🎨 Metaproof Art

Hey friends, this is Sophia from 🎨 Metaproof Art, the weekly newsletter where we keep you informed on how the metaverse and web3 are changing the art industry.

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📲 By the numbers

Web3 builders today are changing the future of blockchain. Here are some of them (Source):

• Pseudonymous 6529’s Open Metaverse (OM) project, launched on OnCyber, hinges on the idea that “100 million people in an open metaverse can change the world.” Currently, OM and the 6529 brand act as a hub for crypto-art exhibitions, unique edition collections, education, and more.

• Katie Haun is a crypto investor and founder of web3 VC fund Haun Ventures. In 2022, she raised $1.5B for the firm, the largest initial fund ever raised by a solo female founding partner, and also led a $50M funding round to boost Zora’s NFT tooling protocol.

• Enigmatic artist Trippy worked in the shadows for years before emerging into the NFT space as a leading voice of blockchain. Today he has 1.4 million followers on Instagram. His multidisciplinary web3 creative studio Trippy Labs, which drives his focus on making web3 events more native to decentralization, enjoyed 50,000 web3 event attendees in 2022.

📫 News & trends

🦸 Celebrated Marvel and DC artist launches on-chain comic series

Renowned Marvel and DC comic artist Sean Chen has announced the launch of an on-chain comic series powered by content studio 247 Comics and building upon the world-first project hinted at with the release of his BiPlane Bobo PFP initiative.

The artist - one of the comic book industry’s most celebrated as he drew characters like Iron Man and Batman - “wanted to do something unique for new audiences looking for further story depth in their favorite digital collectibles.”

247 Comics, forming a network of passionate creators, collectors, and artists, has embraced a decentralized community ownership model and said that the success of every new comic series will be determined by collectors, who can participate in the growth and expansion of each franchise. It has also announced forming a dedicated marketplace with NFT platform Origin Story.

🥇 Art Blocks Friendship Bracelet NFT collection takes top spot on OpenSea

Generative art collective Art Blocks NFT historically has no problem ranking highly across marketplaces, as shown by its latest free-to-mint Friendship Bracelets collection. The 38,413-piece collection, conceptualized by founder Erick Calderon a.k.a. Snowfro and designed by artist and Japanese Generative Art Foundation director Alexis André, was inspired by the novelty bracelets shared between kids and was available to any existing holder of an Art Blocks NFT.

The Art Blocks’ collection page said holders have been able to claim up to two tokens for free since its release in late October up until the claim window period closed on Tuesday, January 10. After the claim period, the collection was quick to rise to the top of the leaderboard on secondary marketplace OpenSea.

The art collective - which seeks to give back to the community purchasing artwork from its artists since its launch in 2020 - is also home to popular collections such as Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza or Emily Xie’s Memories of Qilin.

🇭🇰 HSBC transforms Hong Kong billboard into an immersive art exhibition

In a bid to transform Hong Kong from a bustling financial center into an open canvas through immersive art experiences and a metaverse gallery, global financial institution HSBC has collaborated with new media creator Henry Chu to create an immersive 3D digital billboard in bustling Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry Pier. Chu’s work has been exhibited in prestigious museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he will be part of a rotation of artists' works on the site. HSBC also showcases its metaverse initiative Open to Art, intended as a site for local artists to showcase their work and transform traditional art into immersive experiences. The initiative is part of HSBC’s goal to overhaul Hong Kong’s local art scene - the second largest in the world next to New York in terms of sales - and follows the unveiling of the world’s largest NFT gallery on the facade of HSBC Hong Kong’s main building in June last year.

🤔 Will the machines take over our art and music in a web3 world?

AI company Cinelytic offers studios such as Warner Bros big data to calculate the profit potential of a script, while Netflix and Disney use similar technologies to optimize their profits and minimize risks. Art and music generators also exist; NFT initiative EulerBeats emphasizes AI-generated music NFTs including its Futura series, which allows select NFT holders to create remix NFTs. This attracts those who prefer to tweak existing music instead of investing potentially more resources, time, and labor in making music - and art - from scratch. The big question from an SCMP reader’s mind: Can we strike a balance between machine-generated art and human-generated art?

