The Blame Game
PFPs Bleed. Beanie's Back. And the Pitchforks are out for Blur.
👋🏽 Hello everyone, gm gm, WELCOME BACK to another edition of the Overpriced JPEGs newsletter, where we’re catching you up on the web3, NFTs, and the greater world of emerging tech.
⛔️ Happy Hour Tour Update ⛔️
We are postponing this Friday’s live event in LA with Betty due to an unexpected family emergency. We’re rescheduling ASAP, so keep your eyes on our Twitter for updates! Thanks for your understanding!
We’re excited and grateful that today’s Overpriced newsletter is brought to you by LACOSTE!
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🎰 Doom + Gloom
Following Azuki’s disaster of a mint last week, most of us were happy to touch grass, down hot dogs, and get absolutely lit this weekend
The PFP market, however, didn’t get the Good Vibes Only memo and continued on such a horrific slide that even the normie news made it a point to slap us with a loud ‘I told you so’ on prime time tv
Over the weekend, post-Elementals capitulation and market panic triggered a historic series of margin calls on seriously over-leveraged traders who resorted to begging for help to save their precious JPEGs from liquidation
In the midst of the bloodbath:
A group of angry ‘diamond Azuki holders’ hastily spun up a DAO to raise funds to sue the team over the botched Elementals mint; The proposal to hire a lawyer passed, but the DAO governance token was exploited for 35E in the process
Memeland’s Captainz revealed its choose-your-own-adventure PFPs to very mixed reviews, with the prevailing sentiment being the art was low-effort at best and this at worst:
Several folks zeroed in on the lazy layering technique in some of the Captainz art, but it looks like the trait errors may have been an intentional part of the team’s bug bounty program
In all, TylerD estimates that on the very low end, we saw $1.5B market cap drained from PFP NFTs. Some collections saw a slight bounce in the early part of the week (upgraded PFPs, we see you 🖖🏽), but we all know we’re just playing a game of musical chairs - except here, the last man standing is the bag holder, not the winner.
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👉🏾 Blaming Blur
While we’re ripping the band-aids off, let’s talk about the big elephant in the room: Blur
Since its inception, Blur’s incentive mechanics and business model have been incredibly divisive, with one camp claiming their liquidity incentives are saving us from ourselves and the other side calling it the match that lit this whole market on 🔥🔥🔥
Every move Blur’s ever made - from driving marketplaces to 0% royalties to offering high-risk loans to degens - has been met with controversy and increasing scrutiny
And as collections bled out over the weekend & over-leveraged traders were rekt on defaulted loans, NFT Twitter was quick to pile on, taking jabs at Blur’s incentive structure, tokenomics, and lack of transparency
So it should be of no surprise that when the team announced Blur v2 this week - and more specifically, new incentives for trait bidding - the backlash was immediate and fierce
Blur founder Pacman, who rarely responds to the noise on CT, went big on defense, calling Wale’s dilution theory ‘false news,’ and accusing folks of spreading ‘bad takes’ while low-key throwing Azuki under the bus for draining $40M from the market last week
Blur’s probably feeling the pressure as competitor LooksRare stages a comeback with a new rewards structure that seems to be pretty profitable for those paying attention
👀 Meanwhile …
Beanie Maxi is back - this time as a shit-posting, podcasting ‘Media Beanie,’ and he kicked things off with a spicy AMA, where he offered mostly negative takes on everything from Ordinals to investing in Blur
DeGods announced a DeLay to the start of Season 3, but is keeping themselves busy with a new roadmap and website and potential new IP rights in the works for holders
Pudgy Penguins’ Banana Suit physicals are dropping July 8 in limited quantities, reflecting their 2-prong approach to toy collectibles: 1) Mass-produced toys on Amazon; and 2) high-end products for top-tier physical collectors who haven’t gotten into NFTs yet
ON1 revealed plans in its token-gated discord for a 10k collection on Ordinals and Tropo’s just not buying it
NFT Twitter had a lot to say about the current state of the market throughout the week. We compiled a few interesting takes ICYMI: Leonidas on collectors v. investors; Franklin on the importance of small flips; Udi on strong communities; CozomoMedici on the resiliency of crypto art
And because we love good vibes here at OPJ - here are 25 good things that happened in NFTs this summer 🌞
