🍪 Everything that went down at NFT NYC

Good morning, party people! It’s Thursday morning again, the time when we tell you all the best stuff happening in tech so you can dedicate your time to more important things… like figuring out if there are more doors or wheels in the world.

This ain’t a crypto newsletter, buuut it was a big week, so brace yourselves for a crypto-heavy update today. (Don’t worry, it’s spicy.)

In the oven this week:

• 🔥 Freshly baked: all the happenings at NFT NYC

• ☝🏼One big pizookie: Bored Apes get cloned and resold

• 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized snacks

• 😂 Snickerdoodles: memes to finish off the week strong

FRESHLY BAKED

This week was NFT NYC, a conference for all the crypto believers still standing after last week’s bloodbath. There’s a bunch of speakers every year, but most people skip the conference and go for the parties networking.

Good thing, because the actual conference was kind of a disaster:

• 20K attendees + registration at the Marriott = lines so bad they spanned up and down floors

• No VIP check-in, so speakers got stuck in line with the masses and some missed the thing they were actually checking in for… their speaking gigs. LOL

• Speakers ditching their sessions before the event

• The vibe was not it - booths and marketing giving real salesy/grifty vibes, whole thing was gross

Luckily, there were tons of meetups, parties, and satellite events that made up for it. Here are some snapshots:

Jimmy Fallon and Beeple (famous NFT artist) loving life:

David Blaine doing magic tricks: 

A fake protest someone organized as a marketing tactic:

Multi-tasking while networking:

But mostly a whole lotta this:

Good to know the web3 spirit is still flying high in this crypto winter.

THE BIG PIZOOKIE

In the midst of all the NFT NYC hubbub, one dude decided, you know what? Today’s the day to rip off the biggest NFT project in town (i.e. Bored Ape Yacht Club, or BAYC for short).

So he goes and re-mints 7,000 of the exact same apes, titles it RR/BAYC, and outsells the original BAYC with ~$4M in 24 hour trading volume.

Wow!

The guy’s name is Ryder Ripps. He’s a designer who previously accused BAYC of being racist, and calls his cloned collection “art appropriation.” He also sold a bunch of t-shirts using apes he doesn’t own, just to prove that anyone can violate the supposed IP rights without consequences.

Yuga Labs (the studio that owns BAYC) is now in a copyright battle to take down the cloned apes, but the collection has been delisted, relisted, and re-delisted from OpenSea several times now.

Ballsy experiment, but also not the first BAYC clone out there. Sounds like something is brewing behind the scenes, so we'll be waiting to see how this one pans out 👀

COOKIE CRUMBS

• 👯‍♀️ Spotify is FINALLY developing social features!!! Cue Lizzo because it’s about damn time - people have literally been requesting this for the last 7 years. There’ll be a new Community tab that lets you see what your friends are listening to and the playlists they’ve updated. Fingers crossed it doesn’t take another 7 years to roll out…

• 📉 You can now short Bitcoin through an ETF (symbol = BITI) that ProShares just launched this week. This means as the price of Bitcoin goes down, the price of the ETF goes up. Bitcoin is down 53% YTD, but BITI is up 71%.

• 📱 Elon phones it in at Twitter and employees are not happy: Musk joined Twitter’s virtual all hands and answered a bunch of employee questions. If he had any cool ideas about what to do with Twitter, he sure didn’t share them. Here’s the TLDR:

  • He plans to force remote Twitter employees back into the office

  • He wants to grow Twitter to 1B users to maximize its usefulness, and thinks all Twitter users should have to be verified as real humans

  • He says Twitter “needs to get healthy” - i.e. layoffs are probably gonna happen

• 🙄 Anna Sorokin is launching NFTs: if you haven’t heard of her, Sorokin is a con artist that stole millions of dollars from NY’s rich and famous by posing as a fake German heiress. She’s now launching 10 NFTs to rehab her image. Your prize for holding her NFTs? Her personal junk from prison and a chance to meet her. LOL.. 🤮

• ☕️ Reason 9998 for why I’ll never stop drinking coffee - caffeine improves memory, brain growth, and long term cognitive ability: in a new study, scientists observed big differences in brain function in mice that consumed caffeine-infused water vs those that hadn’t. The best part is that the cognitive benefits lasted in mice even 2 weeks after the caffeine was originally consumed. Time for a Starbucks run ASAP.

SNICKERDOODLES

Times are tough.

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