OpenSea’s New Deal, McNuggets Land in the Metaverse

This week, OpenSea introduced “Deals,” allowing NFT collectors to trade directly with one another and McDonald’s launched McNuggets Land in The Sandbox, inviting users to interact with pixelated nuggets and play mini-games.

In other news, while venture capital funding for Web3 has fallen off a cliff, metaverse startup Futureverse announced an impressive $54 million seed round this week.

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This Week's Alpha

OpenSea’s new “Deals”: NFT marketplace OpenSea announced a feature called “Deals” that will allow collectors to trade NFTs directly with each other as well as add WETH to “sweeten the deal.”

• No more sketchy DMs: OpenSea hopes the feature makes the NFT swapping process more trustworthy, preventing con artists from sliding into collector’s DMs and scamming them out of their NFTs.
• Nearly fee-free: The peer-to-peer swaps are launching with no OpenSea fees or creator payments. Just gas fees need to be covered for the swap if a user accepts an offer.

Yum yum, nuggets so good?: McDonald’s has launched “McNugget Land” in metaverse platform The Sandbox and I was decidedly not “lovin’ it” when I visited. The blocky anthropomorphized nuggets asked my avatar for dipping sauces but my questions were: why am I here and is Grimace around?

• Who has a favorite McNugget?: A tweet from The Sandbox announcing the new experience told people to “get ready to party with your favorite Chicken McNuggets.” Is that a thing?

Web3 funding plunges: A sobering report from Crunchbase showed a dramatic drop in funding from VC funds in the first half of 2023, with only $3.6 billion raised overall compared with $16 billion in 2022 — a 78% drop.

• The Futureverse still looks bright: Bucking the trend, Futureverse, a startup formed out of 11 different firms, announced a $54 million Series A round led by 10T Holdings.

Project in the news

Opepen Threadition

Who: visualizevalue.eth

Why: This week, Crypto Twitter and especially NFT Twitter saw their timeline taken over by versions of the image above. The backstory is that Web3 influencer Thread Guy vied for a spot on the Ape Council but lost the election. In response, Twitter user @BoredOpepen offered to trade one of his rare Opepen NFTs for Thread Guy’s iconic Mutant Ape. This led to a flurry of other trade offers, including one from Pudgy Penguin CEO Luca Netz with a $1 million guarantee.

The winner however, was visualizevalue.eth aka Jack Butcher, who created an open mint for a specially created Opepen NFT inspired by Thread Guy’s Ape, with all proceeds going directly to Thread Guy. Crypto Twitter loved it, and countless interpretations were shared, each declaring “For the culture.”

How: The open edition can be minted for .001 ETH on Zora, roughly two bucks. As of writing, over 50,000 have been minted.

In Other News

Doodles goes to Camp: Are you ready to “get sucked into a magical glowing portal” to an immersive Doodles land? Well, if you live in Chicago, you’re in luck: The new real-life collab between the NFT project and boutique toy store Camp lets you do just that.

Neopets sent to the pound: Neopets announced a metaverse project and NFTs in August 2022, and less than a year later the company has decided to abandon Web3 and pivot back to a project with no crypto and no NFTs.

Blockchain board games: The Blockchain Game Alliance elected a new board to lead its initiatives to promote blockchain within the game industry, including CoinDesk contributor Leah Callon-Butler.

SBF gets animated: The FTX saga is getting an animated comedy series starring T.J. Miller as Sam Bankman-Fried. The series, called “FORTUN3,” will favor the bold choices of those who buy the associated NFTs.

Non-Fungible Toolkit

What Is ActivityPub?

On July 6, Meta released their Twitter-alternative, Threads, and it’s already handily passed 100 million downloads. One of the interesting promises of the new app is that it will support ActivityPub, a decentralized social media protocol, which means users will be able to interact with other platforms in the so-called fediverse like Mastodon and vice versa.

So what is the ActivityPub Protocol and what is the fediverse? Here’s what you need to know.