Over the last year, Bitcoin Ordinals have taken the digital collectible world by storm, and they’ve now garnered the attention of financial titan Franklin Templeton. The digital assets division of the global investment firm today featured the rise of Ordinal inscriptions in a new prospectus. “In the past year, Bitcoin innovation and development has seen a renaissance in activity,” Franklin Templeton Digital Assets wrote. “Positive momentum in innovations is primarily driven through Bitcoin NFTs,...
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Concertgoers at this year’s Coachella Music Festival will be able to earn perks and upgrades by playing a blockchain-based game called Coachella Quests developed by the festival's Coachella Innovations division in partnership with Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain. Coachella attendees who complete quests at the event and on the Coachella Discord server will earn “stamps” and points that can be traded for exclusive festival benefits and experiences, including access to the Oas...
OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace during the 2021-2022 bull run, is now in the middle of a transition to a new “OpenSea 2.0” launch with a much leaner team following layoffs last fall. And we’re starting to understand what that will look like as the once-dominant marketplace considers its evolution and next steps. On Tuesday, OpenSea announced support for the ERC721-C Ethereum NFT token standard, which was developed by video game startup Limit Break and enables project creators to enforce roy...
Nifty Island, an Ethereum blockchain game built around user-generated content, announced Friday that it’s launching a two-part speedrunning challenge around a new play mode called “Break the Targets”—and both level creators and players can earn NFT rewards for getting involved. Over the weekend, level creators can design their own unique courses around the play mode, giving players courses in which they can try to maximize their run while shooting targets. The top three “most creative courses” w...
AnimeChain, announced Wednesday by the Arbitrum Foundation in conjunction with the Weeb3 Foundation and Chiru Labs, aims to be a blockchain-powered one-stop shop for anime creators and fans. The three organizations constitute the AnimeChain consortium, which says AnimeChain will provide an online anime ecosystem governed by the community. The network will include original and third-party anime content, games, merchandise, and NFTs. “As a launch partner to AnimeChain, Azuki evaluated existing Eth...
Bitcoin Ordinals startup OrdinalsBot—which helped mine the largest-ever Bitcoin block and is working with Wu-Tang rapper Ghostface Killah on Ordinals—announced Tuesday that it surpassed its funding goal with a $3 million seed round led by DACM. The round brings OrdinalsBot’s total funding to over $4.5 million. OrdinalsBot launched in February of last year after Casey Rodarmor released the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin for putting NFT-like media assets on-chain. Initially, inscribing an Ordinal re...
The Metaplex Foundation revealed Monday that it is launching a new non-fungible token (NFT) standard for Solana that is cheaper to mint and easier for developers to work with—and crucially, given recent congestion, it requires substantially less Solana network compute too. The Metaplex Core standard, the Foundation exclusively shared with Decrypt, is billed as a next-generation NFT standard for the Solana network, cutting mint costs and network demand by more than 80% compared to the existing To...
After launching its first-ever tokenized asset fund on Ethereum earlier this week, BlackRock is quickly getting acquainted with life on-chain—and all the weird and wonderful things associated with it. Crypto users have been sending welcome gifts to a wallet associated with—but apparently not controlled by—the Wall Street behemoth, including genitalia-themed NFTs and funds tied to a blacklisted service the U.S. government has claimed aids state-sponsored terrorism. An Ethereum wallet associated...
The creators of a popular Bitcoin Ordinals project called Runestone sent the original “parent” inscription—which they valued at 8 BTC, around $525,000 worth—to a wallet purported to belong to mythic Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto on Wednesday. The Runestone—Ordinals inscription 63,026,232, the largest inscription mined to date at around 4MB—was sent to the Satoshi wallet by project contributor and pseudonymous NFT historian, Leonidas. In a Twitter post, Leonidas feigned that the move was a mis...
Ethereum is down this week despite recently setting its highest price in over two years, but the market lull didn’t stop someone from spending big on Wednesday: A CryptoPunks NFT was just purchased for more than $16 million worth of ETH. Punk #7804, one of just nine Alien Punks in the influential Ethereum NFT collection, traded hands for 4,850 ETH on Wednesday afternoon, or $16.42 million at the time of the sale. That makes it the second-largest CryptoPunks sale ever whether measured in ETH and...
