Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) dominated crypto and mainstream media headlines all throughout 2021 as investors who held CryptoPunks and other projects minted prior to 2018 were finally rewarded for their patience. Meanwhile, newer projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Art Blocks Curated saw some of their rarer pieces sell for millions of dollars. Despite the million-dollar sales for select one-of-a-kind NFTs and the record-breaking sell volumes on marketplaces like OpenSea, data shows that a majority of the lower-priced NFTs and lesser-known projects in the market do not accrue value and this means that the sector is rather illiquid. Using …

Sorare, a marketplace for nonfungible token (NFT) trading cards, has raised $680 million in a Series B funding round led by Japanese fintech giant SoftBank, resulting in a revised valuation of $4.3 billion for the platform. According to the company, the latest funding will help expand Sorare’s portfolio of football player NFTs by partnering with more football leagues and associations. In early September, the French NFT-based trading platform secured its first soccer league partnership with La Liga in addition to having NFT collaborations with Paris Saint-Germain, Liverpool and other top-tier soccer teams. Sorare also plans to diversify its NFT-based portfolio …

An OpenSea executive has been outed for hyping nonfungible tokens he purchased and then featuring them on the homepage of the popular NFT marketplace — a move that presumably allowed him to sell the art pieces for a quick profit. Nate Chastain, who serves as OpenSea’s head of product, allegedly used burner wallets to purchase NFTs, which were then featured on the front page of OpenSea — where they’d receive the most attention — before unloading them. A Reddit user documented the whole ordeal by publishing the transaction details. One of the NFTs in question belongs to the Dailydust Collection …

The nonfungible token (NFT) sector has seen an explosion of interest all throughout 2021 and the month of August witnessed record-breaking trading volumes as one-of-a-kind digital collectibles sold for prices in excess of $1 million dollars on a regular basis. As is usually the case in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, hot sectors can cool down in the span of mere hours or days and this appears to be the case for the NFT sector. According to data from Dune Analytics, the total volume of NFTs traded on the top NFT marketplaces has seen a significant decline since Sept. 2 and the …

Three-time NBA champion Stephen Curry has snapped up a Bored Ape Yacht Club nonfungible token (NFT) for 55 Ether (ETH) worth around $206,000 at the time of publication. The Golden State Warriors star purchased an NFT depicting an ape with blue fur wearing a plaid suit on Saturday. Curry’s wallet on OpenSea shows a collection of 20 NFTs, including a 5.69-ETH ($21,000) purchase of Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT on Saturday as well. To the surprise of other collectors, Curry has since been active in the Bored Ape discord group and even changed his Twitter profile picture to display his …

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 …

Matt Furie, the creator of the beloved, sometimes controversial Pepe the Frog meme, requested that a frog-themed nonfungible token (NFT) project worth $4M be removed from OpenSea for copyright infringement. The “Sad Frogs District” is an NFT project containing 7,000 programmatically generated Sad Frog NFTs from a selection of around 200 traits. The artwork depicted in the NFTs may draw some inspiration from Furie’s character Pepe. According to OpenSea’s community-help Discord channel on Aug. 17, numerous members asked why the verified NFT project had been delisted, as they could no longer access the Sad Frog NFTs on the platform. An …

American musician and composer Holly Herndon seems to be capitalizing on the principle of deep-fake technology by allowing fans to use a digital version of herself to create original artwork they can then sell. According to a Thursday announcement from Herndon on Twitter, users who want to make their own deepfakes using the musician’s unique voice and image will have the opportunity to sell their minted creations using nonfungible token, or NFT, marketplace Zora. Herndon said fans can submit their digital copies to be approved by the project’s DAO and would receive 50% of any auction profits. The project said …

Leading nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea is now processing more transactions daily than it did during the entirety of 2020. On Monday, Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, tweeted that the platform had processed $95 million worth of transactions in two days. Finzer estimates that OpenSea processed $21 million in volume for the entirety of 2021, as the marketplace appears to have enjoyed an increase in daily transaction value by more than 650 times since 2020. In 2020, OpenSea did about $21M in total transaction volume. In the last two days, we did $95M. The growth curve for NFTs …

A new artist-focused NFT trading platform has unveiled a $20 million fund to help artists tokenize and sell their works. In the first week since launch, Revival NFT Marketplace has exploded in popularity, achieving total weekly transaction volumes of $1 million. The first artist to be featured on Revival was Edison Zhang, a well-known Chinese street artist, muralist, and graphic designer. The NFT of his artwork Crowded sold for 255 million LOL tokens — equivalent to $71,135. Another, The Beauty and Pain of Pangolin, sold for almost one million IOST. The IOST-powered Revival NFT platform has been built to be …

Anybody who uses Airbnb knows that the company is resting on its laurels as the first mover in the home-sharing economy 1.0, but its dominance rests atop exploitation of the hosts and guests that are actually doing the sharing and creating the value. The guests pay too much and the hosts are paid too little. The resulting situation is akin to feudalism, rendering hosts as serfs who rent out their homes, keep things clean, deal with guests, and do the actual work. Yet the value derived from Airbnb’s peer-to-peer exchange goes directly to shareholders who are multiple steps removed from …

Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins’ new film will be tokenized and sold on an up-and-coming NFT marketplace for movies dubbed “Vuele.” The 83-year-old Hopkins has had a celebrated career and won two Oscars and two Emmys, starring in notable films including Silence of the Lambs, The Elephant Man, the Thor franchise and The Father. The new feature-length film is called “Zero Contact” and has been produced by independent film finance and production company, Enderby Entertainment. According to Enderby, the story follows five characters from around the globe “connected only by their devotion to tech titan Finley Hart (Hopkins).” The five characters discover …