In a March 30 blog post, the Avalanche Foundation announced the launch of Avaissance, a program to support digital artists and foster the growth of Avalanche's non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem.
Avaissance has two main components: the Artist-in-Residence Program (AIR) for 50+ artists, and the Mona Lisa Initiative for curating digital art and expanding collections of art-focused Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) (MLI). The AIR program will provide six-month funding, mentorship and virtual workshops for artists of "any skill level." The MLI will work with the DAO's curatorial team to promote emerging Avalanche NFT artists and build an "Avalanche Permanent Collection."
On March 27, US-based ticketing company Ticketmaster announced a new feature Token Access Ticket Sales that allows artists to reward NFT holders with exclusive offers, including “special pre-sales, prime seats, custom travel packages and a unique concert experience". "
The ticketing giant developed the feature after being approached by American heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) and their Web3 team Bitflips. A7X wanted help implementing a service that would offer holders of an NFT the Death Bat Club, a collection of 10,000 unique Death Bat NFTs the opportunity to unlock perks and participate in events. This feature works for tokens minted on Ethereum and stored in decentralized application (DApp) wallets, such as MetaMask or Coinbase.
Popular NFT artist Patrick Amadon has told his 142,400 Twitter followers that he will be withdrawing his work from major auction house Sotheby’s upcoming “Native Digital: Glitchism” artwork sale in protest of the lack of representation of women. Sotheby’s responded the next day that it would suspend the sale to “correct the imbalance in representation at the auction” and re-launch at a later date with a “more equitable and diverse group of artists.” Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, shared a video with his Twitter followers on March 12 showing off his new 50,000-square-foot studio in South Carolina.
According to Beeple's website, he will use the space to create his artwork and host events to "showcase the best of art and community." "We want to collaborate with cutting-edge artists and communities to host events that can't be hosted in any other venue," the website says. On March 25, approximately $135,000 worth of NFTs from the popular CryptoPunks series were accidentally burned by an investor who was trying to borrow liquidity from them through the NFT wrapping process. Sony Interactive Entertainment, the video game giant behind the PlayStation brand, recently filed for a patent for a framework that allows users to transfer and use NFTs across multiple gaming platforms, titled "NFT framework for transferring and using digital assets between gaming platforms."
Once implemented, Playstation 5 users will be able to explore NFT use cases with popular games.
