The NFT space can feel like information overload at times, so we’ve cut through the noise to deliver you a curated dose of what matters most. Your all-in-one weekly companion.
Headline News - Magic Eden announces Ethereum integration amid huge Solana wallet hack, and white hat hackers mount a fightback
On Tuesday night a malicious attack unfolded targeting Solana wallets, with Phantom and Slope wallets most heavily affected. Approximately 8,000 wallets were compromised, and reports state that somewhere between 5 and 8 million dollars has been lost. During the chaos, a group of vigilante white hat hackers took up the task of impeding the hackers progress. You can read more about how they went about this here: How Solana Vigilantes Battled Back Against the Wallet Hacker
On Wednesday afternoon, Solana released the following update:
“it appears affected addresses were at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications…This exploit was isolated to one wallet on Solana, and hardware wallets used by Slope remain secure…While the details of exactly how this occurred are still under investigation, private key information was inadvertently transmitted to an application monitoring service…There is no evidence the Solana protocol or its cryptography was compromised”.
For a full article outlining the initial hack please click here.
Amidst the chaos of the hack, Magic Eden, the leading marketplace for trading of Solana NFTs, with over 90% of the market share, announced is will be expanding to facilitate Ethereum NFT assets on its platform.
It will be very interesting to see how this unfolds, although having witnessed OpenSea’s lacklustre attempt to acquire some of the Solana market, and Coinbase’s similarly unimpressive attempt to claw away at the Ethereum market, my guess is that it’ll be largely ineffective. My assumption is Magic Eden will continue to dominate the SOL marketplace and OpenSea the ETH marketplace, only acquiring largely insignificant portions or their counterparts’ main shares.
For a full article on this story, please click here.
Curated News - the best bits of the past week
BIGGEST NFT Sale: CryptoPunk #6874 for 300ETH
Binance Deploys Soulbound Token for Immutable KYC Validation
CryptoPunk Ethereum NFT Sales Jump 248% After Tiffany Launch
City of Miami To Drop 5k NFTs With TIME, Mastercard and Salesforce
College textbooks get pricier as Pearson wants NFTs to track secondary sales
Educational: What is OpenSea and How to Use it? The Beginner’s Guide
Maybe Something - things we’re keeping an eye on
Meebits IP rights will be given to current holders. Any historical use of the IP may be continued with the previous holders. Full thread here.
Fidenza's creator, Tyler Hobbs, will be collaborating with Dandelion Wist to release QQL, a collection of 900 NFTs, in September 2022.
Photo Vogue Partners with Voice to Make Waves in the NFT Domain.
A16z Leads $50M Seed Round for Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT Project.
VeeFriends will use the investment to further build out the NFT characters’ intellectual property rights.
FREE Mint: Life’s A Joke mints on 5th August. Click here for more info.
Looks interesting: Eighties Society is minting on 9th August. Click here for more info.
XCOPY announced that CC0 will be applied to all his artworks (except for collabs), allowing holders to reuse without restriction under copyright laws.
Cool Cats announced their ‘JO Collection’ coming in Q4 2022.
Historical Insight: Emblem Vault (Ethereum) has featured heavily in the last weeks trending collections with over 500ETH of volume. It provides the ability to trade NFT assets on Ethereum which are not originally native to the ETH blockchain. It’s a treasure trove of wonders, if not a little confusing to begin with, but well worth the effort if you have the time to explore.
Talking Point - The SuperSea extension
In late July ZenAcademy and the 333 Club established a long-term partnership with SuperSea to provide members with access to their powerful toolkit.
They extended a 70% discount to the community which I took advantage of to have a play around.
Having been so heavily conditioned to the OpenSea UI over the past couple of years, initially it felt odd to see it presented in a (slightly) different format, but the intuitive nature of the SuperSea extension, with all its additional info, very quickly feels like home.
Their free offering provides the following tools: Floor Price, Bundle Verification, Mass-refresh, Skip OpenSea Image Cache & Listing Notifiers (Price related).
The monthly subscription offering provides these additional benefits: Listing Notifiers (Rarity & Trait related), Rarity Ranks, Mass Bid, Quick Buy & Floor Alerts.
I loved being able to browse collections and have the rarity rank clearly visible whilst doing so. It’s also colour-coded, making it very easy to see which are the rarer NFTs at a glance.
The alerts are also great, enabling you to reduce time in front of the computer screen. You no longer have to constantly check floor prices or trait-related floors. This is worth the subscription fee alone in my opinion.
