Features / 303 posts found
Marvel Studios Founder on Comics, Stan Lee, and NFTs
Everyone knows Marvel Studios. The production juggernaut fundamentally changed the entertainment landscape when it began the Marvel Cinematic Universe in earnest with the release of Iron Man in 2008. Fifteen years and over $25 billion in revenue later, the company continues to put out movies and streaming shows that expand on the characters under its banner. What people may not know is the person behind it all: David Maisel, the man who spearheaded that cinematic universe and was named chairman of Marvel Studios in March 2007. Maisel is responsible for getting the company to produce films of the characters it […]
OpenSea Pro: The NFT Giant’s Answer to Blur?
OpenSea has been stuck between a rock and a hard place for the last six months. In that time, its first real competitor — Blur, the NFT marketplace and aggregator — broke onto the scene, siphoning off the majority of trading volume from the once untouchable ruler of the NFT seas. The development caused a stir in the NFT community in more ways than one; renewed discussion on creator fees (royalties) have come to the fore, complaints of market manipulation at the hands of power traders abound, and questions of just how web2 the NFT community wants Web3 to be […]
From Birth to Blockchain: The Evolution, and Future of Digital Provenance
Since the first NFT was minted in 2014, digital artists and collectors have praised blockchain technology for its usefulness in tracking provenance, the origin and history of a particular artwork. Never before had artists seen a tool that could do it all like the blockchain, an immutable digital ledger that records transactions without the aid of galleries or other centralized institutions. In theory, “minting” a piece of digital art on blockchain serves multiple purposes: It documents the date an artwork is made, stores on-chain metadata descriptions, and links to the crypto wallets of both the artist and buyer, thus tracking […]
Is Blur Backing Itself into a Corner?
The NFT ecosystem is bracing for impact. In a few short weeks, the wildly successful and controversial NFT marketplace and aggregator Blur will end its Season 2 points earning season, with big payouts of its native token, $BLUR, expected to land in the hands of its most loyal and active users. Rewarding users for participation is a good thing in theory, a concept that certainly aligns with Web3 principles of all boats rising in the tide. But Blur’s strategy of leaning into the NFT pro-trader demographic by alluring them with staggered token rewards could backfire spectacularly for the platform — […]
AI Art vs. AI-Generated Art: Everything You Need to Know
Artists have been experimenting with artificial intelligence for years, but the practice has gained new levels of awareness with the release of increasingly powerful text-to-image generators like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Open AI’s DALL-E. Similarly, the genre of generative art has gained a cult-like following over the past year, especially among NFT artists and collectors. But what’s the difference? Does the category of generative art also include art made from super-charged AI art generators, too? From an outsider’s point of view, it’s easy to assume that all computer-generated artwork falls under the same umbrella. Both types of art use code […]
To Keep Web3 Safe, Security Needs to Be a Group Effort
Degens look out for one another. Or at least, they should, if seeking to honor the community ethos of the NFT space. But how many NFT enthusiasts are actually putting that principle into practice? Sure, sharing opportunities and prosperity counts for something. Supporting each other to success does as well. But protecting each other from bad actors seems to be left out of this reciprocity equation. By and large, every time a prominent figure in Web3 falls victim to a scam, it feels as if we’ve failed to safeguard one another. But it isn’t due to a lack of trying. […]
20 Caribbean Creators Sharing Their Cultural Traditions on the Blockchain
Web3 has a navel-gazing problem. While it’s hard to pass a day on Twitter without coming across rhetoric of the space’s accessibility and egalitarianism, it remains stubbornly Western-centric. Big international happenings like NFT Paris and NFT Korea Festival absolutely deserve credit for helping to broaden its scope, but even these events can feel like rehashes of the same figures, topics, and artwork that the North American and European crypto art market seem to dictate. Fortunately, there are increasingly common efforts to make Web3 more representative of the global audience of which it’s composed. One group making sure its cultural voice […]
How the Expressions NFT Marketplace Aims to Uplift Global Communities
Next week, the NFT platform Expressions — a marketplace dedicated to supporting underrepresented global art communities in Web3, will launch its genesis art project — Origins & Ancestries. The drop is the first of ten that will take place over the next year and will showcase 1,000 artworks from 12 artists in the Caribbean, including Sofía Maldonado-Suárez (Puerto Rico), Edward Bowen (Trinidad), Carlos Davila Rinaldi (Puerto Rico), Isabel Berenos (Curaçao), and more. Expressions was created with an expansive goal in mind; Web3, for all its open-access rhetoric, remains frustratingly Western-focused, with North American and European artists dominating trends and headlines. […]
NFT100 Spotlight: Latashá on Championing Web3 Music
One of the most promising sectors to have emerged from the proliferation of NFT and blockchain technology over the past few years is undoubtedly Web3 music. Considering the legacy music industry has continued to fail artists time and time again, music creatives of all types have been flocking to the blockchain to take a crack at independence and succeeding. Thus far, few have achieved as significant staying power in the blockchain music sector as Latashá. A rapper, poet, performance artist, events coordinator, community manager, and much more, the Zoratopia founder has continued to define what excellence in Web3 music looks and […]
NFT100 Spotlight: Megan Kaspar on Investing in Digital Fashion
Megan Kaspar, the co-founder and managing director of FirstLight, is widely recognized as a savvy investor and trailblazer in the digital fashion realm. In October 2021, she made headlines as the first person to showcase NFT clothing during a video interview. Kaspar’s pioneering spirit also earned her a feature in Haute Living’s Miami issue wearing a digital ensemble by luxury fashion brand Fendi. Kaspar has been a crypto enthusiast from the beginning and is now a founding member of Red DAO, an organization focused on fashion and blockchain. She is a consistent investor in leading projects like DressX, supporting the […]