💧 Rip n’ drip

GM and welcome back to The Drop.

Outside of the cryptosphere, Apple fans freaked out on the timeline yesterday about the trillion-dollar tech giant’s new “liquid glass” iOS design change. 

Some have compared the look to Windows Vista, which came out in 2007. One dev claimed he recreated the feature in less than a day.

And yeah, I’m not a big fan of it, either. It’s gonna look messy, especially when using text-heavy apps. I think this push is a distracting, superficial change that could definitely cause accessibility issues. Hopefully, Apple fixes this.

— Kate Irwin

🎴 Drip Shop Live launches Instant Packs for trading cards

There’s another card trading platform in the ring: Enter Drip Shop Live, aka Drip, which has a shopping site, a livestreaming-focused mobile app and plans for more crypto integrations. 

Drip has just released Instant Packs, a new feature that gives anyone the ability to “open” physical cards online whenever they want, instead of during limited-time, limited-edition windows to buy from drops or live auctions. Instant Packs are intended to give the feeling of opening a physical card pack, and the physical cards are then shipped to buyers.

Packs can include cards from a range of IPs. You’ll see a lot of Pokémon on their site, but there’s also some Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, and Dragon Ball Z cards. There’s a category for sports cards, though there aren’t actually a lot of that type listed on the site yet. 

On Drip, collectors can buy and sell unopened card packs, individual cards, collectors’ boxes, “slabs” or graded encased cards. It’s possible to pay with crypto or fiat currency.

For Instant Packs, the team (for now) is focusing on digitizing slabs, its most popular category. 

“We configure the packs using an algorithm that maps probabilities to each reveal. These reveals are 100% random based on the probabilities we map,” Drip CEO and cofounder Javaughn Lawrence told me in an email. “Users can also preview what’s in each pack by 1) looking at the collections in each pack 2) trying in demo mode.”

Drip has a mobile-first feel because their iOS and Android apps offer the livestreaming component. But their website isn’t bad, either. 

While the site feels more like eBay, the mobile app is a lot like TikTok Live and TikTok’s shopping features. Both the Drip Android and iOS app versions have positive reviews overall (its Android version has over 100,000 downloads so far). There are about 40 sellers offering collectibles on the platform right now, Lawrence said.

The apps are designed to appeal to live streamers and the entire category of influencers who make videos about card collecting and pack-ripping more broadly, plus the collectors and fans who watch them (think creators like Pokedexter, who I know from my Twitch-streaming and TikTok days). 

While the packs and cards on the site aren’t NFTs or onchain right now, Lawrence shared that the Drip team is currently in talks with a few different blockchains, including L1s and L2s, to determine who to work with to explore that possibility. They’re doing a pilot with Ronin in a few weeks.

It’s also possible to open Instant Packs on desktop via a web browser. I did it via Drip’s demo, and they definitely try to give that ASMR card-opening experience with an emphasis on the shiny wrapper and that ripping sound. 

Drip also has an in-shop synthetic currency called Driplets, which can be used to get giveaway entries on the app or other rewards. Lawrence said that while the currency isn’t a token right now, “this will be the beginning of our social token when we put that onchain.”

For now, Instant Packs are just for opening cards, but Drip could add a loot box-style opening experience for toys, sneakers, or even jewelry at some point in the future.

The app is a bet on the future importance of livestreaming to shopping and collector culture, for sure. That’s what makes it stand apart from Courtyard, which is mainly a slab-buying platform where buyers can choose whether to “vault” or redeem a card (the physical cards have onchain counterparts).

Courtyard, which uses Polygon, has continued to see substantial sales since a spike back in January. It’s netted over $53.7 million in sales in the past month across over 459,000 transactions and more than 74,600 buyers.

Permissionless IV is the definitive gathering for crypto's technical founders and builders.

Infra, incentives, interop, enterprise: It’s all on the table. If you're building for scale, or trying to fix what’s broken, you’ll want to be in Brooklyn.
 
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📱 Coinbase Wallet beta gets even more social features

Coinbase Wallet’s Head of Engineering has shared some of the features the team is adding to the beta version of the crypto wallet app, and which early users can expect to see “soon.”

The changes suggest Coinbase is trying to make its wallet an “everything app,” pushing even further into social media integrations to add some Zora-like features. 

They’ve added the ability for wallet users to create Farcaster accounts within the wallet without switching apps, made changes to in-app motions like swiping and scrolling, and added more mini-app categories, to name a few.

There’s also a video feed, plus the ability to share posts to a feed, customize the app’s visual look, use AI agents and send transactions, and launch coins easily.

It sounds like CashApp meets Twitter, rolled into one crypto-first app.

That’s a massive overhaul.

Vibe-coded, NFT-inspired games are here. Will these stand the test of time — or are they just a flash in the pan?