The Nounish Philosophy of Subtraction 🧮

Dear Bankless Nation, 

At this year’s Devcon event, Ethereum Foundation executive director Aya Miyaguchi gave a talk on the EF’s philosophy of subtraction.

This entails subtracting power to avoid the “natural tendency of organizations to grow and accumulate power.” It’s all about fostering a strong decentralized Ethereum community that can thrive with or without the EF.

Interestingly, this week in the NFT ecosystem we saw this philosophy similarly embraced by Nouns DAO as the decentralized collective announced plans to wind down its centralized Discord server for good:

Why? 

To no longer have a single centralized “official” venue where Nouns communications happen. Instead there will bloom many community venues and from that a stronger, more decentralized Nouns ecosystem.

There’s been plenty of debate about the decision. But in my opinion Nouns DAO continues to be among the most important projects in NFTs because of its willingness to make these sorts of moves. 

In other words, the group boldly pushes out opportunities rather than safely consolidating power, and I think that’s special. Sometimes subtraction is addition. 

All that said, thanks for reading everyone. Now let’s get you caught up on on the other big NFT happenings from this week ✌️

-WM

📣 General NFT News

• Azuki introduced Physical Backed Tokens (PBT), an open-source token standard for tying physical items to digital tokens. 
• Blur, a marketplace aggregator for NFT power users, launched to everyone and unveiled $BLUR airdrop plans:

• Quix is running an L2 NFT bridging contest through the rest of today. 
• Rarible unveiled its 2.0 platform, which provides aggregated listings, bespoke collection marketplaces, revamped $RARI rewards, and more. 
• Tessera is working on new features for Nounlets releases.

🏆 Digital Collectibles

• CryptoKitties Founder Cat #21 resold for 60Ξ ETH this week:

• Reddit Collectible Avatars, which are Polygon-based NFTs, now have ~3M holders. 
• Warner Bros. released a digital collectibles series based on the first Lord of the Rings film:

🎨 Cryptoart

• The Lumen Prize presented artists Aaron Penne and Boreta with the 2022 NFT Award for their Rituals - Venice series:

• SuperRare added support for more Blueprints collections via Async Art. 

🎮 Decentralized Gaming

• Axie Infinity unveiled a Halloween Bonus AXS Leaderboard Rewards campaign:

• Sorare is launching an NFT-based NBA fantasy sports game.

💽 Music NFTs

• Arpeggi published A Year in Review upon its first birthday. 
• PROBCAUSE sold out his Space and Time drop on sound.xyz. 

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Decentraland announced the details of the 2022 Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival. 
• Optimism + Lattice announced OPCraft, a fully onchain 3D voxel world:

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• sudoswap has reached +40,000Ξ in total trading volum

Action steps

• 👋 Read What you missed at Devcon in Bankless
• 📺 Watch The future is fiat | interview with Noah Smith on Bankless 
• 🌱 Watch Web3 social with Stani Kulechov on Green Pill
• 🙇 Catch up on my other write-ups from this week: 
• ✧ A sneak peek of Blur
• ✧ The Reddit NFT surge
• ✧ The Essential Guide to DeFi on Bitcoin