Gucci x Yuga Labs / Multi-Year Partnership — Italian luxury brand Gucci entered a multi-year partnership with Yuga Labs and will take “an active role” in the upcoming metaverse project known as Otherside. The partnership aims to be an exploration of the “intersection between fashion and entertainment in the metaverse” — more
Art Blocks (🤝) / NFT Marketplace Debut — The Art Blocks secondary marketplace went live and is now integrated within the Art Blocks website, aggregating NFTs listed across all AB collections and enforcing creator royalties. “Beyond honoring royalties, the goal for Art Blocks’ marketplace was to better spotlight the projects and individual minted pieces, and provide a secure platform free of scam projects and knockoffs.” — more
Ticketmaster / NFT-Gated Ticket Sales — Ticketmaster announced its Ethereum NFT token-gating feature is now live for artists. The initial pilot was run with the metal band Avenged Sevenfold, offering owners of the Deathbats Club NFT collection early access to buy tickets to the band’s upcoming NYC and LA shows — more
Polygon zkEVM / Mainnet Beta Live — Polygon Labs announced the launch of the Polygon zkEVM on Mainnet Beta. Vitalik Buterin performed the symbolic first transaction on the new scaling solution — more
y00ts / Migrate to Polygon — Popular NFT project y00ts began migration from Solana to Polygon, with more than 11,500 holders having already made the jump. The floor price rose to ~1.95 ETH, up ~15% in the past twenty-four hours. “DeLabs, the LA-based startup behind y00ts and its sister project DeGods, received a $3 million grant from Polygon to facilitate the move. Meanwhile, DeGods will also migrate away from Solana and plans to bridge over to Ethereum.” — more
Magic Eden / Diamond Rewards — Magic Eden introduced Diamonds — a rewards currency that aims to honor the community for their commitment to the platform. Diamonds can be earned by listing, bidding, and completing a Magic Eden user profile — more
Disney / Metaverse Unit Layoffs — Walt Disney Co. made cuts to its “next-generation storytelling and consumer experiences unit” during companywide layoffs affecting over 7,000 people. However, the article sites Disney’s CEO will remain on the board of Genies (🤝) and continue to invest in metaverse-related projects — more
Binance / CFTC Lawsuit — The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance and founder CZ on allegations that the company routinely broke American derivatives trading rules. The suit also alleged Binance violated laws around KYC and AML processes — more
Kraken / F1 Racing Partnership — Kraken, a U.S.–based crypto exchange founded in 2011, partnered with Williams Racing to become the team’s first-ever official crypto and web3 partner. Select Kraken NFT holders will have a chance to see their collectible displayed on the rear wing of the car — more
Ensemble (🤝) / $1M Raised — Ensemble, a platform that allows artists to mint artifacts from their creative process, raises seed round led by Collab+Currency, with participation from Lattice, Builder Capital, and angels Ben Roy and Manu Andorra, among others — more
Hydra (🤝) Ventures / $10M Raised — Hydra Ventures is the first dedicated investment DAO fund of funds. Hydra is solely focused on backing, incubating, and participating in investment DAOs across the web3 ecosystem. The DAO’s membership base includes 1kx, Collab+Currency, MetaCartel Ventures, The LAO, Flamingo DAO, GCR, SeedClub, CMT Digital, and many others — more
EigenLayer / $50M Raised — EigenLayer, an Ethereum restaking protocol, raises Series A led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Hack VC, and Electric Capital — more
Conduit / $7M Raised — Conduit, a crypto infrastructure startup aiming to help developers launch Optimism-based apps, raises seed round from Paradigm — more
Econia Labs / $6.5M Raised — Econia Labs, a startup developing decentralized order books for the Aptos blockchain, raises seed round led by Dragonfly, with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Wintermute Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Flow Traders, Aptos Labs — more
LandVault / $3M Raised — LandVault, a “metaverse construction company”, raises Series B extension round from The Sandbox, the Gemini Frontier Fund, HodlCo and hedge fund Kingsway Capita — more
Summoning Hydra DAO (🤝) / pet3rpan x Hydra — “In addition to being a first check partner of investment DAOs, we aim to take a hands-on approach to support investment DAOs in all aspects, from community coordination, investment practices, organizational design, incentive design, and back office/ops. Our mission is to proliferate the movement of investment DAOs, and further help establish new market standard practices for how investment DAOs are operated, structured, and designed.” — more
The Blur (🤝) Blitzkrieg / Antonio García Martínez — “Marketplaces without tokens, such as Blur competitor OpenSea, are kind of stuck. Like smaller economies that must borrow in a foreign currency (and hence can’t inflate or deflate their currencies at will), OpenSea must either pay for user incentives in fiat or stablecoin, and/or take marketplace royalties in order to keep the lights on.” — more
Mental Liquidity / Morgan Housel x Collab Fund — “I recently heard a phrase I love: Mental liquidity. It’s the ability to quickly abandon previous beliefs when the world changes or when you come across new information. It shouldn’t be controversial. But mental liquidity is so rare. Changing your mind is hard because it’s easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake.” — more
