There’s plenty going on in crypto this week, and that includes the frothy NFT sub-sector. Making news: Goblintown-related controversy; plans for a Canon NFT marketplace and a hefty Illuvium “Illuvitar” sale.
Goblintown gets (even more) gobby
Toilet-humour-tastic NFTs in the Goblintown.wtf collection have all, temporarily, had their original artworks removed and changed to an animated image of a giant bird-flipping hand that’s also holding up three additional middle fingers, surrounded by some expletive-filled messaging/whinging. Suddenly, and without prior warning.
WTF indeed. Here, this is what we mean…
In what’s clearly a sarcastic tone, all of the 10,000 Goblintown NFTs currently read (minus the censorship-sensitive asterisks, of course, which are pointless given the tweeted image above but hey-ho):
Truth Labs, the founders of Goblintown and other related NFT projects, are not happy with changes from major NFT marketplaces regarding royalty payments for creators of NFTs.
And that’s pretty understandable given that top NFT marketplaces Blur and OpenSea have recently decided to enforce just a mere 0.5% creator royalty fee for many/most projects. These are the fees NFT creators receive for the on-selling of their NFTs on secondary marketplaces.
It’s a little more complicated than that for Blur, however, which, as reported by Decrypt and others recently, pretty much declared war on rival OpenSea by offering full creator royalties for NFT collections that block trading on the leading NFT marketplace (which is OpenSea).
NFT creator royalties have tended to range between about 5% to 10% of the sale price – a potentially very handy earner for NFT artists and project founders.
The reason, by the way, for the temporary change to the goblin NFTs is to give Truth Labs time to alter the assets’ smart contracts to help enable creator discretion on royalties. New versions of the NFTs with their original goblin artworks are due to be dropped to holders by the end of this weekend.
While Truth Labs have called out the NFT marketplaces for a “slow rug”, some of the project’s holders aren’t so happy with Truth Labs themselves – largely for making a call on smart-contract alteration without consulting the Goblintown community of holders.
By the way, if you want to learn a bit more about WTF Goblintown actually is and how it came about, nft now has an excellent write-up on the project here.
And in other NFT news…
• An Illuvium: Beyond player has struck the jackpot by unveiling a coveted Illuvitar NFT in a “D1SK” pack, selling it on for a whopping US$45k, according to Illuvium’s official Twitter page. (Slightly more, though, if you believe the Illuvitars bot tweet below).
Said NFT was a “Holo Blazing Rhamphyre” – a coveted asset in the collection of Illuvitars so far released into the world. Is this another sign of frothy excitement returning to crypto and the NFT market more specifically? We’ll field that one… and we say unequivocally, absolutely yes.
The lucky buyer/seller/flipper found the Illuvitar NFT inside a D1SK – a type of digital loot box that contains random Illuvitars and accessories. And you can buy those for only about only US$32. This translates to a profit of oh, only about 140,525%.
Not a bad fraction of a day’s work, really.
• Canon USA, the American division of the global camera and photographic imaging titan, has announced it will be launching an Ethereum NFT marketplace later this year concentrating on NFT-enabled photography.
Dubbed Cadabra, and being previewed at this week’s NFT NYC conference, it will be a curated marketplace for tokenised photos across various categories, including wildlife, sports, lifestyle and landscapes.
