GM

The haters can't believe we continue to write about sacred digital objects every single day.

This is going to be a long decade for them.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Where I’ve been hanging out (NFT tour) 

You’re doing that thing again. The crypto equivalent of saying you “visited NYC” when you really just ate at the Shake Shack near Times Square while waiting for your flight. 

You need to broaden your horizons and get weird – new culture starts at the edges.

Get in, here are three offbeat neighborhoods that I find myself visiting over and over recently. 

(you take it from there) 

L' Avante Garde 2, Solana.

Maybe more of a state of mind than a destination. 

There’s a subculture of multi-layered schizo avant collections quietly growing on Solana. 

I first noticed this with the release of Little Swag World last month by supermetal bosch, but this solar system has since expanded to include Horses and Little Fellow among others. 

Remilia/Milady is the closest comparable, but Solana is building more of a competing ecosystem (or a sequel), with its own ideas, rather than an homage. 

The cherry on top is that this is happening on Solana, which has historically been more Atlantic City than Art Basel. But the-times-they-are-a-changing? 

Recommended tour guides: @matto__matto and @sus_seaweed 

Zora.co, Zora.

The land of free mints. 

Zora has created a culture unlike any other that I’ve seen in crypto. People are out here truly minting things for the sake of minting. 

The idea is that buying these NFTs, which are often “free” but really ~$1, is closer to engaging/liking a piece of content than buying a speculative collectible. 

This low-stakes environment is leading to a lot of experimentation, with people minting podcasts, screenshot newsletters, music, and ultra-weird little virtual objects. 

They hit 68k daily active users last week, and momentum seems to be picking up.

Bonus point: Much of this happens on their own Zora L2, but you can buy things from ETH L1.

Recommended tour guides: founders @js_horne and @dg_goens 

Warpcast, Farcaster

Go here if you want a front-row-seat to a large-scale crypto nerd hackathon. 

I wrote about why Farcaster’s new “Frames” feature is so interesting here, but the TLDR is: 

gasless, frictionless one-click minting inside of a growing social network where many crypto bigwigs are spending most of their time

The rate of tinkering is off the charts, with new applications being built on a daily basis.

And as of yesterday, frames are now open to Solana, with one of the first Solana frames already hitting 21,000 mints. It’s a big deal. 

Recommended tour guides: honestly just follow founder @dwr 

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

SOURCE [On NFTs] by Robert Alice

Not one to lag behind in the auction house race, Christie’s just announced its very first in-house generative art mint, SOURCE [On NFTs] by Robert Alice, mirroring Sotheby’s ongoing program.

The drop is heavily tied to Alice’s upcoming book On NFTs, which chronicles the history of non-fungibles and was done in collaboration with some very influential founders and artists.

This inspiration is visible in the art, with glitched out text splashing across colorful palettes, a style reminiscent of the artist’s past acclaimed work.

We don’t know price, but we’ve seen the kind of pull that auction houses can have, so I’ve…

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

VEIL by Rocketgirl

The annals of 2024 AI art on Solana keep on growing, this time with VEIL, a drop by pseudonymous artist Rocketgirl that ventures into the extraterrestrial.

Mixing in physical paint and collage work, each piece showcases a declassified CIA file about aliens that were allegedly seen around nuclear sites.

For fans of steel beams and sepia.

natives by Nate Alex

OG NFT collector and onchain tinkerer Nate Alex is teasing his next big project with the cryptic natives.

It’s all riddles at this point so I can’t say much on the project’s purpose, but this should be right up your alley if you’re into ciphers and multichain play (kinky).

Alex is a certified veteran (not many have paper-handed 70 Punks and 30 Autoglyphs) who at one point had the market’s attention in a chokehold with ChainFaces Arena. I’m curious what he does next.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