👁️ Eye-scanning yappers

Hey frens. I’m back on the East Coast after a little jaunt out to LA and Portland. I missed the LA weather and the Portland food, but I did not miss that LA traffic. It was nice to see so many businesses supporting the wildfire victims, though. 

I’ll be at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco later this month, so be sure to reach out or say hi if you see me there. 

Things are already looking pretty packed schedule-wise. But if you’re building a blockchain game I need to know about, just reply to this email!

— Kate Irwin

P.S. Let me know how you’re liking The Drop! Send me an email at drop.newsletter@blockworks.co.

World Network adds chatting, payments

Sam Altman’s World (formerly Worldcoin) is adding an important “Mini App” within its iOS and Android app called World Chat, which lets you “connect, chat, and send money” to people verified by the World Network. 

And yes, based on the screenshots, you can send cryptocurrencies like USDC directly within your chat.

World Chat is in beta for now, but there are already over 100 other so-called mini apps on World. That’s a lot — I don’t think you’d be able to use all of them regularly.

“World Chat will be integrated with other Mini Apps to help drive even more growth and engagement in the ecosystem,” Tools For Humanity Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada said. 

Tools For Humanity is the for-profit firm tied to World, but World also has the World Foundation (like most projects that launch a token).

Altman, who is also founder and CEO of OpenAI, has predicted that at some point, the internet as we know it will become overrun with bots — so much so that it’ll be hard to tell who is a real human.

Well, I think we all know that ship has already sailed. From bots on social media to AI agents that can get around CAPTCHAs, we’re already living in a very artificially intelligent world. 

Downloading the World app on your phone will show you where you can get your iris scanned to prove you’re human and use the platform, including the World Network. From there, you can access mini apps and use its crypto rails.

Worldcoin is the native token for the World Network, a blockchain dedicated to ID verification. You go to one of those weird eyeball-scanning orbs, and you can get some tokens to ultimately sell or use on that blockchain.

I absolutely think that World Chat adds more utility to the World app, but Apple Cash within iMessage already exists, and so does Venmo and PayPal. World Chat’s crypto payments feature looks a bit like Strike in its simplicity. The competition will be tough, and some anons may not be comfortable sharing their eyes with Mr. Altman.

That said, World could have more international appeal and accessibility. 

WhatsApp — the favorite chat app of my friends in Mexico and South Africa — doesn’t offer in-app payments. It’s hard for those based in the US to send small amounts of money globally, and crypto is an obvious solution. It’s also great that World Chat conversations are end-to-end encrypted, so at least you don’t have to compromise on privacy on that front.

In my view, Telegram is World’s biggest real competitor. Telegram has global reach and hundreds of millions of users, and you don’t need to verify your identity and can send and receive payments using bots and different APIs. 

But Telegram’s massive size can also be its downside, as its CEO and founder Pavel Durov has admitted himself. Telegram has faced criticism over the number of alleged criminals using the app. Cybercriminals are able to anonymously hawk malware, phishing kits, or scam users on Telegram, often without getting caught.

World offers a vetted, bespoke solution to combat bots and unknown individuals. If you’re not verified with a World ID, you can still use the chat mini app. But your messages and name will appear gray and without a unique gem, so verified users will know you haven’t proven your humanity just yet.

Auto Legends raises $9M, gets Coinbase VC funding

Auto Legends, an upcoming racing game on Base, has raised $9 million, including a $1 million investment from Coinbase Ventures’ Base Ecosystem Fund alongside Operating Group and Draper Dragon, I’ve learned. 

Auto Legends will have an NFT mint for in-game cars. Not sure exactly when that’s happening, but it sounds like it’ll be before the game launches.

Game Director Scott Probin joined the Auto Legends team in January, according to his LinkedIn profile. Probin previously worked as the studio director for Gunzilla Games, the studio behind the battle royale shooter Off The Grid. 

I’m ready for a crypto racing game that’s actually good. 

Berachain shares regrets

The pseudonymous Berachain co-founder Smokey the Bera has shared his regrets about how the token launch went.

“I don’t think the critics are entirely wrong. I think that if I could go back and redo this again, and if the team could start at ground zero, we probably would not have sold as much of our supply to VCs,” he said on Laura Shin’s podcast.

As a refresh, Berachain allocated 34% of its token supply to VCs, while only 16% of the token was set aside for a community airdrop. Overall, half the allocation was allocated to community members and builders, while the other half was granted to the founders and VCs. 

BERA is down over 55% from its all-time high around launch, but its price has held steady in the past two weeks. 

Berachain saw lots of hype around its launch last month. Since then, the number of transactions has held steady, but the number of unique active addresses has plummeted, according to Blockworks Research data.

• News2pump, a SocialFi platform that tokenizes tweets, launched on Wednesday. It’s similar to pump.fun. Elon Musk’s tweet of the peanut emoji is one of the tokens, to give you an idea of how things are going.

• The Blubcoin meme token on Avalanche has officially launched and has its own “ShameFi” board like the WINK token, aka a sell-shaming board.

• NFT marketplace and platform Zora is getting a token. Launch date is TBA but they’re eyeing sometime this spring.

• The top collection on Zora by market cap right now is Zorby, an AI-powered blob that generates a new version of itself every time a sale happens.

• ArtBlocks, the group behind the Squiggles NFT collection on Ethereum, got a website update. Also, the last Chromie Squiggle is in the LACMA until July 13. Squiggle = modern art?

• The Monad blockchain is sending MON tokens to holders of over two dozen different NFT collections, including holders of Miladys, CryptoPunks, BAYC, Pudgy Penguins, and many more. 

• The scifi NFT-optional trading card game Parallel says they’re giving everyone who attended or competed at their recent IRL event in Vegas some special in-game loot. 

• The artist known as Ed Balloon is launching an art collection of NFTs called PARTED on the Flow blockchain. The cost to mint is $5, but you’ll need to bridge some tokens to Flow.

• That was fast! The mint for the Abstract game ChronoForge sold out on Wednesday within 20 minutes. Did you get an NFT?

A look at Treeverse, the mobile MMORPG using the Immutable zkEVM chain: