3-7
Contents
Featured Collection
Discover a sports based NFT community featuring 10,000 unique teams duking it out on the Ethereum blockchain in monthly tournaments to win prizes from their community pool.
8-9
Featured Artist
Lord Ampersand does things with data, mushrooms, and robots. We explore his new collection “The Approach” and sit down with the Swiss artist to ask a few questions.
10-11
Colours of Code
EarlyAlpha explores the The Colour of Code project by Kenyan duo KamauKrypto.
12-13
The Silent “L”
Dexter Lennon explores play-to-earn gaming in the metaverse.
14-15
Meta News
Bored Apes for 0.75Ξ? Pak makes $91 million? Catch up on some things you might have missed this week in the metaverse.
Own your own sporting franchise Place your bets everybody, place your bets! It’s time for the main event, the Excessive Chimps are facing off against Fearful Crocs for this month’s super-slam tournament, who will be the winner? Too much? NFTeams are a 10K collection of sports teams that compete against each-other in monthly tournaments to win prizes from a community pool. Purchasing an NFTeam essentially makes you the General Manager, granting you 100% full copyright ownership of the team, you know what that means by now folks. You can create merch, star on the cover of Drop Magazine, the possibilities are endless!
Each team grants holders a ticket to monthly tournaments in the style of March Madness. Basically a single elimination tournament if you’re not into sports, or loss=bad if you’re REALLY not into sports. Don’t worry it’s not too bad if you lose, you’re just a loser! Like any sporting league, teams get a vote on how the league is run. That means every NFTeam get a voice on how the community fund is used and the future of the project. And what’s a team without players? The roadmap for this project includes players with their own stats and rarity levels that can be tradeable with other teams, it’s basically the metaverse version of Football Manager.
The real-life behind this project include bored apes Steve (day25) and Wil (wilxlee). If you’ve read Drop #10 you will know Wil as the creator of The Littles. Other team members include Artwork by Ari, assistant coach Jace and a couple of nerd developers Jeff and Mat.
Collection: 10K Owners: 2.2K Floor: 0.05 Not for sale: 88%
Half-Time NFTeams have blitzed through their phase 1 roadmap and are now in the process of scaling up the team to work on Phase 2. The project recently initiated a recruitment drive for a diverse panel of community members to help shape their vision over the course of Q1 2022 and are gearing up for a full-court press run to promote upcoming tournaments and teams.
Play of th According to the website each NFTeam is constructed programmatically from over 1 trillion possible combinations to ensure uniqueness. Though we simply don’t have the technology at Drop Magazine to make sure the math checks out, the teams certainly are interesting and fun to look at. On traits, the project has begun implementing fun prizes for earning metaachievements based on the collection, for example the NFTeam that wins a Tournament wearing an ETH crown (one of the possible traits) will win the tournament prize + an extra 5 ETH. Many of the team’s general managers reached out to us on Twitter and kindly
he Game
let us feature them in our magazine, we’ve got some serious division one teams in here like the Balance Horned Gods owned by BigWil, the Dueling Bored Apes owned by ThanXPham, we’ve even got one of the pound for pound all-time greats, The Aussie Hydras proudly owned by JusticeAlbatraoz. On paper the idea of NFTeams is excellent, it enables gamification, sweep stakes and more importantly – it’s fun. Thanks to a relatively low floor, it’s still early to get involved with this project before phase 2 of the roadmap really kicks off – we’ll have to wait and see how It all pans out, but the bookies have NFTeams as a favourite to win.
Meet Lord A Lord Ampersand is a selftaught Swiss artist whose ink and watercolour paintings explore the interaction between organic and technological process. These contrary yet complimentary forces of the things that grow and the things that are built come together in his latest collection, The Approach. The Approach is a dance of digital and analogue. Over the course of 50 iterations, a hand-drawn image is digitally altered, printed out, and hand drawn over again. The result is a psychedelic trip, a 50-part journey through a cycle of growth and decay,
show-casing a striking range of visuals.
What we love about this collection is that while each individual piece, like any piece of art, will attract different buyers or appeal to different tastes, collectively they form their own piece of art that you can watch unfold on Lord Ampersands website You can still grab individual pieces of The Approach for 0.05Ξ on OpenSea.
No stranger to Drop Magazine, we caught up with our friend to ask him a few questions and learn more about the artist.
Ampersand
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Q. How did you get into the NFT space
A.
I’ve been in and out of different art forms throughout my life, typography, photography, writing, sound design, music, audio plays, and had the privilege to have a couple of exhibitions. When the pandemic hit, I decided to take my childhood passion of drawing much more seriously and started a daily online sketchbook with traditional drawings and paintings. I got into the NFT space in September 2021 just by hearing about it. First I was overwhelmed by the amount of hype projects, but then I found some really interesting artistic niches, for example the Entropes or the Decentrazines projects, both of which I support. The community and encouragement coming out of those projects led me to think about starting a collection on my own, The Approach.
