In this week’s news, we’re going to look into both DAI and USDC. OpenSea has announced integration with both stablecoins — allowing users to sell their goods & also make offers with either DAI or USDC. I’ll also talk about NFT derivatives & a new socio-economic game, Microverse.

Biggest Announcement 📢

OpenSea announces integration for DAI & USDC, two of Ethereum’s stablecoins.

OpenSea released a new feature allowing users to place bids & sell cryptogoods for two stablecoins, DAI from MakerDAO and USDC from the Centre Consortium.

Even though DAI & USDC are worth the same ($1) they’re fundamentally different. DAI is an algorithmic stablecoin produced by locking up ETH as collateral — it is the more decentralized version of USDC. On the other hand, USDC is funded and backed by Circle. An audit of USDC completed this week. It’s the more centralized and compliant-friendly stablecoin, allowing the Centre Consortium to make decisions on KYC/AML, including the ability to freeze assets on addresses. Both stablecoins are built on Ethereum as ERC20s.

Stablecoins are essential to crypto-adoption, allowing smart contracts to be denominated & settled in dollars. Cryptocurrency price volatility, especially as of late, makes it difficult to sell cryptogoods and persuade users to interact with contracts. We’re about to see which type of stablecoin developers and users prefer: more compliant-friendly or more decentralized.

Keep an eye on DAI & USDC transaction volume as well as daily active addresses. I’m predicting that 90% digital goods will predominately be sold in the future for a stablecoin in the future as blockchains start to become hidden from the user. Pricing cryptogoods in ETH or some external cryptocurrency forces a user to make an investment decision. Developers are already starting to build centralized applications on a decentralized protocols.

Having a “bank-account” for users that’s non-volatile is useful for tracking sunken costs. Cryptogoods can historically be priced in USD instead of ETH, which is super useful for new investors/traders evaluating whether investments in individual cryptogoods are worth it.

Other benefits to stablecoins include: 1) being able to split payments/revenue between multiple parties and settle in USD 2) incentivize user referrals with dollars instead of store credit, infusing a growth of entrepreneurs 3) having non-blockchain stakeholders receive royalties without having to worry about regulatory/tax issues.

Biggest releases 🎮

New socio-economic cryptogame, Microverse is released.

I don’t write about new game releases often (because there are so many and tons of cryptogaming media publications cover them) but this one is special. Microverse has similar gameplay mechanics to FOMO3D — but with a twist. 19 worlds are sold via dutch auction and encounter a time when sold.

As the game progresses and more ETH is added to the economy, the timer shrinks, encouraging more dynamic interactions. Proceeds are split between the stimulus (jackpot), the current owners of the world (dividends), developers, referrers, and the game economy (to make the next round more enticing when reset).

Should be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Billy Rennekamp’s new hack project, Ether-Auth

Want to chat with other token holders for ERC20s and ERC721? Enter an IRC-like chat room to explore what others are saying.

Thoughts this week 💭

NFT Derivatives

Have been thinking a lot about NFT derivatives — digital goods that are derived from an existing token, transaction, or contract. Here are some examples:

1. FOAM Signaling — staked tokens represented by a NFT
2. Proofs — non-transferable badges being awarded by completing transactions & interacting with contracts on Ethereum
3. KittyCred — turn NFTs into a digital coin that can be traded
4. Cryptogoods — turn NFTs into physical merchandise

That’s all for this week!

Thanks for reading. I’m going to stop publishing NFTY News on Medium after edition #30, so if you want to stay subscribed be sure to subscribe on Substack.

If you are working on creative use cases, or working on trying to get more people into crypto and reaching end users using non-fungible tokens, I would love to talk about how I can help. Reach out to me on twitter @flynnjamm, my DMs are always open.