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Contents
Featured Collection:
Join us on an adventure as we discover The Littles. 10,000 little frens with some BIG brothers. We explore why these little guys were selected as the first recipients of the CyberKongz Kongz Tank initiative and what might be in store for the future.
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Featured Artist
We showcase award winning photographer & NFT Artist Marcel Strelow A.K.A Little #8487
10-11
Early Alpha x Truchet
EarlyAlpha explores the Truchet Styles project by TycheCollective. 2048 algorithmically generated, unique stylizations on the humble Truchet tile.
12-13
Dexter Lennon x Bolero
Dex deep dives into Bolero, the web3 platform decentralising the music industry.
14-15
Meta News
Catch up on some things you might have missed this week in the metaverse.
We The Littles This 10K collection of N-F-cuTies led by Wilson Lee is more than just adorable, it’s a FUD free fun-zone with a stacked team and big dreams. The Littles quickly rose to prominence in the Metaverse as the first Kongz Tank recipient, receiving a grant of up to 10 ETH and 1K $BANANA based on project progress and boy, has this project progressed. But what was the pitch that impressed the Kongz? Well, you might start by looking at the roadmap and notice a lack there-of. The Littles manifestoe proudly steers clear of roadmaps and copy pasta schemes to focus instead on adventure and fun. But what is fun? It can be hard to remember when so many projects are rinse and repeat cash grabs from the same circle
of influencers. The Littles are flipping the trend of early promises and late delivery on its head. Since releasing on November 26th, the project sold out in 3 minutes, became verified on OpenSea in what felt like 4 minutes, and with a 5.6k owner distribution, only 15% of this collection are available for sale! Next week the whole collection will be available on Worldwide Webb as the first bouncing avatars on the platform, now that’s fun.
Collection: 10K Owners: 5.6K Floor: 0.35 Ξ Not for sale: 85%
Big Frens Cyber Kongz aren’t the only frens these little guys have, the project has also partnered with Sup Ducks, Kaiju Kingz and Cool Cats to gear up for a fun-filled 2022 and deliver cool shnizz. If we can speculate a moment about why this project is scooping up so many blue-chip partnerships, let’s look at what is involved in the Kongz Tank initiative: “The project needs to introduce utility for one of the assets from the CyberKongz universe and/or $BANANA.” Based on the Cool Cats teaser, who you may know have a token of their own– we suspect
Littles will be upgradeable with cool little outfits using tokens from the respective communities they have partnered with. Dress your little up like a Kongz using $BANANA, or a Cool Cat using $MILK. There’s so much potential for an idea like that besides being super fun, it could potentially allow Littles to enter the ecosystems of these highfloor communities in interesting ways. Again, we’re just guessing what the exact nature of these partnerships will entail but it’s extremely fun to think about. It may even mean The Littles could potentially partner with Bored Apes, who are expected to launch a token in 2022.
Little Lice
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Huge Potential In a short amount of time The Littles have demonstrated they have the art, the team, the tech and although they’re a little secretive, they clearly have big plans. With blue-chip partnerships stacking up and an affordable floor price, this is one project you don’t want to miss out on.
Meet Marc Our featured artist is an awardwinning photographer, NFT creator and Little fren. Marcel Strelow is a German nature and landscape photographer who has carefully culminated a breath-taking Blend of Space and Time, captured Living Canyons and received international awards from National Geographic.
From Munich to the Metaverse, Marcel’s NFT photography captures starry nights frozen in time, bucket-list destinations, and a soothing sense of life. The Blend of Space and Time collection even comes with some real-life utility, the first 3 collectors can receive a signed ultra HD print and when sold out, all collectors will receive an Airdrop exclusive to the collection. We got a chance to chat with the man behind the camera and ask him a few questions.
Q.
You’ve been all over the world – does your photography fuel the travel, or travel fuels the photography?
A. Definitely travel fueling
photography. Exploration comes first. At least when visiting a place for the first time. I really enjoy scouting places during the day together with my family. That said, I also do love coming back for the photo when conditions promise to be perfect
Q. When did you discover
NFTs & decide to start minting your photography?
A. I minted my first NFT in May this year but it took about 3 months to figure the space out properly. There’s much to learn and things change every day. That’s so fascinating. Love it
cel Strelow
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Q.
