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Welcome to our 12 new subs.

There are 60 hours in the weekend. We recommend spending, at most, 5 hours on things like socializing, working out, or any other hobbies.

The rest should be spent reading back-editions of Mint or Skip or visualizing yourself reading next week’s emails.

See you then.

In today’s edition:

• This free NFT might change gaming (minting now)

• All the latest mint rankings

• And 4 more new drops

More info on Mint/Watch lists HERE.

This free NFT might change gaming (minting now)

Context

Argus, a crypto game developer and publisher, launched a free Genesis NFT collection this week.

The drop is an open edition, available now through June 13th.

This came along with a series of other announcements, including a $10 million seed round and the launch of World Engine, their new L2 blockchain designed specifically for gaming.

Our Take

Where are all the crypto games?

Like, I know there are some on the way – and I try to cover all the major NFT games for my Dearest Readers – but, I don’t know, you would hope by now we’d have a bigger wave of announcements?

Also, why does it also feel like many of these games are simply “Hearthstone/Fortnite, but with NFTs as items”, instead of a more creative redesign of what gaming should look like?

Well, partly it’s because the branding around crypto and NFTs is simply toxic right now. It’s tough for devs to dive in when most gamers continue to have this weird irrational hatred for anything blockchain related.

But also, it turns out, building on-chain games is super difficult.

Scott Sunarto figured this out pretty quickly when he made Dark Forest, a fully on-chain game from 2020 that continues to have a cult following to this day.

In his words: building a game on the blockchain feels like building a game on Microsoft Excel.

And so Scott launched Argus to fix this…at the age of 22. I guess some people are just built different.

Now, this stuff can be a little dense, but if you want a good overview of what Argus does I recommend checking out this video and their written overview here.

Luckily your boy just went through it all himself, so if you’re short on time feel free to copy my notes.

Here are the key points:

1. Current blockchains aren’t built for games. Instead, they’re one-size-fits-all, which makes sense because they need to serve decentralized exchanges, jpegs, games, and any other random use case people come up with.

2. This means on-chain games are limited and slow. A game like Minecraft has 20 “ticks”, or runtime loops, per second. But a crypto game on a rollup today only gets 1 tick per second. Not great.

3. This is why you only see certain kinds of games. Usually, someone will just take a trad game experience and throw “NFTs as items” in as an afterthought. Or, when they do go more on-chain, they opt for slower turn-based strategy games because of low latency.

4. Argus is an L2 designed for high-performance gaming. It’s a blockchain built from the ground up to allow for higher throughput with fewer bottlenecks.

5. This is done through “Game Sharding”. Ever played Runescape or WoW? Remember all those diff servers? It’s like that – games can distribute their workload across mini blockchains.

6. Devs can now use Sharding with the World Engine SDK. You get a blockchain, you get a blockchain! This opens up the design space for a million new experiences, not just copies of web2 formats.

That’s the high-level pitch, and it was good enough for Argus to raise $10 million this week despite the jank market conditions we’re in.

Now will this all work? We probably won’t know for a while to be honest, but it sounds promising.

In the meantime, their free Genesis collection seems like a good way to get involved at the ground level.

✨ Added to Watch List ✨

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

The RED Delirium by RedruM

RedruM, the popular pseudonymous artist whose signature crimson vibes have adequately adorned this bear market, is launching his next collection, The RED Delirium, next Wednesday.

The release will see 55 unique pieces minting on the artist’s Foundation page at 0.44 ETH each. This is a bit larger than the artist’s last couple of primary sales, so I’m curious how the market will react.

The Drama of Happiness

Following a string of thought-provoking low-key drops, digital art platform ARSNL recently announced an intriguing project titled The Drama of Happiness.

The release centers on substance abuse, described as “an NFT theatrical performance in 4 acts”, with a tentative mint date scheduled for June 20th.

Chester Charles: The Lost Grand Master by ClownVamp

Rising AI artist ClownVamp is set to host his first solo show in New York on June 21st exhibiting Chester Charles: The Lost Grand Master, an immersive story pushing the boundaries of AI-assisted narrative-driven work.

The 23-piece collection presents the work of fictional character Chester Charles, a gay artist from the 19th century whose overtly queer paintings were originally shunned but now have gained notoriety.

I must confess, Dear Reader, that even my clever wits were duped while reading about this, as I was convinced Chester Charles was a real person. And we’re still only scratching the surface of what is possible with AI-assisted narratives.

Conviction

Conviction is a new anime brand. Yes, I know, these are oversaturated to the point of making it seem like a Crunchyroll subscription might be good ROI for all these weeb whitelist applications. But there could be something brewing here.

The team is headlined by pseudonymous founder Taisheen, who has previous experience creating IP for the popular Japanese social media character syuwatti.

The art looks exceedingly clean, featuring a hand-drawn style that we don’t see often. And lastly, the team’s got funding from some notable names, including a Sanrio ex-CEO, and the IZUMO founder.

✨ Added to Watch List ✨

THE MINT LIST

1. Project Animus. RTFKT's biggest launch since Clone-X

2. FewoWorld. New PFP by Fewocious, a rising star in the art world

3. Symbiogenesis. Square Enix's upcoming gaming NFT

4. 10KTF PFP. Drop from a team that includes Yuga and Beeple

5. Garbage Friends. New PFP from the creator of Invisible Friends

6. Ether. Anime PFP collection by viii, an artist with a cult following

7. Dimensionals - EVE. Free gaming PFP from doxxed studio

8. Tony Babel x Typical Friends. Limited edition from the popular artist

9. Glacier Dreams by Refik Anadol. AI art from the MoMA exhibitor

10. Illuvium x GameStop D1SK. 1st brand collab for the AAA web3 game