GM

Welcome to the 19 new subs who joined us recently.

We appreciate each and every one of our readers.

In today’s edition:

• Huge changes coming for NFTs

• Updated Mint & Watch Lists

• Four new drops

Links for the Mint/Watch list drops are HERE.

Did you know?

We have a premium pass that gives you access to a directory of every drop we cover, complete with detailed information on how to get on every whitelist (including those underrated ones that aren’t already full).

And for those curatooors out there, you can get free NFTs just by finding drops that end up on the Mint or Watch list.

Lastly, hang with me and the MoS team in a private discord with weekly voice chats. The vibes are great.

Would you like to be featured in Mint or Skip like the above ☝️ ?

Huge changes coming for NFTs

Context

Well, that escalated quickly.

About a week ago, Opensea announced that they would stop enforcing royalties on all NFT collections starting in February 2024.

Naturally, this pissed off nearly everyone. Even Mark Cuban couldn’t believe his eyes.

The very next day, Yuga Labs hit back announcing that they’d be blocking Opensea and their Seaport protocol for new collections and upgraded contracts.

This sparked speculation that Yuga would instead create their own private royalty-enforcing marketplace for all of their NFTs.

When asked directly about this, Yuga’s CEO chose to neither confirm nor deny.

And now, we got an official ApeCoin DAO proposal asking for $1 million to build this very marketplace. This comes from the team that previously built the official Apecoin marketplace, although it’s unclear if the proposal will pass.

Our take

I know we’re all tired of the royalty debate at this point, so I’ll keep things quick.

There are a few ways I can see this playing out:

1. Opensea reverses their decision. They come out and say “ha jk guys, i can’t believe you fell for that”, we all laugh together and pretend it never happened.

2. Yuga launches an Opensea competitor that enforces royalties. All the other farm animal PFP collections agree to join them in paradise.

3. Yuga launches their own private marketplace, but so does everyone else. Large creators might wonder why they should ever rely on a middleman again.

Either way, the end game is likely NFT issuers centralizing control over their collections.

That’s because we’ve realized that ERC-721, the gold standard for ownership today, is incompatible with royalty enforcement.

So now creators are forced to choose between supporting fully decentralized tokens or getting paid – and you can guess which one wins out.

In Yuga’s case, this would mean creating a new contract for BAYC, MAYC, etc. with a royalty-enforcing standard like ERC-721C (which we covered here).

They would then incentivize holders to migrate by promising some utility, and I’m guessing a decent percentage would be happy to do so.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

It’s bad for decentralization. Contracts like ERC-721C work with centralized whitelists that heavily reduce property rights.

For many collectors, this would kill the entire value proposition for NFTs.

But it’s good for adoption. Creators simply make far more money when royalties are enforced.

It was one of the key reasons why many were attracted to NFTs in the first place, and enforcement could lead to another big wave entering the space.

So what happens next?

The floodgates are now open: my guess is that ERC-721C or a similar standard is about to gain serious traction.

That means we’ll start seeing many existing collections migrating to new contracts and new collections launching with centralized whitelists in place from day 1.

Crypto-native collectors will still gravitate towards ERC-721, while newcomers will probably have less philosophical baggage and just go with whatever tokens have the best utility.

As for me, I’ll continue to buy everything under the sun, but I will always pay a premium for anything that comes with full transfer rights.

How about you? Send me your hot take (I know you have one).

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

SAI by IZUMO #4

Another week, another free SBT from Izumo.

This one features a version of Izumo’s cover girl, Ailis, drawn by renowned Japanese animator Shingo Adachi, best known for his work on Sword Art Online, a series that has inspired many a NFT founder.

Again, it’s currently unclear whether collecting all 6 of SAI’s weekly mints leads to some kind of deeper access. Regardless, in it for the art.

RainbowWorld

Tomorrow, Base’s Onchain Summer will feature a fun drop takeover as Rainbow wallet partners with gaming project AdWorld for the release of RainbowWorld.

It is an affordable open edition, as per Onchain Summer tradition, but a customizable one, allowing you to create a personalized 3D character from a selection of various traits.

Also, exclusive pieces of character loot are unlocked by holding specific crypto-native projects like Pudgy Penguins and Milady Maker. Insert utility and interoperability speech here.

Mappings by Ira Greenberg

One of the top AI art platforms in web3, BrainDrops, recently announced their next drop, Mappings by Ira Greenberg, which sees AI interpret landscapes through a generative art lens.

The release aligns with the artist’s track record: he wrote the first book on the Processing programming language and is now a professor of creative computation.

Oh… and he also has a large portfolio of sold-out generative collections on fxhash over the past year.

✨ Added to Watch List ✨

Anokha

Tired of the doom scrolling and engagement farming on social media?

Anokha, a social platform created by Satvik Sethi (a previous NFT lead at Mastercard), presents itself as an answer to these and other mental health issues posed by social media.

Though details are scant, they’re going to have an NFT drop providing early access to the platform, which has an allowlist event scheduled for today.

The Mint List

1. Taproot Wizards. OG Bitcoin meme inscribed as ordinals

2. 10KTF PFP. Drop from a team that includes Yuga and Beeple

3. Shadow Hats. Ordinals drop from the creators of Forgotten Runes

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

5. Symbiogenesis. Square Enix's upcoming gaming NFT

6. Sugartown Oras. Zynga, Farmville creators, releasing free NFTs

7. Memeland [TBC]. High-value treasure MVPs minting on BTC

8. Distance by Mapan. Cactoid Labs x LACMA x influential artist

9. Deafbeef x Bright Moments. OG onchain creator with a track record

10. Glacier Dreams by Anadol. AI collection from the MoMA exhibitor