Over three million Redditors have used Reddit's Vault blockchain wallet to create wallets for purchasing NFT profile pictures on the platform. Reddit released around 40,000 NFT avatar designs a few months ago for purchase between $9.99 to $99.99. The avatars, which are all sold out, were minted on the Polygon blockchain. NFT owners received licensing rights to use their avatars on and off Reddit.
Aptos' token APT is down over 40% on its first day of trading. The project has been criticized for its tokenomics, inconsistent communications, and low transaction throughput. Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh says that transaction throughput is expected to increase once more applications go live and that the project's Discord was muted on launch day to protect the community from scams. Aptos has announced a 20,000,000 APT airdrop that will go to over 110,000 eligible early network participants.
NFT marketplace Blur has launched with an airdrop for people who have traded NFTs within the past six months. The airdrop will sit in wallets unopened until January next year. Blur has three tiers of rewards, with those who pay partial and full royalties receiving more rewards from the marketplace than those who choose to forgo paying royalties. The market offers an aggregation feature, portfolio analytics, and zero marketplace fees.
Andreessen Horowitz plans to expand its Crypto Startup School initiative to include a new accelerator program for entrepreneurs. The inaugural accelerator program will take place in March in Los Angeles over 12 weeks. Each participant will receive $500,000 in seed funding and access to mentors and advisors. There will be a Demo Day at the end of the course. Applications for the accelerator are now open.
Projects like OpenSea's Seaport and Uniswap focus on taking value from the user layer. By owning the user relationship through their UI, they control the distribution of new products and the contracts that users interface with. OpenSea and Uniswap can profitably expand to new verticals as long as they ensure users use new features through their front end. The superapps of web2 grew in a similar way, by focusing on a core service and expanding radially into other verticals.
Bluesky is a project that originated from Twitter. It aims to create an open social media protocol so that users can move between different hosting providers. Its AT protocol creates an abstraction layer that lets users point to wherever their profiles are currently located. This article takes a look at the recent AT release and explains how some of the technology works. There are some concerns about AT's ability to remain an open standard due to Bluesky's involvement with the project.
The Terra Expedition is a proposal for reviving the Terra ecosystem. It is a revised version of the developer mining and alignment programs that were established when the Terra network started. 9.5% of the total supply of LUNA tokens will be used to fund the four-year plan. A community-elected committee will evaluate the plan every 12 months. The plan aims to attract developers, get new users onboard, and promote liquidity.
There are many outstanding blockchains out there, but Ethereum is still the best choice. Ethereum is the dominant blockchain for business applications and it has more developers than any other ecosystem. It is unlikely that Ethereum will be replaced as a market leader as it has a mature ecosystem and a strong management team. Ethereum's competitors will likely survive for another few years, but they will eventually die off.