Welcome to the NFT Marketplace Wars

Plus another Web 3 phone and building for the creator economy.

July 07, 2022

MUSHROOM ALPHA

GM. Hope your recovery from July 4th is complete by now. We were by a train track yesterday when a handicapped man went right in front of a train and we thought he would get killed. The train conductor performed a miracle stop. Don't be that guy. Look both ways.

Today's Topics:

  • NFT Marketplace Wars

  • Another Web3 Phone?

  • Building for the Creator Economy

  • Quick Links

NFT Marketplace Wars

OpenSea is still king for now but rivals are coming up strong. Little NFT marketplace Davids are trying to take down Goliath. Although we are in a bear market there is ample activity in the NFT realm. DappRadar, a blockchain analytics firm called out the number of NFT marketplaces and aggregators being acquired recently as signs of a looming "marketplace war".

People are making moves:

  • OpenSea bought NFT marketplace aggregator Gem a few months ago. Gem lets users buy NFTs across multiple platforms which is a feature pro level NFT traders use.

  • OpenSea launched Seaport a marketplace protocol for advanced features and reduces ETH gas fees.

  • Uniswap Labs acquired Genie which is a huge Gem competitor.

  • eBay takes over KnownOrigin one of the first NFT market places.

  • Magic Eden a Solana NFT market place just raised $130M.

  • X2XY is a ETH marketplace which offers users trading rewards.

Check out the chart below. While down from highs NFT trading volume is still robust.

Source: DappRadar

NFT volume was $25B last year in 2021 and we are on track for $20B with just half the year over in 2022. Looks like it will be a banger of a year for NFTs.

Full DappRadar report here.

Another Web3 Phone?

Polygon the ETH scaling solution is working with the phone company Nothing to introduce Web3. We can't say Nothing is a great phone name but we like where they are going.

First Solana launched their Saga phone and HTC came hot on their heels with their own Desire 22 Pro crypto phone announcement.  Now we have the Nothing phone which will kick off with an NFT membership club with NFTs given to people who participate in crowdfunding or pre-ordering the Nothing phone. The NFTs will allow early availability to new products or access to events.

Nothing Phone will be based off Android and let users easily use apps on the Polygon platform. In the future users can use payments and an upcoming feature for for identification called Polygon ID.

Learn How to Build for the Creator Economy

Li Jin a well known VC in the creator economy is giving out her course on how to build in the space for free! If you ever had an interest in building for Web3 and the creator economy you need to jump on this.

Quick Headlines

Crypto/Web3 Startup Ideas - If you are looking to build look no further.

Ethereum getting closer to POS - Only one more testnet merge remaining after Sepolia was successful.

Alameda owes Voyager $377M - Strange but true given Alameda just loaned Voyager a ton of money.

Reading List:

No Sleep Reading List - Get your PHD with deep crypto reading.

Hacks:

In honor of Goblin Town we had to post this.

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