🌏 Foundation enables community-led art curation with ‘Worlds’

Foundation, an NFT platform for on-chain art originally launched with a modest lineup of 50 artists, has rapidly grown to become one of the largest in its space. To keep up with the intense amount of creativity on the platform, it launched Worlds, designed to be a web3-native curation tool that helps to strengthen the relationship between curators and artists while rewarding them both for their participation. Here’s how Worlds works: curators invite sellers, sellers list any NFTs they own, and both of them earn a predetermined split of the ETH created from the sale. Foundation handles the complex coding and mechanisms of Worlds, aiming to make it as user-friendly as possible and able to be launched by curators in a few easy clicks and a single transaction.

🔮 5 unique NFT use cases that will dominate 2023

Perhaps one of the most underrated sectors of the NFT market is NFT ticketing, where you have tickets in the form of an NFT living on a blockchain that act as access passes for any live (or even virtual) event. Deemed to be of great benefit to the future of live events, NFT ticketing benefits issuers through a more in-depth attendance record (blockchain as a ledger), creating token-gated sites and services, and more. AI is another NFT use case to watch this year, spanning from tools like ChatGPT proliferating in almost every industry to AI-generated art raising a contentious topic in online communities.

⚡ Analysis: Top NFT artists are launching projects on Instagram and selling out in seconds

Instagram, with about 2 billion monthly active users, rolled out in early 2022 its NFT sharing, a feature that allows select users to connect to their digital wallets and showcase NFTs that they either created or bought. The feature easily gained traction as NFT creators and collectors saw a chance to present their digital assets to a wider audience. Instagram then slowly started expanding its Digital Collectibles feature, allowing select digital artists to begin minting and selling NFTs directly on its platform. Drifter Shoots (a.k.a. Isaac Wright), Refik Anadol, Amber Vittoria, Dave Krugman and Micah Johnson were among the known names to launch NFTs there, selling out each time. Instagram's methodical entry into web3 has been promising so far, helping web2 brands looking to make the jump as well as serving as a blueprint for web3’s mass adoption.

🌕 Residency NFT: A one-of-a-kind NFT art and smart contract generator

NFT platform IO Stadium has released Residency NFT, a platform seeking to rapidly launch an NFT project from concept to reveal. According to a press release, Residency NFT simplifies the daunting task of creating an algorithmically generated art collection with unique traits, while simultaneously developing and deploying a custom smart contract - sans the expensive costs of hiring smart contract developers. With zero coding, creators can launch their collections using Residency NFT as a one-platform command center for all the elements of launching their NFT collection. The platform also enables creators to generate art collections with traits, rarity, private and public sale, allowlist management, and scheduled reveal.

📸 Prisca Munkeni Monnier’s art highlights violence and dispossession in the DRC

Photographer, film director, and visual artist Prisca Munkeni Monnier from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is unveiling a new body of work, La Vie Est Belle. The artist is doing so in collaboration with the photography organization Fellowship, which is dedicated to bringing the most celebrated names of photography into web3. Unveiled as an online exhibition and with all her works available to purchase as NFTs, Monnier’s art draws from a complex web of memories, family, and heritage exploring her identity as an African creator and woman whose memories are interlinked with the politics and history of the continent. In November 2022, Fellowship became the first organization to present NFT photography at Paris Photo, with a selection of works by the likes of Guy Bourdin, Dmitri Cherniak, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

💲New NFT art platform Babylon gives artists share in ownership

New NFT art platform Babylon, created by artist OtherWorld and collector-entrepreneur Paruyr Shahbazyan or better known as P Azuro, has emerged to put artists in the place of ownership and change the way editions are thought of and released in web3. In an interview with Hypemoon, Shahbazyan said he wondered how people wouldn’t even think of releasing their editions elsewhere but on Babylon, finding it “most convenient and valuable.” He thought the solution was not to simply give ownership away for free but to instead allow “founding artists” to put some skin in the game to earn their share. In Babylon’s case, these founding artists are Tjo, Rik Oostenbroek, Terrell Dom, Other World, ANT, Mariah (Vestica), Dot Pigeon, P1A, A-Mashiro, Reylarsdam, amu, and Bruno Urli. Revealing there would be a total of 30 founding artists on the platform, Shahbazyan is the founder of azuro protocol, a leading decentralized betting protocol that others can build decentralized applications (dapps) on top of.

