ZenCaps: Edition #48

Your weekly NFT recap to cut through the noise

Feb 04, 2023

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 - Cool Cats Rebrand & Project Update, Pfizer Backs “DeSci” DAO and Opensea’s Polygon NFT Sales Top Ethereum for Second Straight Month

Sewer Pass tops the 7-day volume charts for the third week in a row, although the gap’s considerably smaller than previous weeks. CryptoPunks sits in second, just 350ETH off top spot. Checks - VV Edition is in third, Bored Ape Yacht Club is in fourth and Otherdeed For Otherside is in fifth.

New collection ikehaya Pass saw over 8,700 sales go through in the past week. With more than 1,450ETH traded it sits 7th in overall volume. The floor touched 0.33ETH, before retracing back to 0.139ETH. what the fluff? and Kiyoshi's Seeds Project, also both new releases, saw good volume too. The former is sat in 14th spot having only been launched two days ago, whilst the latter is in fifth spot by daily volume, having launched just 10hrs ago.

Cool Cats have done some rebranding and released news regarding where the project is headed. We heard that Meta’s Metaverse Division lost around $13.72 Billion in 2022 and Mastercard’s NFT lead resigned, whilst Pfizer are backing a DeSci (Decentralised Science) DAO and eBay express their desires to expand further into web3.

The number of NFTs sold on the Polygon network (through OpenSea) once again outstrips that of Ethereum. This makes it two months in a row. In crypto, MATIC is up 6% over the past 7 days, compared to ETH’s 4%, whilst ImmutableX saw an incredible 40.5% uplift, and Optimism a tasty 35%.

For full articles on all the above and much, much more, head into the sections below and click on the relevant links.

If you enjoy ZenCaps, don’t miss out on ZenDaily. It’s published Monday to Friday and provides a short recap of the past 24hrs in the NFT space. Subscribe for free here.

Curated News - the biggest stories of the past week

Educational: How To Prevent NFT Theft, According To Industry Professionals
Educational: ZenAcademy’s 30 Days Of NFTs - Entry Level NFT Course
A word from our Founder: Welcome to ZenAcademy! and why to join

Project news & things we’re keeping an eye on

Talking Point - What Are Soulbound Tokens (SBTs)?

In light of ZenAcademy’s upcoming Student IDs, which will be Soulbound Tokens, I thought we’d revisit what they are, and some of their potential use cases. They initially got attention after Vitalik Buterin discussed the idea extensively in a co-published paper exploring the future of Ethereum called ‘Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul’. This was back in May 2022.

The term Soulbound comes from the MMORPG World Of Warcraft game and refers to items that are non-exchangeable and non-transferable. The game would distribute Soulbound items for accomplishing certain quests or you could acquire them by killing unique bosses.

An excerpt from the summary page of ‘Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul’ reads as follows:

‘Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities—such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands—are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation’.

This gives you the premise of the paper, and should you wish to read it in full (37 pages), it can be downloaded here, but let’s take a quick look at several use-cases below to better understand SBTs value proposition.

To clarify, only SBT creators would be able to produce SBT tokens, and they would be stored in what the paper refers to as “soul” accounts/wallets. Once transferred to these wallets, the token would “stick” to that wallet for its entire lifespan. It would not be tradable on marketplaces, or transferable to another wallet/account.

Several use cases that have been discussed so far are as follows:

Certificates and Documents - Universities and colleges could issue degrees as SBTs. This would largely eradicate the issue with degree certificates being sold online should they be issued as a standard NFT, for example.
DAOs - SBTs could be used to prevent Sybil attacks, whereby malicious actors seek to gain 51% voting rights to pass certain proposals.
Uncollateralized Lending - This is largely impossible at present. Due to anonymity issues, there’s no way for platforms to validate individuals’ credentials such as credit ratings. SBTs issued as (periodic) credit ratings would help with this issue.
Proof Of Presence - Entities could issue attendees to conferences or such with SBTs as a proof of attendance. These could also be used to contact these participants at a later date, or to reward them should they wish.
Medical - SBTs could be used for a whole range of medical reasons, far outside the scope here, but simply storing important information related to your medical history is one example. Blood type and allergies for example.
Personal Identification - SBTs could be used to create accounts with personal data to prove who you are and express your social identity (interests and beliefs etc.).

That’s just a few examples of how SBTs might be used, but there’s plenty more. It’s also worth noting that Soulbound tokens can also be dynamic NFTs. This is the case for the upcoming ZenAcademy Student IDs. If you’re not sure what this means, take a look at last weeks ZenCaps, where we discuss the topic in more detail.

I hope this overview gave you an initial taste for the potential held within Soulbound tokens. Vitalik predicted the following: "I suspect the 2024 up cycle will focus on them”. Time will tell.

The guys at nftnow recently published this article on Soulbound tokens, so if you want to read more, follow this link: NFTs 2.0? When Will Soulbound Tokens Arrive?

