#86 | NFTs Flying High with First Ever Airline Adoption

Estimated Read Time: 7 minutes

Hey friends,

Wonderful to have you with us, we have a great assortment of stories today from Australia’s new crypto regulations to Metaverse NFT trading reaching an all-time high. Let’s jump into it!

It’s been rocky times for crypto recently, but the recent week saw strong support with Bitcoin and Ethereum holding around the 28k and 1.8k line respectively, which are strong signs considering the growing narrative of the US Federal Government’s recent actions to maim crypto.

Australia has been at the forefront of embracing the blockchain such as their recent launch of a Central Bank Digital Currency, but it doesn't stop there because this week saw the Australian parliament launch an industry-leading bill proposing regulations for crypto in Australia. Titled “Digital Assets (Market Regulation) Bill 2023”, the aim is to “protect consumers and promote investors” through regulatory frameworks for stablecoins, licensing of crypto exchanges and custody services.

Pushing on a pain point, Senator Andrew Bragg brought up how Australian consumers had been left exposed to industry-wide events like the collapse of FTX by the inaction of the Australian government to provide regulatory clarity to the sector. The controversial crypto industry has always had growing pains as it furthers itself into mainstream adoption, but a focus on regulation and government backing is one way to make the industry safer for everyone.

Specifically, the new bill will require crypto exchanges to hold licenses granted by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission while also setting various obligations and requirements for exchanges, custody services and stablecoin issuers. These range from capital or minimum reserve requirements, segregation of customer funds, reporting on customer holdings, auditing, assurance and disclosure arrangements to name a few.

Regulation is a touchy subject for our decentralized Web3 future, and Senator Bragg says “Australia can be a digital asset hub whilst protecting digital asset consumers” which highlights the important point here, we need to make it safer for consumers of the blockchain, and hopefully this may set a precedent for other countries to follow.

You may not be familiar with Flybondi, but the Argentinian airline is making history in Web3 with the extraordinary step of making all their tickets NFTs through the Algorand blockchain. NFT ticketing has been a popular concept in recent times, with the digitally authenticatable Non-Fungible Tokens solving a sore spot for the ticketing industry’s lack of infrastructure for verification of our mobile tickets. It was just the last newsletter we covered Ticketmaster’s development to use NFTs as a defense against counterfeiting and bots, and before that saw Europe’s top musical festival committing to NFT tickets, so it’s no surprise to see the trend continue into the airline industry.

The low-cost airline has announced its integration called Ticket 3.0 which will see e-tickets issued as NFTs, Flybondi says the new age ticket "offers a more flexible travel experience that allows passengers to even buy in advance without having to define their travel plans or who the travelers will be". This highlights part of the motivation here, because instead of a traveler having to lock in their details at purchase time to create a ticket, the NFT ticketing technology allows passengers to change their name and transfer or sell their "NFTickets" independently.

The onboarding process is nothing new with travelers able to buy tickets through the normal website using fiat currency. But, when it comes to resales the royalties are most definitely a new aspect for the Airline industry, because although the company will not charge a fee for purchasing the initial ticket, the Airline will receive a 2% cut of trades and sales on the secondary market.

In the press release, Flybondi CEO Mauricio Sana says "With this launch, we seek to generate a positive impact in the aviation industry through innovation and an application of blockchain technology… Changing the rules of the game is never easy, but we know that it is our objective to evolve and offer our passengers a new stage of the freedom to fly". This puts into perspective the real-world application that Web3 is having in our real world, what an exciting time to see where NFTs get utilized next.

With the first quarter of the year flying by accompanied by the consensus of an ongoing Metaverse bear market, DappRadar spins the narrative with their latest report highlighting the record-breaking performance of virtual world NFTs. Hitting a 277% increase over the quarter prior, Q1 2023 traded a huge $311 million reaching an all-time high with 147,000 trades occurring for digital pieces of land.

It’s this “virtual land” that has been creating the stir — despite the broad possibilities of Metaverse NFTs encompassing any and every digital item, it seems we’re still too early; people are still in the colonizing stage with Otherside and MG land accounting for 75% of these Q1 2023 sales. Yuga Lab’s Otherside Metaverse led the charge with their Otherdeed metaverse land trading $222 million in volume, the spike came in anticipation of the Otherside’s “Second Trip” platform test that went down this week with over 7,200 simultaneous players participating in various challenges. Otherside also saw a whooping 186 ETH (~ $2.85 million) sale for Otherdeed #89263 which shows there’s still plenty of hunger for NFT Metaverse land.

This new all-time high wasn’t just fueled by Yuga Lab’s recent hosting though because DappRadar blockchain analyst Sara Gherhelas highlighted how BLUR’s recent marketplace growth tactics through token airdrops have prompted NFT whales to “farm virtual land, particularly the MG land project”. This is a nice segway to MG Land’s $59 million in land sales for its composable and decentralized metaverse where “everyone can bring their NFT into space to socialize, to play games, to hold NFT exhibitions and to trade freely”.

Whether or not you’re ready to settle down with a plot of metaverse land, these recent peaks in sales during our crypto bear market are not only exciting signs for the metaverse, but also for the NFT technology that creates them.

It’s been a big week for pixelated PFP collections — one new, one old.

The new one is in fact, Nakamigos which has been the Cinderella story of this March Madness season — rushing from a free mint to over 0.9 ETH in floor price as of writing, thanks to a ridiculous Beeple tweet.

The other is CryptoPunks — a collection that was recently enabled for trading on BLUR via a new token wrapper (which has confusing instructions, causing one unsuspecting collector to send his to the burn address).

This token wrapper has allowed a lot of BLUR traders to play a game of hot potato with the storied collection — with some interesting stats to show.

This has also led certain “whales” who play the BLUR farming game correctly to be able to make moves like this:

Even prompting a response from Machi himself.

That being said, Machi can probably afford those losses, giving that he’s seemingly abandoned yet another DeFi/NFT project.

In other news — DeGods has bridged over to the Ethereum blockchain and with close to a 10 ETH floor price, are firmly in position as the third-place PFP collection behind the Bored Ape ecosystem and Azuki. Not bad for the new kid on the block(chain)!

That may, of course, have had something to do with their leader Frank currying favor with ETH projects via a large shopping spree.

That being said — he’s currently gone zero-dark-thirty-23 until NFT NYC. We’ll see what he and the rest of the Dust Labs team are cooking up.

Thanks for joining us today, we hope you have a great couple of days while we curate the next Morning NFTea round-up. Take care!

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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.