Dear Bankless Nation,

NFTs continue to see growing adoption. What once was a niche art market for crypto enthusiasts has become a technology upon which platforms are raised that create utilities for collectors, gamers, music and sports fans, and artists and musicians in ways that once were unimaginable. Here at Decentralized Arts, we’ve covered everything from blockchain games and wearables to music NFTs and artist communities. We even covered the first football club to go crypto-native!

In the spirit of continued sports coverage, we take a look at Nike’s NFT sales performance, and Pedro walks us through the new VaynerSports Pass.

Also of note is Telegram’s growth in the blockchain space, with their consideration of a username marketplace.

Welcome to Decentralized Arts!

Contributors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (Grendel, Kouros, Kaf, nonsensetwice, Frank America, Pedro)

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Curated NFT News

Telegram Could Open an NFT Marketplace for Usernames

Telegram founder Pavel Durov shared his thoughts on a possible NFT marketplace for usernames in his personal Telegram page. He wrote, “Imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel links for auction.” He said about the marketplace’s potential, “this would create a new platform where username holders could transfer them to interested parties in protected deals, with ownership secured on the blockchain via NFT-like smart contracts.”

Durov made the suggestion after the success of domain name auctions by The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain originally designed by the Telegram team. The blockchain project launched the TON DNS service, enabling users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts, and websites in mid-July.

The sale of over 2,000 .ton domain names made over 3 million USD worth of TON coin. Talking about the success of the .ton sale, the Telegram founder said, “our team can write bullet-proof smart contracts for TON (since it was us who invented its smart-contract language), so we are inclined to try out TON as the underlying blockchain for our future marketplace.”

Nike Becomes Highest-Earning Brand from NFT Sales

Nike, America’s most iconic sports brand, has been revealed to be the world’s biggest-earning brand from sales of NFTs.

Nike’s NFT drops have generated 185.3 million USD in sales, with secondary market volumes surpassing 1.3 billion USD, according to data from Dune Analytics, that Noah Levine shared in a Tweet last week.

Dolce & Gabbana, Tiffany, Gucci, and Adidas complete the top five with over 250 million USD in combined revenue from NFT sales.

VaynerSports Pass

The top individuals/brands in the world of sports are getting into the NFT space

By Pedro

From professional sports teams like Liverpool FC and the Dallas Mavericks, to actual sport leagues, like the MMA, sports brands are diving into NFTs. And although all are revolutionary in their own way, VaynerSports Pass adds the element of being sports-agnostic, meaning it isn’t tied to one specific sport. The VaynerSports Pass serves as a membership pass, similar to the Proof Collective, connecting its holders to top level athletes across several sports.

Project Introduction

VaynerSports Pass (VSP) is a 15K NFT collection founded by AJ Vaynerchuk, granting owners access to his sports agency, VaynerSports. So far, the project has been following up on its roadmap and providing real-world utility and value for NFT holders. VSP holders receive the following benefits:

• Raffles to sporting events: VaynerSports have signed athletes across several sports, including the NFL, MLB, MMA, and more. VSP holders get to participate in raffles to attend real-world sporting events. Sporting event raffles are frequent, with a recent example being a soccer event in Manchester England.  

• IRL & digital experiences: VSP holders get the chance to attend IRL & digital experiences aside from sporting events. This could be anything from access to an exclusive metaverse event to an All-Star Bingo event hosted by MLB star Justin Turner. 

• Free monthly partner mints: at least once a month since launch, VSP holders have benefited from access to gas-only mints for partner projects. So far, they have given holders access to the following mints:  Team Starboy, Sports Things, and Trophies Collection, and VSP holders only needed to pay the transaction fees. Aside from these mints, VSP holders also benefit from access to whitelists for certain projects. 

• Weekly AMAs with sports athletes: every week, AJ Vaynerchuk speaks to different athletes on his “Going Deep” podcast, allowing the community to get a behind-the-scenes look at the lives and careers of their favorite athletes.  

Colors & Icons Matter

VSP offers a number of tiers, denoted by color, and icons that decorate each pass. While this may seem nominal at first, upon closer inspection, you’ll see that each color represents a particular rarity, and each icon changes a pass’ functionality.

Color Rarity: 

VSP background colors represent your chances of winning a raffle. There are 11 colors total, each falling within four tiers, with Tier 1 giving you the highest chances to win. 

Icons:

There are 10 icons total, each representing a certain sport: hockey, tennis, golf, volleyball, soccer, basketball, football, MMA, esports, and baseball. These icons represent the sporting events you’re eligible to attend. 

For example here, this is a Tier 4 pass with two icons, one for soccer and one for MMA. This means that the holder of this NFT is eligible to participate in sporting event raffles for these two sports. If you’re a fan of basketball, you  want to mint a pass with a basketball icon. Having multiple of the same icons will get you more entries to the raffle for the related sports. For example, if your pass holds two soccer icons, you have two entries into the soccer event raffles. Passes with zero icons are eligible for all raffles, meaning these are pretty valuable. 

Black Card Pass:

Just this year in August, VSP launched their next project, the Black Card Pass.  

These passes will grant holders with unique utilities, including:

• A guaranteed annual event for three years: each Black Card holder gets to go to one sporting event of their choosing (within a certain price range, which is determined by your black card rarity) every year, for three years.  

• Eligibility for all IRL sporting events, top-tier NFT airdrops, and partner mints: Black Card holders get to participate in every raffle taking place in the VSP ecosystem.  

• Premium sports gifts and collectibles: Considering this Black card project just launched, we have yet to see how this feature will develop. However, considering the Vaynerchuk family is well known for their love of collectibles, we should expect some exciting gifts. Valuable sports cards, maybe?

There will only ever be 70 of these passes in existence. Of these, 60 will be given to the winners of a “drip auction,” while the remaining 10 go to the VSP treasury. How does the drip auction work? Each week, 10 Black Card passes will be airdropped to the 10 people who bid the highest amount of VaynerSports Passes. Auctions started on August 23rd, and will go on until September 27th. You can see the exact auction schedule here. 

Roadmap:

At launch, AJ Vaynerchuk released a cadence calendar for his project, and so far they have been sticking to it. Some notable roadmap features coming later this year include a “Wild Card Game” and “Secret Project: P.”

This project is super exciting! Rather than only having access to certain individual athletes or specific teams, VSP gives access to a wide array of different sports. 

Future Bazar

Rarities from the Coming Centuries

By Dusty Eye

The DustyEye group owns a Time Machine. With a series of chronojumps to one of the many possible futures, they have collected many artifacts and memorabilia.

!!!!ATTENTION!!!! We only accept payments in Ukron.

#11 - THE CRANK

Worn out by the light years traveled, the vehicle that transported the android N ° 44 along its universal journey was given up for scrapping. 

Some components are preserved, including the driver's window crank. 

It should be considered more a decoration with a vintage aftertaste, than a real utensil with a function.

MATERIALS: plastic, stone

SIZE: 11x9x10 CM (base included)

YEAR: 2352-2374

VALUE: 900 Ukron

______________________

WEB: www.DustyEye.com
IG: @DustyEye_DE
TWITTER: @Dusty_Eye

Decentralized Arts is written and produced by a small team of contributors who are passionate about art, both visual and written, and its growing place in crypto and NFTs. With each edition, we aim to bring you not only the most current and relevant news in the NFT space, but also explorations in what it means for our culture and societies for this market to continue to grow and expand. When everyone is an owner of art, we all gain a deeper appreciation for it.

With great appreciation for you, we thank you for reading and subscribing to Decentralized Arts.

Cordially,

Grendel, Kouros, Kaf, nonsensetwice, and Frank America