[Daily] Open NFTs? Wtf

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Some Alameda Research wallets have risen from the ashes. The crypto firm is still bankrupt but some users have suddenly transferred millions in FTT tokens. A few have even taken loans using FTT. 🤔

As of Wednesday, 8PM IST

The markets recovered. Bitcoin was above $23,100 and Ethereum headed towards $1,700. Nasdaq fell in early trade. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended higher on an expected 0.25% rate hike by the RBI.

NFTs Turn To Open Avatars

Over the weekend, Snoop Dogg (Lion?) released a music NFT. But what surprised many was the price tag. The NFTs were sold for ~$8. It was significantly lower than some of his other collections. That’s because this one was an open edition version.

What is it?Open editions of NFTs mean that an unlimited number of artworks can be minted. Not like the 10,000 NFT cap that exists on BAYC. The creator decides when they want to stop the sale. Think of it as buying a digital poster of The Starry Night instead of the actual painting. These are more affordable. So, two differences here:

• Unlimited mints, so NFTs are cheaper

• Time limit for mints, so whatever is minted is the size of the collection.

For instance, if an NFT creator has a 48-hour mint and only 10 NFTs can be created, that’s the size of the collection. Some creators such as Jack Butcher have created a gamified model (under the Checks project) where users can burn some NFTs for a rare one.

But aren’t NFTs supposed to be rare?Why would anyone spend $3.4 million on a Bored Apes NFT? The simple answer is exclusivity. It’s rare so collectors either buy it for their personal collection or to sell it when the price rallies. But at the same time, NFTs are expensive so the masses can’t buy them. Open NFTs are here to solve that puzzle.

Take the Snoop Dogg example. His NFT collection, The Doggies, has a base price of ~$117. And the highest priced NFT in this collection is on sale for a whopping $35 million. Now how many of us can buy it? Hence, open NFTs.

How do you make money?The idea is that you buy open NFTs and then earn profit via secondary sales. Take the Checks NFT collection for instance, which was supposed to be a sarcastic representation of the Twitter verified checkmark. The project minted over 16,000 of identical NFTs for $8 (yes, to match the price of Twitter subscriptions) each. Checks’ cheapest NFT now sells for ~$4,160. Guess there’s a price to scoff after all.

ChatGPT Brings An AI Rally

ChatGPT is everywhere. Ever since Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the chatbot world is on overdrive. And amidst this sudden excitement, AI tokens have rallied.

Wild times aheadTake SingularityNET for instance. AGIX, the token of the blockchain-based AI project, rose ~800% since the start of the year. This is a project that aims to build a decentralised AI marketplace not controlled by the large technology firms. Whales have bought the token in bulk. Over the past seven days, AGIX has rallied ~200%.

There’s more to comeWe told you how Google’s also entered the fray. The market’s heating up. So it is not just AGIX that has a bull run. Tokens such as Fetch.ai, Oasis Network, and Ocean Protocol have seen double-digit growth over the past two weeks. With more cross-chain AI solutions on the anvil, this is just the beginning.

UK Gets Closer To China

Mixed payments economy, digital currency, “Britcoin”. There are many ways to talk about the UK’s ambitions with CBDC. The latest consultation paper says the “digital pound could exist alongside other forms of money, including stablecoins”.

Launch in 2025. Or notThe paper talks a lot about how the digital Great Britain Pound could potentially become the same as real money. Retail adoption, public-private partnerships, and innovation etc etc. Some reports pegged the launch date at 2025. Or not at all, if the digital pound does not meet the UK’s “exacting standards” for security, resilience, and performance.

Digital currency experimentsThe cautious tone could probably be attributed to the kind of experiments that have already been done with digital currency elsewhere. Remember how China distributed its e-currency free to citizens in 2021 to encourage adoption? Or the Bahamas, where everything was great but there was barely any adoption? About 100 countries were said to be exploring the CBDC path in 2022. But there is no one-size-fits-all.

Where Is Do Kwon?

In Serbia, according to Bloomberg. And that’s where South Korean officials went looking for him last week. They’re asking the Balkan country’s government to help track the Terraform Labs founder.

How did he get there?For the longest time, South Korean prosecutors believed Do Kwon had fled to Singapore. He insisted he hadn’t and also that he wasn’t in hiding. There was a Red Notice from Interpol and everything. Now prosecutors say he fled to Serbia through Dubai in September 2022.

So, did they find him?Not that we know of. But Do Kwon continues to tweet and respond. He’s never taken responsibility for the Terra crash that impacted the entire crypto market. On February 1, he tweeted this:

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