Features / 303 posts found
Dookey Dash: Six Tips and Tricks to Land a High Score
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is once again injecting the NFT ecosystem with some much-needed vitality. Leading up to and following the release of the Sewer Pass — an access token that enables BAYC holders to take part in an interactive minting experience — BAYC-related assets accounted for nearly half of the total ETH NFT volume from January 16 to 23. Driving that volume is the desire to compete in a skills-based endless runner-style game developed by BAYC’s Yuga Labs called Dookey Dash. Available only to Sewer Pass holders, Dookey Dash players try to make it as far as they […]
NFT Sales Are up 43%, but Are We Really in for a Bull Run?
The 2022 bear market left many in the NFT ecosystem bruised and battered. Sales plummeted, prominent figures left, and consumer brands began to grimace at the thought of launching their own non-fungible offerings. But it seems the new year might’ve brought about some change. As the new year rolled around, the NFT market is starting to trend upward. The global markets’ NFT sales volume is up 43 percent this month, according to data from Cryptoslam. With project floors on the rise, coin prices pumping, and open editions becoming all the rage, community sentiment has also been up in a big way. […]
How Jack Butcher’s Checks Challenges the Way People View NFTs
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, the internet collectively braced itself. The world’s richest human’s new toy was now a social media platform with an active user base of 368 million accounts — what could go wrong? One of the billionaire’s first changes to Twitter was to upend its “lords and peasants” system of deciding who gets a blue checkmark next to their name on the site. These checks, which users had to apply for, were a designation of the notability, activity, and authenticity of accounts. In place of that top-down system, users could now simply buy blue-check-mark-notability […]
Is Bitcoin a Religion? A Scholar of Religion Explains
Read enough about Bitcoin, and you’ll inevitably come across people who refer to the cryptocurrency as a religion. Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.” In Austin, Texas, there are billboards with slogans like “Crypto Is Real” that weirdly mirror the ubiquitous billboards about Jesus found on Texas highways. Like many […]
Lore: What to Know About This New Type of NFT Utility
When it comes to the development and advancement of an NFT project, “lore” is invaluable. From Bored Apes to Forgotten Runes to goblintown and everything in between, lore is often considered the backbone of a successful NFT endeavor and acts as a prominent fixture that drives the storytelling component of a project. But what does the term actually mean? Ask any odd collector or creator what lore is, and you’ll likely receive a range of answers. A term that is undoubtedly tied to the unique and overarching narrative of a project, lore has fallen into ambiguity within the NFT space. […]
Four Artists Open up About AI and the Future of Their Craft
The AI art movement is in full swing. And while it has a fair amount of controversy attached to its name, there’s simply no going back. Billions of people across the globe are using programs like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and plenty more to engage in artistic expression daily and on a scale that humanity has never before witnessed. And, given its penchant for embracing new technology, the NFT community has taken to these tools as quickly as anyone. As a result, we’re now starting to see a proliferation of NFT art whose creators have infused their work with AI […]
The AI Art Movement Has an Objectification Problem
In 1999, the world’s first commercially available color video and camera phone arrived in the form of the Kyocera VP-210 in Japan. A year after its release, worries over the rapid rise in “up-skirt” voyeurism the phones enabled spread quickly throughout the country, prompting wireless carriers to institute a policy guaranteeing the phones they offered would feature a loud camera shutter noise that users couldn’t disable. The effectiveness of that measure is, to this day, up for debate. But the event remains a valuable history lesson on the widespread adoption of technology: new tools make doing everything easier, and not […]