The Self-Custody Trait of NFT Maximalists

Dear HackerNoon Nation,

Anecdotally speaking, it seems like many NFT power users escaped direct exposure to FTX’s collapse.

Why’s that?

Well, a lot of people doubled down on crypto in the past couple of years through NFTs.

That matters because many of these same folks didn’t care about complex financial stuff like trading derivatives or trading with leverage on a centralized exchange — they just wanted to play around with digital items.

That said, you need your own wallet to trade on NFT marketplaces, so the recent NFT boom has served as a pipeline for immediately getting many people into self-custodying their ETH and other digital assets onchain and not holding them in a CEX’s off-chain database.

Of course, self-custody comes with significant responsibilities. Your keys, your crypto right — but the buck stops with you. We’ve seen the ugly side of this with all the stolen Bored Apes and so forth. Yet we can get better at educating and building guardrails here, and we will. In the meantime, it’s heartening to see there really is a new wave of settlers making their way around the onchain frontiers. That’s worth applauding.

As for the task at hand, let’s now get caught up on the major headlines of the week. Thanks for reading everyone ✌️

📣 General NFT News

• Bankless introduced Bankless Collectibles:

• Blur, the marketplace aggregator, announced plans to enforce and incentivize creator royalties.
• Builder DAO, which will oversee the Nouns builder ecosystem, is now live:

• Daylight, the wallet discovery service I recently covered, exited its beta and is now open to anyone with an Ethereum address.
• EthFS, an Ethereum file system for on-chain assets, deployed to mainnet.
• Flipside Crypto launched Badger, an on-chain organization management suite.
• X2Y2 announced plans to enforce royalties on all NFT collections.

🏆 Digital Collectibles

• Bored Ape Yacht Club trading activity this week pushed the BAYC floor price below 50Ξ for the first time since Dec. 2021.
• Wassies wrote off 60% of the creator team’s treasury as a result of the FTX collapse.
• Yuga Labs donated CryptoPunk #305 to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami as the first initiative of the Punks Legacy Project.
  • Yuga Labs also acquired WENEW, the NFT content company behind the 10KTF collection, and gained Beeple as an advisor as part of the deal.

🎨 Cryptoart

• Gallery, an NFT curation project, opened to everyone.
• SuperRare sold out all 250 editions of its new RarePass: Genesis NFTs.

🎮 Decentralized Gaming

• Defifa, a pop-up NFT game for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, is kicking off next week.
• Sony, creator of the popular PlayStation consoles, filed a patent for an in-game NFT assets system.

💽 Music NFTs

• Sound had another full week of collectible music drops:

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Nike unveiled .SWOOSH, a platform for the athletic apparel giant’s virtual creations.
• NonFungible.com launched its virtual HQ in Decentraland.

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• Uniswap introduced Permit2 and the Universal Router, new smart contracts that can efficiently aggregate NFT and ERC20 token swaps.
• UpShot, an appraisal platform for NFT financial markets, opened to the public.

Also published here.

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also recently been contributing content to Bankless, JPG, and beyond!