Do you think we’ve seen a big breakthrough of photography NFTs yet or are we yet to discover the full potential of the technology combination?
A. I think there’s still so much
to come for NFT photography. It feels like 99% of people are not yet active with NFTs. For them, purchasing a virtual yacht or profile JPEG doesn’t make much sense - buying a 1/1 piece of photography art does though. It’s a commonly accepted way to express taste and style. That’s what makes me bullish on NFT photography
BOLERO WAN CHAMPION N Hey, what is ‘art’ anyway?
These NFT things sure have changed the art world, right? By this point, there’s little doubt that the revolution will indeed be non-fungible. Great. Put on your meta-slippers and pop the champagne. But a question remains — how broadly will this new brush of prosperity reach across the wider artistic spectrum? Hit the streets — go on, I dare you — and ask your average Jane Doe what art means to them. Most of the time you’re going to hear something about paint on canvas. They’ll talk about Picasso, Monet, and of course Van Gogh and how he cut his own ear off — yes Jane, we know. Or maybe they’re a little more new age; a fan of Bob Ross, perhaps, having stumbled upon his happy little clouds in search of an ASMR fix. They’d be perfectly entitled to their view, and oh boy could Picasso have abstracted-up a storm in the age of NFTs. But another passerby might take a different view.
Earlier this year, whilst in televised late night conversation with Ringo Starr, Jimmy Kimmel declared that he views The Beatles’ body of work as “up there with Da Vinci — with the great works of art throughout history.” As my Fab Four namesake might reveal, I’d tend to agree. But in the early years of this movement, it’s more difficult to assess how a masterpiece like Abbey Road or Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might succeed in the Metaverse, in the same way that a newly minted Guernica almost certainly would. And this is The Beatles for crying out loud — the most commercially successful act of all time. What hope is there for musical artists on the lowest rungs of the ladder?
Investing in emerging talent A viable answer to this question is seemingly emerging from Paris, France. Bolero Music have their sights set on decentralising the music
industry. The pla platform for mus the Metaverse to emerging talent; new music.
Backed by a Tier host of crypto en and built on the Blockchain, Boler platform went liv iteration in April. collective mainta of thirteen acts, spanning jazz, el R&B. Their locati is a contrast — fo least, Bolero’s ro exclusively based
The idea is simpl standard NFTs fo like music releas merchandise, an tickets, Bolero w invest in the arti through the inter of Social Tokens.
Social Tokens — baseball cards he unique, unalterab issued in limited Bolero promotes as digital membe with holders ben exclusive drops d
NTS YOU TO NEW MUSIC.
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r 1 VC fund, a ntrepreneurs, Polygon ro’s flagship ve in its first . Currently the ains a roster with genres lectro, pop and ion, however, or now, at oster seems d in France.
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think NFT ere — are ble objects quantities. s these tokens erships, nefiting from direct from
the artist. More interestingly, though, is the system by which the value of these tokens can rise and fall in line with the musician’s development. Bolero’s algorithm takes into consideration the growth of sales, streaming numbers, social engagement, and popularity, in maintaining a score for each of their artists. With gains in all of these areas, you could expect to see an artist’s score — and thus their token’s value — rise with each of Bolero’s weekly score updates. Sitting atop the Bolero charts at the time of writing is Pastel, an R&B artist who’s single Sleep Away is soundtracking the production of this article. With 289 tokens issued so far, you could own $PST today for $11. If, a few years from now, Pastel is as synonymous with R&B success as The Weeknd, you could find yourself wishing you’d swooped up one of his tokens.
First steps As the lucrative NFT movement continues to burst into the mainstream, lining the pockets of digital artists everywhere while doing so, so far it feels
lacklustre in providing the same prosperity for musicians.
Bolero, by all accounts, is taking first steps in the right direction. The collective’s vision is to create a new and sustainable source of income for musicians by providing a platform for their digital assets. It’ll be a while before we can truly assess if Bolero really is manufacturing the decentralised breakthrough the music industry has been waiting for. As the Metaverse evolves, we here at Drop Magazine are keeping our eyes open for the developments that just might help bring about the next Beatles as easily as the next Picasso.
