NFTs continued to grow beyond their humble Ethereum roots this week, with Magic Eden becoming the first major NFT marketplace to offer Bitcoin-based collectibles on its platform.
Web3 gaming was also in the spotlight, as Sony filed a patent that could make NFTs transferable between different games and consoles. Meanwhile, blockchains Immutable and Polygon announced a major partnership aimed at making it easier for developers and game studios to jump into Web3.
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This Week's Alpha
Magic Eden’s Ordinals expansion: Magic Eden has launched its own Bitcoin-based exchange for Ordinals NFTs, expanding its roster of supported blockchains and bridging the gap between Bitcoin maximalists and NFT enthusiasts. The move crowns Magic Eden as the first major NFT marketplace to offer Bitcoin-based collectibles as the battle for market dominance rages on.
Back to its (Tap)roots: The leading marketplace for Solana NFTs said in its announcement that the decision to create a Bitcoin marketplace was reminiscent of its “early days.” In its expansion, Magic Eden hopes to “learn and iterate quickly and support an emerging market.”
No royalties: According to the platform, there aren’t robust solutions for enforcing royalties on Bitcoin. As such, the new marketplace will not support royalties for now.
Sony’s interoperable NFTs: Sony has filed a patent that would make NFTs transferable between games and even non-PlayStation consoles like Xbox. The patent would allow players to use NFTs across virtual reality (VR) headsets, tablets, computers and smartphones.
In-game achievements: According to the patent, NFTs could signify a win in an esports tournament or for completing in-game challenges or levels
Cloud-based video games: The patent aims to make NFTs interoperable across gaming ecosystems and platforms, including cloud-based games.
Powerful partnership: Two of the top players in the Web3 gaming ecosystem, Polygon and Immutable, have formed a strategic alliance to develop blockchain games and take them mainstream. As part of the partnership, Immutable will power its platform using Polygon’s zero-knowledge technology to make onboarding Web3 talent easier and more secure.
Polygon recently launched a business unit devoted to advancing Web3 gaming and has partnered with major brands like Nike, Reddit and Starbucks on different projects.
Immutable will launch an all-in-one passport system in April to make the sign-in and management process easier for Web3 gamers, and has partnered with industry leaders like GameStop, DC Comics and Marvel to build out over 140 new game titles.
Projects on the Rise
Opepen Edition
Who: Created by artist Jack Butcher
What: Jack Butcher has somehow managed to one-up his wildly successful Checks VV project with his new Opepen Edition, a dynamic NFT collection that combines the concept of an open edition NFT sale with the internet’s resurgence of the Pepe meme. The collection of 15,894 NFTs was offered as a free mint in January and is hovering at a floor price of around 0.3 ETH (about $540) on OpenSea at the time of writing.
How: While the collection started out with a Mondrian-esque image of the Pepe meme, Butcher has been continuously changing the collection’s metadata, allowing the image to shapeshift over time. There are also rumors that the collection might serve as a gateway toward a larger future profile picture (PFP) project, broadening the reach of Butcher’s coveted artwork.
In Other News
The Quantum question: A lawsuit disputing the ownership of what is believed to be the first generative art NFT titled “Quantum” by Kevin McCoy was dismissed by a federal judge in New York, who said that Free Holdings did “nothing more than an attempt to exploit open questions of ownership in the still-developing NFT field to lay claim to the profits of a legitimate artist.”
IRS guidance on NFTs: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that NFTs can be treated as collectibles for tax purposes until final rules are agreed upon.
Is wash trading ruining NFT trading?: A recent Twitter thread by kouk.eth, a member of the Ledger team, discusses how the wash trading of NFTs is obscuring trade volume data and sabotaging the NFT market as a whole.
Non-Fungible Toolkit
What Are Dynamic NFTs? Understanding the Evolving NFT
Most NFTs are static, meaning that once a token is minted to a blockchain, the data associated with that token cannot be changed. For example, if you mint a rare, one-of-a-kind artwork as an NFT, that digital image and the data associated with it will remain the same, no matter how much time passes or how many times it changes hands.
On the other hand, a dynamic NFT is a type of NFT that changes based on external conditions, such as events or achievements in a game.
Learn more about so-called “living NFTs”
