Weekly Overview: What Happened in GameFi, NFTs, and Metaverse This Week? [October 14–21]

For those who do not want to miss the most influential news about the industry among dozens of news, we have compiled the top five of the week for you.

Oscar Winner Anthony Hopkins’ First NFT Collection Sold Out in Minutes on OpenSea

The Eternal Collection, the first NFT collection based on Sir Anthony Hopkins’ art life, seems to have gone down in history, selling out in less than 10 minutes. The 1000-piece collection was produced in collaboration with Orange Comet, a design agency focused on NFT and Web3.

For Sir Anthony Hopkins, this is not the first work in the NFT world. Hopkins first joined the NFT community when he appeared in the movie Zero Contact, which was released on the World’s Premier Space for Film Memorabilia Vuele. In addition, the artist added the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain to his Twitter profile name.

The Eternal collection, on the other hand, was inspired by the characters Hopkins portrayed throughout his artistic life.

The mint price for each NFT is 0.25 ETH (about $325), while the base price of the collection is currently 0.832 ETH ($1,302.92). NFT owners also have the chance to win personalized NFTs from Hopkins, a signed art book, and a one-on-one Zoom conversation with him.

Although this “breaking record news” seems to be encouraging in the current negative market conditions, the trading volume of the NFT market is still with a dramatic decrease, such that there is a 100% decline in January 2022, which was the peak.

New Decentralized Social Network by Jack Dorsey

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has set out to create a new decentralized social media. The App will be called Bluesky Social and will operate as a federated social network using decentralized technologies. In the tweet quoted by Jack Dorsey, Bluesky’s AT Protocol was introduced. This was an enhanced and simplified version of the previous ADX. Highlights of the AT Protocol include interoperability, high performance, account portability, and algorithmic selection.

· Within the scope of these features, for interoperability, the team says the AT Protocol includes a schema-based Interoperability framework called Lexicon to help solve coordination challenges.

· They also emphasize making fast loading performance at large scales a priority.

· The users will be able to easily transfer their digital identities from one platform to another without losing any data with the AT protocol.

· The AT protocol offers an open algorithm mode for users to have more control over their social media experience. This has become a notable discussion, especially after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica lawsuit. As a significant aspect supporting decentralization, this feature includes providing users with an original feed space that is independent of the platform’s recommendation algorithm, in case users don’t want to activate any of the platform’s algorithms.

Reddit Now Has More NFT Wallets Than the OpenSea Marketplace

Reddit, which entered the NFT market in July, reached 3 million users for the NFT market with its avatar collections.

Reddit has established an alternative NFT market and received a great response from its large community. The 40,000 NFT avatars designated for the platform were priced between $10 and $100. However, all of these products were sold out due to the high demand of the community. The company has partnered with 30 artists for this in the past months.

NFT owners can trade these NFT avatars on their public blockchain addresses. In addition, users are allowed to use their NFTs as profile photos, as on Twitter.

It seems that Reddit has now surpassed OpenSea in terms of the number of active wallets. While OpenSea has 2.3 million active wallets, the number of people who opened the Vault wallet just to use NFT avatars is 2.5 million.

‘Warner Bros. Discovery’ to Begin Selling Lord of the Rings NFTs

Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that the first movie in the LOTR series has been made into an exclusive NFT collection. The project will cooperate with the Eluvio Content Blockchain.

Along with a 4K resolution copy of the movie, behind-the-scenes footage, photos and video clips from the movie, and various content based on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will also be part of this NFT collection. There are also interactive navigation events, discoverable image galleries, and hidden AR collections that can be discovered. With this project presented as Multimedia NFT, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring became the first major studio film to be released in Web3.

The Fellowship of the Ring NFTs are available on October 21st. The “Mystery Edition” will be priced at $30, and the “Epic Edition” for $100. The Epic Edition; includes navigation menus for the Shire, Rivendell, and Mines of Moria as well as key location-specific artwork and extra image galleries.

While NFT trading volume has dropped 97 percent since the start of 2022, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s the sales that the passionate creators of the Lord of the Rings series have been waiting for.

Shopify Users Can Access Tezos Nfts Thanks to The New Partnership

Tezos blockchain has partnered with Web3 automation platform Taco and this partnership includes allowing Shopify users to get Tezos’ NFTs through Taco’s NFT loyalty program.

Shopify is one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies and it was also among the first to integrate Bitcoin and Lightning payments into its platform. With this integration, merchants now have a new way to interact with customers and connect to the expanding Tezos NFT community.

In early June, Shopify announced a new reward system which is called Tokengate as part of its consumer communication initiative. Tokengate has allowed certain trading partners to offer exclusive products for NFT stakeholders.

As a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, Tezos has seen an increase in on-chain and smart contract transactions in relation to the NFT market volatility. Tezos’ high energy efficiency, low NFT mint cost, and low transaction fees attract the attention of Web2 companies that want to integrate NFTs. Ubisoft also announced in the past months that it is turning to Tezos NFTs for in-game rewards.