#96 | Preventing Censorship with NFT Books

Estimated Read Time: 8 minutes

Hey friends,

Wonderful to have you back with us. On today’s edition we have some real-deal stories that show how Web3 is truly changing up the game when it comes to traditional industries and their workflows, from Texas's new blockchain land registry to Sotheby's digital art auction house and the future of NFT books - let’s jump into it!

Volatility could be an understatement for the crypto market, with the last few week's mediocre results being revitalized through this week's nearly 10% gains that have seen Bitcoin and Ethereum toying with the year's highs at the $30k and $2k mark respectively. The market sentiment has seemed to improve off the back of recent news that showed April’s job employment was 40% higher than forecasted, helping the unemployment rate reach a new 3.4% low. The recent pumps are providing some important tests for crypto at its support and resistance lines, but we are really going to have to wait until the next brew-up to see if these new macro highs are sustainable.

In the continued digitalization of our physical world, documents moving to a verifiable online system facilitated by the blockchain seems like a natural progression, and that's what a recent Texas State Bill proposes with the pilot of a public blockchain used to record the ownership of the real estate in a new age land registry.

The pilot trial wants to also look into blockchain-based stablecoins as a potential payment method for land and property, but the focus is very much on how to improve the hassle that the current land registry system has when it comes to facilitating land ownership processes in our new digital world. These processes looking to be improved are not only real estate ownership and transfers, but also recording mortgages or liens too.

The project intends to explore cost differences between a full-blown blockchain land registry and a hybrid version. The hybrid would still utilize the blockchain but only basic information from the deed would be recorded on a public ledger with the full document being held on a permissioned distributed ledger. Currently, the status of the pilot is “Left pending in committee”, but the fact that Texas is even considering the blockchain to help level up its digital infrastructure should be seen as a pretty bullish sign for Web3.

World-renowned auction house Sotheby’s is a prestigious name in luxury art sales that sold an enormous $8 billion in art last year. Although Sotheby's has maintained its legacy over the last 277 years by selling art in the real world, they have taken like a duck to water with the Web3 digital revolution through multiple NFT auctions. Their latest endeavor double-downs on the new technology with the upcoming launch of its own NFT secondary marketplace that aims to redefine the idea of an art market.

Sotheby’s new home for NFT collectibles offers a new opportunity for collectors and artists, saying "The opportunity to expand Sotheby’s Metaverse with a fully on-chain peer-to-peer market is an important step forward in our evolution within the digital art and collectible space". The marketplace in question won't be an OpenSea competitor open to everyone, with the platform cherry-picking 13 pioneering NFT artists who have already earnt “auction house” status, but they will also showcase a rotating carousel of selected upcoming artists every few months to help promote the new and thriving ecosystem of digital art.

The sales on Sotheby’s Metaverse platform will very much be in line with Web3, where all the transactions occur through smart contracts with the option of Ethereum or Polygon payments. It's these smart contracts that first stirred so much craze in the art world with the prospect of perpetual royalties, and Sotheby’s stands by this by honoring artist fees according to the artist's selected rate, saying “Sotheby’s commitment to honoring artist royalties comes amidst a larger debate about royalties within the NFT community, and signals Sotheby’s artist-first ethos as one of the only major NFT marketplaces committed to artist resale royalties.”

On the ever closer Web3 future we all hope to envision, companies like Sotheby's with its extensive history and expertise in traditional art exemplify the real-world attainable benefits of NFTs while helping to legitimize it in the face of everyday people. It highlights an increasing acceptance of this technology in an industry that arguably hasn't changed for thousands of years, and we're all here to usher in the new age.

Speaking of traditional art forms, books have been a crucial part of our human species which we recently saw go digital with the development of eBooks and audiobooks, despite this, they have still been victim to censorship and control through the traditional web world — until now.

Earlier this year I actually read the book in question “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, and if you haven't heard of it I can highly recommend it as a thought-provoking dystopian novel written in 1932 about the year 2540 that shares many cautionary tales like the more well know 1984 by George Orwell. The book's cultural norms predicted to be our future led to “Brave New World” becoming one of the most banned books in history, making it a perfect guinea pig for the idea of decentralized NFT books that belong directly in the digital hands of the owner.

In partnership with The Algorand Foundation and Book.io, attendees of CoinDesk’s Consensus 2023 received free vouchers to secure one of the 10,000 new “Brave New World” NFTs. Each NFT is an eBook within itself, with each of the 500 covers designed by truly futuristic AI artists that bring a nice twist to the nearly century-old novel.

“Brave New World” turning into eBook NFTs is just one example of the potential Web3 literacy future pushed by Book.io. Although you may be questioning the value here since these NFTs share the somewhat identical advantages of printed hard copies, in our increasingly digital world it justifies the very reason why we need digital representations that share the same characteristics of their real-world counterparts which is exclusively achieved through NFTs.

Customers removing their dependence on centralized servers or middlemen to interact with their digital media is an important idea for maintaining global freedom which helps combat the all-controlling totalitarian World State “Brave New World” envisioned for our society, so it's pretty cool to see this book combat itself with the help of NFTs and Web3.

If you’re interested in DePub (i.e. decentralized publishing), you can also look into Litecoin, an L1 chain that aims to empower authors by selling NFTs of their books.

It’s still $PEPE season, and the influencers are out in full force.

People have been selling Bored Apes and turning that liquidity straight into $PEPE.

Looking into some advanced Dune dashboard statistics, we can see how a lot of the NFT & memecoin traders overlap. In terms of number of traders and total volume, NFTs have taken a huge hit due to the dominance of memecoins.

It’s not surprising since it takes as little as 27 seconds to create a memecoin.

Since memecoins are social movements driven off pure hype & attention, here’s an interesting breakdown on how we can evaluate the pricing of tokens based off Google search volume.

We hope you enjoyed this specially curated edition, have a great couple of days and we will see you on the next Morning NFTea. Take care!

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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.#996