Nifty News: Kobe Bryant NFTs, tokenized baseball stadiums and more...

The return of Fame Lady Squad

The Fame Lady Squad (FLS), a nonfungible token (NFT) avatar project purporting to have been created by an all-female team, is set to relaunch today with a new team after it was uncovered that three Russian men were behind the project earlier this month.

SO EXCITING!! pic.twitter.com/V1LKgIU34c

— Cadboros (@cadboros) August 23, 2021

The project’s NFTs depict cartoon female avatars, with the tokens having generated $1.9 million worth of total sales since launching on OpenSea Marketplace in mid-July.

The FLS website previously listed three team members named Cindy, Kelda and Andrea who all had female avatars.

On Aug. 10, Fedor Linnik, a co-creator of NFT project Neural Pepe, tweeted that he had collected “enough proof” to connect three men to the project, specifically outing the pseudonymous developer “D Mefi” as one of FLS’ creators.

I'm the person who started all the fuss @FameLadySquad and @queenship_ project. I have enough proof to state that FLS was created by 3 males who are also behind a whole bunch of abandoned NFT projects. And their "signature" convinces me Queenship is also their product. Thread/

— Fedor Linnik (@FedorLinnik) August 10, 2021

Following the accusations, Russian developer Max Rand also confessed to working on the project via Twitter on the same day. The FLS Twitter account also confirmed the news but failed to name the third member of the team.

After facing public backlash, the FLS founders reportedly conducted a poll on Twitter asking the community if they should hand over the project’s smart contract to a new owner — to which more than three-quarters of respondents voted in favor.

FLS stated they have handed the smart contract over to well-known NFT proponent Digitalartchick. Digitalartchick has since passed the project onto a team of women, including NFT collector Ashley Smith and NFT advisor Daniel Davis.

Yeah, let's all please have a *HUGE* round of applause for @digitalartchick. There would be no #ladyrelaunch without her fierce ways. Thanks girl. pic.twitter.com/QofiHmpnnZ

— Fame Lady Squad (@fame_ladies) August 24, 2021

The FLS website is offline at the time of writing.

MLB to hit NFTs out of the park?

As part of its partnership with NFT sports collectible platform Candy Digital, Major League Baseball is issuing NFTs dedicated to 30 MLB stadiums.

The latest drop went live on Monday and depicts a digital illustration of PNC Stadium, which is home to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The collection includes an open edition up for sale until Saturday, Aug. 28, and a one-of-one up for auction that is set to close on the same day.

The one-of-one currently has a top bid of $3,050, and the highest bidder will receive two tickets to an MLB game at the stadium, a player meet-and-greet, the first pitch at a game, a framed print, and the stadium NFT.

The MLB partnered with Galaxy Digital-backed Candy Digital in June, and this is the third drop of the MLB stadium series so far. The duo has also launched collections dedicated to baseball legend Lou Gehrig and 2020 MLB champions the LA Dodgers.

Related: Altcoin Roundup: Here’s a few things to consider when buying NFTs

Kobe Bryant NFTs

An NFT auction dedicated to the late NBA legend Kobe Bryant is set to go live on the marketplace Cryptograph on Wednesday.

The collection spans eight one-of-one NFTs depicting pictures of Bryant captured by Hollywood photographer Davis Factor in the 1990s. According to Cryptograph, all the revenues from the sales will go toward the Mamba & Mambacita Sports Foundation.

The foundation is a nonprofit that is dedicated to helping “underserved athletes and young women in sports.” The organization was founded in honor of Byrant and his daughter Gigi after they passed away in January last year.

AI-generated avatars fetch big prices

The developers behind EtherRocks — tokenized pet rocks that have fetched as much as $610,000 each amid the recent NFT craze — have launched a new nonfungible avatar project featuring synthetic human faces that have been generated using artificial intelligence.

Nftsprites comprises a series of 100 unique synthetic faces, with holders seeking prices of between 16.5 Ether (ETH) ($55,100) and 100 Ether ($334,000) for secondary sales. The NFT features uncanny animations, in which the synthetic faces move and appear to mouth speech.

Twitter user Larry0x, a smart contract developer at Delphi Digital, dismissively described the Nftsprites as “the lowest-effort NFT project” he has encountered, asserting that the synthetic faces were freely taken from another website.

if true, then this is the lowest-effort NFT project I’ve seen. you literally just go to https://t.co/exiJbXvL6H and right click-save. a new NFT!

— THE_LARRY (@larry0x) August 24, 2021

Roundup

Cointelegraph reported on Friday that in response to the current crisis in Afghanistan, consulting firm Visualize Value launched a series of NFT “care packages,” which are aimed at being sold at the estimated cost of covering a single family’s emergency needs for a month.

Credit card giant Visa also made headlines this week after it purchased a CryptoPunk for $150,000.