In the past week, we’ve seen Epic Games shake up the games industry by launching a lower-fee games store. On the crypto-native front, 0x launches 0x Instant to enable new business models for platforms & Pixura launches new social metrics to try and value digital assets more effectively.

Let’s get NFTY! 💃

Epic Games (The creator of Fortnite) announces the Epic Games Store, a competitor to Steam

While this isn’t necessarily blockchain news, it’s important to keep an eye on gaming trends that have an effect on digital goods. Epic Games will release their game store to take a 12% cut on developer revenue as opposed to the traditional 30% that Steam and Apple takes.

Developers are tired of gatekeepers reaping the benefits of their success. Epic Games knows how this feels from the 20 years they’ve been in the industry. This is a massive shift in the gaming industry. The gatekeepers are now being threatened, as Apple starts to face some scrutiny as well. Time will tell on how this trend develops — but initial indicators points toward decentralization.

Auditable Social Metrics for NFTs by Pixura

It’s really hard to value creative assets like digital art, videos, and music when reputation hasn’t been built up by the creator. The team behind SuperRare is taking a stab at valuing creative assets with the introduction of social metrics. Views & likes can now be tied to creative assets on-chain by allowing users to sign a message to an asset.

The value in creative assets is measured by influence — the velocity at which it flows through social networks. Creating new social metrics for user-generated assets can now let sellers & buyers price digital goods more accurately. Really excited to see this play an integral part in the future of pricing.

0x Instant — a simple one-click buy for tokens in dApps

What a huge week for 0x. 0x Instant is perhaps one of the biggest releases by the 0x team since the launch of 0x V2. Anyone can now integrate the 0x network liquidity pool straight into their app with just a few lines of code.

The biggest advantage of 0x Instant: Anyone can monetize viewership using an affiliate business model. If users purchase tokens (both fungible or non-fungible tokens) through 0x Instant, curators can earn fees by matching orders. Maybe this is the future of NFTY News? 👀

Reads of the week 📚

22 Ideas for 0x Relayers

Clay Robbins gets the creative juices flowing with a great post on use cases for building 0x relayers (discliamer: some of my own ideas are in here like creating a NFT game pass bundle or a NFT scavenger hunt).

Non-Fungible Assets: The Challenge Facing Creative Assets

IDEO CoLab writes about linking metaphors with creative assets. Gavin from IDEO argues that while most view non-fungible asset as financial assets, they should instead be seen as shared human experiences almost like a printed book.

Thoughts this week — On-chain Curation 💭

If you’ve been keeping up with the decentralized finance ecosystem lately, you’ve probably seen headlines around Augur’s midterm election market and the amount of ether being locked up in Maker CDPs.

Anthony Sassano from Block by Block has been play-by-play casting Maker CDPs:

This has led me to think that the future of curation will be less about news curation (This Week in Ethereum style) and more about reporting on on-chain markets. While many readers don’t have the time keeping up with on-chain transaction happenings, they more than likely don’t have the technical knowledge to do so either.

Future curators will be reporting on markets rather than news. Affiliate fees will be taken at every inch in the market. This creates an entirely new effective way to convert attention to liquidity, something that a lot of native-crypto markets currently lack.

Remember the CryptoKitty that was sold for $170K? You could have received an enormous affiliate fee for facilitating this traction. Curators will become a new middle-market for these digital goods as liquidity starts to build. With Pixura’s Social Metrics for NFTs, combined with 0x Instant, we will now be able to curate higher-valued NFTs and push more liquidity for non-fungible tokens.

If you are working on creative use cases, or working on trying to get more people into crypto and reaching end users using non-fungible tokens, I would love to talk about how I can help. Reach out to me on twitter @flynnjamm, my DMs are always open.

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