Web2 in Web3: Starbucks and Nike Make Further NFT Inroads

What is the Friday Focus Newsletter all about?

Our Friday newsletter dives deep into the most impactful topic of the week. This content is exclusively shared through email, it won’t be available on our website. It’s ONLY for you, our newsletter readers. This week:

1. EXCLUSIVE Friday Focus Article: This Week in the Non-Fungible Space

2. EXCLUSIVE Friday Focus Article: Mad Lads Outsmart Bots to Make Huge Splash in Solana NFT Ecosystem

1. This Week in the Non-Fungible Space

By RoryKeyz

As ever with the relentless NFT landscape, the past few days have seen a whole host of exciting developments.

In order to ensure that everyone’s up to date with all things non-fungible, this week’s newsletter will be covering the most notable happenings…let’s dig in.

Sotheby’s Auction House Launches Secondary Marketplace For Digital Art

First to be discussed is illustrious English auction house Sotheby’s, which has recently launched a secondary marketplace for top-tier digital artworks.

The portal was added to Sotheby’s Metaverse platform, an October 2021 launched, Mojito-powered platform for showcasing NFT artwork minted on the Polygon blockchain.

In practice, the secondary sales will be processed through entirely automated smart contracts, and will be allowed to be facilitated through both MATIC or ETH payments- i.e. the two respective tokens of the Polygon and Ethereum blockchains. Here, each transaction will be peer-to-peer and fully on-chain, as well as embedded with a secondary royalty fee in order to empower original creators.

As expected, the marketplace won’t serve as an aggregated, non-discriminatory platform such as the likes of OpenSea and Blur, as instead it’ll be ‘rotating curated selections of leading artists’ that’ll be handpicked by specialists from the auction house.

Artist rotations will take place every few months, with the initial wave including 13 leading creators from the digital art space- including Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, Sam Spratt, and XCOPY amongst others.

In commenting on the development, company Vice President and Head of NFTs and Digital Art Michael Bouhanna described it as an “important step forward” in the auction house’s ongoing Web3 journey.

Phantom Finally Adds Support for Ethereum and Polygon NFTs

Next is leading Solana crypto wallet Phantom, which on Monday announced its new multi-chain status.

After five months of anticipation, the wallet now supports the non-fungible space’s three biggest juggernauts, as both Ethereum and its Layer-2 protocol Polygon have been added to its roster of supported blockchains.

Through such move, NFTs from such blockchains can now be held and managed in one place across Phantom’s mobile app and browser wallets.

Of course, the rationale behind the landmark additions is to allow Phantom users to access and interact with some of the biggest and best NFTs around. Whilst doing so, users won’t be hassled with swapping between wallets, and will be able to import assets from other wallets such as MetaMask and other EVM wallets.

"We are dedicated to leveraging our expertise from the Solana ecosystem to drive innovation in the wallet space... in order to deliver the most versatile and user-friendly experience across all platforms, especially the three most prominent ecosystems: Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana”- Phantom CEO Brandon Millman.

Moving forward, the company has also stated its intent to introduce instant NFT sales, as well as develop a bridge to enable transfers between the Solana and Ethereum blockchains.

Sports Illustrated launch ‘Box Office’ NFT Ticketing Platform

In a novel new non-fungible use case, earlier this week Sports Illustrated Tickets (SIT) announced its new Polygon-built NFT ticketing platform called Box Office.

SIT is the media brand’s 2021-launched secondary marketplace for events such as concerts, sports, theatre, and more. Given the stature of the outlet, such tickets often regard the most prestigious events on the earth, however in a change of direction, Box Office will be listing tickets for smaller scaled events (which may usually be listed on sites such as DICE or Eventbrite). Of course, the platform also has its own distinct spin by offering tickets as NFTs, as opposed to traditional digital tickets.

Further, Box Office- which is built with A-grade Ethereum software studio ConsenSys- isn’t designed to compete against the industry’s main players such as SeatGeek and Ticketmaster, as instead, company CEO David Lane has stated that it’ll be ‘going after the self-service event market’:

“We’re trying to create the first mass-market adoption of NFT ticketing so that everyone from a 15-year-old to a 90-year-old can buy their first NFT ticket without having to go through a crypto tutorial on blockchain, or have to get a wallet and understand any aspects of it”.

Keeping things simple, Box Office NFT tickets will be accessible through the SIT mobile app, where in leveraging the powers of NFTs, the tickets can also be embedded with other perks that relate to each respective event- such as photos/videos, messages, collectibles, offers, and loyalty rewards etc.

The prowess of the blockchain also means that Box Office tickets reportedly have 20% lower fees than Eventbrite, with users also being able to transfer their tickets to NFT marketplace and other secondary ticketing platforms such as SeatGeek, Stubhub, and Vivid Seats.

On the revenue side of things, SIT will be offering a 50-50 split with event organisers and performers for each resale, which will be tracked using on-chain data.

NFT tickets may also relate to free-to-entry events, as well as more obscure events that other sites appear to neglect- such as retreats (of all kinds), conferences, and comedy clubs etc.

