Best of metaversal.banklesshq.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
20 stories from metaversal.banklesshq.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 18 May 2023, with 46 upvotes and 1 comment in total. The latest was shared on 3 April 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The Ethereum Follow Protocol 🤝
The Ethereum Follow Protocol (EFP), first proposed by Brantly Millegan earlier this year, is a system for letting users follow other accounts natively on Ethereum, and it is still in active development with a demo and test API available. Users will be able to create and manage lists of Ethereum accounts or ENS names, and can store those lists directly on Ethereum or on Layer 2 solutions via the CCIP Read mechanism. The article, a Metaversal newsletter by William M. Peaster, says the protocol is in its "coming soon" phase, with launch partners including ENS Vision, Interface, Llamafolio, and Nifty Island.
- Bullish on Nouns DAO
Metaversal author William M. Peaster argues that Nouns DAO is the standout NFT project on Ethereum, and he says no NFT project has more potential to reach people over the long term. He reports that the Nouns protocol has generated 1045 Nouns since August 2021, with the last 10 daily auctions settling at an average of 5.7 ETH. Three forks under the Nouns V3 Fork functionality have returned nearly 600 Nouns, about 57% of the total, to the treasury, and the DAO's holdings still stand at roughly $22M. The article also highlights Prop House, Nouns Builder, and a shift of community discussion to Warpcast's /nouns channel after the Discord server was shuttered.
- ERC-6551: The NFT Game-Changer 🎆
ERC-6551, a new Ethereum token standard that launched on mainnet on May 7, 2023, lets ERC-721 NFTs act as their own smart contract accounts, able to own assets and interact with web3 apps. The standard deploys unique "token bound accounts" for each NFT through a permissionless registry, and a single NFT can own multiple such accounts. The article notes that original unwrapped CryptoPunks are not supported, while Wrapped Punks are. It also flags risks: fraud, such as a seller withdrawing ETH after a sale, and ownership cycles that can make assets permanently inaccessible.
- Midjourney: The Future of the Metaverse? 🔮
William M. Peaster argues that Midjourney is well positioned to become a pillar of the smart open metaverse, the crossroads of AI, crypto and virtual reality. He cites a quoted Midjourney Office Hours plan to build 3D, video and real-time versions of its tool and combine them into a world simulation, described as an open world sandbox where people make games and movies. Peaster notes that Midjourney's open beta began in July 2022 and that the company has generated over $200M in revenue and more than 16 million users. He also points to founder David Holz's earlier work on VR hardware at Leap Motion as a reason Midjourney might eventually release its own headset.
- Blobspace and NFTs 💧
Blobspace is an upcoming Ethereum feature introduced by EIP-4844, the network's next major protocol upgrade, which the article says will sharply cut gas costs and raise throughput. Blobs are temporary chunks of transaction data stored on Ethereum's consensus layer for about 18 days and priced separately through "blob gas," and the article says EIP-4844 may push throughput toward roughly 1,000 transactions per second. The article argues this will make layer-two networks such as Zora Network, Base, and Frame much cheaper for NFT minting and transactions, and it names Pob Studio as noting that blobspace could let decentralized marketplaces challenge platforms like Blur and OpenSea.
- Nouns Will Survive 💫
Nouns DAO is undergoing its first fork, a membership split that the newsletter's author expects will leave the community intact, with the Nouns continuing to survive. At the time of writing, over 350 of the more than 840 Nouns had signaled intent to leave through the fork, which can be completed until the escrow period ends on September 15th. The article says that about 11,000 ETH is now earmarked for the forked DAO and its rage quitters, dropping the treasury from over 28,000 ETH to over 17,000 ETH. It also argues that the fork mechanism in Nouns V3 is a protection against future treasury raids, and that DAO governance isn't fundamentally broken.
