Rug Radio Recap - May 28, 2023

gm fam! We’re back after a little break following an incredible week in Indianapolis at VeeCon. It was great getting to meet so many of you both at the conference as well as at the (somewhat unplanned) after-party at the unofficial Rug House.

Town Hall Note: We’ll be skipping tomorrow’s Town Hall for the holiday in the US, and will host our next one on June 12 at 5pm ET. It’s gonna be a big one as we have a lot cooking in Europe over the next 2 weeks👀

Let’s dive into this week’s recap...

• Rug Radio Updates

• Pudgy Penguins turnaround

• NFTs on Bitcoin continue to soar

• Binance enters the NFT lending game

• Will ERC721-C solve royalty issues?

STUBS Claim

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

The claim is open for “Hate My Mind When I’m Alone” by Anzomez, our featured artist for week 6, who creates purple glitch art with symbolic themes around sadness or disappointment.

• Need more mint passes? Grab a couple on Opensea

• Ready to claim? Head over to the Fair mint site (ends today at 11:59pm ET)

• Not familiar with Stubs? Check out our guide

Audio Galleries & Sarah Script

Ben, the founder and host of Audio Galleries, teamed up with the incredibly talented calligrapher, Sarah Script, to release her first generative art collection, Holy Script. As the prevalence of AI grows in both art and writing, Sarah hopes that the humanity inherent in calligraphy can be preserved and appreciated.

The mint is open until May 29 at 1:30 pm ET (5:30pm UTC), exclusively on OpenSea.

NFC Lisbon

Planning to be in Lisbon for NFC Lisbon on June 7?

In partnership with Lama and nftees, we’ll be hosting a Rug Radio and Rektguy holders only event on June 7 at 7:30pm at Go A Lisboa Rooftop. If you’re gonna be in town, head over to Tokenproof to get your tickets!

The Hundreds, a streetwear brand founded by Bobby Kim, announced the opening of some.place, an immersive 3D store and metaverse platform.

NFT Now revealed a sneak peak of their member portal for Now Pass holders.

The amount of ETH held on exchanges has hit it’s lowest levels since 2016 as staking continues to grow in popularity post-Shapella upgrade.

The auctions for Checks Elements by Jack Butcher concluded on Thursday raising over 400 ETH with $30,000 USD being donated to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

STEPN, the first move-to-earn web3 based gaming app, became the first blockchain gaming app to integrate with Apple Pay.

Context

• Volumes across NFT projects have remained somewhat muted with weekly OpenSea volumes hovering just below $40 million USD. The exception to this has been a select few collections which saw double digit percent drops, as well as art focused projects such as Fidenza’s and the Jack Butcher ecosystem.

• Crypto has continued to move sideways for the past couple weeks with Ethereum ranging between $1,750 - $1,860, generally due to macro economic uncertainty.

• In the week ahead, we’ll get the US Employment Report on Friday as well as keep an eye on how the US debt ceiling talks play out (last night, CNBC published a story stating that a tentative deal had been reached).