gm. there might be some new BivNFT readers today because of, what we call in the industry, the “Touch of Toby” (or the “Lasso Leap” depending on who you ask).
I appreciate you, Toby. it’s underrated how a simple tweet like this can radically change someone’s day (maybe life, who knows).
ALPHA
Permissionless (a Web3 conference that kicked off yesterday in Tampa) helped raise the profile of NFTs with some pretty big announcements.
first, Robinhood (known mostly as a stock trading app) announced it would be launching its own standalone crypto wallet. with it, you’ll be able to hold NFTs and coins - nothing novel there.
its market advantage though? well, apparently they are going to have no network fees (for now at least, until gas gets crazy high and they have to reevaluate that decision).
Robinhood incorporated crypto into its native app years ago and plenty of people used it to start their crypto journey. however, users with Robinhood Crypto have never had actual ownership of their coins and keys. now? Robinhood is forgoing some power here in order to better compete with Coinbase and other exchanges that have self-custody wallets and users.
not to be outdone at the conference, Coinbase announced they would be allowing users of their Coinbase Wallet to claim an ENS domain for free. hopefully, you snagged your username or IRL name as a .eth already, because the window to do so is getting smaller and smaller by the day.
ENS is the future, but the issue with it has long been the web app, which isn’t exactly the easiest to navigate or understand.
with this announcement, Coinbase essentially steps in as a middleman and showcases ENS’s actual utility without having normies go through ENS’s clunky flow to get a domain.
this can’t be seen as anything other than a huge win-win, in my opinion. now only if Coinbase NFT marketplace was better…
BETA
late Monday night, an exploit with MEE6 (allegedly) led to multiple big-name Discords being compromised.
Cool Cats, RTFKT, and Moonbirds were just some of the projects who sent out a link to “mint” something…and that something was actually just a funnel used to try and steal your NFTs.
with more seasoned teams being the targets here, the damage was luckily minimized thanks to their fast action…but also, it wasn’t nothing. the hackers unfortunately gained access to hundreds of wallets even in a short window.
Discord has been the main means of communication for NFT projects basically this entire time. Twitter is where conversation happens, but Discord is where the communities are built and solidified.
however, plagued by constant spam, unreadable general chats, compromised add-ons, and extensions, and now this, I’d say that using Discord is much more of a liability than it is an asset to your NFT journey.
until a more legitimate and secure option comes along, I’d take a break from posting GIFs and stickers on Discord and stick to touching grass.
DELTA
since we’re talking Web2 companies a little today, it’s worth noting that Cloudflare made a pretty substantial announcement yesterday too (though it wasn’t at Permissionless). for those unaware, Cloudflare is a CDN that a lot of the internet runs through these days. they are now the first publicly-traded company to stake their Ethereum and also the first publicly-traded company that has made me any money in the stock market (flex).
VeeCon starts up this week bringing NFT degens and all Veeholics (just made that up) to Minneapolis, Minnesota. I joked yesterday that someone should absolutely have ‘Not VeeCon’ outside of the conference, where you wear your clothes backward and you only talk about Solana NFTs.
speaking of Solana, the ETH vs SOL war wages on. here are some of my favorite tweets from the past 24 hours on the drama:
