Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning everyone and welcome back to another edition of Crypto Thursdays!
I am conflicted today.
There is actually a ton of news in the crypto space, but I don’t want to overwhelm or give it away all at once.
I figured I’ll just share some of the highlights and maybe throw in a few links to articles at the end if you want further reading.
Magic Eden Drama
Ok, so the first bit of news is with Magic Eden. If you are into crypto, you have for sure heard of this.
If you aren’t, let me explain super duper quick.
Magic Eden is a very popular NFT marketplace for the Solana blockchain.
You’ve probably heard me mention OpenSea before; they are a ginormous NFT marketplace for the Ethereum blockchain.
Well, something happened with Magic Eden that is ripping them to shreds.
See, a huge benefit for artists minting NFT’s are royalties. What are royalties in the NFT world?
Let’s say I get an NFT for like $10 because I knew about some project early. But then the project skyrockets and a few months later I flip that same NFT on a marketplace like Magic Eden for $1,000! Well, typically, when the artist initially sells the $10 NFT, they might put a 10% royalty on any secondary sales. So when I sell that NFT for $1,000, the original artist gets $100 of that sale!
This is revolutionary for artists! And adds more revenue streams for them.
In fact, it’s a popular strategy for artists to give away their NFTs for free and count on secondary sale royalties to be their income.
However, the problem with Solana (and Ethereum) is that these royalties are not actually enforced by the blockchain. They are enforced by the marketplace.
So when you sell an NFT on Magic Eden, they are the ones that charge the royalty and pay it to the artist.
But the NFT is simply on the Solana blockchain.
The issue that just went down is that a lot of smaller marketplaces were popping up that allowed buyers and sellers of NFT’s to set royalties as optional.
So when I go to sell my $1,000 NFT, I can decide whether I want the artist to get $100 or not.
In a perfect world, everyone would say yes.
But this is a far from perfect world.
And more and more people started leaving Magic Eden for their secondary sales and flocked to these smaller marketplaces.
This forced Magic Eden’s hand, and they have come out to say they are officially making royalties optional too. Thus, stripping that income stream from hundreds of artists who counted on them.
This has, of course, sparked an insane amount of drama.
It’s been great for DeSo because, on the DeSo blockchain, royalties are baked in. If you put your NFT for sale, it is for sale on any marketplace and the royalties are enforced by the blockchain code, not the marketplace code.
DeSo Blogging Drama
Not to say DeSo doesn’t have it’s own source of drama.
The latest drama on DeSo is that the core team released the ability to post blogs directly on the blockchain.
Cool, right!?
Well, in one sense, as a writer, yea. I like seeing more and more platforms in web3 focus on writing.
But not cool because there is already a very popular blogging platform built on DeSo, called Zirkels. Not to mention, CloutPub and Cuprite already existed before them too!
Now, I don’t think DeSo had the goal of stealing Zirkel’s users. At least from the way they introduced their blogging UI, I hope that wasn’t the goal. Because it’s at a hackathon level right now.
But they wanted to establish a standard for blogs to be stored on the blockchain. This means that any blogging platform, Zirkels, CloutPub, or even non-blogging platforms like Diamondapp, can all write and read the same blogs.
Now, if that truly becomes a reality, I will be very impressed! It’s so annoying copying and pasting my newsletters from Substack to Medium to Zirkels, etc, etc.
However, Zirkels came out with a hot take. I’ll leave the article below. But they are upset because as the leading blogging platform on the blockchain, they were not asked for ideas or consulted in any way.
They also said the choices the core team made for the “standard” are awkward, overly complicated, and hard to work with.
They will be integrating with them, but they aren’t happy about it.
Spatium Stories Beta Launch (No Drama)
Finally, some great news with no drama!
The Spatium Stories beta launch is out there!
I’ll leave the full article below of what is in store, but check it out: spatiumstories.com
If you have a DeSo, Metamask, or Google account you can login and get your first NFT book! The Bible and Tarzan are free so no risk at all if you are new to web3 :)
And with that, I will call it a day! Here are some of those articles I thought would be interesting to share :)
https://diamondapp.com/u/nader/blog/a-game-theoretic-analysis-of-nft-royalties-on-solana
https://zirkels.com/a/zirkels-playing-nice-and-playing-smart