Alpha Schedule #9 - Free mental health support for NFT holders
Discover more from Alpha Schedule - Your Weekly NFT Newsletter
Alpha Schedule #9 - Free mental health support for NFT holders
Hi Frenz,
It's time for celebrations; Bored Ape Yacht Club is turning 1 year old this weekend, which is the perfect opportunity to reflect and realize how much of an impact they made on the entire NFT community through their iconic partnerships and contributions. Apes - We salute you.
On another note: we've been receiving a few comments about the length of our newsletter, so we tried to reduce it. We also received reports from subscribers who found our newsletter in their spam box - please make sure you add alphaschedule@getrevue.co to your address book, this way you won't miss a single newsletter. Our open rate thanks you! : )
— 🩸💀 AMERICAN RADASS
CRYPTOMORIES ADVOCATES MENTAL HEALTH
As part of its roadmap, CryptoMories announced it is partnering with Impact Suite, the mental health specialist, to offer free mental health support to its NFT owners.
For now, this offer is only available for US NFT holders, since Impact Suite is only certified for that region. Both parties are looking into broadening this offer to all their holders, worldwide.
WAGMI UNITED DOA BUYS FOOTBALL CLUB
WAGMI United has become the first crypto company to own a football club after officially announcing the acquisition of Crawley Town Football Club.
Founded by former ESPN betting analyst Preston Johnson and former derivatives trader Eben Smith, WAGMI United “seeks to reimagine how professional sports teams are owned and operated — building communities of passionate fans and empowering them to take a personal stake in telling their team’s story and shaping its future.”
CYBERKONGZ INTRODUCES ON-CHAIN 2FA
Owl - the Solidity Dev at cyberkongz - has announced the Guardian Contract - a solution he developed for on-chain 2FA.
In a somewhat technical blog, he explains how it works works, but in essence, the Guardian Contract allows you to enjoy the convenience of a hot wallet while adding the security of a cold/hardware/multi-sig wallet on top.
This is an innovative technology, which could help to reduce the number of hacks in the NFT space. We'll see if this becomes a widely adopted technique.
FACEBOOK TAKES 47.5% NFT CUT
Facebook’s parent Meta plans to take a 47.5% cut on the sale of digital assets on its virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds, leaving the NFT creator with 52.5% of the sale’s proceeds.
The NFT community online has reacted with mixed emotions to the news as some believe that Meta has priced itself out of the market and further distanced itself from the creator economy.
To put it a bit more in perspective: Opensea, the largest NFT marketplace, currently takes a significantly lower fee per transaction: 2.5% per transaction.
📰 OTHER NEWS FROM THE PAST WEEK
Last night, Cool Cats reopened their Cooltopia game.
Solana NFTs are now available on OpenSea.
The cryptocurrency payments startup MoonPay secured an $87 million fundraiser led by Justin Bieber, Maria Sharapova, and Bruce Willis.
Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie Infinity, is offering up to $1 million to anyone that can identify major security vulnerabilities in its platform.
Coinbase is producing a trio of Bored Ape Yacht Club films in the crypto exchange’s first foray into the entertainment space. [Coindesk]
Known NFT Photographer Drift sold 10,351 NFTs for his "First Day Out" open edition drop, raising about $6.8 million, $1 million of which will go to The Bail Project.
Ripple announced the official release of XRP Ledger version 1.9.0, including XLS-20 standard for NFTs. [Blockonomi]
✨ NEW IN THE SPACE
Epic Games, the firm behind the smash-hit game Fortnite and the widely-used Unreal Engine, announced that it has raised $2 billion in funding—with ambitions to “build the metaverse.”
The funding round was split evenly between previous investor Sony and newcomer KIRKBI, the company behind The LEGO Group, with each firm investing $1 billion at a post-money valuation of $31.5 billion. Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney remains in control of the private company.
OTHER BRANDS ENTERING THE WEB3 SPACE
Video game and entertainment company Sega Corporation revealed it will launch its “Super Game” initiative, which will include NFT technology.
Mastercard has thrown its hat into the crypto trademark ring, with 15 new filings related to NFTs, virtual worlds and more.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in an interview that he could see the company selling NFTs "down the road."
The Golden State Warriors are celebrating its 2022 NBA Playoff Run by Releasing NFT Collection
Ubisoft has doubled down on its cryptocurrency endeavors by leading a $60 Million investment in White Start Capital’s new Digital Asset Fund, meant to help companies work towards the mass adoption of digital assets.