Words by @Dexter_Lennon
Truchet
Recently, it feels as though many NFT enthusiasts are migrating away from rinse-andrepeat profile picture collections, with a few exceptions of course for fundamentally solid projects. One niche that has long been present, but appears to be getting a bit more attention recently, is the realm of generative art. As a result, in this edition we’ll be turning the spotlight to a stunning set of works which perfectly showcases what this category is all about - Truchet Styles. The naming of this collection is an homage to Truchet Tiles, which are the common building block for all 2,048 pieces. Whilst these tiles are very simple shapes individually, the algorithm that generated the collection consists of many functions, each with the potential to transform this single element into a range of beautiful, complex formations. Some of these commands are very straightforward i.e. addition and rotating of tiles. However, other features can increase the intricacy of the image by varying colours, integrating extra layers and even introducing glitches that were picked up as ‘happy accidents’ during the experimental phases of the algorithm! This wonderful collection is
the first project released by Tyche Collective, a UK/US artist & coding duo, combining the two passions in the name of generative goodness. Looking ‘under the bonnet’ at the algo itself, this is a product of the p5.js JavaScript library, which is proving to be very popular amongst generative NFT creators. The code is all hosted off chain and, although the metadata hasn’t been frozen for the collection, there’s good reason for this! Tyche Collective has integrated ‘evolutions’ into the project; these serve as a means for collectors to interact with their piece, directing the future appearance of it over the course of 3 events and therefore allowing a collaboration of sorts between themselves and the creators. Tyche Collective thought it was a shame that there would never be more than 2,048 pieces in the collection, but didn’t want excessive amounts to be minted which would lead to a saturated market and very little value for holders. Therefore, in creating the option to evolve the artwork, this allows the project to remain scarce as well as - albeit only visually - exist beyond the 2,048 works that were minted originally!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year or so, words like ‘roadmap’ and ‘utility’ should be key parts of your
vocabulary. A lot of projects nowadays use a combination of the two in order to advertise how much ‘value’ they’ll be bringing to holders, driving hype and helping to sell out their collection. Unfortunately, in many instances, teams are very amateur; they often fall short of the mark due to having little, if any, business experience and not realising the scale of what is involved to deliver upon their promises. Between this and outright cash grabs & rug pulls, many NFTs fall by the wayside and leave collectors feeling burnt. Thankfully in this case, Tyche Collective is very upfront about there being no roadmap or utility planned for Truchet Styles holders - the collection is purely a display of beautiful generative art for people to enjoy! Although this is only the first project from the ambitious creators (and what a way to kick things off!), there are more to come in the future. The pair intend on pursuing on-chain generation and storage, and are actively experimenting with the Ethereum virtual machine to see how far they can push the creative constraints of Solidity. In the interest of open-source creating, Tyche Collective also plans to release a series of posts after every collection is released, detailing the concept of each drop and what they
t Styles
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have learnt throughout the process. Incredibly, they’ll also be releasing the full code behind each collection, so that others can dissect and benefit from it! Here at Drop Magazine, we’re incredibly excited to follow the journey of Tyche Collective and hope you’ll join us in dropping them a follow and showing the current work some love!
Words by @early_alpha
This week in the M (Dec 6nd – 10th 2
The Appro Christies x OpenSea Christies and Opensea teamed up this week with an on-chain auction. Hosted through Opensea and curated by Christies, collectors could discover and bid on Ethereum NFTs from the 4-7th December.
Drop Magazine hold Lordampersand’s ne Approach” is out no features 50 hand-d over each-other ite single piece when c
Bored Apes x Adidas Adidas is the latest brand name entering the metaverse, partnering with BAYC following the purchase of BAYC #8774 in September for 46 ether. Not much is known about the partnership at this time but you can bet some merch will be involved.
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Spider Man: Into the Metaverse AMC Theatres has planned its first NFT promotion raffling off 86,000 Spider-Man NFTs to subscribers. The collaboration between Sony and AMC will provide more than 100 NFT drawings and is expected to be delivered December 22nd.
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Issue #10 - 7/12/2021 - The Littles was written by The Drop Magazine, @early-alpha & @Dex_Lennon with support from @MarcelStrelow, @boleromusic_, @TycheCollective & The Littles community! Always DYOR