GM

the secret to a long and virtuous life?

buying and selling jpegs over the weekends while ignoring all social obligations

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

The first 24/7 NFT vending machine

Please make sure you’re sitting down…

The metaverse now has its first Pokemon card vending machine. 

Some quick context

Courtyard has been bringing collectible cards onchain for nearly a year (first covered here). Collectors ship their physical cards to Courtyard’s vault, and in exchange they get an NFT representing that card that they can trade or even get a loan against. 

Sometimes Courtyard also brings their own cards and sells them through randomized virtual packs, mixing in common cards with a few rares, and they’ve sold quite a few over the past several months. 

But now they’re going one step further by setting up a 24/7 vending machine where people can buy individual randomized cards at their hearts’ content. 

Here’s how it works

1. “Rip” open a random card on-demand for $25

2. Sell back cards instantly for 70% market value or trade them on secondary

3. Or claim the physical vaulted card  

The odds are shown transparently ahead of time

At the low end, there’s a 40% chance you get a card worth less than $15, while at the high end, there’s a 1% chance of a grail ($200+). 

I haven’t been a Pokemon card connoisseur since 1999, so I can’t tell you how these percentages fare against the physical packs.

But at least they’re proving randomization onchain (nice explainer here), and you don’t have to worry about factory workers snatching rare cards off production lines.

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

Highlight Spring Collections

Options abound for generative art drops on Ethereum as Highlight.xyz has announced a curated program of its own. It features artists you might recognize but with smaller supply sizes than usual (a welcome sight for some collectors).

It started on Tuesday with an ongoing open edition by Piter Pasma, continues today with animated pixel art by loackme, and concludes with three more collections in the following weeks courtesy of Jeres, Marius Watz, and Joshua Bagley.

While it’s undeniably a slow period for the generative art market right now, times like these can make it easier to find hidden gems.

Blooms by Cory Haber

If you were looking for a sign to touch grass this weekend, this might be it.

Blooms is generative artist Cory Haber’s second collection on Verse following May 2023’s Atmospheres. It features the recognizable, hand-drawn style that permeates much of the artist’s other work.

Stop and smell the roses?

The Queue by Miragenesi

Have you ever wanted to endure the agony of a tedious queue bad enough as to seek artistic interpretations of this hellish experience? Me neither.

Artist Miragenesi has said “I hate queues” too, yet they’ve created an onchain art experience where the art is a blocky visualization of the user queue waiting to mint the project.

This makes for a collaboration with minters, as each piece gets more complex the more users there are in the queue (which lasts 3 days), but it also makes for a slow mint process, as there’s a 12-second delay applied between each minter.

An experimental spectacle for the most patient of onchain frontliners.