Exploring the scalability needs for blockchain apps / Polyna — “When it comes to blockchain scaling, we have often ended up with reductive narratives like “TPS number go up gud”. Since then, we have evolved to care more about security properties as well, leading to the rise of rollups. However, even so, there’s great value to be had in granularly examining the actual scalability demands for each type of application and their potential respective product-market fit.” — more
Operation Choke Point 2.0: The Federal Bank Regulators Come For Crypto / Cooper & Kirk — “It has been 2000 years since the Roman poet Juvenal first posed the question: Who will watch the watchmen? Today, Operation Choke Point 2.0 poses the question anew: who will supervise the supervisors of our nation’s banks? In our constitutional system of checks and balances, the answer to that question is clear: Congress. And in light of the mounting evidence of persistent misconduct by our nation’s financial regulators, the time to perform that role is now.” — more
The NFT MEV Landscape / Alana Levin x Frontier Research — “Viewing the DeFi market as more mature — and using it as a proxy for where NFTs may be headed — helps illuminate the gaps that exist today and areas of infrastructure that can address those challenges. Such opportunities include MEV-aware minting solutions, more open pricing data, dynamic onchain orderbooks, experimentation with new auction styles, and additional communication channels for traders.” — more
9dcc x Admit One / Network Points — 9dcc, a crypto-native luxury fashion house and lifestyle platform, introduced Network Points — a program designed to reward 9dcc and Admit One holders. The aim of the initiative is to “build meaningful IRL communities and connections through 9dcc Networked Products” — more
Yuga x Otherside / Legends of the Mara — Yuga Labs introduced Legends of the Mara — “a collection-based 2D strategy game that picks up where the events of 2nd Trip leave off.” Each Otherdeed holder can claim one character from Legends of the Mara and Otherdeeds with a Koda will be able to decouple in advance of the game launch — more
Zebedee (🤝) / BTC Cross-Border Payments — Zebedee released a borderless transaction feature using Bitcoin Lightning network that aims to simplify global payments between the U.S., UK, EU, Brazil, and the Philippines — more
Dune / LLM Roadmap — “Have you ever looked at a 500+ line SQL query and wondered…. “What the hell does this thing even do?” Well, so have we, and we’ve got you covered. We understand that SQL queries can be complex and intimidating, especially if you’re new to the world of data analysis. Starting today, you can click a button to show a natural language explanation of any query.” — more
Escher / Officially Live — Escher, a platform featuring a curated selection of editioned digital art, went live this week and collectors can now start exploring the curated marketplace and browse, buy, or sell NFT editions — more
Ord / BTC Inscription Discovery — Ord launched with a new way to discover the latest ordinal inscriptions. “You can think of Ord as sort of a weird hybrid between Reddit and Google but for ordinal inscriptions.” — more
Pirate Nation / Arbitrum Migration — Pirate Nation, a role-playing game (RPG) with a boxy voxel-art aesthetic and dynamic NFTs, chose to migrate from Polygon to Arbitrum because it “offered support for Pirate Nation’s technical features like OpenZeppelin security products and nodes already implemented into the game.” — more
0xDEAFBEEF / Ensemble (🤝): Memory Box — “Memory Box is a look back into my past, through the traces of digital artifacts left behind on the series of personal computers I've used beginning in childhood.” On April 5th, a 1/1 relic of the first piece of music 0xDEAFBEEF ever created with code is dropping on the upgraded Ensemble platform alongside a number of digital artifacts — more
Right on Ricky / Sovrn Art: Valley Girls — “Valley Girls, a collection of serial 1/1s, is an exploration of the Uncanny Valley through AI-generated portraits. The Valley is a reference to the Uncanny Valley, a term used to describe the phenomenon where something that is almost, but not quite, human-like in appearance or behavior can cause a feeling of unease or revulsion in people.” Minting April 4th — more
Stranger in the Q / Art Blocks (🤝): SL/CE — “This artwork explores Suprematism and generative composition, attempts to fill some gap between generated and constructed artworks. It achieves composition by slicing simple shapes into pieces by some rules and testing them against a "bad composition detector", then carefully selecting colors for shapes.” Minting April 3rd, 10:00am PT — more
Chris Burniske / Crypto in Context
Derek Edws / Unleashing Creativity with Mona (🤝)
IYK (🤝) / Tap to Claim + Contact + Collect
Mona (🤝) / CyberBrokers x Monaverse Coming April 17th
StoryCo (🤝) / Producer Token Community Application Live 👀
Moonbirds / PROOF (🤝) x Beeple x NFT NYC
9dcc / Treasure Hunt in NYC April 12th
9dcc / IYDKNYK
DeGods / Partnering with Blur (🤝)
Baer / Charting DeGods Since the FTX Crash
Derek Edws / Immersive Puzzles with 404 & Mona (🤝)
Emre / Grokking CT via Visuals + Data
maltefr.eth / Cargos by Kim Asendorf on Art Blocks (🤝)
Bagman / 100k Creatures in a Bear Market
FLUF World / Upcycle your NFTs into Goblins
Tableland / Filecoin FVM Overview
Lasso Labs / Digital Objects as Tools, Culture, and Media
JP / AI + Crypto + Stores of Value + Products / Services
Runway / New Text-to-Video Release
🤝 = Collab+Currency Portfolio Company
Curated by @Collab_Currency x @_cutbank
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Gm Gm, Really loving this piece and the work you do here. I also run a web3 news substack for underrepresented creators called Facesofweb3. Would you be open to a recommendation exchange? Our subscribers need to be able to find each other!
Great job, once again!