0% Royalties For The Win?

CNN Rug + Decentraland Fail

Author

Gannon Breslin
October 11, 2022

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gm, it's Tuesday. The entire team is in Vegas so we apologies for the late send time. We hope everyone is having a great start to the week 😊 

  • Visa will soon be releasing debit cards that are linked directly to users' FTX accounts. (yahoo)

  • Web3Expo in Vegas kicks off with a bang, attracting thousands to NFT-themed panels and parties. (@web3expo)

  • The CFO of Opensea steps down from their position, though remains involved as an advisor. (CT)

  • Decentraland opens RVSP for their upcoming second annual Metaverse Music Festival. (decentraland)

  • The founder of Shopify is big-time bullish on NFTs and crypto, and even shared a tweet of one hanging in his living room. (@tobi)

  • Bitcoin mining is in a rough state and is becoming more difficult as of late. (CD)

  • Magic Eden announces Badged Collections. Clarifies badge is not an endorsement by ME. It is a trust and safety signal indicating a project is authentic. (@Magic Eden)

  • Fake Solana Phantom security updates push crypto-stealing malware. (Bleepingcomputer)

Did CNN Rug Us? 📰

Another start to a week. Another rug pull being brought to light. Although these types of projects are usually created by pseudo-anonymous owners, this time, it’s a company that everyone probably recognizes: CNN.

Back in the summer of 2021, CNN released a project called the Vault, which would be a marketplace that would allow users to buy pieces of history as NFTs. Being one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, it goes without saying that this type of project was definitely in CNN’s wheelhouse. Think of playing cards on NBA Top Shot, only this time, it’s with the news. The project netted over $300,000 in sales over its lifetime, and it’s safe to say; owners are pissed that this is ending. On top of all of that, the team is now claiming that the project was actually just a “6-week experiment”, which was never mentioned to holders in the past. Hell, it was promoted on the official CNN website. 

The Vault project team is projecting that they will give back a percentage of the mint value back to owners as a way of compensation. According to a message from someone on the team, “The distribution will be either FLOW tokens or stablecoins deposited into each collector’s wallet. We are currently working out the details, but expect the distribution amount to be roughly 20% of the original mint price for each Vault NFT owned.” But, what CNN did not account for was the idea that people don’t really want a kickback. They want to be able to collect history. And abandoning a project while still allowing users to buy and sell assets is just a funny way of saying, “You’re not trading NFTs. You’re trading pictures.” Without a central body managing a project, the question still remains: are these NFTs actually still NFTs? WAGMI. 

Find Anyone In Decentraland I Dare You 🤳

 Imagine that it's still February and NFT Worlds is rising in floor price at an unprecedented rate and all of the frenzy seems to make complete sense to the community at large. "This was it" everybody thought, here's the virtual land system that will have everybody adopting some kind of dynamic digital existence because what better platform to host a detailed virtual world than the tried and true Minecraft system. Well-resourced projects were purchasing NFT plots in NFT Lands, World Wide Webbland, Sandbox, and Decentraland to position themselves as dominant elites among NFT projects. 

According to data from DappRadar Sandbox and Decentraland have fewer than 1,000 daily users despite the fact that the platforms have billion-dollar valuations. In both of the platforms’ defense, DappRadar only accounted for users that were interacting with the smart contract by way of a transaction and did not account for all of the users who logged in just to explore and be social. With the latter accounted for, the number of active users is closer to tens of thousands of users per month. In fact, according to the directors of the respective platforms, they are seeing an ever-increasing number of core users return to the virtual lands week by week. While land is not all it was speculated to be earlier this year, it also isn’t as underutilized as recent headlines are suggesting. Good reporting requires some basic research and a lot of these outfits just aren’t doing the bare minimum.

0% Royalties For The Win? ⭐️

Over the weekend while you were away to touch grass, DeGods NFT and its community celebrated its first anniversary. One year of true solidarity as a community, one year of pushing creativity and innovation to new heights. One year of lows. One year of highs. While still in the heat of the celebration, the team through the DeGods' official Twitter page made an announcement that was followed by two other announcements 30 minutes and an hour later.

The first of the two major announcements was about their new product- Proof Of Work. The new product is built to usher in a new NFT meta: radial transparency. It is a log of the day-to-day life at the DeGods headquarters. Like the consensus algorithm, the proof of work is made up of blocks with every block representing a day of work on DeGods from 16th September 2021 to 8th October 2021 as of the time of writing.

The second announcement has sparked reactions, hot takes, and controversy and has indeed taken us back to a debate that we've been on for the past month.

Although the founder Frankdegods clearly stated that they (DeGods) still believe in the concept of creator royalties and still thinks the 0% creator royalties can be rolled back whenever the right tech to protect royalties comes out, degens from the Solana community didn't buy the new approach. Saying royalties are incentives for projects and founders to keep innovating and with this, other projects and marketplaces will be forced to adopt the meta and hence leaving these builders with no choice but to abandon the chain to where they're being appreciated. As it stands, DeGod #6256 was the last DeGod to be sold at 9.99% creator royalties on Magic Eden. In other news, the team is also working to update Proof of Work, the new product with a connect wallet feature to have holders only access to leave comments privately. And speaking during a discord AMA with the y00ts community, Frank said the idea of an additional fee for y00ts reveal was just floating around, it will not happen.

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