NFT governance experiments 🧪

Dear Bankless Nation,

Last weekend, the BLVKHVND esports DAO won a world championship event, becoming the first decentralized organization to achieve a world title!

The win was amazing, and it’s also among a spate of interesting advances that are coming to the fore around the crossroads of decentralized governance and NFTs right now. Some other things I’m watching excitedly include:

• 😜 jokedao innovating a new community-driven NFT governance system.
• 💡 Lil Nouns DAO pioneering an idea board system that’s poised to become adopted by DAOs far and wide.
• 🍴 Nouns Builder nearing, so soon projects can easily customize their own Nouns DAO forks.
• 🧃 Juicebox now being able to field NFT mint proceeds directly from Zora sales into a decentralized treasury.

Pay attention to these types of frontier NFT-adjacent governance experiments, because they’re paving important new pathways for the decentralized social happenings of tomorrow. In the meantime, thanks for reading and have a great weekend ✌️

-WMP

📣 General NFT News

• eth.link is down.
• nameless introduced StealthTest, a private cloud-based testnet for QA testing NFT projects.
• Nouns DAO started the ninth round of its Launchpad program for Nounish builders.
• Paradigm researchers unveiled Variable Rate Gradual Dutch Auctions (VRGDAs), a new token issuance mechanism built for Art Gobblers that lets projects release NFTs flexibly along a custom schedule.

🏆 Digital Collectibles

• Pudgy Penguin #6873, the rarest NFT in the collection, resold for 400 ETH:

• 0xngmi released Tubbysea, a friendly experimental borrowing protocol for tubby cats holders.
• Yuga Labs said it will only recognize the PoS Ethereum chain post-Merge.

🎨 Cryptoart

• Chromie Squiggle #7046, a rare HyperRainbow, was acquired by Kevin Rose for 150 ETH:

• Proof of Beauty is holding a free mint of generative on-chain pixel art next week in honor of Ethereum’s upcoming Merge upgrade.
• Don’t Panic by XCOPY resold for 500 ETH on SuperRare:

🎮 Decentralized Gaming

• BLVKHVND became the first esports DAO to win a world title by topping the first-ever Pokémon UNITE Championship event. Bravo, and godspeed!

• Axie Infinity released its latest balancing patch.
• Aavegotchi announced FAKE Gotchis, a community-driven art collection.
• TreasureDAO kicked off Bridgeworld Games by rolling out Harvesters, which are a new tool for farming MAGIC.

💽 Music NFTs

• Coopahtroopa published This Week in Music NFTs - August 22nd.

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Chain Runners released interoperable metaverse avatars, which Nifty Island has already integrated.
• Decentraland kicked off its Metaverse Art Week festivities.
• MOCA launched its first Webaverse world:

• Voxels listed new Chronos parcels.

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• Gem integrated sudoswap listings:

• Hook, a new NFT call options protocol, launched on Ethereum.
• squiggleDAO is now the largest liquidity provider of Chromie Squiggles on the peer-to-peer NFTfi lending platform.
• SudoRare, a low-effort fork combo of LooksRare and sudoswap, rug pulled within hours of launching.
• Uniswap is in talks with seven NFT lending protocols in an effort to unify liquidity in the NFTfi sector.
• UNI holders approved the creation of the Uniswap Foundation.

Action steps