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🆕 NFT and AI Technology Employed by Whiskey Distributor to Sell Vintage 50-Year-Old Collection

🌐 The Glenlivet Distillery, a venerable institution nestled in Scotland’s Speyside, has embraced the cutting-edge world of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence to offer a limited collection of its aged whisky. With a rich heritage spanning two centuries, this move represents a significant pivot towards modernity. On February 13, the distillery announced the sale of 12 exclusive bottles from a collection aged since 1974, each priced at approximately $43,000. This endeavor marries tradition with innovation, as each bottle features a unique label created through AI, underscoring the distillery’s forward-thinking approach.

🔥 To facilitate the sale, The Glenlivet has partnered with The Whisky Exchange Cabinet, a platform that leverages blockchain technology to sell rare spirits. This collaboration introduces digital certificates of ownership and authenticity, ensuring traceability and provenance for each bottle. Nicolas Oudinot, CEO of The Whisky Exchange, highlighted the industry’s growing interest in NFTs while emphasizing their strategy to prioritize the essence of rare whisky sales, supported rather than overshadowed by technological advancements.

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🆕 Wild Forest launching first NFTs on Ronin from 22nd February

👀 Following the launch of Sky Mavis’ Mavis Store earlier in January 2024, three games, Axie Infinity Origins, Battle Bears Heroes and Axie Sky Smash, have listed items in the online shop. Now PVP card-collecting RTS Wild Forest from Zillion Whales has followed suit, unveiling its first mint on Mavis Store, scheduled for 22nd February. 

🔥 Additionally, beta players will share Whitelists for 1500 Premium and 250 Founder Packs. Starting 16th and running to 18th February, 35 Founder Pack Whitelists will be randomly awarded every day to those playing Wild Forest anytime during those dates.

🔝 By participating in the mint, users will also be eligible for a chance to get one of 1,000 Lord NFTs. As more game features are being released, these NFTs will offer exclusive gameplay experiences.

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🆕 Pudgy Penguins briefly flips Bored Ape Yacht Club in floor price

💎 Pudgy Penguins briefly overtook Bored Ape Yacht Club in floor price earlier today — as its rapid rise over the last few months has caught up with the sliding prices of apes.At around 11:00 AM UTC, the floor price for one Pudgy Penguin was 22.2 ETH ($61,780), while Bored Apes had a floor price of just 22.1 ETH ($61,500), according data from Parsec Finance. While this doesn't seem like much and it was only short-lived, it does mark a big moment in the shifting landscape of NFTs.

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🔥 Cozomo de’ Medici Shares 12 Most Iconic Artworks of 2023

🔝 Since arriving on the scene, Cozomo de’ Medici has assembled one of the most important collections of crypto art, while also becoming one of the popular and prominent names in the community.
The Medici Collection has been noted for including many of the major works of the movement, as well as kicking off 2023 by gifting 22 digital artworks to the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
For this special debut edition of Collector’s Vault, our series on the leading collectors who shape the digital art space, nft now is excited to exclusively present Cozomo’s list of 12 iconic works from 2023, in no particular order. Here are the pieces in his own words.

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🆕 WWE Introduces Digital Donruss Elite Cards on Panini Blockchain

🖥 Panini, the renowned Italian trading card and collectibles firm, has announced a strategic collaboration with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) to introduce a novel series of digital trading cards. This venture brings 100 iconic WWE Superstars to the forefront through the digital Donruss Elite card set on the Panini Blockchain. The selection boasts celebrated names such as John Cena, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and Roman Reigns, among others, promising an engaging experience for fans and collectors alike.

🔥 This digital initiative offers enthusiasts the thrill of virtually opening packs to uncover limited-edition digital assets. Additionally, it opens avenues for collector events and contests that further enrich the collecting experience. Participants can win exclusive cards unavailable in packs, alongside digital crafting events that transform standard cards into unique, numbered collectibles.

🌐 The foray into digital collectibles is not a new endeavor for WWE. Previous years saw the launch of NFTs featuring John Cena, which, despite high expectations, did not perform as anticipated. Nevertheless, the wrestling world’s engagement with NFTs and digital collectibles has only grown, with WWE’s competitors also entering the arena with digital offerings.

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🆕 SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH PROPELS PIXEL TOKEN INTO CRYPTO GAMING

🎮 PIXELS is a retro-style farming and social game, reminiscent of popular titles like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. What sets it apart is its incorporation of a crypto token economy with NFT land plots and pets.

👀 Initially built on Polygon, PIXELS migrated to Ronin last fall – a gaming-centric Ethereum scaling sidechain. This move aimed to improve the game’s blockchain infrastructure, providing a smoother and more efficient gaming experience for its users.

