Amazon is coming to NFTs?!
Web2 giant gives us a peak behind the curtain
If we want to see more adoption in NFTs, we need to expand beyond speculative price action and PFPs.
We need companies to utilize NFT technology in their normal, every day business.
We may have received a huge hint at what that could look like!
Let’s dive in!
3 - NFT news stories
Amazon’s arrival is closer than we think
A huge developing story this week comes from none other than Amazon. Blockworks gave as an inside scoop about the massive Web2 giant making an expected entrance into NFTs in the spring of 2023.
The article tells us “Amazon’s NFT is said to lean heavily toward gamification” and a potential sponsorship with a gaming platform is on the table.
This isn’t a spur of the moment decision by Amazon. They’ve been hinting at this since the beginning of 2022 and now feels like the right time to them.
For reference, there are about 40k unique monthly active wallets in the NFT market. That’s less than 1% of Amazon’s monthly users…this could be huge!
The California DMV is using blockchain
An unlikely suspect enters the blockchain space…the California DMV. The DMV is said to be “testing out the digitization of car titles and title transfers via a private Tezos blockchain.”
The obvious benefit of utilizing blockchain would be to make it easier to track the history of a car. Blockchains are immutable which means you won’t be able to change a detail about your vehicle history once it’s recorded on chain.
Imagine receiving your vehicle title as an NFT. You’d be able to seamlessly transfer that title to another individual via a blockchain transaction.
This adoption will obviously take some time but exciting to see a headline like this nonetheless!
Cool Cats announces a new ‘Cool Score’
One of the OG “blue-chip” NFT projects announced a new ‘Cool Score’. This scoring system is based on the NFTs you hold, the items you collect and the interactions you have.
This effectively acts as a social credit score. The higher your score, the more “stuff” you get. That can be future drops, merch or access to events.
Cool Cats had a floor price of 15 ETH in January 2022 and has since fallen off the map. This announcement could be a way to increase community engagement for the project as it is now trading in the 2 ETH range.
2- Thoughts from me
Yuga Labs vs. Doodles: A future case study
Within the past month we’ve seen Yuga Labs and Doodles take two vastly different approaches to their roadmap. I don’t know who will succeed but I do believe there will be a case study written about their decisions.
On one hand, we have Yuga Labs. They released their token gated game, ‘Dookey Dash’. To put it crudely, you’re swimming through the sewer to retrieve a key from a monkey’s rectum. This game is absolutely built for the NFT degen.
On the other hand, we have Doodles. They announced a move to the Flow blockchain with their new collection, Doodles 2. Flow is thought of as a centralized blockchain and receives a lot of criticism from the NFT population. However, Doodles believes Flow is the best place to onboard more people to NFTs.
Up until this point, Yuga has been the most successful NFT company (by a lot). If you’re an original BAYC holder, you’ve been VERY happy with the decisions they’ve made. However, I wonder if the average person is going to want to play Dookey Dash?
Doodles is taking a complete opposite approach, and though it may cost them in the short term, they honestly don’t care. They have a long term time horizon and that is what’s driving their decision making.
Very rarely do you get to see a case study play out real time. That’s what we have here…get your popcorn ready!
The Open Edition Meta has run its course
The NFT market is defined by the “current meta”. The most recent meta has been open editions.
Open editions is when an artist releases an NFT for a certain amount of time with an unlimited number of editions. Many of the most popular NFT collections right now were open editions:
Checks by Jack Butcher
Proceed with Caution
Lascaux
Ness Graphics
However, with any meta in the NFT market, the time has come and open editions are on the decline.
Knowing what the meta is before the majority does can be massively beneficial for NFT collectors.
1 - Thing to make you think
Blur has become my primary NFT marketplace. By all metrics, OpenSea owned the marketplace space since NFTs initially took off.
In my opinion Blur is better for someone that has been involved in the NFT space and feels comfortable trading, while OpenSea is a more user friendly interphase which is better for the beginner NFT collector.
What do you think? Which NFT marketplace do you find yourself using more often?
Thank You
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Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered as investment advice. I’m not a financial adviser. These are only my own opinions and ideas. You should always consult with a professional/licensed financial adviser before trading or investing in any cryptocurrency related product.
Very bullish about the DMV using Tezos blockchain. I reckon we’ll see more and more types of institutions move from archaic systems to blockchain tech this year.
On Doodles, personally i feel like switching up to Flow is a boon to both the Flow ecosystem and Doodles. I think it’ll give the project way more flexibility if they want to branch out their brand into other things, with it being a more scalable chain (although as you say, centralised atm). Flow has very established names building on it, what would be cool to see would be perhaps other brand partnerships or something.