Tip Of The Week - Pocket Universe

Pocket Universe is a security tool which helps users understand exactly what they’re signing for in their web3 wallets. It provides a pop-up before your wallet interface appears, and acts to warn you about potentially malicious transactions by showing you exactly what’s about to happen before you sign anything.

Here's a quick demo of it in action:

Pocket Universe 🟣 @PocketUniverseZ

Pocket Universe protects you by showing you exactly what happens in a web3 transaction, before you sign it Join 10,000+ others and get it for free on our website! Here's an example from a website impersonating @artgobblers 👇

In case you missed this last week, everyone with ZenChest Holder, Genesis Member of ZA, OG, 333 Club Pass Holder, 333 Club Member and ZenAcademy X Nas roles in our ZenAcademy Discord can claim free access to their Premium tier for a month! Click here for more details.

ZenAcademy & 333 Club Noticeboard

ZenAcademy Community News

ZenDaily Twitter Spaces has officially launched, and has been a resounding success. Well done emileevee and Zeneca for such a great show, and thanks to the community for all your support. Tune in every Mon-Fri! You won’t want to miss it! Find details here.
Official Twitter accounts updated: both Zeneca’s personal Twitter account and the ZenAcademy Twitter account have been updated. They are now found at @Zeneca and @ZenAcademy respectively. Everything else is the same, but please be careful with any Twitter interactions from these accounts (or rather accounts which might look like them, or the previous ones).
Welcome to our new 333 Club Members! A reminder that Zeneca has updated his Office Hours for Feb and March, so you can now book a slot during these months. Also a reminder that @emileevee, @mushrooooom and @momo all have office hours available too, and have a wealth of knowledge to share.
We have completed translations of 30 days of NFTs into German, Portuguese, and Spanish. We have lined up some thought leaders in the respective languages to help spread the word, and will officially launch these very soon. We are also close to finishing up 30 Days of Crypto.
Student IDs are almost ready. We had initially planned to launch static IDs and add dynamic elements in the future. Now, we are launching with some basic dynamic elements ready to go, and have built the entire backend framework so that future updates will be easier. As a reminder, these are FREE, Soulbound NFTs, and available to anyone. Our goal is to expand our ecosystem significantly and help onboard as many people as possible, without adding price speculation, fomo or stress into the mix.
The PFP continues. Unfortunately, we’re not going to hit our Q1 goal, so hopefully it’ll be in Q2, although no promises. We will do our best to get it to you soon, and although we can’t be more specific, we can say it’s gonna be amazing.
Excited to announce we've started a new event focused on ART and ARTISTS. It’s called Artists Corner! Every two weeks, we'll host an artist in our Discord. They’ll be sharing their journey, experiences and knowledge with our community. Hop in the call to learn and have fun. Next is this Wednesday, the 8th February.

ZenAcademy - Latest Content Releases

YouTube Video: ZenAcademy Town Hall (PFP, our future, and much more!)
YouTube Video: Episode #68 of Two Bored Apes is now available - Sewer Pass, Dookey Dash, Art Blocks and Random Games
Zeneca Newsletter: Letter 34: On Community Building, Floor Price, Attention and More
Zeneca Newsletter: Letter 35: Lessons From Poker to Crypto
YouTube Shorts: How To Avoid SCAMS
YouTube Shorts: How To Transfer NFTs on OpenSea?

ZenAcademy Regular Events

The ZenDaily Show hosted by Zeneca and Emileevee, every Mon-Fri. This space is all about education, information and entertainment. It'll have a focus on Web3 education, topical perspectives, and being a forum for the ZA community and beyond to join in & discuss what’s going on in the web3 world. Additionally, Zeneca will be doing what he does best: distilling complicated information into easily digestible bites.
Wellness Wednesdays - Hosted by @Kit777 every other Wednesday. Kit talks with one of our highly esteemed members in a Twitter spaces where we pause, take a break and discuss all things related to mental health/wellness and our shared human journey in life.
Artists Corner - Every other Wednesday, and hosted by KingInTheCastle, this event takes place in our Discord for our members. Artists take to the mic and share their journey, experiences and knowledge with our community. Hop in the call to learn and have fun.
Thankful Thursdays - hosted by Zeneca and Emileevee every Thursday at 17:00 ET. An hour escape from the chaos of web3, focused on bringing as many speakers up as possible, with zero pressure, to share what they're thankful for, discuss topics related to mental health, wellness and all things good.
333 Club’s weekly ‘This Week in NFTs’ Twitter Spaces, each and every Sunday. Follow the 333 Club Twitter page here for more info.
Join Poker Nights via our Discord. Events held weekly, with prizes to be won.
There’s a new ‘global-events’ forum in the ZA Discord to help facilitate IRL meet-ups amongst the community. Find more details here.
Don’t forget to keep across the Giveaways Discord channel, with plenty of allowlist spots up for grabs on a regular basis.

Follow RogueRaven on Twitter here: @RogueRavenNFT

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.

ZenCaps: Your Weekly NFT Recap to Cut Through the Noise

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