💼 The current market capitalization of PIXEL is estimated at $441 million, based on its circulating supply. This puts it within the top 200 most valuable cryptocurrencies in the market. With 771 million tokens currently in circulation out of a maximum supply of 5 billion, the fully diluted valuation exceeds $2.8 billion.

🚄 Breaking News: Unleash Your Cosmic Creativity with "Space Eggs" NFTs! 🌌

🌠 Attention, NFT Enthusiasts! The clock is ticking, and Space Eggs are vanishing into the vastness of the NFT universe! 🕰🚀

🌌 Act swiftly—only a handful of these celestial treasures remain. Secure your spot in the cosmos by owning one of these limited-edition NFTs! 🛸✨

🎨 Each Space Egg encapsulates the allure of the cosmos in a mesmerizing digital masterpiece. 🌈

🚨 Time is of the essence! Don't miss your chance to be part of this interstellar art revolution. Grab your Space Egg NFT before they vanish into the cosmos! 🪐👾

🌟 Hurry! Limited availability—join the cosmic journey now! 🚀

✖️✖️5️⃣ 🔤🔤🔤🔤✖️✖️

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🆕 Sports Illustrated Transitions NFT Ticketing Service to Avalanche Blockchain

👀 Sports Illustrated’s ticketing division, SI Tickets, has embarked on a strategic shift, migrating its innovative NFT ticketing platform, Box Office, to the Avalanche blockchain. This move, announced in partnership with Ava Labs, marks a significant transition from the platform’s launch on the Polygon blockchain nearly ten months prior. The collaboration aims to leverage Avalanche’s robust capabilities to mint NFT tickets and transform event tickets into dynamic content, enhancing guest engagement.

🌐 The Box Office platform, launched in May 2023, initially sought to revolutionize the event ticketing experience by offering exclusive benefits to ticket holders. These benefits ranged from expedited entry passes and drink coupons to music downloads before events and video content and additional rewards post-event. The shift to Avalanche is expected to enhance these offerings further, providing event attendees with a richer, more interactive experience.

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🖥 Greg Solano, BAYC Co-Founder, Assumes CEO Role at Yuga Labs

🌐 Greg Solano, co-founder of the acclaimed Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), has stepped up as the new CEO of Yuga Labs, signaling a fresh direction for the company. Solano takes over from Daniel Alegre, who has led the firm since last April. This leadership change comes at a pivotal moment for Yuga Labs, with Solano expressing his commitment to revitalizing the original spirit that catapulted BAYC to fame. His vision includes enhancing the utility of BAYC NFTs and fostering a creative resurgence within the community.

🙂 Under Solano’s guidance, Yuga Labs aims to amplify the intrinsic value of BAYC by leveraging the collective strength of its members. He emphasizes the importance of community-driven initiatives such as ApeFest and Made by Apes in broadening the BAYC brand. Solano’s strategy involves granting the BAYC team at Yuga more autonomy to realize its ambitions, fostering an environment ripe for innovation and distinctive experiences.

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🌐 Solana NFT Marketplace Achieves $5 Billion in Total Sales

🌐 The digital art market on the Solana blockchain has seen a significant surge, surpassing $5 billion in total sales volume. This milestone reflects a remarkable uptick in trading activity for Solana-based nonfungible tokens (NFTs) over recent months. Data from CryptoSlam highlights this achievement, showing that the platform has attracted over 2.2 million buyers and 1.6 million sellers, resulting in nearly 43 million NFT transactions.

👀 After the subdued performance, with monthly sales volumes struggling to exceed $40 million from July to October 2023, the Solana NFT market experienced a revival. November 2023 marked the beginning of this resurgence, with sales jumping to approximately $82 million, a 192% increase from the prior month’s $28 million. This rebound in investor interest and market activity continued into December 2023, when Solana NFTs recorded a staggering $365 million monthly sales. This figure is the platform’s second-highest monthly sales volume, only surpassed by the $373 million peak in October 2021.

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🆕 As we enter 2024, achieving meaningful representation and equity in the web3 space remains a work in progress.

🌐 Back in 2022, we wrote that the NFT space needs to do more to uplift Black artists, and the point remains salient today. While pioneering POC creatives continue to inspire and push forward black excellence every day in the digital art community, the top of the industry unfortunately remains largely whitewashed. Last year’s top 10 highest-selling artists in the NFT space did not include a single Black artist, a sobering fact that illustrates how far we have to go in leaving web2’s entrenched hierarchies behind in this new paradigm.

