Ask Doctor Bitcoin: What's the promise of NFTs vs. the reality? [Free, #3]
NFTs are a highly promising technology, but the reality of where blockchain technology currently sits limits their usefulness and accessibility. Scaling is a problem that must be solved soon.
Well, hello there!
After this issue, we may take a brief break from focusing our deep dives on NFTs, but after the last couple issues, I felt it was necessary to provide a little high level detailed context on what I feel like the true promise of NFTs are, and what’s stopping us from getting there immediately, given the current technology landscape.
There’s a myriad of factors, but chief among them is the scaling of the Ethereum network. We’ll talk a little about that this week in our Blockchain Bulletin, as Optimism public mainnet news has hit the wires earlier in the week.
Over all, we’re still in a bull market, and bitcoin continues to dominate markets as a whole. Daniel’s market outlook for Bitcoin will show validation of our previous analysis, and show us what to look for in the coming weeks for whether it’ll continue or not.
As always, if you’re in the free version, you’re getting a bullet point summary only of our much more detailed letter. If you’d like to see what you’re missing, get a free trial to the newsletter by clicking below!
Now, to the news!
Blockchain Bulletin
Blockchain.com raises $300M in Series C funding. Cryptocurrency wallet company Blockchain.com raised $300 million in Series C funding this week and has soared to $5.2 billion in valuation up from $3 billion last month after a $120 million “strategic” funding round.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet NFT sells for $2.9M. The first-ever tweet sent by the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, sold for $2.9 million, or 1,630.58 ether on March 22 as an Ethereum nonfungible token for charity.
Ethereum Optimism launch delayed, testnet launch on April 20 The Ethereum Optimism public mainnet, a startup company that will provide a much-needed scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain, announced that it is delaying its mainnet launch to mid-July.
Blockchain Behind the Scenes
Nvidia accidentally unlocks RTX 3060 Ethereum mining limiters. Nvidia proudly touted that it had added cryptocurrency mining hash-rate limiters to its RTX 3060 graphics cards, but then it accidentally released divers that unlocked Ethereum mining.
TIME auctions off three magazine covers at NFTs. The current bonanza with NFTs continues as TIME Magazine jumped on the bandwagon by auctioning off three magazine covers as non-fungible tokens.
Unmarshal raises $2.6M to create user-friendly blockchain data indexing. Unmarshal, a project seeking to build a structured protocol for blockchain data indexing, announced on March 19 that it closed a $2.6 million seed funding round.
Blockchain Deepdive on NFTs: Promise vs. Reality
Market Survey: I’ve spent a few weeks now doing a market survey of NFTs as well as playing around with minting a few of my own.
Five predominant players. I looked primarily at five platforms to get a handle on the state of things: OpenSea, Rarible, Mintbase, Cargo, Mintable and Super Rare.
They range from “Walmart” to “Neiman Marcus.” OpenSea is the Walmart of NFTs. It’s cheap to mint, but the underlying tech makes it less desirable to collectors. Super Rare sits at the other end - exclusive, and invite only, and expensive to mint using their platform.
All fall short of completely idealized NFT architecture. In the paid version of the newsletter, we diagram what this looks like and how current implementations diverge from this.
Fees, fees, fees and more fees. While OpenSea provides a servicable cheap alternative, all NFT oracles that sit on the Ethereum blockchain are cost prohibitive for experimentation, and all lack clear documentation on how to utilize them on testnets.
Bitcoin Markets Near-Term Analysis
Dennis Liu of VirtualBacon DAO is back again this week with near term price analysis for Bitcoin.
Last week’s price target for a bounce from $51.5k held true.
The trend of “higher lows” continues.
We’re looking for “higher highs” above $61k to indicate a new parabolic turn.
Long term, as long as the higher low holds, we’re still bullish.
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