Taking Music NFTs Mainstream, Loot's Expanded Universe & More
🎙️ Taking Music NFTs Mainstream With OneOf
While major music artists have begun to enter the NFT space, we’ve only scratched the surface for mainstream adoption. Backed by legendary producer Quincy Jones, OneOf raised $63 million to build a sustainable, music-focused NFT platform on the Tezos blockchain and recently announced collaborations with iHeartRadio Music Festival and Doja Cat.
In our latest podcast episode, we caught up with OneOf CEO Lin Dai, COO Joshua James, and co-founder Adam Fell to discuss welcoming music fans to NFTs, navigating the web of industry rightsholders and the rationale for building on Tezos. Hit subscribe and watch the full episode here.
Be sure to tune into our Twitter Space at 2 pm ET today for a conversation on “The Future of Music NFTs” with OneOf and other trailblazers in the space.
🧙 Loot’s Expanded Universe
It’s been nearly two weeks since the launch of Loot, and the open-source, adventure-themed project continues to keep everyone on their toes. Created by Dom Hofmann, co-founder of Vine and other innovative NFT projects like Blitmap and Supdrive, Loot has grown to incredible proportions — ascending to the top of OpenSea’s charts with a mind-blowing 60,316 ETH (over $200 million) in sales volume.
Loot’s free-to-mint NFTs are displayed as a text list of adventure gear that would be commonly obtained in any RPG. The developer, Dom, “intentionally omitted [images and stats] for others to interpret,” leaving the project fully up to the community’s collective imagination to build. And build they have — creating a wealth of community initiatives and projects that have helped expand the Loot universe.
Some have pushed Loot into the next level of development, others are straight-up derivatives, but each brings something different to the table. — Langston Thomas
Adventure Gold ($AGLD)
Adventure Gold is a token developed pro bono by Will Papper to “set a standard for projects building on Loot in the future.” At the time of Adventure Gold’s launch, anyone in the Loot community was able to claim 10,000 $AGLD per Loot bag. With the price of $AGLD rising to around $7 USD almost immediately after launch, the drop meant anyone holding a Loot NFT could receive a substantial chunk of change just for being involved.
Role might be the most complicated, but also the most interesting project to spring up in conjunction with the Loot ecosystem. Role provides each Loot NFT an accompanying character that can utilize its adventure gear. Each Role can be created by a user and offers customizable combinations of attributes like gender, strength and dexterity, race, occupation and more. It allows players to create their own adventure stories using both Role and Loot in the lead-up to a full metaverse game.
The n project took Loot’s model of free-to-mint, text-based NFTs and ran with it. This collection’s twist is that each token contains a list of randomly generated numbers stored on-chain, rather than adventure gear. Since its September 5 launch, its community members have created all sorts of generative art based on the random numbers presented throughout n project’s NFTs.
Bloot was started by NFT collector Beanie in what seems to have mostly been a joke. Despite toting the tagline “it’s basically worthless,” the collection sold out quickly, with a Discord community materializing almost instantaneously. Since the launch, there have been a few NFT airdrops to Bloot holders, with the community sentiment being that “free-to-mint” projects are the future.
What would an adventure project be without a Realm to adventure through? Similar to $AGLD, this project expands the Loot ecosystem by giving each holder the option to mint a free Realm NFT. Each NFT is a procedurally generated map that is completely unique, even down to the language used to distinguish each Realm's name.
Loot: Explorers
Similar to Role, Explorers takes the idea of character-building, but utilizes Loot’s NFTs to directly influence its collection. Still in its infancy, Loot: Explorers looks to marry generative PFP style projects with the original Loot’s fantasy trappings in creating matching characters to accompany each individual Loot NFT.
Firsts is a satirical on-chain Loot derivative project cooked up by influential developer DeafBeef. Instead of adventure gear, this project is a collection of text-based tokens that offer short statements about a “first” in NFTs. Both informative and humorous, this project also includes a charity component as all primary sales and royalties from secondary sales go directly to GiveDirectly.org.
Gear (for Punks) is exactly what it sounds like. Don’t be fooled though, the developers’ use of “Punks” is not related to Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks. These text-based NFTs take a page from Loot’s book but instead of adventure gear, each NFT depicts “cyber gear” that is generated and stored on-chain. There are already image and character projects in the works for this Loot derivative.
📈 Floor to Ceiling
Floor to Ceiling is a weekly section that tracks the price action of prominent NFT projects, featuring a handpicked assortment of blue chips and trending collections. Below you’ll find the current lowest price (floor), and highest sale (ceiling) for a single token in a given collection, as well as the original mint price for reference.
💥 Quick Hits
Sotheby’s’ Ape In! auction closed with more than $26 million in sales, including $24.4 million for the lot of 101 Bored Apes and 1.8 million for the lot of 101 Bored Kennel Club dogs.
NASCAR track operator Speedway Motorsports announces first NASCAR-related NFT marketplace with GigLabs.
Yahoo announces first NFT collection with Rebecca Minkoff for New York Fashion Week.
Karl Lagerfeld launches first NFT in tribute to late Chanel designer.
This newsletter is purely for educational purposes and is not financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any investment decisions. Please do your own research!