Rug Radio Recap - August 13, 2023

gm fam! It was a pretty exciting week with Coinbase launching Base, DeLabs announcing some key ecosystem changes, and PayPal launching their stablecoin. The builders keep building.

This is Rug Radio. Discipline and patience is all it takes.

Here's what we've got in this week's recap...

• Rug Radio Updates🎙️

• Base is now available to everyone🔵

• DeGods SIII & y00ts Migration↔️

• Dave Portnoy buys Barstool back for $1🤯

STUBS Claim

This week's featured artist is Trizton, a multimedia artist who started his journey at 18 creating album cover art for his friend’s music before falling in love with painting over the past 5 years.

This week’s piece by Trizton, Statue No.2, is a representation of the garden of an architect. The architect and the garden are always trying to arrange things in their own way, but neither is completely happy with how things are arranged. The architect keeps designing, and nature keeps taking over, resulting in a constant back-and-forth between the two.

• Ready to claim? Head over to the Fair mint site

• Need more mint passes? Grab a couple on Opensea

• Not familiar with Stubs? Check out our guide

Content Competition

The Rug Radio content competition is underway🕺

Starting on Monday at 12pm EST of each week until September 4th, 3 participants will have a chance to win a share of $250 USDC! To enter into the competition, all you have to do is:

• Simply create content related to Rug Radio. The content can be anything from memes, music, art, videos, threads, blogs, to even TED talks.

• Share the link on your favorite platform such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram in our Discord or send us email.

Need some inspiration? Check out this thread from one of the previous winners.

Coinbase Launches Base

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, launched its own blockchain network, Base, on August 9 becoming the first publicly traded company to do so. Base is a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which means that it processes transactions off of the main Ethereum blockchain, resulting in lower fees and faster transactions.

Base kicked off the launch with a month-long celebration called OnChain Summer, a series of daily mints in collaboration with over 50 artists, brands, and creators. The most popular being a collaboration between beloved animator, DeeKay, and prominent pseudonymous digital art collector, Cozomo de’ Medici.

The piece features an animated character designed in Cozomo’s famous zombie CryptoPunk flamboyantly climbing up the Federal Reserve building and planting an Ethereum and Bitcoin flag, representing the concept of an “inevitable future where crypto will be currency and art will be digital.” Despite the artwork and site being censored on social media (and even email), there were over 71,500 mints for the piece across more than 27,000 wallets. Check out the piece here.

Base was built using the Optimism stack, and it is interoperable with the Ethereum mainnet; this means that developers can build applications on Base that can also interact with applications on the Ethereum. At launch, there are 100+ dapps and service providers available in the Base ecosystem.

The launch of Base is a significant milestone for Coinbase, representing the company's commitment to furthering the development of blockchain technology. Base could help to make Ethereum more accessible to a wider range of users, and grow the DeFi and NFT ecosystems.

DeGods SIII & y00ts Migration

After months of development, DeGods and y00ts, two of the most popular and active brands in the ecosystem, made 3 big announcements that were met with very mixed reaction from the community. These announcements included:

• Art refresh: Simplified artwork that doesn’t dilute the existing collections, but instead is added to the metadata and can be “downgraded” for 333 $DUST, the token of the ecosystem. The artwork refresh also introduces female versions of each PFP, a long standing request.

• Points Parlor: Not too many specific details have been revealed about this yet, but 100% of the $DUST collected will be allocated to the pool and used to reward loyal holders.

• y00ts Migration: After a previous migration to Polygon (at the same time, DeGods went to ETH), y00ts will be migrating to ETH and returning the $3 million grant from Polygon. This move will bring both collections to Ethereum and allow for better interoperability.

The community reaction to the announcement was very mixed, but centered around one key idea: lack of communication. The traditional way of making an announcement for projects has been to build hype and excitement with mysterious messages; the result is high expectations and negative reactions when the announcement doesn’t meet those expectations.

That type of communication doesn’t work anymore, and ultimately shows how much the industry has matured. Shortly afterwards, the artist and co-founder for the projects released a short video addressing the communication lapse which appeared to shift sentiment for the better.

At the end of the day, every company has communication lapses at some point and it’s not the end of the world. Frank and his team are a small group who genuinely care about their community and making a difference in this space, and these updates are only going to continue to positively contribute to their mission.

Context

• NFTs continued to maintain low volumes with DeGods topping the charts this week among the mixed reaction from their announcements.

• Crypto was also relatively muted this week, but after ~1 month of a downward trend, ETH bounced off a local bottom of ~$1,800. Let’s see what this week brings.