👀 In honor of Black History Month, nft now has partnered with Black NFT Art, a media and community brand empowering Black creators in web3, for the second year running to curate and showcase a list of standout artists to know. Far from exhaustive, this list is aimed at discovery and giving flowers to those who deserve more shine — we’ve given a lot of support to leading artists like Drift, Diana Sinclair, and LATASHÁ in the past and will continue to champion them in the future.

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🆕 ZachXBT’s painstaking nine-month probe culminates in the recovery of the vast majority of $177K stolen NFT proceeds

🌐 Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has successfully recovered most of the proceeds from a stolen NFT, marking the culmination of a nine-month probe into the theft. The NFT, a rare DeGods token, was unlawfully sold in May 2023 after the original holder became a victim of a phishing scam, losing access to their digital assets.

🔄 ZachXBT, known for his pseudonymous on-chain research, shared the outcome of his extensive investigation in a recent post to his substantial following of 505,200 individuals. He disclosed that the stolen NFT, identified as DeGods #3251, had been sold for 99 Ether (ETH), equivalent to approximately $177,000 at the time of the transaction.

🔥 Expressing satisfaction with the recovery efforts, ZachXBT stated, “I am pleased to share that I was able to help recover a decent chunk of the stolen funds, which have now been returned to the victim.” The success of the retrieval underscores the efficacy of ZachXBT’s methodology, which often involves using straightforward diagrams to elucidate the intricacies of phishing scams and track the movement of funds, even when routed through crypto mixers.

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🆕 Magic Eden's Ethereum Marketplace with Yuga Labs Now Live

🌐 In addition to its new Ethereum marketplace, Magic Eden has also established The Magic Eden Creator's Alliance to show solidarity with platform creators. The Creator's Alliance is an initiative that promotes a sustainable royalty framework, ensuring fair compensation for creators industry-wide. Yuga and Magic Eden will exclusively support marketplaces that honor creator royalties, leaving non-compliant ones behind. Dozens of projects and companies from around the industry have joined the alliance, including Yuga Labs, RTFKT, Pudgy Penguins, Azuki and more.

👀 Magic Eden's Ethereum marketplace gives users access to all the prominent mints from top creators and gives users the ability to receive incentives through Magic Eden's industry-leading rewards program. Users of the platform receive Diamonds for platform activity, including retroactive diamond airdrops for delisting and relisting NFTs on the new marketplace.

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🆕 PolyOne Unveils Exclusive NFT Release by Trailblazing 2D/3D Artist, Necrofear FX

👀 PolyOne, an emerging NFT platform, has recently partnered with the acclaimed 2D/3D artist Necrofear FX to launch an exclusive NFT collection. Necrofear FX, known for his gothic-inspired artwork, brings a unique blend of ancient mythology and contemporary themes to the digital art space. This collaboration highlights PolyOne’s commitment to supporting innovative artists who explore and push the boundaries of digital art.

🌐 The collection features three distinctive pieces: “The Last Wine,” “Eldorado,” and “Eclipsed Grace.” Each piece weaves a unique narrative, reflecting the artist’s commitment to merging deep theoretical concepts with modern-day relevance. “The Last Wine” explores societal dynamics and gender progress, “Eldorado” draws inspiration from the poem “The New Colossus,” symbolizing wisdom and abundance, and “Eclipsed Grace” celebrates humanity’s journey through space and time.

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🆕 VanEck Ventures into NFT with SegMint Launch

🔥 VanEck, a prominent name in global asset management, has ventured into the digital realm with the launch of SegMint, a pioneering digital asset management platform coupled with an NFT marketplace. The platform’s primary objective is to facilitate the seamless sharing of access and ownership of self-custodied assets, marking a significant advancement in the evolving digital finance landscape.

🌐 SegMint introduces an innovative model named “Lock & Key,” devised to address the challenge of securely sharing access and ownership within self-custodied assets. The model enables users to securely distribute access and ownership of assets to others while retaining control. Founder of SegMint, Matt Bartlett, elucidated, “We identified a significant pain point in the digital assets ecosystem—the challenge of sharing access and ownership in a self-custody world.”

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🆕 MixMob, a Solana Gaming Venture, Secures Exclusive Stormtrooper NFT Licensing Rights

👀 MixMob, the Solana-based gaming platform, has struck a significant deal in digital entertainment, securing licensing rights to incorporate iconic Star Wars stormtroopers into its gaming universe. The move marks a pivotal step in MixMob’s strategic roadmap, signaling their official licensing strategy initiation.