☀️The 18-year-old who went from heart surgery to six-figure NFT sales

18-year-old Justin Bodnar, known in web3 as jstngraphics, used to want to become a professional soccer player. A hole in his heart, however, changed the trajectory of his life: Unable to hit the field, the fifth grader got deep into video games and decided to record his matches on Call of Duty, making edits of his trick shots. Adobe After Effects got handy for the job, serving as his foray in the world of design. From there, he started making his own thumbnails and realized he might capitalize on his newfound set of skills. In the fall of 2020, he was first exposed to NFTs, first minting a piece on Rarible and afterwards seeking out other artists on Twitter and establishing a small network of creators in a group chat. Today it’s a wide range of achievements for the young artist, from achieving six figures in sales on SuperRare to a forthcoming collection set to drop on Nifty Gateway.

🔥 It’s happening: SuperRare X Van Arman collab dropping on 1/17

Digital art market SuperRare and American artist and roboticist Pindar Van Arman’s collaboration is dropping on January 17. Every purchase comes with a limited-edition hoodie, zippo lighter, and skateboard decks - decks numbered and hand-signed by Pindar - plus free stickers. Buyers must have a minimum of 123 $RARE in their wallet to purchase. Founded in 2018, SuperRare features a curated selection of digital artwork that span a broad spectrum of artistic styles ranging from photorealistic illustrations to psychedelic and conceptual art from prominent NFT artists and up-and-coming creators. Van Arman is an award-winning AI artist who builds, codes, and experiments with robots that paint in various styles, and is best known for his robotic art project Cloud Painter, an autonomous robot that anyone with an internet connection can control to produce artworks. He won the Robot Art Competition for his homemade robots that use AI to create art.

🎭 Vivo Ego Sum by CECHK

CECHK's Vivo Ego Sum, mint limited and unique generative art, explores the way humans communicate through facial expressions and aims to celebrate life in the present moment. The art project separates, analyzes, and puts together different human expressions to translate them into emotions such as a furrowed brow, a shy smile, and sad eyes. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication that can convey a wide range of emotions, but can be difficult for some people to understand or interpret. The project also aims to showcase the diversity of emotions and how mental illness can affect one's perception of the world. Viewers and collectors are free to interpret the facial expressions and create their own story.

👩🏻‍🎨 Art of Mob: Ladies First

Art of Mob's Ladies First is the second-generation collection of the NFT project’s illustrated 2D female characters, building on the mob/mafia theme. The collection was minted on the Ethereum blockchain for free on January 7 and already sold out. This collection focuses on "LIFESTYLE x ART x FASHION x INNOVATION" with a focus on the marketplace Moving Picture. The funds generated by this collection will be used to support women-led businesses in the web3 space and expand Moving Picture while also acquiring movie NFTs.

🏛️ Pune’s RKDM, India’s first metaverse museum coming soon: Here’s all you need to know

Pune's Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum is taking the metaverse route. The museum entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Indian metaverse platform BharatVerse, which will oversee RKDM's metaverse experience via design, development, and feature enhancement. Visitors will get to access the metaverse experience through head-mounted devices, mobile phones, web browsers, and more. RKDM is home to a rare anthology of Indian artifacts, showcasing India's cultural heritage and craftsmanship.

💸 Finance buzz

• Web3 platform Quantum Temple, dedicated to preserving cultural heritage, has announced a $2M pre-seed funding led by Borderless Capital and with participation from strategic angel investors. (Source)

🗣️ Quote of the week

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All content on this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not aim to serve as or replace expert investment advice.

If you are a startup building in the metaverse / web3 ecosystem and are raising capital, please reach out to Sfermion. Sfermion is an investment firm focused on accelerating the emergence of the metaverse.

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