gm fam! Welcome to Q3.

Q2 was another chaotic couple of months from Pepe kicking off memecoin mania to the Ethereum Shapella upgrade, as well as big crypto players getting sued by the SEC while TradFi took over. The latter will likely continue to make headlines as we continue into Q3, but as we all know, anything can happen in the world of web3.

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

• Rug Radio Updates🎙️

• Azuki Elementals Fiasco⛩️

• Tokenized Teslas👀

STUBS Claim

Did you claim your Stubs Mint Passes or are you holding onto a few?

This week’s featured artist is Pauline Faieff, a nude artist who collaborates with photographers to bring the female body and femininity to her work. She began her journey three years ago and ventured into the world of NFTs in 2021 becoming an advocate for reduced censorship of nude art.

Her focus lies in sharing her artistic evolution in the realm of nude art, emphasizing the significance of personal expression rather than technical expertise. At NFC Lisbon, she assumed the role of recruiter for the Nude category, where she conveyed the motivations behind nude art and its meaning to herself and others.

• 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

$RUG Claim Update

Bad news: Our development partners stopped supporting our original claim dashboard meaning there isn’t currently a way to claim $RUG tokens via a website.

Good news: Our tech team has been working overtime, and will have the new dashboard up this week with an easier to navigate UI and full functionality.

In the meantime, we created a quick tutorial showing how to claim $RUG directly from the smart contract!

Track all of your wallets with
MetaMask Portfolio

The crypto tools we use everyday are very fragmented.

We often find ourselves juggling multiple wallets, exchanges, and applications to manage our assets.

MetaMask aims to solve this with MetaMask Portfolio, a one-stop shop to manage your assets and access a range of web3 services in one place with features including:

• Portfolio Tracking: See a comprehensive overview of all of your coins, tokens, and NFTs across multiple wallets in one place.

• Cross-Chain Capability: Buy, swap, bridge, and stake with the best rates and providers across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and more.

• Secure and Simple: Leveraging the security of MetaMask and an easy-to-use interface, you get a streamlined solution to manage your wallets without needing to trust third parties.

Are you ready to streamline your experience with managing your portfolio and interacting with dApps?

Azuki Elementals Fiasco⛩️

During Azuki’s “Follow the Rabbit” event in Las Vegas, the team announced Azuki Elementals, a sister collection to the original Azuki collection, with 20,000 tokens spanning across four different domains - Earth, Water, Lightning, and Fire.

In an electric announcement during the event, holders were told to check their wallets to find that Azuki Elemental Beans had been airdropped and would act as a pass to reveal their Azuki Elemental.

Fast forward to mint and reveal day, things didn’t go exactly as planned…

• Mint: As expected, the mint sold out during the presale. However, there was some backlash with the mint mechanics with starting times for Azuki, Beanz, and public staggered across 10 minute windows. Additionally, there was an uncapped number of mints for Azuki holders and some Beanz holders didn’t get to mint.

• Reveal: Shortly after the mint closed, the reveal went live and it was discovered that - with the exception of a few special traits - the art was very similar to the original collection leaving many community members upset, particularly holders of the original collection.

In response to the community backlash, the team hosted a Discord community call, which was also broadcasted across several Twitter Spaces, with a combined audience of several thousand listeners. In the 1.5+ hour call, the team addressed a variety of community concerns from the mint mechanics to the art to next steps; Arcanic summed up the key points super well in this thread…

Can Azuki recover from this? Prices across nearly their entire ecosystem saw significant declines, and the answer to this will depend on where the team goes from here.

Azuki is known to be one of the highest performing teams with a strong community, and with plans to launch an anime series to build out the IP and introduce community-based products and voting, they might just be able to make an incredible comeback and regain the community’s trust.

One mystery remains…What are the Green Beans?

Eloop, a ride-sharing service in Vienna, launched their decentralized car ownership service with 100 tokenized Teslas.

DeLabs released a video teasing a DeGods and y00ts update, along with releasing an update to their website with a FaceBook-like design.

Cool Cats announced some big changes to their ecosystem including gaming partnerships, upgrades for Cool Pets, and discontinuing $MILK token generation with a burn to claim digital and physical rewards.

In a 15,000 person survey, Consensus found that 92% people have heard of crypto with over one-third of people seeing it’s future potential.

Context

• The Azuki ecosystem dominated the headlines and volume this past week with the Elementals fiasco, along with the Yuga Labs ecosystem with the launch of the HV-MTL game.

• Crypto was lower throughout the week before a little bit of a rally on the back of some technical moves and Fidelity filing for a Bitcoin ETF.