GM

All I want for Christmas is for everyone to have fun with their friends online.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Let’s get weird

New adherents to the Temple of Mint or Skip might not know this, but we have a running series called Magic Loot Bus that we revisit from time to time. 

Here’s a quick summary: 

What’s the Magic Loot Bus?

You know when you visit a city – let’s say Rome – and they take you to all those tourist attractions, like the Colosseum or the Pantheon, and you take your photos and eat your gelato and buy your little hats for the family back home?

Yeah, this is the opposite of that.

It’s more like being taken into random alleyways exploring pop-up goth raves, quantum graffiti exhibits, and something called Gepetto’s House of Absinthe.

And today we’re hopping back on. So hand in your golden tickets…

We have three weird drops to cover: 

DoAW by Joan Heemskerk

This nerdy art drop minting today caught my eye. 

The mint page by Folia brings you to an endless light and color show where real wallets are being created in front of you with random seed phrases. 

The NFT you mint takes a snapshot of one randomized wallet and seed phrase and adds it to your tokens metadata. 

In other words, you're getting an NFT with a compromised wallet that exists forever onchain.

Then, anyone who minted in the first 24 hours gets a second NFT airdropped to that wallet. 

And you can claim this by depositing ETH into the wallet to transfer it out. 

But WAIT.

According to the artist, “bots, vigilantly watching compromised wallets, will plunder any free ETH”. So maybe don’t do that. 

One for those that are in it for the crypto(graphy) art.

Minting today at 1 PM EST: 1,024 supply for 0.055555555555555555 ETH

Skystrife By Lattice 

I’m guessing you’ve never played a fully onchain game before (meaning 100% of the logic and memory is stored on a public blockchain). 

That’s not a diss – maybe less than 10,000 people on Earth have ever played one, even though the genre has a lot of promise. 

But, look, this could be your moment – the start of your 80-year-long onchain gaming career. 

Skystrife by Lattice is a fully onchain real-time strategy game that’s gaining quite a bit of attention. It already has its own mini esports league and is struggling to keep up with new users. 

And it’s in the middle of its Season 0 playtest. Free games are hosted every twelve hours until December 15 on the Ethereum test network Holesky. 

This is the last chance to become a test player before the mainnet launch (and season 1 pass) in early 2024.

Bonus: here’s a play guide for anyone who wants to speedrun up the ladder. 

The History of Collecting by Forefront

Strong opening line on Forefront’s new Drop Space, where they plan to release periodic NFTs going forward. 

This first Drop is an essay called The History of Collecting.

Now, essay NFTs aren’t new. But what’s interesting here is the fact that you can snip and own individual lines or paragraphs from the essay itself.

These snippets are then aggregated in a Mint Stream where others can comment on the passages being collected.

A good reminder that virtually any micro-slice of data on the internet can be tokenized and collected: paragraphs, guitar riffs from your favorite song, lines of code, moments from a podcast or livestream, etc.

This is a cool experiment taking us in that direction.

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

Nifty Gateway’s Tokens of Thanks

NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway embraces the holiday spirit with their 2023 Tokens of Thanks mint.

23 pieces from artists who dropped on the platform this year are being given away via daily raffles, including work from artists we’ve frequently covered like Grant Yun and Zach Lieberman.

It started yesterday, so there are still 19 giveaways left.

ALEPH-0 by Hackatao and Insight

While OG crypto art duo Hackatao are known for their digital art (with some ludicrous sales prices), they’ve also dabbled in generative algorithms as early as 2018.

Now they revisit those days with ALEPH-0, a 392-supply collection made in collaboration with Insight, a generative artist who’s previously released on Art Blocks.

The art features a continuous line that branches out to fill the whole canvas, mimicking organic structures. It has many inspirations that you can read about here (including quantum physics, good luck).

Sometimes I Sing Back by Adam GenLight

Some more affordable generative art is coming to Base network after last week’s Art Basel drop. We now have pseudonymous artist Adam GenLight releasing the floral Sometimes I Sing Back.

Colorful yet gritty, this open edition features generative flowers that change in arrangement depending on the display used to view them (cool), and which you can interact with by adding shading and other visual elements.

Quick little onchain gift for a special someone?