On Thursday, Adidas announced it was entering the Metaverse in collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club, gmoney NFT, and PUNKS comic. In an article posted on the Adidas mobile app, the developers behind the initiative said the following: This autumn, Adidas, known for celebrating ideas at the bleeding edge of originality, it settling in at the frontier of creativity: The Metaverse. Our goal there? To see every one of its inhabitants thrive. The Metaverse is where anyone can express their most original ideas and be their most authentic selves, in whatever form they might take. And thanks to the blockchain …

The Matrix’s NFT revelations Soaring demand for the Warner Bros.’ Matrix NFT avatar drop on Nifty’s this week caused the website's purchasing page to crash. Earlier this month, the film studio announced it would be dropping 100,000 unique Matrix-inspired avatar NFTs for $50 each as part of a promotional campaign for the new Matrix Resurrections film set to hit cinemas in the U.S. on Dec. 22. After more than 300,000 Matrix fans queued up for the drop on Nov. 30, Nifty’s was forced to start and stop the queue multiple times due to max capacity-induced “infrastructure issues.” Hello again everyone. …

Hip-hop legend Snoop Dogg has debuted his first nonfungible token (NFT) collaboration with artist Ryan Colditz (Coldie) in the final release of the Decentral Eyes Portrait Series. The “Decentralized Dogg” NFT was minted on SuperRare on Nov 29 at 7:15 PM UTC and will be on auction until Dec 3. SuperRare is a digital NFT marketplace that caters to buyers willing to pay up for more exclusive pieces. The NFT is a stereoscopic 3D collage of 10 different portraits of Snoop Dogg from various stages throughout his life, underscored by an original NFT-inspired soundtrack by Snoop. At the time of …

AMC Theatres is planning a NFT promotion to celebrate the opening day of Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: No Way Home at cinemas across the United States. The company is offering a limited number of up to 86,000 Spider-Man NFTs for members of its “AMC Stubs Premiere & A-List” and “AMC Investor Connect” subscriptions. Those who purchase an advance ticket for the Dec. 16 showing of the latest Spider-Man movie will be eligible for the airdrop. The collaboration between Sony Pictures and AMC Entertainment is the first of its kind according to the Nov. 28 announcement. More than 100 NFT designs will …

Visa got itself a fancy new Twitter avatar this August, and even though it didn’t stay up for long, the 8-bit-styled picture of a visibly unamused woman with a stylish mohawk still made dozens of headlines. It was not just about the relatively hefty price tag of $150,000. The mere fact that the financial giant bought a nonfungible token (NFT) representing the image from the CryptoPunks collection set off fireworks in the media. It was the best marketing spend Visa’s done all year — the ROI on news articles alone must have paid for the purchase tenfold. Yes, even Visa …

Trading volumes across various verticals of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have been on a tear this year. Combined sales for collectible and art NFTs have reached $7.4 billion as of Q4 2021. The art NFT market has grown from $17.8 million on January 1 to $1.8 billion in total sales as of Nov. 5, 2021. At the beginning of 2021, the collectible NFT market started with a total sales volume of $55.5 million. It has since ballooned to $5.6 billion. As reported by Reuters, total NFT sales volumes jumped from $1.3 billion in Q2 to $10.7 billion in Q3. Record sales …

An Australian software developer has created an online repository of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called the “The NFT Bay”. The repository includes JPEG versions of the NFTS, not the blockchain-secured token itself. Adelaide resident Geoffrey Huntley launched The NFT Bay 10 hours ago containing a 17.96 terabyte archive of non-fungible token image copies that has since attracted a total of 1.2 million visits. The site has the same layout and logo as torrent website The Pirate Bay, where users can download pirated films, video games, music, and other media. However, instead of downloading blockbuster movies, users can download JPEG copies of …

Multimedia film director and artist Yi Zhou is set to mint the first-ever royal nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, based on the story of Italy's House of Savoy. The digital works are made in collaboration with the House of Savoy's (non reigning) descendent, Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia, Prince of Venice. The House of Savoy is known for playing a pivotal role in the Unification of Italy, or the "Risorgimento", over 150 years prior. Its then king, Victor Emmanuel II, acted as a symbol of the movement. Together with the Sardinia-Piedmont premier Camillo Benso, known as the Count of Cavour, revolutionary activist …

Prestigious auction house Sotheby’s has announced it will accept Ethereum (ETH) bids in real time for its Nov. 18 auction that includes works by famed street artist Banksy. Sotheby’s claims this will be the first time an auction house has accepted crypto in real time as a standard currency for payment in an auction on a physical work of art. The auction, titled ‘The Now Evening Auction’ features Banksy’s Trolley Hunters and Love Is In The Air. Although the bidding prices will be announced in ETH, winning bidders have the option to pay for the works in either Ether, Bitcoin …

The Russian State Hermitage Museum continues diving in the nonfungible tokens (NFTs) industry by debuting its first fully-virtual exhibition of digital art. Shortly after raising over $400,000 via its first NFT auction on Binance in September, the Hermitage is now hosting a free exhibition of NFT artworks existing exclusively in the virtual space, the so-called “celestial hermitage,” or the museum’s digital avatar. Launched on Nov. 10, the Hermitage’s exhibition is called the “Invisible Aether” and is based on the concept of metaverse, allowing users to create digital avatars and surf across the virtual site using PCs, smartphones, virtual reality glasses …

An admin account for Beeple’s official Discord group was compromised overnight resulting in a fake NFT drop that saw users lose an estimated 38 ETH. An admin from Beeple's Discord named "Multi" confirmed to the group on Nov. 10 that their account had been compromised despite having 2FA. The perpetrator went on to impersonate Multi and the Beeple Announcements Bot to promote a fake NFT drop from Beeple on Nifty Gateway. The incident is the latest in a long line of Discord hacks that have caused users substantial losses. Discord members were primed to expect Beeple to run a cheap …

It could be argued that nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, have been a concept since 2012. For instance, the inception of “Colored Coins” in 2012 may have laid the groundwork for NFTs today, as this project demonstrated how the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain could be used as a transaction mechanism for real-world assets. Fast forward to 2017, a time when CryptoKitties became one of the most popular decentralized applications, or DApps, ever built on Ethereum. CryptoKitties was described in 2017 by Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, as “the first Ethereum-based decentralized Pokemon-like game, in which users can collect and breed digital …