NFT Innovation Digest #17

Most innovative (author's pick)

LooksRare NFT marketplace launched in the hope to provide a more decentralized alternative to OpenSea. The project is built around the $LOOKS token, granted to big NFT spenders. The fees on NFT trades are 2% (smaller than OpenSea's 2.5%) and are earned directly by $LOOKS stakers.

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• The platform also features instant royalties payment, so there is no need to wait weeks to claim the royalties fees;
• Users who trade collections with a higher than 1,000 ETH trading volume will also earn $LOOKS, this features incentivized several allegedly wash trades in the platform.

Most discussed

Sports NFT minting platform Lympo was attacked by an $18.7M hot wallet hack. Hackers managed to gain access to Lympos operational hot wallet and stole a total of 165.2 million LMT tokens.

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• Lympo posted an update confirming the attack and announcing the removal of LMT from liquidity pools;
• The majority of the stolen LMT tokens were transferred to a single address before being traded for ETH on Uniswap and Sushiswap.

Pudgy Penguin community voted co-founder Cole Thereum and the 309Labs team out of the project. The founders allegedly have failed to deliver on stated goals and drained the project's treasury.

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• Pudgy Penguin egg NFTs were airdropped to holders and hatched in form of fishing rog NFTs. The fishing rogs were supposed to be used for an NFT game that was being developed. 309 Labs did not deliver any updates on the game;
• 309 Labs has been accused of draining all the funds out of the project. The 420 ETH raised by the Lil Pudys drop was allegedly distributed and sold off by Cole and the founding team.

Mainstream Adoption

The Associated Press will launch an NFT marketplace for photography on January 31. The marketplace will feature NFT versions of the Associated Press photographs taken over the past 175 years.

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• The marketplace was developed in partnership with the blockchain firm Xooa and will mint the NFTs on the Polygon network;
• Credit card payments will be supported by the marketplace, and further this year is expected the support for centralized exchanges (Fortmatic, Binance, and Coinbase).

Samsung opened its Samsung 837X virtual store in Decentraland. The virtual store will be open in Decentraland for a limited time, and it offers digital adventures through “Connectivity Theater and Sustainability Forest” and a musical experience at the “Customization Stage”.

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• The players will also be invited to quests that grant 837X NFT badges and one of three limited-supply wearables.

New products and ideas

Unstoppable Domains Launched "Login with Unstoppable" an NFT-Based Sign-On for Ethereum and Polygon. With the tool, users can verify their identities and share data (including metadata and proof of ownership) across different apps and metaverses.

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• The username as an NFT is 100% user-owned, unlike centralized services such as Google sign-in, and adds interoperability within the Web3 ecosystem;
• “If you want to share some private information about yourself, like your email address, or maybe your credit score, or some KYC [know-your-customer] data, by tying a single sign-on protocol back to your NFT domain, you can now permission applications to look that stuff up about you,” said Matthew Gould, Unstoppable Domains CEO.

MetaFabric Launched its Metaverse Identification NFTs, a new version of digital identity designed for multiple virtual worlds. The IDs will be the core of the MetaFabric platform and will enable the users to have an NFT representing a unique handle and web address that can be used across the Metaverse.

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• The launch will take two steps, the first which is currently underway, in the format of a Dutch auction. The price starts at $1000 and will decrease until it plateaus, setting the price for the second phase, in the format of a public sale;
• To participate, the users must have an Ethereum wallet with MetaFabric's native token $FABRIC, and mint the user ID in the MetaFabric website. The fee paid in $FABRIC will be burned by the MetaFrabric team, reducing the tokens in circulation.

Nervos Network partnered up with Pastel to offer protection from NFT rug pulls, scams and hacks. Nervos will be integrating Pastel’s ‘Sense’, a near-duplicate detection system for NFTs and ‘Cascade’, a robust on-chain NFT storage solution.

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• The 'Sense' protocol is designed to assess the relative rareness of an NFT against near-duplicate metadata to protect NFT creators and collectors against scams and copyright infringements;
• The 'Cascade' protocol offers permanent storage for NFTs, combating rug pulls, NFT content disappearances, data losses and manipulation;
• “The NFT space is ripe with opportunity, but few projects are addressing the security and storage issues in the industry. With its innovative technologies, Pastel is solving many of these challenges and truly protecting users and digital assets on NFT dApps” said Kevin Wang, Nervos co-founder.

Recommended Readings/Watchings

• EIP4393: Micropayments Standard for NFTs and Multi Tokens: This Ethereum Improvement Proposal outlines a standard for smart contract tipping to ERC-721 NFTs and ERC-1155 multi-tokens, as rewards to their holders;
• How Genie Is Driving Ethereum NFT Bulk Buying and 'Floor Sweeps': This Decrypto article comments on how the NFT marketplace aggregator Genie, a tool designed to bundle purchases to save gas fees, is heading the movement of buying multiple items of a collection and 'sweep' floor price pieces.

New podcasts and shows

• Overpriced JPEGs Podcast: In this episode, Carly interviews Colby Mort and Olivier Biggs, marketing leaders at GET Protocol, an NFT protocol focused on the ticketing industry;
• The Crypto Conversation Podcast: In this episode, Andy interviews Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY, a leading cloud graphics company that is pioneering technology and also seeks to provide energy-efficient solutions for creating NFTs.

Save the date

• 14th - 16th January: ETH Global NFT Hack is a virtual hackathon and summit that brings together creatives and developers of the NFT space, don't miss it!
• 17th - 20th February: ETH Denver is the largest and longest-running ETH event in the world, with several panels, workshops and hackathons, it's a no-brainer.

NFT space in numbers

The values below are from 7th - 13th January 2022. Source: DappRadar.

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