NFT Winter is Here, but Some Projects are Heating Up
While many projects are battering down the hatches and waiting for the cold to thaw away, some aren’t wasting any time melting the ice. As we covered in previous articles NFTs have dipped in interest, volume, sales, and active wallets. However, that hasn’t stopped many from continuing to build through the downtrend.
Dust Labs raises 7M on the heels of the y00ts mint arguably one of the biggest mints of 2022 that garnered interest from ETH and SOL users alike. Including celebrities like Howie Mendel, Wanye Rooney, and Lil Baby. Participants in the round include Solana Ventures, Metaplex, Magic Eden, Hello Moon, and FTX Ventures. The investment was a 50/50 split between company equity and its $DUST token.
$DUST is the utility token of the DeGods ecosystem. DeGods is the largest PFP project on Solana and recently cracked the top 5 projects across ETH & SOL. Dust Labs was founded by @frankdegods & @kevindegods which aims to become a B2B SaaS solution for NFT projects. Their first product which was on display during the y00ts whitelist phase is called “Scholarships”.
What are Scholarships? In an attempt to eliminate the grind for whitelist meta. The Dust Labs team imagined that most NFT collectors can be grouped into 9 different categories. After selecting your profile you are prompted with 4 different questions that are capped at 280 characters. The premise is that you (the collector) can provide value to the community at large. The project team reviews your application and determines if you are eligible for a whitelist spot.
It’s an interesting twist on the existing process that requires users to either be consistently active in discords, win some kind of RNG-driven game or win a meme/fan art contest. The issue with this process is that it forces users to be constantly active in a community and doesn’t scale. Now you can be rewarded for being an active member of the NFT community at large.
The current iteration of scholarships didn’t come without its challenges. All accepted users were getting tweets tagged with their names. Which created a lot of initial hype and FOMO (fear of missing out).
However, those that weren’t accepted were left in a state of “under review” until the day of the y00tlist mint. Applications started in early August and the y00tlist mint was labor day weekend. Some users waited up to 30 days to find out whether or not they had been rejected or accepted. The unintended consequences of such a lengthy denial process are that it left some hopeless, and created anxiety, and others, felt like they needed to shill their applications to increase their chances. This created a more grindy element than the y00ts team intended it to be.
This isn’t so much a slight to the scholarship application but more so against the handling of acceptances/rejections/waitlists by the team.
We tried some shit. We learned some shit. Now we’re trying some new shit.
— Frankdegods
B+J Studios raises $10M!
Investors in the oversubscribed round include Big Brain Holdings, Foundation Capital, Brevan Howard Digital, and other crypto-native investors. B+J Studios is founded by two software engineers from Solana Labs and multi-national hedge fund Citadel. Their goal is to onboard billions of users through their infrastructure that focuses on a seamless user experience.
B+J Studios' first product, the NFT super-app Cupcake, can onboard a new crypto user in less than a minute. Cupcake eliminates the headache of setting up a wallet, funding it from an exchange, and eliminating gas fees.
Through the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology end users can simply tap their phone to a cupcake sprinkle enter their phone number and receive an NFT. This can all be done without the user even realizing that they just minted an NFT.
Welcome to era of the digital collectible where users are collecting images that are NFTs but they wont ever be referred to them, as that.
B+J Studios rolled out Cupcake at Lollapalooza where attendees went on a treasure hunt collecting NFTs which were redeemed for merchandise, backstage passes, and NFT-gated access to special creator/fan experiences. For those of you that don’t know, Lollapalooza is an annual 4-day festival held in Grant Park, Chicago. Out of the 400K attendees, roughly 30,000 people signed up with Cupcake at Lollapalooza.
One of the exciting use cases for Cupcake is the blending of the physical and digital world currently dubbed as phygital. Imagine supporting your favorite creators on YouTube by buying a physical piece of merch with a sewn-in Cupcake sprinkle that you can just tap with your phone and claim your digital collectible. This is how you onboard the next 100M users into crypto without them even knowing it.
For the experienced NFT users you might be asking yourself can you move the NFTs you claim from your cupcake wallet? The answer simply put is yes. The process is easy, all you have to send a little bit of $SOL from your crypto native wallet to your Cupcake wallet, and then you can move the collectibles out. Cupcake does plan to extend to the Ethereum chain, however, due to the incredibly low gas fees on Solana, it makes more business sense to launch via the native chain. When you lead a campaign with Cupcake you absorb the transaction fees that end users would normally experience minting to create the “gas-free” minting process.
The bakery is open to anyone that has interesting ideas for Cupcake technology. Simply visit their store and pick the package that fits your needs.
Many have begun to speculate that the next iteration of NFTs would not be called NFTs but would become some branded version of the term digital collectible. If you look at the recent announcement from Starbucks and their plans for web3. Their initiative isn’t stunt-based like many failed attempts by web2 companies. Starbucks plans to bolster its loyalty program experience “Starbucks Odyssey” where program members will be able to earn “Journey Stamps” that are essentially NFTs but packaged in a way that the end user only perceives them as a new form of digital collectible.
These types of frictionless user experiences are essential for ushering in the masses. Hopefully, they can shift the macro narrative that NFTs are scams as well. Granted closed ecosystems like what Starbucks is proposing buck the decentralized narrative it does provide a “safe space” for end users to experience NFTs and not just the trading side where crypto vets are waiting to dump their bags on them.
If you made it this far, just know that you are awesome, and check out some of our previous articles below.
The Flip-to-Earn Meta needs to end
How Much is My NFT Worth?
What are Dynamic NFTs?
