#219 - Pudgys Toys and a HUGE Fidenza sale 💰

Plus, new Blend collections and a Vitalik essay

Author

joe hitchcock
May 23, 2023

GM and welcome to Decentra Daily.

We're the web3 newsletter that’s back for another week to feed the bears.

Today,

  1. Huge sales at Sotheby’s NFT auction 💰

  2. Blend is adding more collections 🛒

  3. Yesterday was Bitcoin Pizza Day 🍕

  4. Another look at Pudgy’s toys 🐧

  5. Vitalik says don't overload Ethereum 📝

D-Daily takeaway 🥡
Sotheby’s 3AC liquidation sale causes our index to surge!

What's this? 🤔
Our floor price index tracks the biggest, most influential pfp projects, art collections, and gaming assets.

1. Fidenza sells for +$1 million at Sotheby’s 3AC sale

Fidenza #725 – a particularly nice Fidenza – sold for a wild price of $1,016,000 in a Sotheby’s auction last week. That’s almost five times the high estimate!

The auction was part of Sotheby’s GRAILS series, which includes NFT artworks owned by closed crypto hedge fund 3AC.

A total of seven Chef’s Kiss 3AC NFTs netted over $2.5 million 🤌 👀 – which the company currently managing 3AC’s assets says will help “fund creditor recoveries.”

The lot included Autoglyph #187, which sold for $571,500, also hundreds of thousands over the estimate.

A rare Crypto Punk and Ringers both went for over $150K.

Why the high prices? – 3ACs collection is elite. It contains some of the best representations of historic and significant collections in the space.

It’s also possible that some traditional art buyers are more comfortable interacting with a well-known auction house than an online NFT marketplace.

The auction seems to have sparked a resurgence in gen art trading, with several impressive Fidenza sales seen over the past few days. The Fidenza floor up is currently up more than 30 ETH after 6 recent sales.

Ringer #879, known as “The Goose” is the next 3AC grail to be auctioned by Sotheby’s, on June 15th.

2. Blend is adding a new NFT collection every day this week

Blend support is now live for Kanpai Pandas and Milady’s spin-off Redacted Remilio Babies.

You can buy a Redacted Remilio Babies with a 0.17 ETH deposit and take out loans against Kanpai Panda NFTs.

Yesterday, Blur announced that new collections will be coming to Blend every day this week – an increased output for collection reveals on the platform.

3. Yesterday was Bitcoin Pizza Day

May 22nd is Bitcoin Pizza Day – the anniversary of a 2010 transaction widely regarded as the first use of blockchain tokens in a physical purchase.

Pioneering Bitcoin miner Laszlo Hanyecz posted an open offer on the BitcoinTalk forum, the original place for discussing all things Bitcoin.

He offered to pay anyone who could deliver him 2 large pizzas 10,000 Bitcoin (about $40 at the time).

After a couple of confused posts asking Laszlo if he needed food donations, college student Jeremy Sturdivant became the first Bitcoin Pizza delivery guy, by sending a Papa John’s Cheese and a Supreme to Laszlo’s home.

Shortly after, Bitcoin began skyrocketing in value and reached $1 within a year.

But Jeremy apparently spent his entire bag on traveling before it could appreciate into a life-changing fortune.

Today, 10,000 Bitcoin is worth around $268,000,000. At BTC’s all-time high in November 2021, it was worth $675,668,300.

Last week, we spoke about a recently uncovered Reddit post that seems to show another BitcoinTalk thread where BTC was offered for an offchain asset (in this case, a JPEG), a few months before the infamous BTC pizza.

On the web3 wire

Hackers are more likely to return stolen funds 🥷
The number and size of hacks have so far decreased in 2023, with hackers increasingly taking white hat rewards for returning funds.

Azuki adds a community page to its website 👬
The page allows holders to form groups based on NFT traits, location, and other common interests.

What happened at VeeCon? 🎤
Here’s an in-depth summary of what went down at Gary Vaynerchuk’s 3-day NFT conference.

4. More info on Pudgy Penguins toys

Pudgy Penguins have already sold more than $500,000 worth of their soft toys and figurines since last week’s launch.

That’s over 20,000 units! Most options are now sold out on Amazon.

All Pudgys toys grant entry to a web3 digital experience called “Pudgy World.”

The toys

Available through Amazon (and other major retailers inc. Walmart from next month), the Pudgy toys come in various types and skews.

There are 13-inch soft plushy versions, 4.5-inch plastic collectibles, “positive penguins” holding cheerful signs, and several smaller pocket-size toys – all licensed from the community.

The toys are marketed towards kids and retail for around $25.

Pudgy world

Each pudgy toy is pre-tokenized as a Soulbound NFT or “forever friend.”

Toy owners can sign up for Pudgy World, a platform where they can customize and share digital versions of their toys, and open loot boxes containing wearables/traits.

Creating a wallet, minting Penguins to the blockchain, and trading traits are all made highly user-friendly through Pudgy World and its Polygon marketplace.

The site also contains social features and minigames.

Notable Tweets

5. Vitalik says, “Don’t overload Ethereum’s Consensus layer“

Since Ethereum switched from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, its become increasingly popular for web3 devs to “over-engineer” their projects, leveraging the blockchain’s consensus layer for additional duties and tasks that aren’t related to validating transactions.

In his latest blog post, Vitalik warned against this trend, saying that “expanding the duties of Ethereum's consensus” is making the network more expensive, complex, and open to attacks.

Recently, Ethereum has struggled to deal with intense $PEPE trading activity and also suffered multiple Finalization Failures, where new blocks were not correctly added to the chain.

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Meme of the day

C U Tmrw! 👋