gm fam! Whether it was the long holiday weekend in the US or everyone spending their time on Threads, it was a very quiet week for NFTs while the sentiment surrounding crypto is slowly but surely improving.

This is Rug Radio. Enjoy your Sunday and happy threadin’.

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

• Rug Radio Updates🎙️

• Threads & the Fediverse?🧵

• Bitcoin Q2 Network Report🟧

STUBS Claim

This week's featured artists, E1MT and Raskalov from On The Roofs, form a daring duo whose artistic focus revolves around their thrilling urban explorations and breathtaking climbs to incredible heights worldwide. Their extraordinary feats include climbing the Giza pyramids, Shanghai Tower, Christ the Redeemer statue, as well as the tallest buildings in NYC.

Raskalov, hailing from Ukraine, nurtured his adventurous spirit through exploration, climbing local trees, and embracing any challenge that came his way.

Em1t has consistently defied conventions since his youth, channeling his rebellious nature into art that not only provides him with the exhilaration of scaling new heights, but also delivers something of value to people.

• Ready to claim?

  • Dualism & Dimensions by E1MT

  • Risk & Reward by Raskalov

• Need more mint passes? Grab a couple on Opensea

• Not familiar with Stubs? Check out our guide

$RUG Claim Dashboard

The new $RUG claim dashboard is here! Our Tech Lead, Gman, and his entire team put in a ton of work to create a seamless claim experience. You can even check how much unclaimed $RUG a Genesis NFT has before you buy it.

We’re still waiting on a few additional details from our former development partner, so currently only $RUG claims are available with $RDAO coming soon!

Simplify your wallet management 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.

Threads🧵

Threads has taken social media by storm the past couple of days. Funny enough, the app isn’t actually about posting threads but instead combines the speed of Twitter with the lighter vibes of Instagram.

In an attempt to replicate Twitter, Meta introduced Threads, a text-based social media platform that is designed to be a more intimate and personal experience than other platforms with nearly 100 million signups since it launched.

The secret to it’s incredible early success? To sign up, all you have to do is connect your Instagram account and you can even automatically follow everyone that you already follow on Instagram. Instead of having to get the entire user base to sign up to a new app, 2+ billion people can seamlessly sign up using their existing account.

One of the most interesting things about the platform is how the algorithm displays content. Similar to TikTok, content is quite loosely ranked making discovery of accounts with less followers a lot better. However, and it’s probably still too early to say for sure, it appears that text and photos perform significantly better than videos. If you’re an artist and/or writer, this is your time to shine.

Threads is still in its early stages, so it’s not 100% perfect and is very basic in it’s functionality; you won’t find any DM’s, social audio features, and your timeline and notifications might even serve you threads from several hours/days ago. A lot of people don’t seem to mind this though…they’re actually enjoying the simplicity and refreshing feel of the app.

Additionally, the could be an element of “decentralization” with Threads. In Meta’s blog post, they talked about the fediverse and making the platform interoperable with both centralized platforms like Wordpress as well as decentralized platforms like Mastodon. This means that developers can build integrations that pull the content from Threads but set their own policies, while users would be able to transfer their content to a different service. It seems that Meta might just be shifting away from their “walled garden” approach and embracing the concept of decentralization and user ownership.

All of this has a lot of people asking: Will Threads replace Twitter?

It’s still too early to tell what Threads will become, but it likely won’t completely replace it and instead will have it’s own place in the social media landscape…but, if Meta builds out the product to the same level of or higher than Twitter with features that it’s users want, there is a potential for Threads to having real staying power as a leading social media app.

Context

• The Azuki ecosystem continued to dominate the top 10, but things were still pretty quiet in NFT land with continued attention towards crypto ETF news and Threads.

• Crypto started the week higher, but ended relatively unchanged after a hotter than expected ADP employment report and minutes from the previous FOMC meeting showing the potential for a couple additional rate hikes. The exception to this was Solana which rallied 16% for the week.

• In the week ahead, we’ll be waiting for more key economic reports including US CPI and PPI as well as more attention and headlines surrounding Bitcoin/crypto ETFs.