explainer / 51 posts found
An NFT Every Day: A Guide to the Nouns NFT Project, DAO, and Ecosystem
If you’ve been around the NFT space, you’ve likely seen Nouns’ playful pixel art images featuring signature bright colors and simple blocky designs. As time goes on, you’ll definitely see these unique characters more and more frequently. Unlike most NFT projects that have a set number of supply before mint, Nouns is an infinite work of art. One Noun NFT is generated every single day “forever.” As a community-driven brand, Nouns aims to use its open-source IP to empower holders to fund their most ambitious dreams and business ideas with their NFTs as the face of the projects. Nouns are already […]
Renga NFTs: A Guide to the Collaborative Storytelling PFP Collection
Renga is an NFT project as enigmatic as the “black box” NFTs that started it all off. Since launching in June 2022, the project has done more than 40,000 ETH in volume and has a current floor price of 1.1799 ETH. Despite the lack of a roadmap, little in the way of traditional NFT utility, and a mostly-private artist and founder, the project has maintained a healthy community sentiment, buoyed primarily by what some people call the best PFP art in all of Web3. But what is Renga, and how has it found its success? What is Renga? Renga is […]
A Guide to Photography NFTs and the Future of Imagery
Never before has society been so visually saturated. Trillions of photos are taken every year, and the popularity of social media and the prevalence of image-based marketing are simply a given at this point. Clearly, image is everything. But, this proliferation of images and the infrastructure surrounding their consumption hasn’t always been for the better. At times, social media has been a particularly fertile ground for the outright plagiarism of professional photographers’ work. In October 2017, photographer Cath Simard shared a picture of a Hawaiian road on her Instagram account. It immediately went viral and was shared across several platforms […]
OnChainMonkey: Meet One of the First 10k PFP Projects on Bitcoin
OnChainMonkey (OCM) has emerged as a historic staple of the NFT community that’s proven time and time again to be well ahead of the curve. The project is well-known for uploading its entire 10,000 NFT collection to Ethereum in a single transaction. And with the new Ordinals protocol, OCM became one of the first 10,000 PFP projects on Bitcoin. While OnChainMonkey has made its mark in Web3, its parent company Metagood is perhaps less well-known. With a mission to empower communities and be catalysts for positive collective action, Metagood has spearheaded a number of impactful initiatives and is one of […]
NFT Resources: The Best Blogs, Podcasts, Spaces, and More
Let’s be real: the NFT space can be tough to crack. Making the jump from Web2 to Web3 can be seriously disorienting; First, there’s wrapping your head around NFTs as a technology and working through the “Why can’t I just screenshot it?” phase. And if that’s where you’re at, don’t feel embarrassed. Even experienced NFT enthusiasts can struggle to keep up with the ever-evolving landscape. The blockchain is still very much a new technology, and a lot of the rhetoric you see floating around the Web3 world is that anyone actively involved in it is “still early,” and that’s absolutely […]
Wolf Game NFTs: A Guide to Gameplay, Wool, and More
The world of blockchain gaming can be confusing. For every smash-hit success, there’s an equally unfortunate story of the disastrous ruin or slow demise of a play-to-earn (P2E) game (see Axie Infinity’s rise and fall). But if done right, gaming in Web3 can be a potent gateway to onboarding billions to the blockchain. And, though a bonafide AAA blockchain title has yet to hit the scene, skeptics shouldn’t discount the progress and innovations being made in the crypto-native sphere. Wolf Game is just one such success story. One of the most compelling and popular entries to the blockchain gaming space, […]
What Is Proof-of-Stake? Sustainable Blockchain Explained
Proof-of-stake is a mechanism for achieving consensus on a blockchain. Blockchain is a technology that records transactions that can’t be deleted or altered. It’s a decentralized database, or ledger, that is under no one person or organization’s control. Since no one controls the database, consensus mechanisms, such as proof-of-stake, are needed to coordinate the operation of blockchain-based systems. While Bitcoin popularized the technology, blockchain is now a part of many different systems, enabling interesting applications such as decentralized finance platforms and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. The first widely commercialized blockchain consensus mechanism was proof-of-work, which enables users to reach consensus […]
Blockchain 51% Attacks: What to Know to Stay Safe
While undoubtedly complex and necessary for the world of crypto and NFTs, the ideas that underpin and connect to blockchain technology are relatively simple to understand. One of its most important concepts is the so-called “51 percent attack:” an almost unrivaled threat to decentralized technology (and the crypto industry it supports). To understand what that is and its potential wide-reaching implications for Web3, we need to look at the fundamentals of the blockchain itself. The blockchain is a distributed digital database that moves and tracks data in blocks that link together to form a chain-like record of information flow. The […]
Behind the Crypto Hype Is a Mentality of Extreme Social Change
Ads for blockchain, NFTs and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin seem to be everywhere. Crypto technologies are being promoted as a replacement for banks; a new way to buy art; the next big investment opportunity, and an essential part of the metaverse. To many, these technologies are confusing or risky. But enthusiasts ardently promote them. As a cybersecurity and social media researcher, I’ve found that behind the hype is an ideology about social change: Hardcore enthusiasts argue that crypto will get people to trust in technology rather than government, which they see as inherently untrustworthy. This ideology leads people to encourage its […]
Blockchain 101: All the Basics Explained
Web3 can be a confusing place. If you’re new, words like “blockchain,” “NFT,” and “smart contract” are opaque terms that do more to suppress curiosity than invite it. That skepticism shows up in the data: globally, just 1 in 10 working-age internet users own some form of cryptocurrency, the digital tokens needed to engage with much of the Web3 ecosystem. This is ironic, since Web3 is the latest version of the internet, founded on ideas of accessibility and equity. Don’t let the critics fool you; the stereotype that crypto and NFTs belong to an exclusive and unwelcoming “crypto bro” niche […]