Features / 303 posts found
Ed Balloon’s Mission to Bring Black Hair Culture to the Blockchain
Don’t put Ed Balloon in a box. The multidisciplinary artist has never lent himself well to labels, exploring his quirky creative vision through the lenses of music, film, and stop-motion animation with projects like Run Ed. Now it’s time to add generative art to the list. His new project, Beauty Supply Is Out of Du-Rags, released this week on the newly-launched Prohibition platform, explores the complex cultural legacy of Black hairstyles through algorithmic code. Billed as “the first on-chain generative art project featuring braids and locs,” the collection represents a deeply personal and cathartic moment of expression based on Balloon’s […]
Next Up: Dani Loftus on Leading a Cultural Metamorphosis Around Digital Fashion
The metaverse brings with it many promises: finding identity anew through digital means, the democratization of information, and the potential to achieve financial independence, to name a few. Yet, before these broad-scope benchmarks can be achieved, it’s surely up to the blockchain-based builders of today to iterate upon our current culture to lead us into the future. And although a true-to-form metaverse may be a ways off, we’ve already begun to see glimmers of the fabled next iteration of the internet through advents like artificial intelligence, Soulbound Tokens, and the crossover between digital and physical. Specifically, thanks to the work […]
For the Culture: Jack Butcher’s Custom ThreadGuy Opepen Edition Goes Viral
The niche internet subculture that is the NFT space has gone through numerous iterations. From market cycles to controversies, the vernacular, priorities, and overall vibe of what the inhabitants of the blockchain call Web3 has continued to ebb and flow as consistently as the prices of the coins that drive it. Yet, one thing has remained certain, and that is, regardless of speculation, NFTs have and will always have greater meaning than what can be derived from the constraints of art and money. There is a singular culture that has formed within the NFT space, and it’s one that — […]
How to Explain Bitcoin Ordinals to Your Grandmother
What are Bitcoin Ordinals? If you’ve asked yourself this question in the past six months, you’re not alone. The rapid rise of the Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem has enthralled developers, divided the Bitcoin community, and reintroduced the original blockchain to a new generation of users. In May, Bitcoin became the second-largest blockchain for NFTs with sales volume passing the likes of Solana and Polygon. Even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has hailed Ordinals as an “organic return of builder culture” to Bitcoin. Ninjalerts CEO Trevor Owens has been a fixture on the movement’s frontlines, investing in Bitcoin projects as a GP for […]
Five Factors That Led to Ether’s Paused Public Mint
After two years of development, the Ether project finally launched its much-anticipated mint on June 30 to allowlist members. However, after the project launched its public sale a week later on July 9, the team paused the public mint due to a lack of activity. At the time of writing, less than half of the total supply has been minted. While the low amount of mints could be seen as an immediate cause for the pause, the current state of the project has been shaped by a multitude of influences. These include community feedback and responses about elements like price, […]
Terraforms Are Trending, Here’s Why You Should Be Paying Attention
Every once in a while, an NFT advent arrives that shakes the foundations of Web3. At first, the sole innovator of the metaverse seemed to be PFPs. Then came text-based NFTs, open editions, minigames, and so on — expanding outward to more conceptual advents like Soulbound Tokens and phygital goods. Anecdotally, it’s been anyone’s guess as to what might set off a new trend and bring both interest and copycats to a budding sector of the NFT market. Yet, after many hype cycles have come and gone and with no clear breadwinner currently in sight, an unlikely suspect has reemerged […]
An AI-Generated Nude Just Sold for $340,000. So, Why Are People Angry?
With all the developments in AI art in the last year taking up so much of the public awareness, it can be easy to forget that the movement has roots that reach back far before Stable Diffusion or Midjourney arrived on the scene. Robbie Barrat, for example, is a household name in the artificial intelligence and generative art universe and also represents an important part of crypto art history. Having experimented with machine learning and GANs (generative adversarial networks) since 2018, Barrat’s early explorations led him to produce a series of 300 AI-generated nude art portraits that have since become […]
How Forgotten Runes Is Using ChatGPT to Build a Fantasy Empire
What is the point of an NFT project? How do they sustain themselves, and what truly differentiates one from another? These kinds of Web3-related questions are unique in that they come from both crypto art veterans and those who still find the very concept of NFTs to be a bit absurd. They also sit at the crux of what is arguably the NFT ecosystem’s greatest challenge: justifying its own continued existence. Not many projects have come up with a good, lasting answer to these questions, and it’s not always for lack of trying. Despite sincere efforts and the exceedingly common […]
NFTs Are Crashing (Again). Here’s Why.
The NFT space isn’t what it used to be. This has become painfully obvious to those within Web3 over the past few months. From controversial memecoin escapades to overwhelming regulatory initiatives, the magic of the metaverse has been palpably waning throughout 2023. As it stands, the current state of the non-fungible ecosystem is a far cry from the market highs that helped kick off the year. Yet, this round of “NFTs are crashing” feels different than times past. With this bout, the causation behind NFTs slowing down feels more nuanced. Rather than fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) leading the market […]
Could Blur Token Farming Tank the NFT Market?
Few entities have shaken up the Web3 landscape as much as the NFT marketplace and aggregator Blur has in the last year. In November of 2022, it began to consistently rival OpenSea, the previously undisputed NFT marketplace champion of the past six years. By February 2023, it had left the platform in the dust, outpacing OpenSea by as much as $400,000,000 in weekly trading volume. Blur owes its success to a few things; it addressed a major gap in the market by providing a frictionless way to trade NFTs in large numbers via a no-frills interface featuring tools that appealed […]