#225 - Sold Out NFT Collection Pulls the Rug 💨

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We're the fruit roll-up of web3 newsletters. Unravel our corn-syrupy goodness.

Today,

1. Sold out 10K NFT collection rugs 💨

2. NVIDIA hits $1T market cap 🤠

3. Paragraphica, the AI camera 📸

4. BRC-721E, an ETH to BTC bridge 🌉

D-Daily takeaway 🥡
NFT markets are quiet so far this week.

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

1. 10K NFT collection Pixel Penguins rugs within hours of selling out

A charity NFT project that ignited the Twitter community and bucked trends by selling out while other pfp collections have remained dormant turned out to be a scam and rugged holders.

Pixel Penguins is a pixel art pfp collection supposedly created by someone called Sarah who posted via the now-deleted Twitter account, @hopeexist1.

Unusually for a scam artist, Sarah ran @hopexist1 for several years, presenting themselves as a hardworking artist, posting works to Foundation, and even reportedly taking commissions.

Sarah also claimed that they were in an ongoing battle with dacryocyst (tear duct) cancer, and had recently lost an eye.

The 10,000 NFTs were priced at 0.0069 ETH (around $13 dollars). 20% of the revenue was allegedly donated to charity, while the rest was claimed to go to Sarah’s outstanding hospital bills.

Yesterday, the project quickly gained momentum when it was heavily promoted by several Twitter influencers, notably DachshundWizard and Andrew Wang, who has over 150 thousand followers.

Collector Wizard of Soho Tweeted that he bought 100 Penguins, as well as a number of 1/1 art pieces listed by Sarah.

The collection topped the OpenSea trending chart and sold out, generating over 60 ETH or around $117K.

Shortly after, Sarah deleted their Twitter account and went dark.

It now looks like all of the art sold by @hopexist1, including Pixel Penguins, was stolen.

A deeper look at the Twitter account shows earlier, less sophisticated attempts to scam money from traders and influencers – again by claiming that the account owner or their family members are struggling to pay for cancer treatment.

While scams involving claims about sick children and relatives are not unusual, this one stands out for the way the fraudsters played the long game.

The rug also comes at a time when sentiment in the NFT space is nearing an all-time low.

Hear more: Andrew Wang apologizes for his part in the scam and discusses what happened with other Pixel Penguin buyers.

2. NVIDIA hits $1T market cap and casually announces they’ve created Westworld

All signs point to Nvidia taking over the world. With the company’s GPUs powering the generative AI revolution, its stock has been 🚀🚀🚀.

Yesterday, Nvidia’s market cap broke the $1 trillion dollar mark, making the company (at least temporarily) more valuable than Meta and Tesla – as well as the first trillion-dollar microchip producer.

To celebrate, CEO & founder Jensen Huang gave a two-hour keynote speech at Computex 2023, the annual computing conference in Taipei.

He announced a bunch of projects, including new AI super-computing tech.

But perhaps most interesting was the Avatar Cloud Engine – a set of tools for integrating AI and Large Language Models into video games.

With ACE, developers can create AI video game characters with the ability to listen to players talk and respond in real-time in their own voices.

In theory, future video games built with ACE could offer players more immersive worlds, including organic interactions with characters who have artificial thoughts and live artificial lives inside the game.

– Basically, the plot of the HBO show Westworld.

Huang played a demo of this feature during his speech, showing a scene from a cyberpunk-style game where a player sits down at a restaurant bar and talks to the NPC chef.

The NPC seems able to understand what the player says and responds in a way that helps to drive the narrative of the game forward.

And while the demo is clunky (and far from Westworld-level immersion), the potential is clear to see.

Watch: a demo of the Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine

On the web3 wire

Prosper Robotics’ robot butler 🧹 
A startup created by an OpenAI alum is on a mission to pioneer household robot helpers. Prosper Robotics claims its bot can load the dishwasher, do your laundry, and even cook. The robot could retail for less than $10,000.

Australian Binance users rush to withdraw their crypto 🇦🇺
Binance is closing down operations in prominent markets including Canada and Australia. With a June 1st withdrawal deadline causing a liquidation rush among Australian users, BTC is currently trading at 21% lower than the global spot rate.

Metaverse projects are down bad 🔻
While many see generative AI as the key to unlocking widespread metaverse development, the price of “land” in current projects such as Otherside and Voxels is down 80-90% from its peak in 2022.

3. Digital artist makes a 100% AI camera

One common criticism of AI art is that generated pictures are nothing more than “fake” photos.

The complaint expresses a growing anxiety about the blurring line between "raw" photos and images that have been digitally altered.

While some people worry about the implications of AI art, designer Bjørn Karmann embraces the uncertainty, making it the source of his creative inspiration.

Bjørn is the creator of Paragraphica – a camera with no lens that takes pictures using location data and AI.

Instead of capturing light, Paragraphica feeds information about the photographer’s location into an AI image-generation prompt (⬇️), to produce a picture that approximates nearby surroundings.

Bjørn even designed a physical device to transport his image generator – complete with film camera dials to set prompt parameters.

He says that “the photos never really look exactly like where I am,” but the generated images “capture some reminiscent moods and emotions from the place but in an uncanny way.”

You can try the camera yourself with the online version.

Watch: Bjørn tests out his camera

Notable Tweets

4. A new blockchain bridging protocol from the team behind Miladys

BRC-721E is a smart contract that takes regular Ethereum NFTs (like Bored Apes, Azukis, etc), burns them, then recreates them as Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

In other words, it converts any NFT from Ethereum into a Bitcoin Ordinal.

Why would holders of regular (ERC-721) NFTs want to do that?

In theory, bridging an NFT to Bitcoin makes it rarer, and places it within a digital asset market that’s currently receiving lots of attention.

There are now over 10 million Ordinals inscriptions on Bitcoin, with activity showing no signs of slowing.

The contract standard was made by the Miladys NFT ecosystem in collaboration with the Ordinals marketplace Ordinals.Market and Bitcoin wallet Xverse.

But any NFT collection could utilize the one-way bridge to Bitcoin.

One thing to note about the contract standard: it doesn’t currently store metadata onchain.

– Instead, users can embed a low-quality preview image and a receipt of the original burned NFT to preserve provenance.

Try it out: Bridge a Milady (DYOR)

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