🎯 ATTN Economy

🚨 BREAKING: We are in purgatory.

I must say, pleasing the Google gods and the other email service provider gods (ESP gods, heh) is a mysterious challenge. 

For some of our readers, we’ve somehow ended up hidden away by ESPs in other email folders, which is never good. 

Getting every edition of The Drop into your hands as easily as possible (without you having to search around “Promotions” or “Spam” for it) is our goal.

Even if we’re not ending up in a purgatory folder, it would help us a lot if you replied to this email, even if it’s just with a GM. That pleases the email overlords.

You could also mark at least one edition of The Drop as “important” (yellow arrow thingy).

I know these might seem like strange asks. Truth is, we hate email spam as much as you do, so we understand why some ESPs are so careful about protecting you from it. And we want to also make sure it’s easy for you to unsubscribe completely if you need to take a break.

If you’re just looking for a break from the daily cadence, there’s always the option to switch to a weekly delivery cadence for The Drop. You’ll only get one edition per week, though it won’t be a summary of the week’s news (just one day’s regular edition).

I won’t be offended if you prefer this, I promise. In fact, it’d be very helpful to know as we shape our coverage.

— Kate Irwin

OpenSea adds Voyages in OS2 public launch

OpenSea has fully released OS2, the latest version of its NFT and token marketplace, ending its beta period. It’s also added “Voyages” to incentivize trading. 

OS2 is definitely an upgrade from the legacy version of OpenSea, both aesthetically and from a focus standpoint. Traders can choose to get analytics and data prioritized with Pro mode, while collectors can enjoy larger art graphics and a focus on collections’ stories. 

The crypto company has also been gamifying its platform with a rewards program that grants users XP for doing things, like buying or selling an NFT across different blockchains. OpenSea previously confirmed shared that XP is a non-transferable rewards system.

The Voyages concept takes that a step further, turning using OpenSea into a sort of quest experience. Traders have to navigate to OpenSea’s rewards page, connect their crypto wallet, and optionally tie that to their X account and Discord accounts to get started.

On the rewards page, you’ll see a list of Voyages, or things OpenSea wants you to do. Buying tokens, engaging with OpenSea’s social media posts, and using different features of the site are the main tasks I’ve seen thus far. There’s also a section for “Treasures,” a “Loyalty” percentage calculation, and an activity tab that lets you see what you’ve done so far. 

Now, I know what you’re thinking: wen token? OpenSea has confirmed that a SEA token is coming, via the OpenSea Foundation. And while the company hasn’t explicitly stated that its rewards program decides who gets some SEA (and how much), that’s likely the plan.

Back in February, an OpenSea press release said it will “recognize active and loyal users” with the SEA token (in that release, it also said XP is a “new system for recognizing and rewarding active users”). What better way to do all this rewarding than create a tool that encourages said users to be active on OpenSea and literally present them with a loyalty score?

We don’t yet know when SEA is coming, but it may launch after this rewards program has been around for at least some months. 

A cynic’s perspective would be that OpenSea is effectively using this rewards platform to pay for engagement by dangling the token airdrop carrot for those who follow it on X, engage with its posts, pay it fees by using its platform, and overall become a valuable, active OpenSea user. 

But on the other hand, it’s a strategy that’s aligned with the times. It’ll help OpenSea stay competitive in the challenging current NFT landscape, which has shrunk in favor of memecoins and social token apps. Finding a way to gamify crypto trading is a smart move — especially if it can prove sustainable long-term.

OpenSea has also revamped its community-focused Discord server, which has over 280,000 accounts in it. 

It’s continued to add support for more tokens on more chains in recent months, including Ronin, Solana memecoins, and Abstract NFTs. The marketplace now offers support for assets across 19 different blockchains, and has also recently launched cross-chain swaps, as well.

Bring on the dancing Yapybaras

Kaito has launched an NFT collection of “Yapybara” PFPs, with cutesy art of the world’s largest living rodent, the capybara.

“The NFTs will continue to have a role in our wider ecosystem including multipliers,” the team said on X.

The collection of 1,500 NFTs includes 20 one-of-a-kind Yapybaras. They’re sitting at a floor price of 3.3 ETH, which is about $8,500 each, as of 11am ET Friday morning.

That’s a lot for a new NFT these days. But Kaito has managed to hold Crypto Twitter’s attention by bringing bigger-picture data and sentiment assessments to the table. The AI-powered platform offers insights into what’s being talked about on Twitter, and tracks who is “emerging CT” and who is in the “inner circle.”

It’s part a check to see what’s going viral at any moment, and part a reputation tool for users to see who’s gaining traction — or falling off. Kaito’s paid Pro tool, which costs over $800 a month per person with a year commitment, offers smart alerts, token tracking, and “narrative mindshare,” among other data points.

It’s a tool that offers info which search engines don’t — and that might be hard to collate from Twitter. 

The Yapybaras notably made it to the top three NFT collections on OpenSea on Friday, after the CryptoPunks and Courtyard’s card-opening platform.