#73 | Prestigious French Art Museum Announces NFT Exhibit Featuring CryptoPunks

Estimated Read Time: 8 minutes

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Great to have you joining us! On today's specially curated edition we have NFT news from a top art museum, Reddit's incredible NFT onboarding as well as NFT house deed sales. Let's jump into it!

Steaming Headlines ♨️

France Displays NFTs In Top Art Museum

NFTs got a popular mainstream public appearance when the art world started embracing them; not only as digitally authenticated pieces of art but also for their perpetual creator royalties — one of the most prominent cases being the $69.3 million sale of Beeple's “Everydays” NFT. However, since then the notion of these “screenshot-able jpegs” hasn't had the most positive light for the public, but maybe the latest news from France's major modern art museum “The Centre Pompidou” will be another step in the right direction with its upcoming spring exhibition.

This week the art museum said they are preparing a collection of NFTs for its upcoming permanent exhibition which will showcase 13 digital artists including popular blue-chips like CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs. Xavier Rey, director of the French National Museum of Modern Art said “Web3 is an innovative territory that artists have now seized upon to create original and daring work, and this collection reaffirms our support for artists in their conquest of new means of expression, which is the foundation of modern art".

If you're wondering how this museum is willing to drop the current 62 ETH floor price on a Cryptopunk or 249 ETH for an Autoglyph, they were both donated to the Centre Pompidou by Yuga Labs and Larva Labs respectively. CryptoPunks parent Yuga Labs says it plans to donate more Punks to leading art institutions worldwide, with co-founder Greg Solano stating “Seeing CryptoPunk #110 displayed in the Centre Pompidou, arguably the world’s most prestigious contemporary art museum, is a great moment for the Web3 and NFT ecosystem, and we’re honored to help drive this cultural conversation”.

As we climb over the hurdle of mainstream NFT art acceptance, support from prestigious museums like this is a crucial step to having digital art better accepted and appreciated for its impact and modern relevance.

Reddit Avatars Surpass 6 Million Unique Holders

Over the last year, we have seen increasing adoption of NFTs on social media platforms, whether that was Instagram releasing an in-app NFT marketplace or Facebook adding a NFT section to your profile. However, one of the biggest success stories was last July when we covered Reddit’s partnership with Polygon to integrate NFT “Collectible Avatars”. According to Dune Analytics, in the last 7 months, these NFT avatars have continued to grow in popularity and have just surpassed 6.4 million unique holders.

To put the scale of Reddit's success in perspective, the end of 2021 saw a total of only 28 million unique wallets that held all NFTs in total, so Reddit is no doubt playing an important role in helping the space move toward future mainstream adoption. Over 9.2 million NFT avatars have been minted as of now, which has been an 80% increase since the 5 million back in December, and there aren't any signs of slowing down with Reddit furthering this adoption through partnerships like the NFL and their 500,000 Super Bowl LVII NFT avatars that were recently launched for free with custom colors for your team.

Whether you're a keen Redditor or not, 6.4 million people onboarded into Web3 with 9.2 million mints is no small feat! That cements Reddit as a key player in our space, and in a positive way too where this is likely people's first interactions with NFTs and in a way that gives them not only ownership over their digital identity, but involves finite collectibles and community building, exactly what newcomers need in the space as we continue trotting on towards mainstream adoption.

Another House Sold As An NFT

The conversation around NFTs and property tends to be dominated by digital land in the Metaverse, but with the rise of Web3 infrastructure and the connection between physical and digital goods, we are beginning to see the beginning of a new trend through real estate with property tech company Roofstock now selling its second house as an NFT through its Origin Protocol-associated marketplace.

Last October we covered Roofstock's first $175k South Carolina Home Sale, but this week's home in question was the sale of a $180k Alabama-based property, with Chief Officer Geoffrey Thompson exemplifying the ease of this system by saying “what it boils down to is being able to transact a real-world home with one click using NFT smart contracts”. It really was pretty much one click, as this sale also marks the first time a home has been purchased with on-chain leverage from DeFi lender Teller, really showing the ease, transparency, and security of Web3’s blockchain infrastructure compared to the current systems in place.

To quickly tame your curiosity on how this works, Roofstock verifies you on their NFT marketplace through a Know Your Customer (KYC) check that gives you a non-transferable “soulbound” token, this token can then be used to buy an NFT, but a special NFT which is actually linked to a single-purpose limited liability company (LLC), it is this LLC which actually holds the deed to the property. So the KYC-verified wallet holds the NFT which owns the LLC which owns the house, an interesting loophole needed to get around existing Web2 real-estate processes. As NFTs continue to find use in our day-to-day lives, and the tying to physical goods becomes more normalized, houses as transparent records on the blockchain may seem inevitable, so pretty wild we are here reporting on merely the second-ever sale from Roofstock.

Big thanks for joining us, we hope you have a great couple of days while we curate the next edition. Take care!

What's the NFTea? 🍵

Airdrop season is in full swing, starting with a lovely Valentine's Day gift from a money printer called BLURRRRR.

While it started off slow at a token price of roughly $0.5, $BLUR is now trading at roughly $1 with a high point of $1.15. For some active traders, that's a 6-figure airdrop!

As a result, floor prices have gone up, as have BLUR 'bid walls' on top tier NFT collections, as some have predicted structure and clarity regarding $BLUR airdrops will incentivize more NFT traders to participate in the ecosystem.

Want to start doing some of this $BLUR airdrop farming yourself? There are plenty of guides on Twitter to get you started such as the following:

JPEGs are fun again it seems.

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DISCLAIMER:

None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.