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Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

10 NFT drops I’m watching in April 👀

Crypto The Game: Anon Island

April 2nd – @cryptothegame_

The first of two Crypto Hunger Games launching within days of each other (the other being natives).  

I didn’t participate in season 1 of Crypto: The Game, but by all accounts, it was an absolute banger. 

Now they’re running it back, and you can expect another series of mini-games and machiavellian tactics as people compete for a grand prize (last time it was 41 ETH). 

Unlike Season 1, players join by buying an NFT, which means they can sell their spot in the game at any point.

NEW YORK NOW

April 3rd – @MAIFMAIFMAIF

Coming next week to NFT NYC: one of the largest crypto-native AI art shows in recent memory.

Hosted by MAIF, a collective founded by artist ClownVamp, this is an east-coast follow-up to last year’s DEEP FAKE.

Like the last event, the lineup is stacked for AI art fans, with pieces by RedruM, Str4ngeThing, and DeltaSauce among the fifty total that are dropping.

Broken Printer

April 4 – Tabor Robak (on Verse)

Before Tabor made appearances at MoMA and The Met, he used to work in a copy shop.

Now he’s journeying down memory lane to give us a pastiche of historical printing techniques, and the result is a visual feast with layers of graffiti stacked on top of photographs stacked on top of vivid patterns. 

It’s called Broken Printer because the procedural generation comes with the kind of imperfections that were common in 1990s-2000s printers, subverting the polish of pixel-perfect advertisements we see today. 

Today Ancient Seeds

April 9th – @todaythegame

Today is a cozy social simulation game developed by a doxxed team with AAA game development experience, which will soon launch their free genesis NFT collection Ancient Seeds.

Featuring a heavy AI focus, the game has you construct a world using generative tools. This includes your own island, where you’ll vie for the attention of NPCs and other players, kind of like a first-person Animal Crossing vibe. Check out gameplay footage here and here.

While this type of game is hard to pull off and we still don’t know what these Ancient Seeds actually do (I’m expecting them to work as a sort of access pass), the accessible price of free makes it a no-brainer.

Filigree 

April 11 – @mattdesl

Popular artist Matt Deslauriers (Meridian, Subscapes) has a very interesting idea here. 

He’s creating a series of hand-made books, crafted in London using classic book-binding techniques. The epitome of human touch, in a way.

But the pages show 100 images of Generative Art using AI, perhaps the most synthetic artform being produced today. 

Anyone can mint the images as NFTs, but a certain number of them will also come with the physical books and high-quality prints. 

Probably will be the priciest drop on our list, but one for those who appreciate artisanship. 

Velocity Series 2.0

April 12th – @redbullracing, @Bybit_Official, @ArtOnInternet

Red Bull, Bybit, and AOI are running it back after the success of the first Velocity Pass last year and I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Full mint details will be released over the next couple of weeks, but we already know the following:

• This new pass has similar perks as the first, including early access to mints and free art airdrops

• Half of the 2,000 supply will be a free mint for holders of the first pass

• The first artist dropping is Kjetil Golid, a familiar name to many generative art collectors

The first series was #26 on my list of top 2023 NFTs, mainly thanks to the surprisingly impressive artist roster, and there’s a chance they pull it off again.

natives

Early April – @nativeswtf

Nate Alex (popular NFT collector, artist, and all-around OG) hopes natives will “change the way people think about NFTs and what they can do”. 

Not totally sure what that means yet – but it’ll involve 9 days of social maneuvering, leaderboards, and cutthroat competition from a Who’s Who of popular Web3 influencers and buildooors. 

In addition to getting access to this thunderdome, each mint also comes with:

1. A digital game piece on Ethereum

2. A claim for a physical piece, hand-drawn by Nate himself

3. And a single Bitcoin ordinal matching the final art

chatFUKR by Harvey Rayner 

April TBD – @harvey_rayner

Generative artist Harvey Rayner is distilling all the madness that is web3 into chatFUKR, a PFP collection for “degens, art-loving degens, and art lovers who love degens”.

There’s a lot going on artistically as surreal characters, chaotic patterns, and crypto references overlap to create an amusing underlying message.

The weird character represents “a troll that has evolved in the wild of interconnected chat and social servers, consuming the discord of Web3 communities. It screams as its consciousness comes online, an AI that has evolved in the wild.”

I don’t know what an AI-trained-on-Web3 would look like, but screaming as its consciousness comes online sounds about right.

mmERCH

April TBD – @mmERCH

Here’s the genesis drop from a “non-fungible fashion” company partnering with artists to small batch produce everything using NFTs.

This one comes with 960 hoodie-NFTs made in partnership with comic book illustrator Gilbert Hernandez. 

The NFTs are bundled with a claim for the physical hoodie, which comes in French Terry, or Cashmere (if you’re lucky). They also come with NFC chips set to unlock more utility onchain, which likely includes access to future drops. 

The first of many from mmERCH, which raised $6.4 million since we last covered them. 

Keys and (ch)art

April TBD – @batzdu 

We covered these last month but they never launched, so we do a little copy-paste while crossing our fingers that they drop in April: 

Batzdu loves Pepe, and any friend of Pepe is a friend of mine.

We did an entire profile on Batzdu a few weeks ago. I recommend checking it out to understand what he’s doing at the intersection of fine art & memes and why he’s exploded in popularity over the last 24 months. 

This month he’s aiming to kick off his generative arc with Keys and (ch)art. 

Keys is a collection for those holding Batzdu’s My Keyboard NFTs. We still don’t have much in the way of sneak peeks. 

(ch)art is, well, a set of market charts, ranging from simple ones to whatever this is.