Category: NFTs

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Crypto News NFTs

eBay to Allow the Sale of NFTs on its Platform

E-commerce giant eBay has dipped its toe into the burgeoning non-fungible token (NFT) market. In a blog post, the company said it’s updating its policy to include sales of NFTs ranging from digital collectibles such as trading cards, video clips to images and art. 

eBay is reportedly the first e-commerce company to allow such a service. As per the announcement, the initial rollout of the NFT service only involves a selected number of trusted sellers who were able to meet eBay’s standards “across categories like trading cards, music, entertainment and art“. This is more like a pilot launch aimed at enabling eBay to understand what’s important to their community.

In coming months, eBay will launch new functionalities to allow blockchain-driven collectibles. This will enable its audience to buy and sell NFT content directly on the platform.

Expect to see programs, policies, and tools that will allow our audiences to buy and sell NFTs with greater ease and confidence, across a broader range of categories.

Jordan Sweetnam, eBay senior vice-president

NFTs are Gaining Broad Support 

As Crypto News Australia reported, eBay began considering supporting crypto and NFTs early in May. The NFT frenzy is only getting stronger as other big-name corporations such as Facebook join the fray. Recently, the head of Facebook financial services, David Marcus, disclosed the social media giant is considering enabling support for NFTs on the Novi digital wallet. 

Fractionalised NFTs are also breaking out in the market. This follows the recent listing of the official Dogecoin meme NFT as fractionalised tokens, raising the initial US$5.5 million cost price to over US$300 million. Some market participants say this will be the next big trend in the NFT sphere.

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Crypto Memes Crypto News Dogecoin Ethereum NFTs

Demand for Fractionalised NFTs Grows as Doge Meme Valuation Exceeds $300 Million

The Shiba Inu named Kabosu is not only the most popular dog on the planet, it’s been immortalised on the blockchain as the face of Dogecoin – now up for sale in pieces as a fractionalised NFT.

In June 2021, Kabosu’s owner, Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato, minted the famous photograph as an NFT. The image (above) of her pet dog went viral, after unknowingly becoming the mascot for $DOGE – the cryptocurrency that started mass meme coin mania and whose valuation is now over US$300 million.

The NFT, aptly named Doge, was sold recently for a record-breaking price of 1696.9 ETH (over US$5.5 million) to investment collective PleasrDAO on August 31.

PleasrDAO is now offering up the NFT in parts to the broader Dogecoin community by fractionalising it into billions of pieces using fractional.art. The Doge NFT is now available for purchase in the form of $DOGE ERC-20 tokens, allowing for multiple owners.

First Auction Generates US$45 Million

The first auction of $DOGE took place on September 1 on miso.sushi.com, raising a total of 11,942 Wrapped Ethereum (worth more than US$45 million) from 1,796 buyers, according to figures from MISO.

Fractionalisation of an NFT allows owners to mint ERC-20 tokens. Unlike NFTs, which usually apply Ethereum’s ERC-721 token standard, the ERC-20 tokens are fungible and can be traded, sent and received on smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain. $DOGE is now available to exchange on fractional.art or on decentralised exchanges Sushi or Uniswap.

Ownership of the Doge NFT provides access to an exclusive set of activities brought to you directly by the Doge community. For more details, visit the Doge Discord.

Top “blue chip” NFTs have become insanely expensive and are now out of reach for many collectors as prices have gone through the roof: CryptoPunks, for example, recently hit US$1 billion in sales. CryptoPunk #543 has also been chopped up and sold as a fractionalised NFT, going for $1 per share.

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Blockchain Crypto Art NFTs

Playboy Set to Release NFTs on the ‘Art of Gender and Sexuality’

The latest brand to jump aboard a non-fungible token bandwagon already groaning under the weight of art, music, gaming, beverages and sports collectibles is soft-core porn publishing pioneer Playboy, which is inviting submissions for its first NFT exhibition next month.

