🏞 NFT Roundup: New Marketplaces Challenge OpenSea with Multichains, Tokens and Other Features

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:

News

• Exclusive: OpenDAO Is Building an NFT Prediction Market and Bespoke Blockchain
• Fees.wtf Triggers Uproar by Charging .01 ETH Fee to Join Airdrop
• Gitcoin Revives Debate Over Quadratic Funding with New Dev Protocol

Weekend Read

• NFT Marketplaces Challenge OpenSea’s Grip with Multichains, Tokens and Party Bids

Deep Dive

• Crypto Markets Throw Tantrum as Fed Prepares To Target Inflation

Video

• SuperMassive NFT Show": Looks Rare, but is it really an OpenSea killer?
• Real Vision vs. The Defiant: THE FIRST GLIMPSE INSIDE THE METAVERSE – LIVE WITH UNREAL ENGINE

Links

• Near Raises $150M From Major Crypto Investment Firms: CoinDesk
• Tether Freezes $160M of USDT Stablecoin on Ethereum Blockchain: CoinDesk
• Mark Cuban and Robinhood's CEO join $6 million round for high-yield investment app Seashell: The Block
• State of Ethereum | Q4 Report: Bankless
• We’re going to [redacted] to [redacted] for [redacted] and its gonna be [redacted]! Aave
• GM Ethereans… find here a video greeting from one of our 36 super talented artists: Infinite Machine Movie & Collection

Trending in The Defiant

• Ethereum Burn Rate Hits Record High as DeFi Market Jumps
• LOOKSRARE Airdrops Token and Entices NFT Fans to Try Out New Marketplace
• Vitalik Sounds Alarm on Security of Cross-chain Bridges

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NFT Markets

👷🏼‍♂️ Exclusive: OpenDAO Is Building an NFT Prediction Market and Bespoke Blockchain

NEWS While the OpenDAO is building a marketplace, it is not building a marketplace for NFTs. It is building a marketplace for information about NFTs. That is, it’s building a prediction market, The Defiant has learned.

AIRDROP Crypto users are most likely to know of OpenDAO because of its giant airdrop of its SOS tokens to past users of OpenSea at the end of 2021 (this reporter got less than $100 worth of SOS tokens in that airdrop). What those tokens were dropped to build has been less clear up to this point.

THREE PRODUCTS OpenDAO’s founder, 9x9x9, told The Defiant that he has three products in mind that should come soon. The purpose of his DAO is to make the whole market for NFTs work better.

“Everything in the NFT space, everything is so old,” he told The Defiant in a phone call. The three products coming out very soon are a prediction market, a new NFT launchpad and a bespoke blockchain custom made for the NFT ecosystem.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Airdrops

😡 Fees.wtf Triggers Uproar by Charging .01 ETH Fee to Join Airdrop

AIRDROP People like free money, but free money with a fee might not garner the same enthusiasm. Fees.wtf, which started as a community tool to horrify Ethereum users by showing them how much money they had spent in gas, announced an airdrop on Jan. 13. Unlike other airdrops, this one came with a .01 ETH fee, a break from the norm in crypto. The move had some people up in arms.

CASH GRAB “Lol why would you charge a fee for claiming?” tweeted Eden Au, research director at blockchain information platform, The Block. “Such a blatant cash grab,” tweeted Anthony Sassano, founder of Ethereum newsletter, The Daily Gwei.

BACKLASH Despite the backlash against the fee, people were paying it — Etherscan showed tens of .01 ETH fees streaming into wtf.fees’ team wallet every second on Jan. 13, shortly after the tokens became claimable.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

SPONSORED POST

$WEB3 Tokenized Index is Live & Up 25% in ETH Terms

Arch Ethereum Web3 is now live – This index product which unlocks broad-market exposure to Ethereum’s governance token ecosystem. With 17 constituents, the product tracks the returns of roughly 70% of the market capitalization of the Arch Ethereum Web3 Index (+$60B at current prices).

The Arch Ethereum Web3 Index is up 25% in ETH terms in the last 30 days. This outperformance is led by tokens in the Infrastructure and the Lending sectors, which are up 48% and 34% in the past month against ETH, respectively.

$WEB3 is built methodology-first to deliver predictable and reliable exposure to the major governance tokens in the Ethereum ecosystem. This market-weighted and monthly rebalanced product, provides web3-natives with an efficient vehicle to diversify their portfolios and is set to become the gauge for the overall web3 ecosystem, akin to SPX in TradFi.

$WEB3 is the first tokenized asset curated by Arch, a DeFi asset manager focused on passive investment strategies based on rigorous analytical frameworks and fundamental research to enable a wide-range of investment strategies.

Arch Ethereum Web3 token is available for trade on Ethereum mainnet and Polygon network decentralized exchanges, visit www.archfinance.io to learn more.

Quadratic Funding

🧐 Gitcoin Revives Debate Over Quadratic Funding with New Dev Protocol

FUNDING Gitcoin, an Ethereum foundation-supported platform for public goods funding, has revealed it is working on a new offering designed to help protocols incentivize ecosystem development dubbed Aqueduct.

DEBATE The key: Enabling projects to employ automatic quadratic funding rounds, which uses a novel voting mechanism intended to produce outcomes that equitably balance the interests of a wide variety of stakeholders. The move has triggered fresh debate about the utility and design of quadratic funding.

