The Weekly Take
Who owns the stories we tell? How do we incentivize people to contribute to world building? How do we ensure quality of the contributions remains high? What becomes canon? These are the kinds of questions being confronted by a new wave of NFT projects focused on community generated lore.
To be clear, decentralized storytelling has existed in some form for as long as people have been telling stories. Fan-fiction, open world gaming, and even the development of ancient mythologies are all forms of this bottom up approach to building worlds. However, NFTs are providing a way for individuals to feel like they own a true stake in the world they are building. Combined with decentralized voting mechanisms, updates to canon and new storylines can be proposed and adopted by the community members with the most skin in the game.
This week we’ll be talking with one of the co-founders of Forgotten Runes about what sorts of opportunities NFTs and the blockchain offer world builders and contrast it to the more traditional top-down approaches.
The Chart of the Week
Despite OpenSea breaking sales volume records in January, the fine art category has had a terrible start to the year. Sales across major fine art marketplaces amounted to just over 100 million dollars last month making it the slowest month in over half a year.
News
JPMorgan becomes the first bank in the metaverse opening a lounge in the popular online digital world Decentraland. A report recently released by the bank argues that annual revenues from the metaverse sector could soon be valued at over 1 trillion dollars per year.
Some OpenSea users were targeted in what is looking to be a sophisticated phishing attack stealing about 1.7 million dollars in NFTs. Early on there was some concern that it was related to the ongoing migration of the OpenSea listing contract, however OpenSea has now ruled that out. Instead, it is looking more likely that affected users signed or interacted with a malicious contract after being targeted by the thief.
Reese Witherspoon is partnering with the popular World of Women NFT project through her Hello Sunshine production company. The plans are to produce a TV and cinematic universe for the 10,000 NFT collection. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the next step for many so-called “profile-pic” projects is to expand into these traditional media spaces.
Upcoming this week in Metanomics
Thursday, February 24th:
3pm EST - Metanomics Spaces #3: Building a Storytelling Economy in the Metaverse with Forgotten Runes co-founder Elf (@ElfJTrul)
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The author may be an investor in one or more of the companies, investment products, or NFT projects mentioned in this article