Decentralised AI Assistant ??

GM, folks ???? - Happy Wednesday.

Let's get into today's issue ??

In Today's Issue:

• What Matters:?OpenSea reduces fees to zero ??
• Products:?AlgoveraAI, a decentralized AI assistant ??
• Charts:?10.5M Reddit NFT holders, Bitcoin Ordinals NFT growth ??

This newsletter is co-written by?Marco Manoppo

WHAT MATTERS

OpenSea Reduces Fees to Zero

State of play:?OpenSea, one of the world's largest NFT marketplaces, has?reduced?its trading fees to zero and removed royalties on collections without contract-level enforcements.

• NFT marketplace Blur, which has zero trading fees, has been?taking?significant market share?away from OpenSea in the past few months.
• With this change, the large majority of NFT marketplaces are now?not enforcing royalties.
• NFT might?need legal avenues?to enforce royalties, in order to maintain one of its strongest features for creators, as royalties are?not fully enforceable on-chain.

What’s next:?NFT market dynamics will change significantly. New marketplaces with unique primitives like SudoSwap are turning NFT more "fungible", with a focus on trading experience, instead of collectors. This might?make NFT less attractive for artists?as it loses its number one benefit, royalty fees.

Our take:?We've always said that building in crypto is a double-edged sword. You have no edge via Intellectual Property as everything is open-source. This often results in business models becoming a race to the bottom???

So how does this affect web3 builders and investors?

?? Zero Fees NFTs

PRODUCTS OF THE WEEK

AlgoveraAI: A Decentralized AI Assistant

What is AlgoveraAI:?AlgoveraAI?is a decentralized AI assistant for organizations. By connecting personal data for web2 and web3 sources, Algovera’s AI model will create personalized AI assistants.

• These assistants can help with?specific tasks?such as community management, governance assistant, personal note management, and many more.
• The project is built with?multiple existing technologies. This includes Ocean Protocol, IPFS, and OpenAI. It’s also supported by Kernel and Gitcoin.
• Grants program. AlgoveraAI will pay developers that build their AI workflow through AlgoveraAI. There’s a $10,000 equity-free grants per month, distributed evenly to 10 applicants ($1,000 each). AlgoveraAI charges $0.01 per credit or $10 per month for 1,500 credits and perks.

Other cool products:

• Alpha Drops, a tool to discover new crypto alphas.
• Shardible, a low code end to end NFT marketplace.
• OpenCover, a DeFi data aggregator.
• Chainstack, a platform connecting developers and web3 infrastructure.
• SCATR by Stabel, a smart contract security tool.
• CharmVerse, a platform for token communities to group, work, and build relationships.
• Web3Summary, a platform summarizing web3 contents using AI.
• ChainJet, a no-code tool to build on-chain and off-chain task automations.
• Pizza Wallet, an easy-to-use multichain crypto wallet
• Degenda, a web3 events and announcement tracking tool.

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

Reddit-Polygon Avatar Growth: 10.5 Million Holders

Reddit avatar holders reached 10.5 million. The Super Bowl might have ended but Reddit and Polygon PoS, the blockchain its collectible avatars were built on, have broken new records. In the past few weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, more than?1.8 million Super Bowl avatars?were minted???

Our take:?Polygon is defacto king in business development. The chain has been able to acquire many corporate partnerships, pushing crypto towards the masses. Polygon is able to focus on products, without having to remind the end users that what they’re interacting with is blockchain-crypto technology. This is key to adoption???

To watch:?Great marketing and business development need to go together with technology and revenue. Polygon PoS hit $1.5M in revenue, which was an all-time high, last week. However, we need to see how the network performs post the partnership hype, and how it will compete with other up-and-coming Layer 1, with equally significant funding such as Sui and Aptos???

Bitcoin NFTs Growth

Bitcoin NFTs (Ordinals) growth continues. The first inscription happened on Dec 17th, but the explosive growth started on Jan 21st. In total, there are now?~140,000 Ordinals.

State of Play:?Ordinals is the first?successful implementation of NFTs?on the Bitcoin blockchain. It inscribes data in the “witness section” of a Bitcoin transaction, which allows blocks with Ordinals to be significantly larger than usual. Post Ordinals, the average Bitcoin block size has grown from?~1.5 MB to 2.5-3 MB.

Our take:?Bitcoin eventually needs to find other ways to receive fees. Although this isn’t an immediate concern, Bitcoiners have been discussing the future of the asset if halvings continue to decrease miners' revenue???

• Some projects like Stacks aim to build smart contracts on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. The success of Ordinals is marked by many Bitcoiners as a milestone moment, signaling that Bitcoin might be able to support scalable decentralized applications.

QUICK BITES

• Nishad Singh?pleads?guilty, he’s the 3rd FTX former Exec to do so.
• OpenSea?reduces?fees to zero.
• Galois Capital?shuts down?as funds got stuck in FTX.
• Blockchain.com?clarifies?subsidiaries situation.
• Tencent?slash?its metaverse hardware plans.
• Jump?revealed?to be the unnamed ‘US trading firm’ in SEC vs Do Kwon.
• SEC?warns?celebrities over crypto promotion.
• OKX?releases?February Proof-of-Reserves report.
• Custodia Bank?renews?push for Fed ‘Master Account’.
• Filecoin?soars?due to interest in Filecoin Virtual Machine launch.
• Helium?will fully?migrate to Solana by March 27.

MEME & NOTEWORTHY READS

• Jon Charbonneau’s?article?on why Ethereum is not ultrasound money.
• @xavana0x’s?thread?on Ethereum shanghai upgrade and LSD tokens.
• Luca Prosperi’s?article?on Circle’s situation.