In partnership with Sevens Foundation, a non-profit that helps digital artists create and exhibit NFTs, Playboy will choose 50 winning submissions for its inaugural series, mint them as NFTs and promote them on social media.

The first topic of the proposed four-part series is “The Art of Gender & Sexuality”, with October 1 the closing date for submissions. In the month following, winning artists will have their work showcased at the NFT.NYC conference to be held in Times Square, New York City.

Playboy Has Form in the Crypto Space

In previous flirtations with the NFT space, Playboy collaborated with digital artist Slimesunday on May’s “Liquid Summer” collection featuring archival photographs of Playboy model Lena Forsen, the so-called “First Lady of the Internet”. Last month, the multimedia brand posted articles teaching artists how to mint NFTs, using the example of its initial foray into collecting NFTs via 2020’s Beeple Bull Run series.

Image from the Beeple Bull Run series, some of which Playboy collected.

The leisure and lifestyle magazine’s crypto journey actually began in 2018 when Playboy TV started accepting payments in bitcoin.

For Liz Suman, its vice-president of art curation and editorial, Playboy’s interest in crypto and NFTs is “a natural fit” for a magazine with a near 70-year history of resisting censorship and championing free speech.

We’ve always been a place that champions art in sometimes controversial ways and see NFTs as the frontier of creative expression going forward … As a female curator working in the digital art space, I’m most excited about the opportunity to build on that legacy by working with more female artists and diverse voices.

Liz Sulman, VP, art curation and editorial, Playboy

Sevens and Playboy Chase ‘the Global Promise’ of Blockchain

For its part, Sevens Foundation developer Tim Kang says the non-profit organisation is selective in who it works with to ensure niche social issues and minorities are represented in “the global promise” of blockchain.

We seek out partners and relationships who represent and align with our goals. It’s important for us to elevate women and LGBTQ+ voices to achieve healthy equality and understanding, so we’re excited to work with Playboy to highlight artists in the community who value cultural progress and integrity through creative expression and digital works. 

Tim Kang, Sevens Foundation developer

Neither Sevens nor Playboy will derive any profit from the exercise, and both entities will showcase the chosen artists’ work across their collective social media channels and digital platforms, with a combined reach of more than 25 million followers.

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Cryptocurrencies DeFi Ethereum NFTs

ETH Soars 20% Amid Thriving NFT and DeFi Sectors

We are officially off to the races again as ETH leads the charge in a strong bullish ascent back up towards previous all-time highs after a month of sideways action. In the past week alone, ETH is up over 20 percent, reaching A$5,120 at the time of publication.

Source: Coinjar

Ethereum has now beaten bitcoin’s price action for three months straight. The King of Crypto has struggled to break through the key psychological resistance level of US$50,000, while Ethereum is picking up the pace, rising by 50 percent in the last month.

ETH has climbed over 380 percent so far in 2021, with gains largely attributed to the booming DeFi and NFT sectors. Bitcoin, however, has only managed to gain 62 percent so far this year against the USD. 

Here Comes DeFi Summer 2.0

Market activity and token prices are surging as altcoins, especially in DeFi, look to the upside and we welcome the announcement of DeFi Summer 2.0.

There used to be just bitcoin and altcoins. Now you’ve got bitcoin, altcoins, DeFi, NFTs, all these different things, and then within those you’ve got subcategories of gaming NFTs, JPG NFTs, collections of NFTs and real world NFTs. There are so many different things within crypto…and basically all the money does between all these different things is shift.

@ThatMartiniGuy, YouTube

Calling ‘Alt Season’

Traditionally when Ethereum breaks and Bitcoin dominance drops, money in the market flows into other cryptocurrencies. That is exactly what is starting happen as mid-caps begin to surge. The likes of Cardano, Solana, Polkadot and Kusama have all been performing exceedingly well as the sea begins to rise once again.