Former OpenSea Exec Gets Sent Down

And on a final, more-gossipy note, OpenSea’s ex-Head of Product Nathanie Chastain has finally been convicted of fraud this week.

Chastain was initially detained in June of last year under charges that accused him of wire fraud, money laundering, and making trades using insider knowledge.

Here, Chastain allegedly traded NFTs in which he knew would be on homepage, where in doing so, he made over $50,000 worth of illegal profit.

With his ‘not guilty’ plea now confirmed as unsuccessful, Chastain is now awaiting his sentencing, wherein he may face up to 20 years in prison for each charge.

Article by RoryKeyz

2. Mad Lads Outsmart Bots to Make Huge Splash in Solana NFT Ecosystem

By RoryKeyz

The Solana NFT ecosystem has undergone a treacherous few months, as in wake of the ever-impactful FTX collapse, the blockchain has seen two of its most prized possessions- DeGods and y00ts- migrate to other networks.

However, the Solana-residing Mad Lads NFT collection has now swept across non-fungible ongoings, with the collection not only being able to mingle with some of Ethereum’s big boys across trade rankings, but its controversial mint has also rediverted collector’s attention to the second largest NFT blockchain.

Mad Lads

Mad Labs is a collection of 10,000 PFP NFTs which each depict a rightwards-facing, anime styled man, or a forwards-facing woman. As ever, each comes with a unique and vibrant semblance of traits, which include Expression, Eyes, Hair, Hand, Mouth, Moustache, Background, Back accessory, Clothing, Glove, Hat, and Smoke/Smoking.

The collection was developed by Solana NFT pioneer Coral- or more specifically, infamous duo Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver- who launched the collection as the first to be tied to its all-in-one crypto wallet Backpack. Such wallet was developed with its Solana xNFT (a.k.a. executable NFT) standard, which involves users accessing token-gated events and experiences through their Backpack wallets, as opposed to individual NFTs.

In the case of the Mad Lads mint, this involved a ‘collective boss battle’ dynamic which resembled ‘raids’ on World of Warcraft, as together, players could embark on quests together as a shared gaming experience.

The Mint

In a rather wholesome move to add power to the (actual) people, the mint was preceded by a fake counterpart which lured bots into purchasing over $250,000 worth of SOL on fake NFTs. Here, the aim of such ploy was to distribute the collection’s actual NFTs away from bulk-minting speculative traders, and into the hands of those who actually wish to be part of the project’s community.

That being said, the core rationale for the fake mint was realised through the bot owner’s explicit threats to the company, as Coral CEO Armani Ferrante stated that an unknown Telegram account contacted him in the days prior to the mint, stating that they could extort the mint by taking down the company’s Backpack app (known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack). Further, an alternative to appease such threats would’ve been to issue a ‘stand down’ payment.

“We decided that we had to battle the botters, and we had to do it for the sake of the project”- Coral CEO Armani Ferrante.

The project’s allowlist mint opened on Wednesday of last week, with the bot swarm then initiating just before the public mint went live the next day. Here, over a billion requests were made through Coral’s Backpack crypto wallet.

The DDoS’s billions of requests caused glitches across other platforms, such as two RPC node failures and problems across security platform Cloudware. Although the Solana Network was able to stand strong and remain live, Coral was still unable to access the NFT mint for around an hour.

Such occurrences prompted the mint to be delayed 24 hours, with a bot-free mint finally taking place through Coral setting up a two-pronged update. Here, bots had been attacking the mint by reverse engineering the code, which is why one of the prongs- named ‘honeypot’- was only accessible through such method. Such funnelling mechanism then saw the bots purchase around $250,000 worth of counterfeit NFTs, which in turn, left the collection’s real assets for actual humans to mint.

Of course, some good actors may also have been caught in the honeypot crossfire, however all matters have since been resolved, as all money spent on counterfeit NFTs have been returned to their rightful (human) owners.

Trading

In wake of such headline-hitting events, over $16.5 million worth of Mad Lads secondary sales have taken place over the course of over 13,700 individual trades. Such stats see the collection sit above the vast Yuga Labs NFT empire- i.e., collections such as Bored & Mutant Ape Yacht Club- across many metrics over the past week.

The project’s success comes in wake of period of angst for Coral, as the company was hit with huge financial problems when over $14 million of the $20 million it raised in a funding round last year had been lost during the FTX collapse.

In hindsight, the potential of a bot invasion has been beneficial for the Mad Labs launch, as in addition to the marketing attention it’s garnered, the project’s community begins with a fully engaged set of NFT enthusiasts.

In addition, Coral’s Backpack- which leverages a new non-fungible called xNFTs (executable NFTs)- is currently in public beta mode across mobile and web apps, with Ferrante stating that xNFTs have gone through ongoing security audits in order to be rolled-out in the long-term for users to build on.

At this moment in time, the assets are permissioned, however such feature will be removed once Coral are ‘confident in the security’.

Article by RoryKeyz