Q. Tell us more about the
motivation behind The Appoach
A. What I didn’t want to do
was just publish works I had drawn and painted traditionally. That felt like not taking the possitibilites of the medium seriously enough, like early TV showing theatre plays. I wanted my work to reflect on how the traditional and the digital both differ and how they are similar, how they can fight and collaborate with each other. That’s where the idea of an iterative collection came in - a piece that starts traditional, gets scanned and altered digitally, printed out again in order to be overdrawn traditionally. Each of the two “realms” can use its own degrees of freedom to alter the other, which can be a response, a challenge, an invitation or a complete destruction of the previous piece. Within the traditional-digital oscillation,
I tried to display symbols for the organic and technological, which ultimately came down to drawing fungi and machines. In the end, I created 50 artworks - 25 traditionally crafted and 25 digital pieces, for which I used a wide variety of techniques, from drawings to glitches, screen printing, sumi-e on rice paper, digital renderings, shredded printouts, even live mushrooms. They all are part of a big chain both an artistic chain and on the block-chain. I hope I will be able to display all 50 works as part of a digital-physical exhibition some day.
Q. What’s you ambition for
the future?
A.
My ambition is to continually explore these two spaces, both process-, contentand medium-wise. At the moment, I’m working on a digital wildlife photography collection, where hand-drawn robots colonies are shown within their “natural habitat” of digital nature landscapes. The works of photographers Armand Sarlangue and Timo Heinz were very inspiring in that respect. The first of this collection was published as part of the Decentrazines Community Collection, and a second one I’ve just finished.
THE SILE Pick a side.
The emergence of NFTs within the gaming world is a hot topic, and there’s already been controversy around stances taken by some of the industry’s biggest players. A few weeks ago, for example, Steam rather surreptitiously updated its rules to include an interesting additional restriction on publishing: What you shouldn’t publish on Steam. 13. Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs. This restriction, according to a tweet from SpacePirate, developer of the blockchain game Age of Rust, is because Steam doesn’t want items that have “real-world value” on their platform. But, why? From a myriad of explanations they could’ve gone with — not least the somewhat sketchy reputation of blockchain games thus far, or the much publicised environmental issues surrounding crypto generally, they went with value. This
implies of course that they believe there is value — but they maybe just don’t know how to control it yet. In response, and as if unable to resist the invitation, EA suddenly burst on to the tech columns with statements about NFTs and play-to-earn games being the future of the industry. PC Gamer points out that recent job listings for EA include roles in blockchain innovation, hinting that the FIFA-gargantuan is more than invested in this emerging market. One company for, one company against. It could well be nothing more than a little insight into the respective preparedness of each. EA seem poised to capitalise, Steam, on the other hand, perhaps just not there yet. With others throwing their hats into the ring, the future of blockchain gaming is certainly one that sparks interest.
Play to earn. We don’t yet know where EA plan to go in the blockchain
space, but various already emerged a industry. Axie Infin allows users to buy Axies ($300 at leas there they can buil collection by playin Axie’s range of gam addition being anot can keep or trade o market. Play-to-ear Well… sort of. Axie’ technically a pay-to earn. Though in fai initiative is aimed t gamers, it still begs as to whether this will ultimately prov into the crypto wor ones.
Ubisoft, by contras after your time, no This week, with the of Ubisoft Quartz, c concept of Digits — within their games now, can be earned playing time. The fl thus far, has been T Enhanced Helmet. it, an in-game cosm that you can foreve by having your info embedded in its me cost? 600 hours pla Ghost Recon: Break
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some, 25 days worth of game time over an extended period is more than achievable, but again we find only barriers for the casual gamer. It does appear that Ubisoft intend to provide the more traditional platform of allowing gamers to pay for their in-game NFTs, so you won’t have to just give up your beauty sleep to get involved. As with most things NFT, the gaming industry is still just finding its feet, or rather trying to figuring out how it can most consistently get in on the action. It feels that as time goes by though, there will come a model-for-all. As blockchain games continue to rise in popularity, I have no doubt that the existing big players will find a way in too. I can already hear my nephew asking for an NFT Fortnite skin for his birthday instead of V-Bucks. Hell, by that time V-Bucks may well have reached their final form as a tradable cryptocurrency anyway, as if it weren’t already incomprehensible enough for parents that their kids want to turn cold hard cash into a unicorn outfit in a game. The concept of embedding
NFTs in video games is such an exciting prospect, but it’s clear that we haven’t yet seen the exact science of how to execute it. For now it seems the “L” in “play-to-earn” remains negotiable, whether by time or by cash, players gonna pay.