🔥 MixMob’s acquisition of the original Stormtrooper licensing rights, immortalized in the 1977 classic “Star Wars: A New Hope,” is poised to inject fresh excitement into its gaming ecosystem. With plans to integrate the revered characters into their card racing game, Racer 1, as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by the second quarter, MixMob is primed to captivate gamers and collectors alike.

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🆕 Bitcoin Ordinals Trader Retrieves Bitcoin After Accidental NFT Purchase

🛡 A Bitcoin Ordinals trader recently found themselves in an unexpected situation after mistakenly purchasing a nonfungible token (NFT) on the Bitcoin network for a significantly higher amount than intended. The trader, who shared their mishap on social media platform X on March 1, expressed dismay at realizing they had spent approximately $13,000 worth of Bitcoin instead of the intended $1,287 for an NFT valued at 0.21 BTC.

🔥 The incident sparked embarrassment and concern for the trader, who urged fellow digital asset enthusiasts to exercise caution and double-check transactions to avoid similar errors. However, in a surprising turn of events, the seller of the NFT, Dan Anderson, came across the trader’s post and took action to rectify the situation.

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🆕 BACKPACK’S $17 MILLION SERIES A FUNDING UNLOCKS NEW WEB3 POTENTIAL

🔗 The Backpack ecosystem, known for the Backpack wallet, the Mad Lads NFT collection, and Backpack Exchange, has successfully closed its first joint $17 million Series A funding round. This strategic investment round, led by Placeholder VC, values the conglomerate at a substantial $120 million. 
The funding attracted a diverse group of strategic investors, among them Hashed, Robot Ventures, Amber Group, Wintermute Ventures, Selini Capital, Delphi Digital, and notable founders from leading Web3 ecosystems such as Solana, Tensor, and Galxe, among many others.

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🆕 Bitcoin NFTs Surge in Weekly Sales, Outpacing Ethereum

🔥 Bitcoin NFTs have surged into the spotlight, boasting remarkable sales figures that have outpaced Ethereum in the past week. The sudden spike in Bitcoin nonfungible token (NFT) sales, mainly fueled by collections like NodeMonkes, has propelled Bitcoin ahead of Ethereum in weekly sales volume.

👀 According to data from CryptoSlam, Bitcoin NFT sales skyrocketed by 80% week-over-week to an impressive $168.5 million, surpassing Ethereum’s $162 million in sales. This surge was primarily driven by the emergence of Bitcoin Ordinals-based collections, with three of the top five best-selling NFT collections for the week being Bitcoin Ordinals-based.

🌐 NodeMonkes, a collection of 10,000 unique pixelated profile pictures (PFP)-style Ordinals, emerged as a significant player in this resurgence. With over $41 million in sales, NodeMonkes experienced a nearly 170% increase from the previous week, solidifying its position as a top contender in the Bitcoin NFT space.

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🆕 Alien CryptoPunk NFT Fetches $16 Million in Ethereum Sale

👀 A rare Alien CryptoPunk NFT, CryptoPunk #3100, has captured attention after selling for a staggering 4,500 Ethereum (ETH), equivalent to $16,032,959. This sale marks the second-highest price ever fetched by a CryptoPunk NFT, showcasing the unique allure of these digital assets. An anonymous bidder, operating through a newly created wallet, clinched the deal around 2:30 pm UTC on March 4, following several days of intense bidding. Initially, the bidder had offered 4,250 ETH, worth $14.78 million at the time, before increasing their bid to the final amount of 4,500 ETH.

🔥 CryptoPunk #3100 stands out as one of the mere 10,000 CryptoPunks available, distinguished not only by its rare Alien attribute but also by sporting a headband, an adornment shared with only 405 other CryptoPunks. Its value is significantly enhanced by its rarity as one of only nine Alien CryptoPunks, making it a coveted piece among collectors.

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🆕 Coachella Teams Up with OpenSea to Debut Music Festival-Themed NFTs with Real-World Perks

🔥 The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a pivotal event in the global music scene, has embarked on a novel partnership with OpenSea, the leading nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace. This collaboration marks a significant shift towards integrating digital assets with tangible festival experiences. Coachella is renowned for its eclectic mix of music, attracting over 645,000 attendees, and now, it aims to enhance the attendee experience through the introduction of three unique NFT collections.

🌐 Set against the backdrop of a diverse music lineup and celebrity presence, the 2024 edition of Coachella is poised to redefine festival engagement. These NFTs will serve as digital keys, unlocking exclusive on-site experiences, merchandise, and VIP access for holders. The innovation lead for Coachella, Sam Schoonover, emphasized the transformative potential of NFTs in crafting unique customer experiences that blend the digital with the physical realm.