huge shift in digital real estate ownership - The biggest land barons of digital real estate are currently the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Blockchain technology brings ownership to the people.
Valuable metaverse land will be worth MUCH more than valuable physical land - metaverse land will get way more “foot traffic” than the world’s busiest IRL streets.
The metaverse won’t be winner take all - Different metaverses will be used for different things.
⬇️ More great stuff
Zora API
ENS’ has a record-breaking month
NFT.NYC side events
Avalanche put together a great repository of NFT.NYC side events
🎙 Zima Red Podcast
Mack is the founder of Big Head Club, an NFT production studio. Mack was also on the Axiom Zen team which was the company that created CryptoKitties and the company that eventually became Dapper Labs.
Our conversation has it all, we discuss:
How the ERC721 standard was created
The ideation and launch of CryptoKitties
The creation of Dapper Labs
His NFT production studio Big Head Club
How the Oni Ronin NFTs are pushing the boundaries
The issues with the NFT space
Why he is not a huge fan of Play-to-Earn
And so much more
An awesome conversation with someone who is not afraid to speak their mind!