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Blockchain Crypto News Ethereum NFTs Scams

Fake Banksy NFT Sells For A$465,000 Amid Suspicion the Artist’s Website Was Hacked

A British crypto art collector who paid almost half a million dollars for a non-existent NFT by graffiti artist Banksy was most likely the victim of a hacker, as it turns out.

A link to an online auction for the purported NFT was posted on a since-deleted page of the artist’s website, banksy.co.uk, a week ago. The only item on the page was a JPEG (below) of Banksy’s impression of a CryptoPunk, the NFT craze that’s already generated more than A$1.5 billion.

The artwork, evidently Banksy’s comment on the substantial carbon footprint NFTs generate, was titled “Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster”.

Banksy’s purported NFT, Great Redistribution of the Climate Change Disaster.
Source: yahoonews.com

Soon after an image of the artwork was listed yesterday on the OpenSea NFT marketplace, furious bidding broke out for what people assumed was a “genuine” Banksy NFT.

100 ETH For an NFT That Never Was

The winning bid, fully 90 percent higher than any other, was made by an otherwise anonymous crypto art collector who calls himself “Pranksy”. It ran to a gobsmacking 100 ETH, or just over A$465,120, according to blockchain records.

Meanwhile, the page on Banksy’s website was quietly taken down, with no word about how it had appeared on the site in the first place. The buyer told the BBC that he suspected Banksy’s site had been hacked, and that some random scam artist put up the seemingly legitimate webpage.

No Such Thing as a Banksy NFT

Banksy’s PR team also denied that any NFT existed in the artist’s name. But in a happy ending to a bizarre story, the hacker has since refunded the 100 ETH to Pranksy’s bank account, less the transaction fee of around A$10,000.

Pranksy says he’s planning on keeping the artwork, for now at least.

The refund was totally unexpected. I think the press coverage of the hack plus the fact that I had found the hacker and followed him on Twitter may have pushed him into a refund. I feel very lucky when a lot of others in a similar situation with less reach would not have had the same outcome.

Pranksy, duped NFT art collector

Just a fortnight ago, Crypto News warned Australians about the prevalence of fake crypto trading websites. Pranksy, for one, seems to have missed the memo.

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Crypto Art Ethereum NFTs

NFTs Still Booming as Ethereum-Based CryptoPunks Project Hits $1 Billion in Sales

CryptoPunks has become the second collectible NFT project in a month to surge past US$1 billion in sales after Axie Infinity hit the mark on August 8, though OpenSea remains the undisputed market leader with sales of US$3.53 billion.

With the cheapest CryptoPunk now selling for US$445,000, prices are still climbing – as recently as August 28, the floor price for a single CryptoPunk was a comparatively modest US$345,000.

“Covid Alien”, aka CryptoPunk 7523, which sold for $11.8 million. Source: cnn.com

However, neither mark remotely compares to the world record price paid at auction for a single CryptoPunk in June: an astonishing US$11,754,000 for “Covid Alien”, aka CryptoPunk 7523, one of just nine “alien punks” in a series.

A Cool $15M For a Pair of Alien Punks

There are a total of 10,000 CryptoPunks, with no two exactly alike. When launched in 2017 by Larva Labs, original CryptoPunks were made available for free but several have since changed hands for millions of dollars. Two other “alien punks” sold for more than US$7.5 million each, according to CryptoSlam, and seven more have gone for over a million each. In May, a collection of nine CryptoPunks sold for almost US$17 million at Christie’s.

Trading surged to new heights in late July, pushing CryptoPunks’ daily volume up from US$1.8 million to US$41.5 million within a week. Things got even hotter in August. A week ago, CryptoPunks hit a daily sales record of US$101 million when VISA bought one of the Punks, and the project’s total trading volume has increased by 716 percent in the seven days since.

