⚓️ the sniff test
gm.
thought it’d be a chill and relaxing weekend. but of course, the NFT space always has other ideas. lol.
my name’s subvert. I’ve been filling in for Biv while he’s moving this week. if it’s easier to remember or pronounce, you can call me sub instead.
oh boy, we’ve got some stinkers today. strap in for a rather pungent newsletter coming up…
ALPHA⚓️
let’s talk about those Azurians.
what a horrible art reveal. just horrible. totally unacceptable for the level of hype and excitement that Jenkins the Valet and Tally Labs have drummed up. like, what world do these Azurians live in?
as people familiar with NFT influencers pointed out…
and fans of James Cameron were also extremely excited:
those that have been sceptical of Azurbala have pretty much all come out of the woodworks, making all the jokes you can imagine about such a big misstep. and to think that this is one of the pioneering “storytelling NFTs” projects!
to the team’s credit, they responded swiftly and will be revamping the art “until they get it right”. hopefully they get the art done quicker than the y00ts team.
but all jokes aside, we should take a step back and think about what this reflects on the team. there was either a lack of product control & gatekeeping; or even worse, the team's tastes are terrible. like, how does that art even pass the sniff test?
to create an inhabitable world takes extreme care to intricate details… and a slideshow with sloppily generated Photoshop edits that I could do just don’t bring out a premium level of quality that the brand portrays itself as.
perhaps @NFT_Shooter is onto something here.
BETA⚓️
somehow the Azurbala PFP reveal wasn’t even the biggest miss of the day, because an entire blockchain went down yesterday.
yes, we’re talking about you, Solana. right after I sung its praises over the past few days, it rewards me with a big, fat, juicy Grade A freshly-laid egg right to the face.
as a result, I take full responsibility for the outage.
worst part of this outage is, they can’t even cite high traffic or usage this time. we’re in the middle of a bear market!
i guess that
or from another perspective,
DELTA⚓️
all around it’s been a blunder-filled day or two across the NFT space.
a quick word about the controversial Cool Cats x The Next Legends collab:
while on paper, this might have seemed like a ‘free’ partnership where there’s something to gain and nothing to lose, sometimes the cost comes in terms of brand integrity. expecting the team to do slightly more gatekeeping on these partnerships going forward!
oh, and OpenSea mistakenly delisted Azuki for a bit.
if we’re still making these mistakes in the space… mass adoption isn’t going to come in quite some time.
that’s all for today, folks.
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like it, hate it, love it? tweet at me @subvert_nft. I’ll see you again tomorrow.
until next time,