There’s also a ‘Calculate Profile Value’ tool within your Profile. This was very accurate for “traditional” collections (e.g. Cool Cats, Meebits, Azuki) whereby there’s essentially one NFT type with varying traits. Unfortunately, when it comes to more complex collections (e.g. Curio Cards, Parallel Alpha, ZenAcademy) which have several subsets of NFTs, each with their own distinct floor prices, it was unable to accurately calculate their value. Hopefully this is something that will improve over time.
Overall, it’s great value for money for anyone trading NFTs on a regular basis, and can save huge amounts of time (and money) if set up correctly with appropriate alerts. Check it out yourself by clicking here. Enjoy!
Watch Out For This - The 12 Days of Zenmas
This is a fun, annual event geared towards supporting up-and-coming artists. The 12 artists for this year have been revealed and can be found here in the ZA Discord.
The work is commissioned by ZA and is intended to help those who are struggling to get noticed, can’t seem to sell much or any of their art as NFTs, or are simply new to the space.
The commissioned art will be airdropped to everyone holding a ZenAcademy Genesis or 333 NFT. The airdrops will occur once per day for 12 days towards the end of August, and will be accompanied by an artist profile with details about their work, their story and links to their socials.
The goal is to use the community platform to elevate great art and artists, especially those who are struggling. Creating art and marketing art are two very different skill sets, and we want to help those good at the former but not so good at the latter.
This is the first initiative of the ZenAcademy Scholarship Fund; expect more fun things like this in the future where we can reward our community and support artists at the same time.
ZenAcademy and 333 Club Noticeboard
Regular Event Reminders
Join poker nights via our Discord. Events held weekly, with prizes to be won.
Weekly Movie Nights are going strong. See more info here. This week is Disney & Pixar’s Soul.
As a ZenAcademy member you get exclusive access to periodic market health statistics in the Discord content channel.
As part of the ZenAcademy community you’ll also have free access to the Misfit Robot Discord, and several of their “Members Only” rooms. ZA believes mental health support should be accessible to everyone. Check them out here: https://discord.gg/misfitrobots
Season 2 of the ZenAcademy Trivia Challenge has started up again. Click here for more info.
Irregular Events and Community News
Zeneca shares his thoughts on the market and offers insight on his personal portfolio restructuring. Available to ZA community members by clicking here.
The 12 Zenmas artists have been chosen! Zenmas is something which started back in December 2021, whereby ZA commissioned 12 up-and-coming artists to create 12 unique pieces of art that we airdropped to our community. For more details read the section above.
The 333 Prysm Squad applications are now closed, with a 39-strong team involved in the joint venture. Wishing you all the best of luck!
Attention 333 Club members: token verification will be moving from Collab Land to Vulcan (Premint). Click here for more details.
333 Club Advisory Services are being established to offer support to 3poch, a fund founded by a 333 Club member.
A bit of fun: Introducing The "Zenacademy x Glitched Food weekend". Community members can post images of food which include a small ZenAcademy & The Lost Glitches logo. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, and it can be anything. You can share photos in our Discord here throughout the weekend. At the end of each weekend a winner will be chosen and The Lost Glitches will pay 50$ for the winning meal!
A ‘global-events’ channel was launched in the ZA Discord to help facilitate IRL meet-ups amongst the community. Click here for more details. The FIRST ZenAcademy sponsored "Global-Local" Meetup will be taking place in Singapore. Community members click here for more details.
ZA announced a long-term partnership with Roo Troop! Roo Troop is a collection focused on developing the first on-chain job marketplace.
Additional ZA Content
Watch ZenChats #38 where Zeneca talks about The future of decentralized IP w/ Chris Wallace from UltraDAO/Woodies
YouTube Video: Security tips on Discord + Giveaway of a ZenAcademy token
YouTube Video: Dutch Auction Strategies For Beginners
YouTube Video: Should Metaverse Land Be Scarce? - Digital Land And Scarcity Discussion
Zeneca released another educational video in collab with InPeak entitled ‘Mastering Art Block NFTs’. Check it out here.
Episode #48 of Two Bored Apes, called ‘Hacks, Spiders, Tomatoes and a Giveaway’ is available on YouTube. Click here to watch.
Zeneca’s latest Newsletter is now out, entitled ‘Impossible Expectations’. Click here to read the full article. Also includes a closer look at Proof, Moonbirds and Oddities.
Our GITBOOK is now live! It is a repository for all of the information relating to ZA (our values, the team, our partners, perks, and plenty of helpful resources). You can visit it by clicking here.
Nothing in this or any other ZenCaps publication should be construed as financial or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed in ZenCaps publications do not reflect those of Zeneca_33 or the ZenAcademy.
Always exercise caution within the NFT space and adhere to best practices when it comes to making any investments. There is plenty of potential, but this comes with inherent risks.
Stay safe, and as always, good luck.