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Crypto News Ethereum NFTs

Costly Mistake: Mutant Ape NFT Sold for 17 USDC Instead of 17 ETH Worth $54,000

Confusing USDC for ETH is a costly stupidity fee in the world of crypto and NFT trading. This kind of “accident” happens when you don’t pay attention, and there is no customer service desk to help you get a refund.

Mutant Ape #5275.

Last weekend, Mutant Ape #5275 sold for just $17 (0.0035 ETH) instead of 17 ETH (US$54,000) on OpenSea. Here is the transaction on Etherscan.

Floor price for the Ape is 7.95 ETH (US$24,200). The new owner of Mutant Ape #5275 scored the deal-of-a-lifetime discount after fooling the seller by cheekily sending through his purchase bid in USDC (instead of the usual transaction currency of ETH).

Mutant Ape #5275 Now on the Market for a Cool $18K

According to Etherscan and OpenSea, poor Douglass had spent about 2.87 ETH ($9,100), including fees, to mint Mutant Ape #5275 before mistakenly selling it to lucky recipient FungiblesV1 for only 17 USDC (instead of the 17 ETH he likely assumed). Only three hours later, he swiftly flipped the NFT for 5 ETH, making an easy profit of $15,900, which he then onsold to new owner Weevis who currently has a highest offer pending of 5.7691 ETH ($18,318.80).

The initial sale has raised the question of whether OpenSea should as a matter of course post a warning in the order of “are-you-sure-you-really-want-to-sell-this-NFT-for-a-99.9%-loss?“

Misfortunes such as this are sadly commonplace in the wild west of NFT collectibles. In early August, Crypto News Australia reported how another simple error led to a US$69,000 CryptoPunk selling for under one cent.

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Facebook NFTs Social media

Facebook Exploring NFTs as Part of ‘Ready’ Digital Wallet

Facebook is considering allowing the company’s Novi digital wallet to support NFTs, according to David Marcus, the social media giant’s head of financial services. 

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Marcus said Facebook is in a “good position” to enter the NFT market and allow users with related features to store their work. This would make the Novi wallet a multifunctional system besides just storing Diem, Facebook’s delayed token formerly known as Libra.

We’re definitely thinking about this. It’s really an area that is worth exploring, and one where we can have a positive impact for both creators and consumers.

David Marcus, head of financial services, Facebook

Novi Would Facilitate Cross-Border Payments

Facebook hopes Novi (which will go live as soon as Diem goes live) will make cross-border payments more efficient and reduce transaction costs.

Novi is Facebook’s blockchain-based wallet to support Diem transactions. Libra, Diem’s predecessor, was a coin meant to be backed by a mixed set of currencies and government debt, yet after several regulatory hurdles it was left as another stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar.

Speaking of regulatory uncertainty, the Reserve Bank of Australia, which has been dragging its feet regarding the study and launch of its own CBDC, remains unsure if the Diem will gain regulatory approval and be allowed to operate in Australia.

Facebook still suffers from the mistrust people have felt over the years regarding personal data security and privacy, thus their negative response to the company’s involvement in finance. Marcus has referred to this opposition as “un-American”, adding: “I don’t think we deserve people’s trust, I think we deserve a shot at earning people’s trust.”

Western Countries Are Losing the Race

Marcus notes that Western countries such as the US are lagging in technological and financial innovation compared to countries like China. “We are really falling behind at an alarming rate,” he says.

Four months ago, Facebook announced it was working on Pontem, an experimental network for Diem that will allow users to build decentralised applications (dApps), DeFi strategies, and other tools before Diem goes live.

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Blockchain Crypto News NFTs

Budweiser Dives Into Crypto: Pays 38 ETH for Beer.eth Domain Name and Rocket NFT

American beer brand Budweiser has bought the Beer.eth domain name for 30 ETH and changed its Twitter profile picture to that of an NFT rocket ship from manufacturing plant Rocket Factory for another 8 ETH, its total outlay the equivalent of US$120,000.

