GM

was never unlikely tbh

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Huge day (but not why you think)

This says it all…

Rapper French Montana sent a tweet yesterday announcing that he inscribed his latest album Mac & Cheese 5 on Bitcoin and will be releasing it as a free mint this week.

But the inscription doesn’t seem to actually contain the album itself – just a URL to his page on apple music, plus some weird ad for an upcoming shitcoin of sorts. 

Low-effort celeb cameo?

That no one asked for?

With a possible grift angle?

O Dearly Beloved, this can only be described as one thing: Bull Market Behavior. 

Everything is awesome. Bitcoin hit $60,000 U.S. dollars, airdrops are falling from the sky, and I’m suddenly getting bids on long-forgotten jpegs that I previously wrote off to zero. 

However, something happened yesterday that might be even bigger for NFTs than all the above. 

Magic Eden finally launched its ETH marketplace with royalties

The TLDR is: 

1. Magic Eden will let creators enforce royalties with centralized contracts

2. Unlike prior enforcement attempts, you can’t bypass these royalties (theoretically)

3. Many of the largest PFP collections have already signed on, including Yuga Labs

This marks the end of the 0% royalty meta and the return of one of the primary sources of income that attracted creators to this space in the first place. 

To put it into perspective, Pudgy Penguins had about $80 million in volume in the last 30 days. 

This means that they missed out on as much as $4 million in royalty revenue this month given that the vast majority of people don’t pay the optional fees. 

That’s nearly $50 million a year lost from not having an enforceable contract – an insane amount for any startup. You could argue volume would drop with royalties, but in a bull market you can still reach silly numbers with them activated (see: 2021). 

But of course, royalties don’t just help the high-end, they’re also super valuable for the smallest creators. 

Consider the free mint meta, which was very common a couple of years ago but has more or less disappeared. 

Free mints allow small creators to get ideas out into the world with as little friction as possible, while still being able to earn money through royalties. 

Removing royalties made everything 10x harder. It was borderline impossible to convince someone to pay upfront for anything experimental, especially during a bear market, which meant that culture more or less ground to a halt for a while. 

So in other words, a return to royalties means: 

1. Large creators once again have more money to spend on their business (or more money for their pockets, depending on the creator)

2. Small creators have more flexibility to experiment and get off the ground

Combine both and you get… more creators.

For anyone interested in a longer essay on what royalties means for NFTs (and who wouldn’t be??), check out this post I wrote back in December.

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

Barbarians by Jacek Markusiewicz

Art platform Verse continues its flagship Solos program (which has sold out every drop this year) with an upcoming collection by Jacek Markusiewicz, a creative coder known for his Ethereum and Tezos releases.

Expansive aerial shots of natural landscapes with quasi-photorealistic mountain peaks and valleys fill the digital canvases, barbarically (see what I did there) interrupted by geometric shapes one might encounter in everyday gen art.

It’s a provocative contrast that echos some of the artist’s earlier work. Zoomers might even say these look bussin’ on a wall.

This will be Verse’s first fully on-chain drop, which might prove enticing for pure onchain apostles.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

Guardian Lion by Emily Xie

Avant Arte is another art platform that’s sold out basically every single NFT offering it’s ever put out. And they’re looking to add to that success story with Emily Xie’s upcoming Guardian Lion.

It’s a low-supply physical + digital collector’s item, like most Avant drops, and one that sees the acclaimed generative artist reimagine the traditional Chinese guardian lion through abstract collage, combining generative AI and algorithms with free-hand drawing.

One for those missing Asian heritage inside their chambers.

Memento Mori by Richard Nadler

As Ordinals gain attention, more and more Ethereum-based art platforms are looking for homes on Bitcoin.

Among these is gmDAO, who recently unveiled gm.scribe as their new Bitcoin-based platform, which is launching alongside the inaugural collection Memento Mori by popular AI artist Richard Nadler.

Nadler’s running hot following two sellouts on Verse that amassed almost $1.5M in trading volume since minting last year (one of which made it on my list of Best NFTs of 2023).

Sneak peeks showcase a color-rich threaded style similar to Nadler’s previous successes, albeit with a much darker tone, given the title’s motif. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