Christmas Came Early - $ENS Airdrop

Welcome to The Drop NFT Newsletter. Subscribe and join the discord for breaking NFT news, project breakdowns, & artist spotlights. Thank you for following along on this journey!

What's Dropping ⚡️

• The Red Village came out of nowhere this week and announced one partnership after another after another after another. Trust me when I say we will be telling you all about them very, very soon.

• Divine Anarchy revealed on Tuesday night. Floor dipped to 0.2 ETH as flippers did what flippers do and started heading north again as expected and is staying strong at 0.24 ETH.

• BAYC member Volutra has been teasing out a new mystery project for days and the entire NFT space is captivated. 

• MetaChamps is up to something 👀.

• Discord teased out a little Web3 tease signaling yet another player is clearly paying attention. 

• $ENS token made a lot of NFT happy with what's clearly the best airdrop since Uniswap when those with .ETH domains when ENS granted a varied amount of tokens based on activity and length of time of registration. Wen OpenSea and Metamask token? (much more on this below)

• Art Blocks Curated took over ETH on Monday for about 20 minutes and gas hit 1,200 gwei 💀.

• This didn't work out so well for Artchick.

Christmas Came Early 🎄 $ENS Airdrop

Out of the blue, or I guess you could say out of the starry night a gift appeared to all ENS domain holders. ENS stands for "Ethereum Name Service". Just the other day if you held an ENS domain you were gifted $ENS tokens that are currently worth $63.67 a token! For many, this was a pleasant surprise since even owning one ENS domain could be worth over $10,000 USD - one could say this was an early Christmas present from the Web3 gods.

What is an ENS domain?

Every crypto wallet has an address and they are very long and complex. For example "0x1f679C4Ba4FFa87D704514A39B882a202EDB456" would be an address (this is a fake address that I put random numbers in). 

So if I wanted to send my friend .5 ETH and that address above was their wallet address I would have to copy it exactly to send it to the right address. If I fudge one number or letter the ETH will be sent to the wrong address and lost forever. 

To solve this and make transactions easier, ENS came up with a function in which you can buy a domain for your address. For example, the domain I bought from ENS was "gannonbreslin.eth". Instead of having to copy and paste my complex address, you can just type that in, and whatever you send will go to my wallet without the hassle and fear of typing the wrong address.

Source: ens.domains

Why did ENS drop $500m+ worth of tokens?

A DAO according to our friends at Wikipedia is: 

"a decentralized autonomous organization, sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation, is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central government". 

To put it simply, ENS is now a DAO and thus in Web3 fashion is giving holders of ENS domains power to make decisions about the future of the Web3 company. ENS wants to be the "Go Daddy" of crypto and currently is making huge strides to be so. Currently, $ENS token can be traded on Binance and is rumored to be available on Coinbase very soon.

“ENS is for the people [...] no investors, decentralized and the community can now set the key parameters of the protocol. This is the essence of Web 3.”

- ENS Director of Operations Brantly Millegan

All Avatar Power Rankings

Twitter NFT Profile Picture Update 🔥

Twitter's NFT profile picture verification is coming along! The Drop tuned in for a space with Justin Taylor, Head of Consumer Product Marketing at Twitter. Taylor shared some updates on the progress of Twitter's official NFT profile picture (PFP) verification product.

The clearest indicator will be a new, hexagon-shaped PFP icon for user profiles. Users who have normal PFP's will keep the current circle shape, but NFT PFP's will take on this new hexagonal shape. To change a profile picture to a verified NFT, you would select "edit profile" as you normally would update your profile, but an added button will say "Select NFT" and bring you to your NFT wallet. Additionally, users will be able to click on anyones NFT PFP to display the full NFT, as well as data pulled from OpenSea (including the collection info, a description, unique properties, and contract addresses).

When Taylor was asked whether verification would only be for OpenSea verified projects he said, "I don't think we [Twitter] should be taking an active role in that." Artists should be able to display their artwork whether their collection is "verified" on OpenSea, or not. Another concern arose regarding the integrity of curated PFP collections fitting within the hexagon. Fortunately, the hexagonal shape is quite subtle and shouldn't crop the artwork any more than a circle would. As for other details, such as which wallets or blockchains will be compatible, only OpenSea was mentioned, so we are awaiting more details and looking forward to this Twitter product launching soon!

Artist Spotlight 🖌

Jay Baum has been making incredible gloss resin art pieces of everyone's favorite NFTs and people are losing their minds over them. Definitely worth checking out below and make sure to give him a follow! (Jay if you are reading this I would love to talk about getting a custom piece)

Meme Drop 💧

Disclaimer: The Drop DOES NOT provide financial advice. All content is for informational purposes only. The Drop is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor or a broker/dealer. Trading any crypto-related asset is extremely risky and could result in significant capital losses.

Follow the team:

Gannon Breslin, Kayla Kilbride, CryptoVonDoom, Nathan Roth

Join the Discord + follow the links below 👇