In this issue:

• Why there’s so much kerfuffle around open editions ♾️

• NFT lending is here. Are you prepared? 💸

• Cracking open RTFKT’s pods 🥜

DYOR 🔬

This week the topic of every second Twitter Spaces — and plenty of Discord and Telegram chats — has been open editions. That is, NFT mints with no limit and, in some cases, no termination date.

Open editions aren’t anything new — consider posters of famous works sold in museum gift shops, or the fact that some artists continue to sell prints of their most famous works indefinitely (see Vladimir Tretchikoff’s “Chinese Girl/The Green Lady” for instance). One argument in their favor is that they provide an affordable access point to an artist for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to collect them at all.

If you’re an XCOPY or a Pak or a Beeple, an open edition might be precisely that: a way for newcomers to your work (or fans long since priced out of the market) to support it. Or, if you’re Snoop Dogg, it might be a humorous way to flex your clout. For established artists it can also be a way to grow their community, and to collect wallet addresses to later harness for exclusive drops.

But if you’re a newcomer with a limited audience, track record, and archive, don’t be surprised if people call your open edition a cash grab and point to it as a reprehensible example of the form and a reason the category deserves to be decried.

Our position? Open editions are tools — like watercolors or Procreate or NFTs themselves. For some artists and works, they’re going to be the right tool… and for others, well, they’re going to be cash grabs. So, you know, DYOR. And buy the art you like, because even if the floor price for an open edition you’ve bought dropped below the price you minted it at… if you like the art (and/or the artist) it doesn’t matter.

Drop alert 🚨

Rug Radio’s PFP drop is coming on Monday, February 6, and holders of the Cory Van Lew (the artist behind the PFP collection) or Rug Radio 1/1s can mint for free:

Probably nothing 🤔

Goblin collateral ⛏️

This week, some bold soul bundled 32 Goblintown NFTs together and use them as collateral against a $40,000 loan using NFTfi. Why is this newsworthy? Because as our investment analyst Jameson Mah outlined in an expansive blog post this week, interest in NFT lending is growing, and it looks set to move from being an esoteric corner of Web3 to a normal part of it.

All your pods are belong to RTFKT 🌱

If you’re an RTFKT holder you should familiarize yourself with its Space and Loot Pods and what burning them can unlock. If you’re not an RTFKT holder and this is all gibberish, you should check out the thread below anyway, because mechanisms like these are only going to get more common as big brands (like Nike) try to find ways to keep their NFT holders actively engaged and participating in their ecosystems.

To the moon 🌛

• Ei.Ventures, a psychedelics-focused startup based in Miami, Florida, announced this week it’s bought a plot in metaverse platform The Sandbox where it plans to have clinicians host psychedelic therapy sessions.

• OpenSea added a three-hour hold period (with various exceptions and caveats) to try and mitigate against scammers immediately flipping stolen NFTs by accepting offers on whole collections.

• Legendary illustrator and high ABV beer fan Ralph Steadman has a drop incoming on Nifty Gateway:

• Musician Saweetie will perform a free pre-game Super Bowl concert in the Roblox metaverse.

• PleasrDAO is auctioning the couch from the original picture of doge.

• In more PleaserDAO-related news, Steve Aoki and Seth Green have teamed up to let buyers of a forthcoming NFT collection shape the stop-motion video they’ll be producing over the six weeks following its launch using Emily “pplpleasr” Yang’s Web3 video platform Shibuya.

🪡 Thread of the week 🧵

NGMI ☄️

Squiggles vs. The SEC 🥊

If you’ve been in this space a while you may remember Squiggles, or perhaps you’ve blocked it from your memory given how egregious a rug project it was. First, we should point out this has nothing to do with Chromie Squiggles (the legendary generative art collection that kickstarted the Art Blocks revolution).

No, the Squiggles to which we refer was a Doodles-like project that raise a heap of ETH… and then vanished into the, err, ether, taking a chunk of change with it and getting delisted by OpenSea in the process for being sus. Now the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating possible (AKA “definite”) malfeasance.

⏳ We’re ancient ⌛️

Sounds rare 🖼

Art unfiltered 🎨

On Monday you can catch Metaversal’s own Matt Miller and his co-hosts VonMises and ayybee in conversation with none other than Erick “Snowfro” Calderon and gmoney.

You can set a reminder to tune in to the Spaces here.

IYKYK 🤭

🤝 Connect for more from Metaversal 🔌

You can find more rapid-fire updates, insights, memes, and other c-o-n-t-e-n-t from the Metaversal team on any of your preferred platforms, we’re on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Mastodon, and TikTok.

This week’s edition was compiled by Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson. You can find him on Twitter or Mastodon.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse!