NFTs are what we make them

Dear Bankless Nation,

There’s a debate ongoing in the mainstream right now as to whether or not NFTs can constitute art.

Of course they can. NFTs are simply a medium, like marble or canvas can be. Sure, they’re a novel programmable medium born of and for the 21st-century, but they’re still just a medium, and one that many artists have already embraced.

So yes, NFTs can be art. They can be many things and do many new things.

This is why artists and people from so many other walks of life are embracing NFTs. It’s a technology and ecosystem around which all the various fields of human activity can be explored toward unprecedented ends!

-WMP

🛒 NFT News & Platforms

• LooksRare, an upstart OpenSea competitor, launched. Use at your own risk: the project’s unaudited and its GitHub repo’s private at the time of this newsletter’s writing.
• OpenSea remains king: over 1M users have now made an NFT transaction using the platform.
• Ghozali Ghozalu entered NFT stardom after selling out +900 charming selfies on OpenSea.
• Ethereum creators are estimated to have earned over $3.5B collectively in 2021, and that’s without counting the gaming NFTs sector!
• Etherscan unveiled an NFT Tracker tool.

🏆 Digital Collectibles

• Nouns DAO is preparing to trade one Noun NFT in exchange for a “prominent beverage company [including] Noun glasses in a 2022 Super Bowl commercial” and more.

• MoonCats are now totally on-chain.
• Josie announced that her CyberBrokers project will launch on Feb. 22nd.

🎨 Cryptoart

• Wikipedia editors have declined to categorize NFTs as art for now. How absurd.
• SuperRare collectors and minters from pre-2020 are eligible for a new POAP by renowned cryptoartist XCOPY.

• Non Fungible Poems: this week I curated an exhibition for NFT curation platform JPG to highlight literary NFTs and how they’re on the rise and here to stay.

🎮 NFT Games

• Axie Infinity’s Ronin sidechain has quickly become a force to be reckoned with:

• Chainfaces Arena, created by longtime NFT veteran Nate Alex, now has less than 2,500 warriors left standing.
• Coinbase becomes the latest Sponsor-A-Scholar partner of Yield Guild Games.

💽 Music

• Aluna is releasing Forget About Me today on sound.xyz.

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Cryptovoxels activated the Flora district.
• Atlantis World is building a metaversal clubhouse for the Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult.
• The Sandbox is airdropping $SAND to LAND holders.

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• TreasureDAO: check out this TheTie research write-up, which is the best primer I’ve seen yet on $MAGIC and the Treasure NFT marketplace on Arbitrum.
• ParagonsDAO, a project centered around sci-fi card game Parallel, unveiled the details of its PDT token launch.
• NFTfi has now facilitated over 3,000 loans.
• Glass Protocol unveils an automated market for NFTs.
• Flip, an NFT marketplace co-founded by LedgerStatus, just raised $6.5M.

Action steps

• What’d I miss this week in NFT world? Let me know in the comments below!
• Read NFTs as dephysicalized merch by Metaversal
• Read What is the ideal NFT marketplace by Metaversal
• Read How to use StarkWare Layer 2s by Bankless
• Watch NFTs’ Next Big Unlock | GET Protocol by Overpriced JPEGs