Words by @Dexter_Lennon
The Colour Just had a read through issue #10? Feeling like you didn’t get your full fix of generative goodness from our Truchet Styles article? Yep, thought so. That’s why today we’re diving into yet another amazing collection harnessing the power of two hands, a keyboard and some good old programming The Colour of Code!
The project itself is a collaborative effort by the Kenyan duo KamauKrypto and Ian Wright, together forming Kright Technologies. With two massively successful drops behind them so far, the pair are on course to set their latest batch of creations loose on the blockchain this Friday December 17th, at 12pm EST. With some details surrounding this most recent release still under wraps, they have a bunch of followers waiting eagerly after teasing several circle-heavy pieces on Twitter, with many of them fragmented, overlapped and ranging heavily in colour! As it stands, the collection currently holds 44 NFTs. 20 of these fall under Volume 1, ‘Abstractions’, with another 20 forming Volume 2, the Halloween special! For those of you standing by with the quick maths, you’ve probably noticed that this still leaves 4 more… The remaining pieces don’t follow the linear, ascending
numbering system like the rest as these were special items airdropped to a handful of lucky holders. Particularly lucky in this case, as the project was deservedly featured on the OpenSea homepage as a ‘notable drop’ just days later! Anyone familiar with the space knows that this puts millions of eyes on the work, creating FOMO and driving up the price. That was definitely the case here; freshly-minted pieces, which were listed at an extremely generous 0.06 ETH, soon got swallowed up, sending the floor price rocketing. Several sold for just shy of a whole ETH and, of the traded airdrops, the cheapest went for 0.39 ETH (around $1,600) - not a bad little gift! That said, two of the fortunate recipients are still diamond handing to this day, even deciding to pass up on some extremely generous offers of up to 0.5 ETH! At the time of writing, the floor price for the overall collection is currently resting at 0.333 ETH with more than $50k in volume. Much like Tyche Collective, Kright Technologies aren’t trying to sell us ‘moonshot’ pipedreams, ridiculous roadmaps or talks of impossible utility; their only promise is delivering brilliant works to enjoy and it’s fair to say they’re killing it in this department! Looking at the art itself, the
algorithm offers a great deal of variety, opening up the aesthetic to a wide range of potential holders. This dynamic duo have done an incredible job of curating a high quality selection of outputs which include flow lines, spirals, arches, fidenzalike pieces, icon-based images and much, much more! According to the collection’s OpenSea description, these are all spawned from over 1,000 lines of code, using the Perlin JavaScript library and incorporating ‘data structures, loops, recursions and object oriented programming’ to bring us such a stunning body of art. Large chunks of the algorithm are also frequently rewritten in order to maintain variety and avoid generating too many pieces with potentially similar appearances. As mentioned previously, Kright hasn’t yet spilled the beans on everything to do with Volume 3. However, we do know that this iteration will be named ‘Mosaics’! Building up to release, they did ask Twitter followers to try and guess the name, theme and/or number of pieces, with an airdrop from the upcoming mint promised to a randomly selected correct answer! Combing back through the replies, it doesn’t actually look like anyone managed to pinpoint the name or theme, and it seems like the number of
r of Code
c
minted pieces is still a secret! One thing we can be sure of is that, once again, the generous creators will be airdropping 4 amazing pieces - this time to a small number of lucky Volume 2 holders!
Regardless of the inner workings, collectors only have a short while to wait for their next dose of algo-baked goodies. Given the pair’s track record, the anticipation from many fans and the beautiful sneak peeks that have been teasing us so far, it’s looking like Friday’s drop will be a banger. This is definitely one for fans of high quality, generative art to mark on their calendar and here at Drop HQ, we’re just as excited as you guys to see the outcome! If you’re already a holder or are planning to scoop some magic in the release of Volume 3, be sure to share your pieces with us on Twitter using the #TCOC hashtag!
Words by @early_alpha
This week in the M (Dec 13th – 17th 2 Bored Grapes Bored Ape #3547 was accidentally sold for 0.75 ETH instead of 75 ETH this week. The owner made a fatfingered typing error which was quickly picked up by a bot and bought with an 8 Eth gas fee to ensure the sale went through before the seller could undo their mistake. Some sellers might think to double-check an intended $300,00 listing, not this seller, but some.
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Nike x RTKFT Nike have acquired the artifact (RTKFT) NFT studio, one of the most talked about NFT forces in the space. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The start-up raised an $8 million seed round back in May led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the company at $33.3 million.
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Issue #11 - 16/12/2021 - The NFTeams was written by The Drop Magazine, @early-alpha & @Dex_Lennon with support from @lordampersand, @KamauKrypto & The NFTeams community! Always DYOR