Japanese gaming developer Bandai Namco announced setting up a fund of 1 billion yen (or $7.9 million approx.) in 1 year and 3 billion yen ($23.8 million approx.) in 3 years to invest in upcoming gaming companies related to Web 3 and metaverse.
Snoop Dogg is collaborating with Clay Nation to launch an NFT Collection on Cardano.
💀 HOW TO RECOGNIZE A RUG PULL
A “rug pull” is a wildly used term within the crypto world and NFT space to describe a scam in which the founders of a project don’t fulfill their promises after receiving funds - essentially, running away with the money.
In order to recognize these rug pulls and to help you improve your research, we’ll be sharing various tips and tricks over the next few newsletters.
This week, we're highlighting a known scam that targets everyone who organizes a giveaway: scammers are copying usernames in order to claim a prize they don't deserve.
POSSIBLE RUGPULLS
Please be careful with Collabland Verifications, because there are some bots impersonating it, and scamming people.
Rug Pull Finder has announced that they found a group of scammers that collected 40.000 ETH from the community via rug pulls, not including royalties.
Check Point, an hardware and software supplier for IT security, has identified a security flaw in the popular NFT marketplace Rarible, which boasts over two million monthly active users.
North Korean Lazarus Group has been identified as the group that stole $625M via Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge Hack!
Suspicion has fallen upon NFT Marketplace Manifold over what looks to be an impromptu “pump and dump” in the wake of an abortive NFT drop involving the popular digital artist Pak.
Retired professional boxer Floyd Mayweather launched a second NFT project, which was rugged once again.
Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet as an NFT for $2.9 million last year. He listed the NFT for sale again at $48 million last week. The top bid was $280 (or 0.09 ETH).
📅 UPCOMING MINTS
This chapter of the newsletter functions as the extension of my public NFT mint calendar, which is meant to highlight projects I’m looking forward to.
For next week, I'm actually only looking at Moonbirds and Weirdos. We recommend you still do your own research into them if they sound interesting because this shouldn’t be considered as financial advice.
MOONBIRDS
Date: April 16th
Supply: 10,000
Price: 2.5 ETH
Twitter: @moonbirds_xyz
We already reviewed the project last week, so short summary: founders are known for building, well connected, and introducing unique and refreshing utilities. They've got a steep price and allowlists will only be given away via a premint raffle.
WEIRDOS
Mint date: April 19th
Supply: 9,272
Price: 0.09272 ETH
Twitter: @TheWeirdosNFT
Roadmap: theweirdos.com
Weirdos are releasing the second season of their weird and adult-themed NFT collection, which contains 9,272 clones and prelude the outbreak of war and 'Project W'.
This means the founders have already launched a Season 1, which contains 412 hand-drawn 'OG' weirdos, and currently sits at a 1.35 eth floor price.
Something we noticed, is how much effort the team is putting into their lore, and gamification. For example; they introduced "rat milk" as their discord coins, and are gamification it by keeping a leaderboard on their website.
Additionally, they created a "Meet the weirdos"-lore for every one of their 9,272 characters and listed them on the same website.
The project will be priced at 0.09272 ETH, mainly because the team thought it would be 'weird'.
🔮 LOOKING FORWARD
We are already looking ahead to the next few weeks, meaning we’re currently doing our due diligence and researching the projects listed below.
It’s no financial advice at all, but you might want to start doing your research and grinding for these allowlists before it’s too late.
PS - Don’t hesitate to tell them you found out about them via this newsletter ;)
📖 LEARN HOW TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH
Twitter user Marlonperalta, who's known to help various NFT projects with their marketing, has revealed some tips and tricks in order to drive traffic to an NFT project.
These are interesting insights for everyone looking to launch a project, but also for collectors in order to understand the mechanics of NFT projects.
😂 LAUGH OUT LOUD
We've seen a lot of funny NFT memes, so we wanted to mention a few honorable tweets:
😊 ENJOYED THIS WEEK'S ALPHA?
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🤓 DISCLAIMER: NFA & DYOR
This newsletter is a curated overview of the most interesting things I’ve read the past week, the projects I’ve researched, and the NFTs I’ll be trying to buy.
This means I’m - per definition - biased, so don’t consider this as financial advice and keep doing your own research if you see something you like.