- What Is Sofamon? 💟
Sofamon is a crypto-native social platform built around collecting and trading onchain Telegram stickers, and William M. Peaster writes that it may be the first real answer to what a crypto version of Reddit Collectible Avatars could look like. The project launched its beta on Base on March 26 and generated over 3,300 ETH in trading volume and over 95 ETH in revenue within its first week. Its stack combines Telegram, Base and Privy embedded wallets, and it uses a Friend Tech-style bonding curve for pricing. Access is invite-only, and the author reports that the stickers do not appear to be NFTs per se, based on his scan of the smart contract.
- Ethereum: The Infinite Story Machine 💫
Writer WMP argues that Ethereum works as a new kind of medium for storymaking, which he calls an "Infinite Story Machine," and that this framing values the network in ways traditional financial descriptions do not. He describes Ethereum as a growing "Book of Everything" and cites Zora, a hyperstructure NFT protocol, and the Nouns DAO as examples of this. He also argues that Ethereum offers a liberational alternative to institutions that shape how people experience stories, and that ETH can gain value if Ethereum keeps widening as a hub for storymaking.
- Playing the Parallel Open Beta 🎴 - by William M. Peaster
Parallel, a sci-fi trading card game where players command unique factions, launches its open beta on Thursday, February 29, and this guide introduces its basics for new players. The article explains that players earn $PRIME, the in-game currency, by winning ranked matches, with a daily cap on rewarded wins. It also notes that players can start without buying NFT cards, since completing Rookie Mode earns a starter deck, and that five factions (Augencore, Earthen, Kathari, Marcolian, and The Shroud) each have distinct strategies.
- Bitcoin Stamps Explained 📬
Bitcoin Stamps is a newer Bitcoin tokenization protocol that has gained attention alongside Ordinals, and the author presents it as offering the strongest permanence guarantees for NFTs today. Released by Mike In Space in March 2023 as a proof-of-concept on Counterparty, Stamps moved fully to Bitcoin through the SRC-20 protocol update this past summer. Stamps store metadata in UTXOs, making them unprunable but more expensive to create than Ordinals, which store data in witness segments. Luke Dashjr has criticized Ordinals and Stamps as spam, and his Ocean mining pool filters their transactions.
- Majors FTW in the Next NFT Bull Run 🔥
William M. Peaster argues that Ethereum, Bitcoin and Solana will each see significant NFT activity in 2024, making the next bull run more multipolar than the 2021 cycle, which was dominated by Ethereum. He points to Bitcoin's Ordinals inscriptions, which have boomed since early 2023 and often top CryptoSlam's daily NFT volume charts, with Casey Rodarmor's upcoming Runes protocol as a further catalyst. For Ethereum, he cites its top-tier projects, infrastructure and liquidity, and speculates that OpenSea could launch an L2. He also points to Solana's influx of new users and buy pressure on established collections such as Mad Lads.
- What Is Parallel Colony? A 101 🦾
Parallel Colony is an experimental game from the Parallel team in which AI-powered Parallel Avatars, which are NFTs, accumulate in-game resources and evolve as unique agents, according to William M. Peaster's Metaversal newsletter. The project was inspired by the 2023 "Smallville paper" from Stanford and Google, which simulated humanlike behavior with 25 AI agents. Colony's creators describe it as a "1.5 player" game, and Avatars use ERC-6551 Token Bound Accounts to transact autonomously. The team has been iterating on the Base L2 testnet and aims to release a playable MacOS build in Q1 2024.
- NFT Market Momentum ⤴️
Metaversal's weekly NFT roundup reports that daily and weekly NFT volume levels have uptrended over the past month, which the author describes as a strength not seen in a while, though a volume snapshot is not a comprehensive measure of the space. The newsletter, written by William M. Peaster, says it will watch whether this renewed strength precedes a bigger year-end rally. The roundup also lists recent ecosystem news, including ENS launching the EVM Gateway, Taproot Wizards raising a $7.5M seed round, and Ubisoft holding a free mint for Warlords.