For the uninitiated, .eth domains can be created via the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a distributed, transparent and extensible naming system powered by the Ethereum blockchain. All .eth domain owners are able to use their addresses to receive ETH, other cryptocurrencies and even NFTs.

The Tom Sachs-designed Budweiser rocket ship. Source: decrypt.co

Parent Company Partners With Gary Vee

The new Budweiser rocket ship NFT was designed by Rocket Factory’s Tom Sachs. Budweiser’s parent company, Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), first dipped its toe into the burgeoning NFT collectibles industry last July when it signed a partnership deal with Gary Vaynerchuk, aka Gary Vee, a Belarusian entrepreneur and internet personality. At the time, the team made it clear it would invest in Vaynerchuk’s NFT media shop, which would mint Budweiser’s NFTs on the platform.

Budweiser’s breadth gave us an opportunity to go big because we think NFTs are not a fad … crypto-collectibles have the potential to change the way people think about their sponsorship properties in the future.

Richard Oppy, vice-president, global brands, AB InBev

Just Another Phallic Symbol?

Bizarrely, the wallet that holds the Tom Sachs Budweiser rocket and the beer.eth NFTs also holds a random assortment of other NFTs, including two shaped like a penis (see PeePeeBoy, above) and one pointedly called the “cryptodickbutt”. It has to be said that the shape of the Bud rocket ship is not a million miles removed.

Budweiser is not the first big beverage brand to recognise the potential market for NFTs. As reported on July 30 by Crypto News Australia, Coca-Cola released a collection in association with OpenSea and Decentraland to mark International Friendship Day and raise money for Special Olympics International.

The Budweiser NFT rocket mission, on the other hand, appears to be a strictly commercial arrangement.

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Crypto News Crypto Wallets NFTs Scams

Scam Alert: Fake OpenSea Support Staff Are Stealing Crypto and NFTs

OpenSea users are the latest victims in a phishing attack where scammers are posing as support staff in Discord to take over wallets and steal funds.

These fake support admins are targeting users who have asked for help and tricking them into giving access to their MetaMask wallet, resulting in the loss of everything in that wallet, including NFTs.

Breakdown of the OpenSea Scam

Here’s how it works. An OpenSea user in need of support requests help at OpenSea’s help centre or via the site’s Discord server. Scammers respond by sending private messages and inviting the user to a fake “OpenSea Support” server under their control (see image below).

After being walked through various troubleshooting steps, the fake OpenSea Support scammer asks the user to share their screen. They tell the victim that they need to resync their MetaMask Chrome extension with their MetaMask mobile app.

To synch your mobile MetaMask wallet with your Chrome extension, if you go to Settings > Advanced > Sync with your mobile phone, you enter your password and a QR code will be displayed. The scammer then screenshots this QR code and can sync it with the MetaMask app on their own mobile phone, without asking for your seed phrase or password (because you already entered it on your end).

Now scammers have full access to the victim’s MetaMask wallet and all the cryptocurrency and any NFT collectibles stored within it. They then transfer the user’s assets to their own wallets and there is nothing the real support staff can do to help get it back.

How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Always go through the official help desk ticket option for communicating with support staff to ensure you don’t lose all your crypto assets in your wallet to a dodgy scammer. As these scams are so popular right now, it is strongly advised that OpenSea users only open tickets through the site’s help centre and not use Discord or Twitter when seeking support.

This is a warning: never share your wallet’s recovery keys, password phrases or QR codes used for synchronising. Always be alert; if anyone direct-messages you through any platform they are most likely a scammer. Do not click on any links to an external server; this is a red flag. Real support staff will never directly message you, send you any link to click on, or ask you to share your screen or password, etc. These are all red flags. Go slowly and be careful out there, scammers are everywhere.

Scam Alert: The number of crypto scams continues to grow. Australians should be wary when dealing in crypto as phishing attacks, fake support staff, fake apps and fake sites are everywhere.