Nifty News: Anime-ca Brands, Steve Aoki’s NFTs more profitable than decade of studio albums

Anime and Animoca Brands

Blockchain gaming and Metaverse company Animoca Brands has launched a strategic subsidiary in Japan after raising $10 million in seed funding.

The new subsidiary, named Animoca Brands KK, plans on expanding popular Japanese content into NFTs, the Metaverse, and fungible tokens through Web3 applications. The content includes anime such as My Hero Academia and Dragon Ball, games, art, sports, and others.

Funds for this latest expansion were raised in a $10 million seed round led by Japanese investment firm MCP Asset Management’s MCP IPX One Fund.

Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu told Cointelegraph that “this one is really big” because of the content being brought into the NFT space and the size of the firms now involved.

Siu also said in the official announcement from Feb. 15:

“Our Japanese division will focus on partnering with IP owners in Japan to enable them to offer new Web3 products and services in the open Metaverse.”

Animoca’s other major investments in NFTs and the Metaverse include The Sandbox (SAND), Axie Infinity (AXS), and Dapper Labs.

Rarible and Cyber create VR platform for NFTs

Virtual reality platform Cyber and NFT marketplace Rarible have teamed up to create a fully immersive virtual NFT marketplace.

The marketplace is compatible with the Oculus headset on mobile devices and gives collectors a way to browse collections in a 3D Metaverse setting. Using Cyber’s marketplace requires users to list their NFTs for sale on Rarible.

— ᴏɴ ᴄʏʙᴇʀ (@oncyber_io) February 15, 2022

Rarible is the 19th biggest NFT marketplace with $47,000 in trading volume over the past 24 hours according to DappRadar.

DJ Steve Aoki’s NFT income surpasses music career

Azukita song performer Steve Aoki revealed that he makes more from trading NFTs than he has from 10 years of selling studio albums.

Aoki has been selling NFTs on the OpenSea NFT marketplace since March 2021, when his Steve Aoki collection dropped. Since then, the collection has enjoyed 547 ETH volume traded among 953 owners.

At a private Gala Music event on Feb. 10, Aoki said,

“If I was to really break down, OK in the 10 years I’ve been making music, six albums, and you culminate all those advances, what I did in one drop last year in NFTs I made more money.”

Aoki’s collection demonstrates his keen sense of the NFT industry. He owns a Yat that serves as his personal URL and has collected several Bored Ape Yacht Clubs and Adidas Originals NFTs worth over $1 million. His latest foray in the NFT space is the Aok1verse Metaverse iteration.

Samsung S22 pre-sale offer includes NFT drop for Koreans

Samsung’s latest update to its S-series of smartphones hit the market with fanfare in South Korea, where early buyers were treated with several benefits including an exclusive NFT.

Presale buyers of the S22 phones and Tablet S8 will receive an NFT from Theta Labs, which has had a long-standing partnership with Samsung. Theta hopes the offer will drive users to its ThetaDrop NFT marketplace, where people must go to claim their NFT.

Presale orders for the S22 exceeded those for the S21 by three to four times, according to a report from Korean news agency Yonhap News.

Other Nifty News

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) may be diving into the Metaverse soon as the exchange has registered to trademark the NYSE name on several blockchains and crypto products. The application includes uses in virtual reality and augmented reality software, NFTs, and online marketplaces.

The CryptoPunks community is up in arms over allegations that Larva Labs sold dozens of CryptoPunks v1 on OpenSea before withdrawing recognition of their authenticity. The v1 collection had a smart contract exploit which was fixed by issuing a v2 collection.