- Cross-chain NFTs ⛓️
Metaversal's post surveys the main approaches to moving NFTs between blockchains, noting that there is no single "right way" and that each method has its own tradeoffs. Equivalent bridging, such as moving an NFT from Ethereum to the Optimism L2, is described as conceptually simple but rarely seen in practice, with the Quix marketplace's former bridge now not working for the author. The article says burn-and-mint is more common, citing y00ts moving from Solana to Polygon and then to Ethereum. It also describes LayerZero's lock-and-mint ONFT approach, Holograph's hNFTs, Chainlink's CCIP, and Pirate Nation's mirroring system, which keeps assets on Ethereum while gameplay happens on Arbitrum Nova.
- FTX NFTs 😐
Writer WMP argues that private servers are the weakest option for NFT longevity, using the shutdown of the FTX NFT platform as an example. The platform relied on a private server, so its NFTs now have broken metadata, following Sam Bankman-Fried being found guilty on 7 counts. The newsletter says the NFT space's floor-based market cap held steady at 5.1 million ETH over the past week, and it previews a future write-up on bespoke storage networks such as IPFS, Arweave, and Filecoin.
- Are NFTs Back? 😃
Daily NFT trading volume is recovering, though WMP says it is too early to know whether the latest bear market is ending. Over the past week, the floor-based market cap of the NFT space fell from 5.3 million ETH to 5.1 million ETH, a 3.77% drop. Other news includes Yuga Labs winning its court case against Ryder Ripps et al. and PoolTogether launching its v5 protocol. Juicecrowd's first cohort, JC01, accepts submissions through Nov. 1, 2023.
- Max Mint ⏫
William M. Peaster argues that the NFT market has entered an era of "Max mint," in which many NFTs can be minted cheaply on layer-2 networks. He cites nearly 100 million NFTs minted last month via more than 6 million transactions across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, with Ethereum not congested during Coinbase's Onchain Summer. The newsletter's weekly roundup reports that the floor-based market cap of the NFT space shrank 0.35%, from 8.55 million ETH to 8.52 million ETH, and that the SEC charged Impact Theory with conducting an unregistered security offering via its Founder Key NFTs.
- The NFT Groundswell 🥳
Metaversal, a Bankless newsletter by William M. Peaster, argues that despite a bear market for NFTs, creative experimentation is laying the foundations of future NFT developments. The newsletter reports that the floor-based market cap of the NFT space rose from 7.54 million ETH to 8.55 million ETH over the past week, a 13.4% increase. It also lists weekly news, including Nate Chastain being sentenced to three months in prison over the OpenSea insider trading case and Farcaster announcing plans to move to Optimism. The Museum of Crypto Art is raising operational funds through an open edition mosaic priced at 0.0142069 ETH, with over 700 cryptoartists contributing.
- The NFT Royalties Landscape
Royalty enforcement for NFTs has become optional on major platforms, and the article argues that creators should turn to workarounds rather than expect full royalties to return. OpenSea and Blur made royalties optional to stay price-competitive, after a timeline starting with OpenSea's November 2022 Operator Filter and its February 2023 move to optional royalties with a minimum 0.5% rate. The article lists alternatives such as holding back supply, Zora's Auto-Reserve, Manifold's Royalty Registry, sudoswap's Creator Settings, and Visualize Value's Infinity mints.
- Keeping Up With The Nouns
William M. Peaster presents Nouns as the most ambitious and visionary NFT experiment on Ethereum and offers a catch-up guide for newcomers. He says a cheaper route into Nouns DAO governance is the Bud Light N3XT NFT, currently just under 0.01 ETH, which lets holders collectively vote on how Noun 179 votes, compared with a Noun floor price of around 31 ETH. The article also recaps recent proposals, including a 15% quorum reduction from 20% and a global pizza party in 90+ cities, and notes two areas under exploration: a DAO split mechanism for ragequitting, led by David Brailovsky and Elad Mallel, and zk-based private voting, built with the Aztec x Aragon teams.