In this week’s issue:

• The Yacht Club turns its attention to plumbing 🪠

• Beeple wants to show off your art 🖼️

• Rarible makes selling NFTs even easier 💰

• Nat Geo’s fans go feral on social 🐆

Right, let’s get straight into it!

DYOR 🔬

The biggest news this week came from arguably the biggest project in the NFT space. Bored Ape Yacht Club parent Yuga Labs revealed its Dookey Dash game, along with the Sewer Pass NFTs required to participate.

It came as no surprise that the Sewer Passes have topped the trading volume charts in recent days, raising volumes for all Ape-related NFTs in the process, too. Because while holders of Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, or Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs could claim a Sewer Pass for free, you don’t need to hold one of the Ape projects to participate in the subterranean fun.

The Passes come in various tiers, and at the time of writing the floor price on the secondary market was sitting at 1.99ETH (~$3,200), and the total volume was nearing 14,000 ETH (~$22.3 million).

While some of the mainstream media derided the toilet humor of Yuga’s latest initiative, the numbers don’t lie: People absolutely love it.

Complex leaderboard mechanics that might dampen enthusiasm for a game from another entity were no match for Yuga’s ability to command attention. If anything, they’ve made fans pay closer attention by forcing them to really dig into the game if they want to optimize their odds of success.

With players able to keep trying for the highest scores until February 8 and Yuga selling various power-ups for Ape Coin, we expect it’ll remain in the headlines — and rake in a fortune — in the coming weeks.

They say you can’t polish a turd. It turns out you can if you’re Yuga.

📢 Don’t sleep on Tezos? 👇

Probably nothing 🤔

Beeple’s steeple ⛪️

Digital artist Beeple is opening an exhibition space/studio in Charleston, South Carolina on March 11, and teaming up with Christie’s for the opening event. If you want to attend, you’ll need to own a Beeple NFT to claim a ticket by February 1, and you’ll need to still be holding it on event night.

The venue’s interior — from the walls to the support pillars — is covered in digital displays, and in addition to a star-studded selection of artists whose work will be shown at the grand opening (including Fvckrender, Blake Kathryn, XCOPY, Refik Anadol, and many more), Beeple is inviting other artists to submit their work for consideration.

Artists can submit old work or new, and if their work is selected, they’ll also get a ticket to the opening. Given the caliber of attendees and the scale of the digital displays, it’s an incredible opportunity to grab the attention of some of the digital art scene’s most notable players. Interested in submitting your work? You can do that here until February 1, 2023.

Everyone gets a marketplace! 🛍️

Rarible has unveiled a new service called “Community Marketplace” that lets anyone create a marketplace for Polygon NFT projects or collections.

The service follows a similar one launched for ETH projects and supports royalty enforcement on-chain, and users can set the fees themselves. They’re also able to customize the no-code marketplaces fairly extensively.

If your needs are more complex, Rarible offers a “white glove service” to help marketplace creators with greater demands. There’s an initial set-up fee to create a marketplace, but no transaction fees or recurring monthly costs, making it an especially attractive prospect for small projects looking to keep overheads low.

🐸 Amphibian ablution solution 🚿

To the moon 🌛

• Crypto payment and NFT concierge service MoonPay has acquired web3-focused creative agency Nightshift, which will be rebranded as “Otherlife.”

• Porsche revealed the mint price of its forthcoming collection of 7,500 virtual Porsche 911s is 0.911 ETH (~$1,450). It’s bold… but decidedly on-brand.

• Daily sales of former US President Donald Trump’s NFT collection leaped 800% after falling off a cliff only a week earlier.

• Metahood, a company that wants to be the Zillow of the metaverse, raised $3 million during a seed round led by 1confirmation.

• Nouns announced preorders for the first Noun Comic are open for European and North American buyers:

• Yves Saint Laurent has filed web3-focused trademark applications for its name and logo. The application covers “NFT-backed media,” stores featuring “virtual goods,” and “virtual makeup, cosmetics, and skincare preparations.”

• A project selling pixelated pictures of feet (!) and appropriately called feetpix.wtf has done nearly 1,680 ETH (~$2.75 million) in volume since it launched in early January. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bedtime reading 📚

This week Decentraland outlined its plans for 2023 at length. The resulting document, “Dentraland 2023 Manifesto: Year of the Creators,” is an interesting read for anyone interested in DAOs, open-source software, and of course what it’s got planned for its platform, along with a year-long calendar of key events it has planned.

Whether you’re into virtual real estate or not, it’s an intriguing look behind the curtain at Decentraland, and might inspire you if you’re working on your own project this year.

🎖️We’d need bigger blazers 🫡

Goats only 🐐

Whether you’re a sewer spelunker or a virtual foot fetishist, you should be watching or listening to Goats and the Metaverse.

In each episode, collectibles OG and entrepreneur Stan “The Goat” Meytin and Metaversal co-founder and CEO Yossi Hasson talk about digital and IRL collectibles, NFTs, and the week’s news worth knowing.

This week, they interview the creators of the NFT project PVNKS and investigate this week’s crypto market movements. Check out the latest episode here:

Aside from providing invaluable insights into digital art and collectibles, Stan and Yossi have assembled a collection of NFTs dubbed “The Goat Vault.” When the show hits 5,000 subscribers on YouTube, one of those lucky subscribers will win the contents of the vault, which at last count is valued at more than 10.10 ETH (~$13,500).

Prefer listening? Check out Goats and the Metaverse on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, or wherever you get your podcasts.

NGMI ☄️

National Catastrophic 💣

This week National Geographic proved having a 135-year-old brand that’s a household name and which boasts hundreds of millions of followers on social media is no guarantee your NFT project will sell out.

The brand announced “GM: Daybreak Around the World,” a collection of 1,888 photographic NFTs from 16 well-known photographers priced at 215 Matic each (~200) on social media, and the backlash was swift.

For starters, it probably shouldn’t have used a Bored Ape in the (now deleted) promo materials given how disconnected a 2D profile picture is from class-leading nature photography, and for many people outside of the NFT space, they’ve become synonymous with the worst assumptions about it. Nat Geo fans climbed into the comments to call NFTs a scam and slam the brand for its project.

It also probably should’ve picked a more reliable partner than Snowcrash, which experience a range of technical problems when the drop opened (but which have since been resolved).

At the time of writing, fewer than 400 of the NFTs had been purchased despite minting being open for nearly three days. Ouch.

IYKYK 🍳

🤝 Connect for more from Metaversal 🔌

You can find more rapid-fire updates, insights, memes, and other malarky (that’s right, we said malarky) 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!