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This week’s featured collector: ClipCity

ClipCity’s motto is “No idea what I’m doing and that’s the fun part.” And we appreciate the spirit! Their collection focuses on Ethereum profile pics and NBA TopShots. Includes many projects we’ve never seen before. Check it out at lazy.com/clipcity

Hackers strike again… Here’s how to protect yourself from the sophisticated scam that stole $1m worth of NFTs from Kevin Rose, the creator of Moonbirds

A couple days ago, Kevin Rose, the creator of Moonbirds, lost over $1,000,000 worth of NFTs. This is another dramatic reminder that even highly knowledgeable NFT creators and collectors can fall for sophisticated hacks.

This week we are going to discuss what happened and how you can protect yourself.

How was Kevin Rose hacked?

Technically, Kevin Rose was hacked because he signed a malicious signature request that transferred his NFTs to the hacker.

The way the hack works, in simple terms, is that the victim visits a scam website that appears legitimate. The website requests that they sign a transaction and explains that the signature is needed to login or claim an NFT. However, the signature actually gives the malicious site permission to transfer the victim’s NFTs using OpenSea’s Seaport protocol.

The signature request might look something like this:

As you can see, there is nothing obvious in the signature request that alerts the user to the fact that it’ll steal all your NFTs. This explains why people keep falling for this particular hack.

How can you protect your NFTs?

First, and most obviously, the best way to protect yourself from this hack is by only signing transactions that you trust. The trouble, however, is that hackers are now going to extreme lengths to craft websites that appear 100% legitimate. So it is important to be skeptical of any website that requests your signature.

The reason this hack has been so effective is that the signature request is not written in a human readable format. After all, it is hard to understand that signing a string of numbers can jeopardize your NFTs.

To address this, there are a few browser extensions that aim to make all signature requests human readable.

Two options are the browser extension from Revoke.Cash and Fire. We haven’t fully tested these, so please do your own research before installing.

Given the recent spate of high profile hacks, there is a lot of pressure building for a solution at the wallet level. It is likely that we will see MetaMask and other wallets introduce features to protect their users from NFT scams. Until then, stay safe!

This week’s poll: Have you ever lost NFTs in a hack?

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This week’s featured collector: Jeevan

Jeevan has a sizable collection of Ethereum NFTs. In fact, they have a little bit of everything—from ENS names to generative art to profile pics. Lots of interesting finds! Check it out at lazy.com/jeevan

What do you think about Conceptual NFTs?

This week jpg.space released a curated list of Conceptual NFTs. This is a genre of NFTs “in which the idea or concept takes precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, or material concerns.” In other words, while many NFTs are judged by how they look, Conceptual NFTs are judged by their ideas.

The curated list of Conceptual NFTs has generated some buzz in the ecosystem. Primarily because this is not a genre that many collectors are familiar with. In fact, 32 out of 75 NFTs on the list have 0 volume.

View the full list here.

So what do you think? Is this a tremendous opportunity to scoop up NFTs in a neglected genre? Or are Conceptual NFTs interesting but not worth collecting?

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This week’s featured collection: dklounge

Dklounge is the web3 pen name of Dennie Kim, an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. (Don’t worry, we’re not doxxing Dklounge, they list their real name publicly.) Dklounge’s collection is very cool: it ranges from Top Shots to Invisible Friends and more. Check it out at lazy.com/dklounge

Financial engineering is coming for NFTs in 2023. It is an exciting development… but is it good for the industry?

Just two weeks into the new year and it is clear that one of the biggest developments for NFTs in 2023 will be the merging of DeFi with NFTs. This trend is being called NFT Finance.

Previously the main thing that could be done with a collectible art NFT was to buy and hold it.

Now, traders will be able to take out complicated perpetual futures and options to bet on the rise and fall of NFTs without ever owning one directly. For a taste of what is to come, take a look at nftperp.xyz and hook.xyz.

On the one hand, these developments are exciting: they are proof that the NFT ecosystem continues to grow, attracting new participants and fostering new ways of interacting with NFTs.

On the other hand, the financialization of NFTs could open the door to negative outcomes: pushing NFTs away from art and culture toward financial engineering and gambling.

Either way, we will be watching these developments closely. It is clear that some serious building is happening during this bear market!

What do you think about NFT Finance? Fill out this poll and let us know!

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This week’s featured collection: MiguelFaus

MiguelFaus is a writer and director from Barcelona, now living in London. ​ His first feature film, Calladita, was the first European movie funded by NFTs. MiguelFaus’s collection includes several famous NFTs, such as CryptoPunks, HashMasks and Ringers. Check it out at lazy.com/miguelfaus

Hello 2023! This week we are kicking off the New Year by deepening our understanding of how NFTs work. You may be comfortable navigating an NFT marketplace, but today we’re going to look behind the scenes at smart contracts on the blockchain.

