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NFT Innovation Digest #50

X2Y2 asks holders to vote on creator royalties / Revolutionary NFT licences from a16z / The White House Historical Association enters NFTs / Nifty Gateway transitions Curators into Publishers / Sudoswap to release SUDO tokens
NFT Innovation Digest #50

Featured artwork: When We're Alone by Jake-Andrew

Most innovative (author's pick)

Image: Coinlive

There's a new set of licenses in town, designed specifically for NFTs. This week, a16z released a series of "Can't be Evil" Licenses that are freely available and serve three goals: (1) to help NFT creators protect (or release) their intellectual property (IP) rights; (2) to grant NFT holders a baseline of rights that are irrevocable, enforceable, and easy to understand; and (3) to help creators, holders, and their communities unleash the creative and economic potential of their projects. The key features of each licence are as follows:

More:

  • While many have welcomed the release and believe it will offer more clarity for NFT buyers, others have decried the inclusion of a "hate speech revocation" and think the new offerings might threaten the Creative Commons Licence favoured by many in the space.
  • a16z has deployed the licenses to Arweave so that they can be stored permanently and easily incorporated by future NFT projects.

Most discussed‌

Image: X2Y2

‌In a controversial move, NFT marketplace X2Y2 announced it was making royalties optional. While the NFT space has been widely praised for its widespread feature of artist or creator royalties so far, this is beginning to be challenged, limited and in some cases totally removed. In response to a barrage of negative comments on their tweet, X2Y2 publicly blamed Sudoswap and said "While entities like Sudo exist, who blatantly disregard royalties without even giving the option, we are all at risk" as well as "It's an awful move from decentralised platforms in the first place".

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  • X2Y2 has updated its proposal to include holder-only votes on whether optional royalties should be enabled or disabled on specific collections and is encouraging NFT communities to get involved.
  • It is also hosting a Twitter space today, the 2nd of September, on the topic of '0% Royalties - Industry Panel Discussion - What is the Way Forward?'.
Image: The Shack

A charity auction held on Coinbase's NFT marketplace saw a winning bid of $185k for a 1/1 NFT with a unique utility: going for a beer with Bill Murray! The winner will also have their beer-meeting painted on an IRL canvas by artist David Grizzle.

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  • Six collectors submitted 60 bids before it went to the highest bidder, Brant Boersma. The proceeds will be donated to Chive Charities, a non-profit that supports families of veterans and first responders.
  • This 1/1 NFT is part of the "Bill Murray 1000 collection". Other NFTs in the collection include never-before-heard anecdotes and stories from Murray.
Image: Meta

This week, Meta announced that users can share NFTs on Facebook and Instagram by connecting their digital wallet to either site. The response has been mixed, with some praising the move for encouraging broader adoption, and others highlighting security and privacy concerns.

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  • The critics pointed out Meta's track-record of massive data losses, a history of abusing personal information and the danger of flagging very high value assets in relation to your public profile.

Mainstream adoption

Image: The White House

The White House Historical Association (WHHA) has entered the NFT space in an exciting partnership between the artist Linda Dounia Rebeiz, the WHHA, NFT platform Iconic Moments, and PROOF Collective. The new artwork created, titled "Sparrows Do Not Fear the Sun", pays tribute to Alma Thomas' incredible painting Resurrection which was added to the White House Collection in 2015, becoming the first artwork by a Black woman to be included.

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  • The artwork was released as one of PROOF's Grails collections, which can be minted by PROOF Collective NFT holders but the artist identities are hidden until the minting window closes.
  • Linda Dounia Rebeiz is a self-taught artist and curator born and raised in Senegal, and you can check out more of her great work on her website here.
Image Dapper

Ticketmaster and Dapper Labs have partnered in a major project to onboard more people into NFTs. Event organizers will now be able to issue NFTs before, during and after live events using the Dapper-operated Flow blockchain. These NFTs could offer loyalty rewards, special event add-ons or simply operate as memorabilia.

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  • Ticketmaster will also be issuing NFTs to all attendees of 100 selected NFL games this year and claims it has already enabled the minting of over 5 million NFTs since dropping digital collectibles to 70,000 Super Bowl LVI ticket holders.

New products and ideas

Image: Medium

Nifty Gateway has announced a new and expanded version of their previous curated drops: Publishers. Publishers will have access to a suite of tools including unique drop types, setting buyer rules, payment options and more, with additional features coming soon.

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  • The beta launch took place on September 1st, with an initial group of around 50 Publishers participating. Eventually, the platform will be open to everyone.
  • According to Nifty Gateway's research, Publisher drops bring in up to 90% new buyers, and up to 70% of those buyers go on to collect additional NFTs.
Image: OpenSea

OpenSea has announced Polygon support on Seaport, the open-source marketplace protocol it launched in June (previously Polygon assets were powered by the 0x protocol). It claims this consolidation of infrastructure will provide a more stable buying and selling experience and enable new features for Polygon NFTs, including: no listing thresholds, native token support (you can buy and list in MATIC, Polygon's native token), multiple creator fees, bulk transfers, and many more.

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  • OpenSea will also be adding support for Klaytn and other EVM-compatible chains in the coming months.
Image: Sudoswap

The popular decentralized NFT marketplace Sudoswap has announced an upcoming launch of SUDO tokens. 60M will be released at first but they will be non-transferable for a length of time that is currently unspecified. A treasury will be governed by SUDO holders, and governance will be able to mint more SUDO, up to a maximum inflation cap of 10% a year. The initial supply distribution can be seen in the chart below, and the full details are outlined in this blog post.

More:

  • A massive 41.9% will be dropped to XMON holders, which is the utility token behind the popular NFT collection 0xmons - unsurprising as the same developer is responsible for both projects.
  • Exploring CeDeFi: The Merge of DeFi and CeFi: This article introduces the fusion of CeFi and DeFi (centralized and decentralized finance), the potential advantages and disadvantages of combining them and some of the key products that already exist in this space;
  • Rarity Tools Explained: Get to grips with rarity rankings and rarity tools with this handy new guide from Randy Ginsburg, written for NFT NOW.

New podcasts and shows

  • Podcast 1: A new, must-listen episode of Between 2 Layers from Carly Reilly and Robby Ferguson as Ethereum's Merge nears, with their thoughts on carbon neutrality, sharding, ZK wars and price action;
  • Podcast 2: This episode of the NFT Catcher podcast is a much-needed Web3 cyber-security advice special, hosted by Michael Keen and Jennifer Sutto.

Save the date

  • 17 - 18 September 2022: NFT Show Europe takes place in Valencia, Spain
  • 3-4 November 2022: NFT.LONDON (brought to you by NFT.NYC) takes place in London, UK

NFT space in numbers

The values below are from 27 August - 2 September. Source: DappRadar.

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