1/ Dawn of the Guilds: Settlers of the Metaverse

Led by @AxieInfinity, 2021 has been a monumental year for blockchain gaming which continues to be a primary driver of global NFT volumes.

delphidigital.io/reports/dawn-o… 2/ The meteoric rise of Axie has prompted many to draw parallels with the explosive growth of games like Candy Crush at the advent of F2P mobile.

Axie appears to be validating the thesis that gaming could be a trojan horse for global blockchain adoption.

1/ Amped for this! 🔥

@YieldGuild comfortably remains the most exciting project in the space to my mind, and I couldn't be happier for us to lead their Series A as @BitkraftVC's first token investment.

More to come.

venturebeat.com/2021/06/16/yie… 2/ The wealth of industry experience and broad network provided by the the wonderful BK team stands firmly behind Yield Guild on this pioneering mission to settle the New World.

1/ This year's NFT boom exposed many to crypto's consumer-facing side for the first time—exciting.

Awareness of the massive potential of these technologies has grown, but for many the most important question remains: where should we build?

delphidigital.io/reports/rankin… Note / The full piece has much more elaborate reasoning and justification for each of our gradings. There are unquantifiable aspects to some of the topic areas covered.

Also shoutout to @mediodelphi and @Alex_Ged for being an absolute pleasure to work on this with.

1/ Some crazy data from @nonfungibles Q1 2021 report.

Over $2 BILLION USD has been traded as NFTs on Ethereum ALONE in the first 3 months of this year.

That's 131x more than Q1 2020, and 20x more than than Q4.

Boy did things escalate quickly.

👇

https://twitter.com/pierskicks/status/1350472003120193537?s=20

2/ I suspect gaming will be the highest growth sector over the next 5 years.

Maturing infrastructure and growing developer mindshare will drive greater variety and quality of experiences that appeal to the 2.7B strong gamer population.

This will be a primary crypto user funnel.

Get them while they're ho... oh.

Literally every single NFT domain other than .faith and .eco (lol) and a handful of others are taken.

Own up guys, who bought nft.clinic and is it intended to ultimately treat victims of this hype cycle?

1/ NFTs: The Lay of The Land.

The NFT market is undeniably hot right now, the vast majority of record-breaking sales have happened within the last 30 days.

Millions of $ are changing hands daily across projects both old and new.

delphidigital.io/reports/nfts-t… 2/ Record engagement from high-profile figures with big audiences e.g. @mcuban, @MesutOzil1088, and even @lindsaylohan...

Crypto Art pioneer @beeple is back with the 1st ever purely digital art to be sold at the renowned auction house @ChristiesInc.

https://twitter.com/pierskicks/status/1338590621217550344

Some brilliant data in this very comprehensive report.

The @nonfungibles team have done an excellent job over the past few years and it's epic to see them join forces with @latelier.

The tide is quite clearly rising.

Some of my favourite charts/info below. 👇

https://twitter.com/latelier/status/1361238824328781824

1/ Dapper Does It Again.

I just dropped a note covering the historic rise of @nba_topshot, @flow_blockchain's flagship experience on their new chain.

In the last 24 hours, NBA Top Shot has eclipsed the CryptoKitties all-time secondary market volume.

delphidigital.io/reports/dapper… 2/ Dapper has now built the two largest collectibles experiences to date.

Yesterday we saw $7M of volume in just 24 hours, across 7K buyers and ~50K transactions.

In and amongst those sales were two moments that went for over $100,000 each (pictured below).

As promised, a 13,000 word overview of why I think crypto is integral to the emergence of an Open Metaverse.

The essay just dropped on @master_the_meta.

📓Into The Void: Where Crypto Meets The Metaverse

TL;DR

👇👇👇

metaversed.net/Into-The-Void-… 2/ Crypto is laying the foundations for a self-sovereign financial system, an open creator economy, and a universal digital representation and ownership layer via NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

1/ Yesterday I pushed out a report covering the various angles of growth observed across the NFT ecosystem.

2020 was a monumental year for NFTs, and the stage is well and truly set for another record-setting year in 2021.

👇👇👇

delphidigital.io/reports/nfts-a… 2/ For those of you new to the topic, take a moment to familiarize with what non-fungible tokens are as well as how they might become a core driver of the evolution of online content.

Don't be afraid to let the imagination wander!

1/ In yesterday's note, I covered the DeFi <> NFT symbiosis and explored how the two are mutually beneficial.

The 2020 DeFi summer drove gas fees to intolerable levels for many NFT activities. Whilst it seemed like a curse, it may have been a blessing...

delphidigital.io/reports/the-de… 2/ Some may argue that residual liquidity from a frothy market is what affored NFTs their moment in the sun.

The end of the DeFi boomed coincided with the highest volumes the NFT space had seen since 2017, before ending the year explosively with historic crypto art sales.

1/ Today I pushed out a note to @Delphi_Digital subscribers covering the monumental milestone that this past weekend marked for #cryptoart with @beeple's @niftygateway drop.

delphidigital.io/reports/beeple… 2/ Legendary artist @beeple has spent the last 13 years of his life producing an artwork every single day. 4976 consecutive days of dedication eventually brought him to crypto art.

In just 48 hours, he sold over $3.5 million of digital artwork. 🤯

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a Google error message. Could be something serious up. Using incognito to try and log in again gives no record of existing accounts...

Imagine Google's data centres got wiped lmao

https://twitter.com/lorem64/status/1338455087883014144

1/25 Today I touched upon the recent Roblox S-1 filing as it relates to the nascent blockchain-based virtual worlds or Crypto Sandboxes as I like to call them.

The @Roblox IPO is a landmark event and represents the first pure, public Metaverse play.

delphidigital.io/reports/the-ro… 2/25 For those of you that don’t know, Roblox is a multiplayer sandbox game with over 30 million daily active users. Sandbox games derive their name from the nature of a sandbox that lets children create nearly anything they want within it.

1/ Today we released a report on Crypto Art. We shed light on an eclectic mix of the artists contributing to the growing ecosystem. We provide an overview of the marketplaces currently available, as well as brief commentary on how we think things could evolve. 2/ With the recent advent of yield farming across virtual goods protocols, we expect competitive dynamics to heat up as the battle for market share comes to the fore.

1/ Metaverse Musings #1

Last night, 12.3 million concurrent players gathered in Fortnite to watch Travis Scott debut his new album. For context, that is almost four times bigger than Rod Stewart's Copacabana Beach—the largest concert ever on NYE 1994. 2/ In order to facilitate such an operation, all other game modes were disabled in the hour run up to the show beginning. Users were encouraged to join lobbies 30 minutes before the scheduled start time in order to guarantee a spot.

1/ Bitcoin is the unstoppable force that obliterates immovable objects. Never before have we seen a self-reinforcing technology of this calibre. Its incentive mechanisms effectively guarantee its inexorable improvement. 2/ It is an infectious three headed beast; technological, economic, and ideological, that consumes all in its path. In order to break its steadfast economic equilibrium, a catastrophic system failure must occur. With every second of continued operation, this becomes less likely.