Nifty News: NBA star snaps up Bored Apes, and what is Loot playing at?

NBA star Stephen Curry snapped up a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT worth $206,000, while Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann unintentionally created an NFT craze.

Three-time NBA champion Stephen Curry has snapped up a Bored Ape Yacht Club nonfungible token (NFT) for 55 Ether (ETH) worth around $206,000 at the time of publication.

The Golden State Warriors star purchased an NFT depicting an ape with blue fur wearing a plaid suit on Saturday. Curry’s wallet on OpenSea shows a collection of 20 NFTs, including a 5.69-ETH ($21,000) purchase of Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT on Saturday as well.

To the surprise of other collectors, Curry has since been active in the Bored Ape discord group and even changed his Twitter profile picture to display his recently purchased ape.

.@StephenCurry30 just casually chillin in the bored ape discord pic.twitter.com/sREO3RIq2N

— Storm (@CryptoStorm__) August 28, 2021

The Bored Ape Yacht Club project has shot up in popularity over the past few months. According to data from CryptoSlam, the NFTs generated $295 million worth of sales on secondary markets in August.

There are 10,000 NFTs in total, and data from OpenSea shows a current floor price of 36.2 ETH, or $135,000.

Vine co-founder’s new NFTs are a hit

Dom Hofmann, co-creator of the Vine social media app, has developed a simplistic-text-based NFT project that has generated $54.8 million in sales since launching on OpenSea on Friday.

The project describes its NFTs as “randomized adventurer gear generated and stored on chain,” which some believe are intended for use in a future community-driven fantasy game.

Hofmann announced “Loot: (for Adventurers)” via Twitter on Saturday and has kept information minimal with short descriptions of the project’s website and OpenSea.

The project has no front-end interface, and initially, the only way to obtain an NFT was to engage with the minting contract.

LOOT

- randomized adventurer gear
- no images or stats. intentionally omitted for others to interpret
- no fee, just gas
- 8000 bags total

opensea: https://t.co/qSnRJ1FD0n
etherscan: https://t.co/bF9p0RSHX2

available via contract only. not audited. mint at your own risk pic.twitter.com/uLukzFayUK

— dom (@dhof) August 27, 2021

The floor price for Loot NFTs has quickly risen to 6.1 ETH ($22,000) on OpenSea, which has led some to question the viability of requiring expensive NFTs to play the potential game. But while Hofmann’s creation has captured the attention of NFT collectors and even some Web 3.0 developers, he has never actually stated that Loot would become a game.

so on one hand Loot is by far one of the most interesting things i’ve seen in long time, but on other hand idea that floor = $24k means that it costs $24k to play the hypothetical future community created game?

— wakaflocka.eth (@mikedemarais) August 31, 2021

Cointelegraph reported on Aug. 20 that Hofmann was working on an 8-bit NFT gaming project called “Supdrive” in which the NFTs will serve as games themselves for an on-chain gaming console. Hofmann has stated in the Supdrive Discord channel that Loot is unrelated to the project.

Play-to-earn metaverse poker

Decentral Games announced the development of a play-to-earn metaverse poker game slated for launch in October.

1/ Decentral Games is excited to announce the development of free-play, play-to-earn Metaverse poker! ♦️♣️♥️♠️

Read the announcement here: https://t.co/NMZBPdgTrz

Read the whitepaper here: https://t.co/idXvAbiz8B

A thread pic.twitter.com/g1isrCPFRi

— Decentral Games (@DecentralGames) September 1, 2021

The game is called “ICE Poker” and will be hosted in the Decentral Games Metaverse. The game is free to play after either purchasing or acquiring at least one Iced NFT wearable. Players can earn the in-game currency dubbed “ICE token” via multiple methods such as competing in poker games, engaging with daily challenges, trading NFTs and “mining” ICE to sell to other players.

According to a Wednesday blog post from Decentral Games, NFT sales will be launched later this month starting from a price of 0.1 ETH each ($375). The more NFTs a player has, the more poker chips they are allocated with each day.

The games’ launch partners include Collab+Currency, Gmoney, HashKey Capital, Arca Funds, Binance Ventures, Decentraland Foundation and Polygon Studios.

BabyMetal NFTs may induce Megadeth

Japanese pop-metal band BabyMetal is dropping a collection of tokenized trading cards on Sept. 9.

The NFTs are being dropped to commemorate the final live performance of the “10 Babymetal Budokan” series from earlier this year. The collection consists of 20 tokenized trading cards that are split over three rarity levels with varying copies and depict photos from the Budokan shows in Japan.

The NFTs are not available for individual purchase and come in two sets of card packs. The randomized five-card NFT packs will be priced at $35 each, while the 15-card “Mechapack” is priced at $125 and includes a physical copy of a 13-track golden vinyl album recorded from the live Budokan performances.

The sale is being hosted on the Wax marketplace, and purchases can be made via credit card or PayPal.

Roundup

Larva Labs, the creators of CryptoPunks, Meebits and Autograph signed a deal with top Hollywood agents United Talent Agency (UTA).

According to a Tuesday article from the Hollywood Reporter, UTA will represent Larva Labs for intellectual property deals in TV, film, video games, licensing and publishing.

Earlier this week, NFT collector Pransky was duped out of 97.67 Ether ($366,000) after the website of popular artist Banksy was hijacked to promote a fake NFT auction. However, almost all of the money has since been refunded.