GROWTH ENGINE The protocol was announced on Jan. 13 by Paradigm developer Dave White and fellow Aqueduct contributor, Gitcoin’s “Owocki.” White described the forthcoming protocol as “a new ecosystem growth engine.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Weekend Read

🏞 NFT Marketplaces Challenge OpenSea’s Grip with Multichains, Tokens and Party Bids

In this roundup, Brady Dale takes stock of the leading contenders to go after OpenSea’s dominance of the NFT market. They come in many flavors!

CLOUT OpenSea is the giant of the NFT marketplace space. It’s the place everyone looks at if they want to buy or sell an NFT. In fact, OpenSea is so big, there’s a decent chance that any NFT service that’s also providing a window into NFTs is ultimately using OpenSea as well, via its free NFT API. All of this clout has driven it to a valuaton of $13.3B in its latest round of financing. Not bad selling a product anyone can steal by right-clicking.

VOLUME Meanwhile, driven in part by the extraordinary boom in NFTs that came out of nowhere in early 2020, there’s been a rush of entrepreneurs chasing OpenSea’s lead and starting NFT companies. As it stands, all of their volume combined represents a very small portion of what sells over OpenSea every month, but things move fast in crypto.

GRINDING OpenSea’s dominance is down to the fact that it basically invented the idea of an NFT market. As metaverse investor Andrew Steinwold said on Twitter, “These are the guys that were busy building & grinding since 2017 back when 99% of people in CRYPTO laughed at NFTs.” With all that success, competitors are obviously going to circle, but the internet tends to be a winner-take-all place. Most retail sales online go through Amazon. So much search goes through Google. Entrepreneurs have been trying to unseat the giants for years, with little success.

An NFT for sale on Rarible.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Deep Dive

🏛 Crypto Markets Throw Tantrum as Fed Prepares To Target Inflation

In which yyctrader delves into the connection between that TradFi bastion, the Fed, inflation, the economics of Covid-19, and crypto…

URGENT Inflation has become an urgent topic of discussion ever since the U.S. Federal Reserve released minutes of its December meeting, indicating that it’s willing to take a harder line on inflation, which hit a 39-year high in December.

LOSSES Crypto markets were hit hard over the last two weeks, with Bitcoin briefly trading below $40,000 for the first time since September 2021. Markets have since recouped some losses after the US Consumer Price Index (CPI) data this week came out just above expectations.

QUESTIONS But why is inflation suddenly in the spotlight? And why have crypto investors become ardent Fed-watchers? Aren’t we building a new financial system that’s supposed to be independent from TradFi? To answer those questions, we’ll need to look back at the last two decades.

DEPTHS At the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, there was clearly a need for unprecedented action to prevent a total collapse of the financial system. Global central banks worked in tandem to flood the system with liquidity and bailed out troubled banks using public funds.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

SuperMassive NFT Show: Looks Rare, but is it really an OpenSea killer?

📺 Real Vision vs. The Defiant: THE FIRST GLIMPSE INSIDE THE METAVERSE – LIVE WITH UNREAL ENGINE

Links

🔗 Near Raises $150M From Major Crypto Investment Firms: CoinDesk

One of crypto’s most cash-rich ecosystems just got a little richer as it prepares for a major decentralized finance (DeFi) push.

🔗 Tether Freezes $160M of USDT Stablecoin on Ethereum Blockchain: CoinDesk

Stablecoin issuer Tether froze three Ethereum addresses on Thursday, holding over $160 million worth of USDT, according to data from Etherscan.

🔗 Mark Cuban and Robinhood's CEO join $6 million round for high-yield investment app Seashell: The Block

Seashell, a startup building an investment app to offer high yields, has raised $6 million in a seed funding round.

🔗 State of Ethereum | Q4 Report: Bankless

One of the key documents to evaluate the health of a company is the quarterly earnings report. These reports include cash flows, profit and loss statements, and key growth indicators.

Aave @AaveAave👀 https://t.co/4rrFNvouLx

stani.eth (👻,🐻‍❄️,🦎.🦎) @StaniKulechovWe’re going to [redacted] to [redacted] for [redacted] and its gonna be [redacted]! More [redacted] coming soon11:25 PM ∙ Jan 11, 2022140Likes15Retweets

The Infinite Machine Movie & Collection @ETHMovieGM Ethereans… find here a video greeting from one of our 36 super talented artists. Remember our second mint is coming up this Sunday the 16th. Follow us for more info and WL spots, and follow @rebelbeebs for more of her beautiful work! #WAGMAM 6:29 AM ∙ Jan 14, 20225Likes2Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• Ethereum Burn Rate Hits Record High as DeFi Market JumpsSevere volatility has driven Ethereum’s daily burn to an all-time high, with roughly 18,070 ETH, or $57.8M, destroyed in 24 hours on Jan. 11.
• LOOKSRARE Airdrops Token and Entices NFT Fans to Try Out New MarketplaceA new NFT marketplace has launched on Ethereum, and its revenues are open to anyone who is willing to put some skin in the game.
• Vitalik Sounds Alarm on Security of Cross-chain BridgesVitalik Buterin, the co-founder and chief scientist of Ethereum, has sounded the alarm over the security of cross-chain bridges, warning of their vulnerability in the event of 51% attacks.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, DeFiDad, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader, and Camila Russo. Videos are produced by Robin Schmidt, Alp Gasimov and Daniel Flynn. Podcast is led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr)