August 16th's NF3 Recap: CyberKongz, Tom Sachs Rocket Factory and Damien Hirst

If you don't yet know CyberKongz, here's an intro from the project's website:

"CyberKongz are unique and randomly generated 2D/3D NFT Social Avatars for your online experiences. Some appear normal. Some look weird. Some are just damn cool! Maybe some even look familiar!"

Part of what differentiates the Kongz from other similar generated projects is the avatars' integration into a metaverse as digital avatars. This weekend, they launched CyberKongz VX and 10,000 were available to mint, burning more in ETH fees than OpenSea and Uniswap combined in 24 hours. Insane. Read more about the project here.

Browse the original project on OpenSea here (Floor: 1.7 ETH) and the VX project here (Floor: 0.35 ETH).

The legendary visual artist Tom Sachs (known for designing one of the most expensive sneakers of all time, among other things) launched his NFT project back in mid-July. This past weekend, he announced the launch event for the project (a bit of a double entendre), which will take place in NYC on August 28th.

Beginning tomorrow, owners of the project can apply on the website to be one of the First Ten Rockets launched, but only if they have assembled at least one rocket. This project built up a lot of steam before the launch was announced, and now we're finally going to be able to see some of the tokens in action.

This is also just the first of many future benefits and utility associated with the Rocket Factory NFTs.

Damien Hirst is one of the most recognizable artists in the world, and this weekend, his project "The Currency" absolutely soared on OpenSea, reaching a floor of nearly 10 ETH at the time of this writing. Unlike some of the other moments on this list, this explosion can't be traced to an announcement from the project. Rather, the rise seems to be the result of a culmination of interest in the project from collectors.

It's a neat project aesthetically, and they intend to return some of the profit from the project back to the NFT community.

I'm curious to see if they will implement any utility or other benefits into the project at some point down the line. For now, "The Currency" exists as more of a traditional old-guard type of art project. Collectors are getting into it because of their interest in the piece as a work of art; there's definitely still room for these kinds of projects in the NFT world.

One of the interesting differentiators of Hirst's collection is how it could exist as either a physical work or digital. Successful applicants to the project (when it launched in July) all received NFTs. However: "Ultimately, you have to decide between the digital NFT or the physical artwork, both of which are artworks in their own right. Whichever you pick, the other gets burned."

This factor operates as a bit of a social experiment; collectors had to decide if they wanted to bet on the piece as a physical work of art or as an NFT. As of right now, there are 1,130 on the OpenSea listing, so it seems people are opting for the physical work, at least for now.

It's interesting to see which collections have more of an isolated owner-base (VeeFriends) versus which ones have owners invested in numerous projects.