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IRS is cracking down on pseudo-anonymous transactions and crypto tax fraud; here’s how to stay off their radar
BlackRock refiled its ETF app, naming Coinbase its Surveillance-Sharing partner and brokerage firm Bernstein said the odds of an approval are fairly high
Crypto outperformed major indexes by more than 2x in the first half of the year
A new Ethereum standard, ERC-7265, would enable DeFi protocols to trigger a circuit breaker to mitigate damage from hacks by preventing drains on all tokens
Crypto ATM provider ‘Bitcoin Depot’ is the first of its kind listed on Nasdaq
Mastercard launched one of its ‘most ambitious’ blockchain projects, the Multi Token Network (MTN); designed for mass adoption and improving trust & confidence in the tech
Jack Dorsey and Brian Armstrong call out Apple for blocking software and not supporting Bitcoin
Singapore & Thailand ban advertisements for crypto lending and crack down on crypto staking
An analysis declared DCA’ing into Bitcoin proved to be a successful strategy no matter when you started investing
Blockworks compiled some of CT’s best Gensler ratios over the years; calls it crypto’s most powerful protest
Bankruptcy Court approves Celsius’ request to sell all its altcoins for ETH and BTCH
New Ethereum standard, ERC-7265, would enable DeFi protocols to trigger a circuit breaker to mitigate damage from hacks by preventing drains on all tokens
🌐 web3 + NFTs
Luminex’ new BRC-69 Standard could reduce the cost of inscriptions for Bitcoin Ordinals by >90%
Decentralized AI artist Botto contributes 365 ‘Socially Umpired Animals,’ to 6529 Meme Cards; it’s Botto’s first large edition
Ubisoft reveals its next web3 game, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicals, a PvP RPG experience
KRO released a mini ‘State of the Moonbirds’ thread and RTFKT dropped a short trailer for Project Animus
A Lost Robbie was sold for the first time for 175E, nearly half the cost of the most recent sale of 300E
World of Women teased the upcoming release of its WoW Galaxy-themed Monopoly game
Boss Beauties gives holders a chance to have their BB featured on physical merch from ‘a MAJOR retailer’ - and get paid for it
Six months after promising to make amends, Logan Paul still hasn’t refunded $1.8M to people who bought into his non-existent CryptoZoo video game
Recursion allowed someone to put a fully on-chain music engine onto Bitcoin over the weekend; by entering just a few key words, anyone can instantly generate a music track
📈 Brands + Biz
100,000 Funko Stranger Things NFTs are dropping on July 13; a small portion will be redeemable for Funko Pop physicals
ALTs by Adidas opens chapter 2 with ‘Collect Your Traits’ teaser
Winners of the 2023 European Games will receive NFT medals; European Olympic Committee said it’s a stepping stone towards monetizable NFT medals at future events
Sega is releasing its first blockchain game, Sangokushi Taisen, on the Oasys Chain
Lacoste announced a gamified, mission-based experience for its UNDW3 Card holders
Dior announces B33, a limited run men’s sneaker line paired with an NFT and an NFC chip in the shoe
Sony Network invests $3.5M; collabs with web3 infrastructure firm Startale Labs
Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse collabs with Swiss Football Association on NFT collection to support the women’s national team
Madhappy partners with MoonPay to launch its membership loyalty program
🤖 AI + Metaverse
Stability AI CEO says there’ll be no human programmers in 5 years after study shows 41% of code right now is generated by AI
Political satirist / video editor banned from Midjourney for making deep fakes of Presidents and politicians cheating on their wives
Google’s new privacy policy allows for scraping of public data to improve its AI models
Microsoft adds an AI chat interface into Windows; previews ‘Windows Copilot’
Carly’s joined by Alex Taub (aka AJT) from Truth Labs, the team behind Goblintown, Illuminati, and more recently, Big Inc.. Alex shares Truth’s vision for the ecosystem, his take on the current PFP NFT model, and the story behind Goblintown’s inclusion in the viral Twitch video game, Only Up! Plus, he hints at what’s next for his DAO-in-a-Box platform, Upstream. Check it out below ⬇️
Carly and Zeneca dissect the Azuki drama, from Follow the Rabbit to the botched mint to the shocking reveal. They also chime in on Ordinals and Ether (the project, no the token 😜) and NFT Asian joins the show to reveal what’s really going on in the Japanese web3 scene. Catch it all here!
Thanks again to our generous sponsor, Lacoste!
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