This Week in Web3...

🐎 Say neigh. Game of Silks, a crypto-based horse-racing fantasy game, raised $5 million in a Series 2 seed round. Game of Silks lets players simulate the ownership of real-world thoroughbred horses through NFTs that track the horses’ lineage, physical traits, development, and real-time performance.

💰$BIGTIME wins. Also on the topic of web3/NFT gaming is $BIGTIME, up 320% after being listed on Coinbase and OKX. $BIGTIME is the gaming token for a multiplayer action role-playing game. There’s also an open game economy where players can generate and exchange game items. Overnight on Thursday, the token hit an all-time high (ATH) of $0.3012, one of the best-performing altcoins this week.

🐈‍⬛ New cats in town. Gutter Cat Labs is under new ownership, purchased by community member Noah (@mauloadream). The NFTs are up 130% since the takeover.

🦊 Offline and unhappy. A brief hiccup on Saturday as Metamask’s app was briefly pulled from the app store. The app has since been restored, and Metamask discovered that the app was removed due to "an internal operational error on their end”.

🚗 Cars for crypto. Ferrari has started to accept crypto payments for cars in the US, and will likely expand the service to Europe. The market and dealers have requested the option, as many clients have invested in crypto, either as young investors with crypto fortunes or traditional investors who want to diversify their portfolio.They will be using BitPay to accept Bitcoin, ETH, and USDC.

Quick Headlines

• DeGods migrate y00ts, again: this time to Ethereum.

• NFT Now has rebranded to Now Media, continuing their expansion into other topics beyond NFTs such as AI.

• The Brand Lead for Meebits, Danny Greene, has left Yuga Labs.

• World of Women released their Monopoly game.

• Catch my conversation on the future of art last week on Twitter:

Future-Forward Fashion

Dress your best. Adobe showcased a dress with an digital, interactive display at their Adobe MAX conference. The dress, Project Primrose, is a strapless, knee-length dress with lots of small, scale-like screen that can be changed to suit your look.

AI Corner

🍿 Disney caught using AI, twice. Disney is facing two AI-related controversies this week. First, Disney's new film, Prom Pact, features the digital likeness of several background actors generated by AI (and looking super creepy).

Second, their promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has designers claiming it was at least partially created using generative AI. The poster is below: what do you think?

🎨 Machine Learning at MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art has acquired Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA (2022) by major digital artist Refik Anadol. The work is a generative artwork that uses the museum’s visual archive to produce a machine-learning model that interprets and reimagines images of artworks in MoMA’s collection. The work is also an NFT, showcasing how these two emerging technologies can intersect!

🧠 Show me a cat riding a bicycle. Google’s Search Generative Experience now lets you create images right from a text prompt. If you opt into the feature through Google’s Search Labs program, you can just type your query into the Google search bar and generated images will appear.

This Week We’re Bullish On …

Jess Houlgrave (@jesshoulgrave)

Jess Houlgrave is the Chief Operating Officer of WalletConnect, the company that created the open-source standard for connecting wallets to different apps. She joined WalletConnect in August 2023 to lead Strategy, Operations, People, and GTM, having previously worked at Checkout.com as their Chief of Staff and leading their crypto strategy. She is also a member of the Bank of England CBDC Engagement Forum, advising on central bank digital currencies.

Positive Affirmation for the Week

Your brain is your most powerful ally or enemy - how are you taking care of it and your thoughts?

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Shira