📔 Weekly Journal: Metaverse Museums 🥽🦖
[8 min read] Your guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier (& the weekend!). Today, the usual market news & treats as well as why museums are the ideal use case for immersive experiences
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 36 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Enjoy your weekend! 😎
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
📈 Market update: Nothing exciting this week pricewise, but sentiment pops back into mild greed.
🗞️ Interesting news: NFT-styled debit cards, Indonesia's national crypto exchange launches, Avalanche’s push into tokenising real-world assets, British Museum partners with The Sandbox.
👓 Read of the week: The food and beverage industry adoption of NFTs projected to exceed $2 billion by 2032
🎥 Video of the week: The immersive museums with virtual art galleries, cultural venues, and educational spaces
🤖 This week’s AI showcase: A new (free) sketch-to-image tool that helps you to turn a simple sketch + word prompt into stunning images
✅ Weekly poll: Help choose the emerging tech topic for Wednesday’s showcase.
🤑 DCA with me: Follow my regular $50 weekly investing in an emerging asset class.
Market Update
🔥🗺️ The 7-day heatmap shows a slightly red week with BTC and ETH holding at support levels.
🎭 Sentiment levels are back to mild greed as the market returns to tentative optimism about the possibility of starting another bull market
Interesting news 🗞️
Digital Assets News 🌐💱
🏦 NFT-styled debit cards are envisioned as the future of Web3, as demonstrated by Animoca Brands' $30 million investment in Hi, a Web3 neobank platform. These innovative debit cards allow users to personalize their physical cards with NFT avatars they own, embracing the ongoing shift towards personalization in the digital world. By combining cryptocurrency exchange services, digital banking, and customizable NFT-styled cards, Hi's approach aligns with the essence of Web3—empowering users to express their individuality and creativity in new and exciting ways.
🌏 The operational launch of Indonesia's national crypto exchange and clearinghouse is of immense significance due to the country's size and economic importance (4th largest by population!). With government approval, Indonesia fosters a fair and secure crypto trading ecosystem, providing legal certainty and customer protection. This move enhances investor confidence and highlights the country's adaptability to emerging technologies for economic growth. Collaborating with regulatory authorities demonstrates a balanced approach, promoting innovation while mitigating risks. Indonesia's proactive stance sets a precedent for other countries, influencing global recognition of blockchain's transformative potential in shaping finance and fostering economic growth.
🧩 Avalanche introduced Avalanche Vista this week, a $50M fund to promote asset tokenization on its Layer 1 blockchain. The initiative will purchase tokenized equity, credit, real estate, commodities, and blockchain-native assets. The aim is to drive a more accessible and cost-effective financial system. The program will support protocols with clear value propositions and comprehensive go-to-market strategies. Avalanche's move aligns with growing interest in real-world assets (RWAs) within DeFi, and Bank of America predicts the asset tokenization sector to exceed $16T in value over the next 5-15 years. Several asset tokenization projects are already operational on the Avalanche network.
💸 MakerDAO's founder, Rune Christensen, is pushing for a significant increase in the Dai Savings Rate (DSR) from 3.19% to 8%. The DSR is a module that pays interest to users on their DAI deposits. The proposed 8% yield on DAI would be highly attractive to users, especially considering that stablecoin yields on other platforms are generally between 2% and 3%. This increase is viewed as a growth initiative for the protocol. However, it requires clearance from MKR holders. The move aims to encourage more DAI deposits and stimulate growth while MakerDAO undergoes significant changes in its governance structure and explores its own blockchain development.
XR & Virtual Worlds News
🖼️ The Sandbox (I did a post on them) and the British Museum are partnering to bring art and history to the metaverse, creating immersive experiences for users to explore world history through digital collectibles. The collaboration aims to make the museum's artefacts more accessible to new audiences from around the globe. This move follows other major museums embracing the metaverse, showcasing NFT collections and digitalised art:
Centre Pompidou held a new exhibition at the intersection of art and blockchain. The exhibition featured NFTs from renowned collections like CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs.
Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp tokenized a classic art masterpiece worth millions of euros.
Decentraland's Metaverse Art Week showcased interactive digital art exhibitions, including a Frida Kahlo immersive experience virtual installation that included nearly 800 different pieces that Kahlo used in her everyday life, unseen by the public until last week.
🧠 Ready to think “Hey Siri”? A patent by Apple published this week features an interesting brain-machine interface: EEG-integrated AirPods. (Patent US-20230225659-A1)
👓Read of the Week
The food and beverage industry is rapidly adopting Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to enhance marketing and transparency, with a projected global market size expected to exceed $2 billion by 2032, according to a report by Research and Markets.
Major chains like Pizza Hut and Papa John's are already integrating NFTs into their strategies, offering unique digital assets like virtual pizza slices and handbag designs. My fav was Pizza Hut Canada’s "1 Byte Favorites" - NFTs of a pizza slice with recipes such as Hawaiian, Canadian, Margherita, and Pepperoni, as part of a marketing drive to promote their pan pizzas and draw customer attention.
For more, you can read the report summary here.
Video of the week 🎥
Museums, traditionally physical spaces for art and historical objects, are now embracing the virtual world to attract new audiences. These virtual museums, known as metaverse-native or digital museums, exist solely in the digital realm. They offer exciting experiences in the metaverse, with virtual art galleries, cultural venues, and educational spaces emerging as examples of this trend.
I enjoyed this video by SliiceXR, a global Web3 ad agency that aims to help brands in seizing new markets and producing additional revenue sources using VR, AR, AI, and XR technologies.
(Note: I would call these more “virtual experiences” and save the term “Metaverse” for what’s emerging over the next 5ish years)
This week’s AI showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
AI is disruptive, challenging industries and driving innovation. Each week I showcase something amazing generated by AI-based tools. My vision of the emerging Metaverse predicts the use of many AI tools to enhance how we work, learn, play and socialise.
Stable Doodle is an innovative sketch-to-image tool that helps you to transform simple sketches into dynamic and visually appealing images, offering virtually limitless creative possibilities. Basically, you do a little doodle then write a word and the rest is magic!
Here are some examples:
Weekly Poll ✅
Help choose what you would like to learn about on Wednesday for my weekly emerging tech showcase:
That’s all for the free version this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.
DCA With Me 🤑
Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy in which an investor regularly invests a fixed amount of money into a particular asset/asset class at regular intervals, regardless of its current market price. By doing so, the investor can reduce the impact of market volatility and potentially earn a better return over time. Motto = time IN the market beats trying to time the market
To experiment with this, I invest $50 NZD into a Digital Asset every week. Each week I will choose an asset that seems underpriced in the short term and has positive long-term potential. My timeframe is 3-5 years. I don’t give financial advice but if you want to follow along with me you can use my easycrypto.co.nz referral link to support this newsletter. Let’s dive into this week’s pick:
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