Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning everyone and welcome to the 3rd edition of Crypto Thursdays!
Have you ever seen a monkey reading a book?
Unfortunately, a quick Google search told me monkeys cannot read. Despite the old monkey theory. The one where if you had an infinite amount of monkeys each with a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, eventually one of them would write a book.
All in all, they can’t read…so they say.
So what do monkeys and books have in common?
Well, today, they have one thing in common: NFTs.
Tik Tok and Amazon Work to Exploit Hard-Working Authors
I actually wrote this article in my newest newsletter for the Spatium Stories platform. This article in particular breaks down a crazy trend I found out about on Tik Tok.
People figured out that on Amazon you can return an ebook! You know, in case you bought the wrong one or whatever.
Well, humans being humans, a group of people on Tik Tok broke the system and it went viral.
People everywhere realized you could buy an ebook, read it, and then return it for a full refund!
Essentially reading the book for free!
What they didn’t realize when they started this trend is how detrimental this is to authors. The same authors whose work they love.
It hurt a lot of reputations and many authors ended up owing Amazon money because of this trend! Check out the article to get all the details!
So where do NFTs come into play?
In the article, I propose that selling books as NFTs can solve a lot of these issues.
The first is that Amazon’s cut on ebooks is still way too high. Authors only make at most 70% from a sale.
They should make much much more than that. For comparison, some of the most popular NFT marketplaces only have a 2-3% seller’s fee. Not 30%.The second is that an NFT platform like Spatium Stories is extendable.
This means that we may not offer returns on our main platform, but if someone else wants to build a better platform for returns, they can! And they can do it in a way that benefit the author.
No one can go out and build a better app that works with Kindle books right now. But with NFT books, this will become a reality.
ApeCoin DAO to Fund Bored Ape News Site for $150,000
https://decrypt.co/106271/apecoin-dao-to-fund-bored-ape-news-site-for-150000
This article and the next are both about the Bored Ape Yacht Club. This is the most well-known, expensive, and largest NFT collection/community to date.
They live on the Ethereum blockchain, were started by a company called Yuga Labs, have average prices in the $200K range, and have made a total volume of sales of around $2.3 billion!
Last year they launched a couple of things.
First was a new cryptocurrency: ApeCoin.
The goal of ApeCoin was to be able to use it for special merchandise shops and other opportunities. The biggest goal was to create a DAO for all the Bored Ape holders to join.
What is a DAO? It stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization.
It means that instead of Yuga Labs making all the decisions, they would put decisions up to a vote and any members of the DAO can vote. To become a member I believe you need one of the Bored Ape NFTs along with being an ApeCoin holder.
The newest update is they voted recently to fund a newsletter called the Bored Ape Gazette. The votes were like 1 million for and 200K against. So it won in a landslide.
The main vote was to fund the gazette with $150,000 in order to hire their very own Kyle Swenson to keep writing articles for $7,000 a month.
Not a bad gig for Kyle, congrats!
Magic Eden Wants to Build an ApeCoin NFT Marketplace Just for Bored Apes—Here’s Why
https://decrypt.co/107108/magic-eden-apecoin-nft-marketplace-bored-apes
I think this was a genius idea.
Let me explain why.
Magic Eden is an NFT marketplace where people can go to buy and sell NFTs. They started working with the Solana blockchain.
That means you can only buy Solana-based NFTs on their site.
However, last week they announced they were going to offer support for Ethereum-based NFTs too! Ones like the Bord Ape Yacht Club!
Well, there is one slight problem here: competition.
Another super well-known NFT marketplace is called OpenSea. They did the opposite of Magic Eden.
OpenSea started with Ethereum and were around when NFTs got their huge boom. A few months ago, OpenSea offered the ability to buy and sell Solana NFTs, hoping to take a lot of the market from Magic Eden.
It didn’t work, and now Magic Eden is now hoping to make that competition even stronger.
And they are adding another twist.
Magic Eden want to steal the Bored Ape market.
They just announced that not only are they offering Ethereum support, but they are going to offer special offers for Bored Ape holders using ApeCoin to buy and sell Bored Ape NFTs!
One of the main bonuses they talked about is lowering their seller fees from 2% to less than 1%. Which when we’re talking about trading $200K NFTs, it adds up.
I think this is a brilliant way to try and pull the biggest Ethereum NFT community away from OpenSea and onto their platform instead.
We’ll see how it all pans out.