NFT News Update, July 22 2021

8 min readJul 24, 2021

Welcome to the weekly NFT News Update! Created & presented by your hosts, Scott Chestnut, “Two Ties” Tyler, and Kate Fear (Trevor, Tyler, & Alyssa!)

Watch the show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmnH32eCq1o

Streamed on the NFT Update channel https://www.youtube.com/c/NFTupdate

Contents

CNFT Marketplace News
Events
Cardano News
Hot Topics
Contests and Giveaways
Drop It Like It’s Hot!
Projects to Watch

CNFT Marketplace News

The Cardano NFT Discord Server (LINK)

The Cardano NFT Discord Server has reduced their escrow fees to 2%. They are also offering complimentary NFT tokens! Any escrow ticket of 20 Ada or more earns BOTH parties “a magnificent HydrogenHex Coin”!

The CNFT Discord server (LINK)

The CNFT Discord server is now paying royalties to artists when their CNFTs are traded via their escrow service (what!). MORE INFO here.

They also offer promotional escrow tokens with a much wider variety, but only the party paying the escrow fee receives one. Right now they are the Pink Dino avatar collection :D (Escrow fees are 2.5%)

Events

Mad In Art podcast feat Fahadouken

7pm EST on July 22nd (PASSED) Watch it here!

Accompanying drop of 100 CNFTs with Rarities for 65 $ADA each (SOLD OUT!)

Wolfram LiveMinting

https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1418235487953768454

livestream event taking place on July 27th at 1:00 PM CT

What is LiveMinting? Who knows! The article doesn’t explain it v well, but it’s no doubt worth your time to find out by watching the livestream XD

**If you know of any more events (not just drops!) coming up, please let us know!**

Cardano News

Catalyst 5 voting LIVE NOW

$2,125,000 to be distributed
Here’s a great reddit post with all the deets in the Cardano subreddit

If you registered for Fund 5 you can still vote, but if you didn’t register last time you won’t be able to vote until the next round because registration ended a few days ago.

Another fun fact: $31,000,000,000 of Cardano’s 38 bill market cap is currently staked in a pool :D

Alanzo White Hardfork Successful!

Adam Dean writes “The Alonzo White testnet is continuing to progress and is actively under development. We should see the addition of some extra Alonzo White community members in the next week or so. So far, it seems that we’re sticking to the roadmap for Alonzo.

Right now it’s mostly IOG doing internal development.”

Cardano Mercury

It’s a WooCommerce Payment Gateway plugin that enables seamless Cardano payments on WooCommerce which is one of the largest e-commerce platforms by market share and opens up a world of opportunity to the entire Cardano ecosystem by building bridges between cryptocurrency and traditional commerce. Brought to us by the wonderful Adam Dean!

Cardano Developer Portal is now live

https://developers.cardano.org/

Plutus Pioneers has begun

https://testnets.cardano.org/en/plutus-pioneer-program/
The second cohort is now closed but there will be more later this year that you can sign up for now!

LudoToken by CryptoKnitties and Adam Dean

Project LudoToken proposes that an API that allows game developers to interface with Cardano would be a significant step in the gamification of native tokens on the Cardano blockchain and could position Cardano as the native token platform of choice for game developers. Unity is the game engine primarily used in education and academic research. As such, the LudoToken project will use Unity to place the tools to access and innovate with gamified utility and native tokens into the hands of game devs, academics, educators and students worldwide.

Watch for the coming contest for game designers with BIG ada prizes!

https://twitter.com/cryptoknitties/status/1415414586984050690

Hot Topics

Now that’s a spicy (faux) meatball!

Duplicate NFTs — Scam or Performance Art?

Starting with the above tweet, a discussion about counterfeit NFTs has swept the CNFT community on Twitter. Here are some relevant tweets:

This is something we should watch out for and it’s important to verify your trades! This community can stay the beacon of awesomeness that it is if we all work together :)

What do you think?? Tell us in the comments :D

Sold Out Hype: Bizarre and Unhealthy or Awesome and Totally Fine?

The above post by the beloved Jennycita calls into question project “sold-out” goals. Does this attitude move the CNFT community closer to the same issues as something like Kickstarter has, where everyone is plastering the number of hours they sold out in on all of their pictures? It’s definitely something to be proud of (and exciting to share!), but how much should we measuring project success by those metrics?

What do you think?? Tell us in the comments :D

Contests and Giveaways

Magical NFT Creative Contest

450 Ada in prizes! Submissions must include a piece of artwork as well as a description of the magical item depicted. The description is as important as the artwork! We want to hear about your magical item’s effects & lore!

Community Artist — Smaller following and no previous CNFT projects Collection Artist — Larger following with previous/ongoing CNFT projects Panel of Judges — Will vote on best overall piece.

Deadline September 2nd

CLICK HERE to join the Creative Contest discord server

CatLoaf Fan Art Contest