Let’s start with a basic recap. In very simple terms, there are three kinds of cryptocurrencies: 1) native tokens that power a blockchain 2) fungible tokens or 3) non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Native tokens, like Ethereum, are the fuel for the blockchain: you spend the native token to pay for transactions, such as transferring an NFT.

Fungible and non-fungible tokens are managed by smart contracts that run on the blockchain. What distinguishes NFTs from fungible tokens is that each NFT is one-of-a-kind. Think of it this way: each NFT has a unique serial number. And if you know the serial number of an NFT then you can also prove who owns it.

With that background out of the way, we can now look more closely at a specific NFT’s smart contract.

We’ll look at an NFT that we don’t own: Azuki.

First, we head to OpenSea and find Azuki’s smart contract address by clicking the Etherscan icon on the collection page.

Etherscan is a blockchain explorer. It tells us everything that is happening on the blockchain in an easy to read format. Each NFT has a smart contract that keeps track of ownership and other information.

Azuki’s smart contract address is 0xed5af388653567af2f388e6224dc7c4b3241c544 and if we open that address in Etherscan then we see this page:

Spend some time exploring this page. For now, we’re going to click on the Contract heading. This will load the NFT’s smart contract. If we are doing due diligence on a project then we could look at the smart contract to see if it was sophisticated or a simple copy/paste.

If you’re not a programmer then looking at the smart contract isn’t particularly helpful. Instead, try clicking on the “Read Contract” button. This allows you to query the NFT’s smart contract for information. You can scroll down to “ownerOf” and put in the serial number (or “tokenId”) of an Azuki NFT.

For example, if you put in the tokenId 1 then it will tell you who owns that NFT:

Keep playing around with the Read Contract screen and you’ll notice that all kinds of information is stored in the smart contract. For example, if you go to tokenURI and input 1 then the smart contract will give you a link to where the NFT’s image and attributes are stored.

In this case, the NFT’s information is stored on IPFS, a distributed file storage system.

Now you can understand how an NFT marketplace knows the attributes of your favorite NFT: the smart contract tells the marketplace where the information is stored!

Congratulations, you just interacted with an NFT smart contract running on the blockchain! Keep exploring and let us know what you learn!

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This week’s featured collection: Illestrater

There is something deeply satisfying about browsing an extremely large collection of NFTs. That is why this week’s featured collector is Illestrater, whose Ethereum NFT collection is extensive and includes many big name projects along with new ones worth discovering. Have fun looking through their collection at lazy.com/illestrater

Learning to “Delegate” could be the most important new skill for NFT collectors in 2023. Here’s how delegation can keep your NFTs safe.

A few of weeks ago, an extremely sophisticated scammer stole over a million dollars worth of NFTs from a Bored Apes collector. Although hacks are common, this particular scam attracted a lot of attention due to its complexity.

In brief, the scammer contacted the victim and claimed they wanted to license their Bored Ape for an upcoming film. When the collector went to sign the paperwork, they were asked to login to a web3 site. The site requested their signature and their Apes were instantly stolen.

Many people assume that signing a transaction is harmless, after all it is how we sometimes login to web3 sites. However, these scammers exploited a feature of OpenSea’s marketplace that allows the creation of private auctions using signatures. In other words, if you sign the wrong transaction it can be used to steal your NFTs. Scary!

For a full analysis of the scam, check out this thread.

One of the best ways to protect against getting scammed is to delegate your NFTs.

There are a few different delegation systems. The most well known is delegate.cash. Others, such as the one announced by Punk6529, will be released soon.

The way they work is simple:

1. You, the collector, store your NFTs in a cold wallet

2. You use a delegation system to link your cold wallet to a hot wallet

3. When a site wants to check if you own a specific NFT, it queries your hot wallet address instead of your cold wallet.

In other words, websites and smart contracts interact with your hot wallet (which does not contain any NFTs) instead of your cold wallet. And because your hot wallet is empty, nothing can be stolen.

It is an elegant solution. However, it does require NFT projects to upgrade their smart contracts and/or websites to support delegation. The best way to encourage that process is for collectors to make delegation a core part of their strategy for staying safe in 2023.

Thanks for reading! We wish you a wonderful end to 2022!

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This week’s featured collection: LongZai

Some collections show off the potential of NFTs and that is why we were delighted to discover LongZai. What makes their collection different is that it contains NFTs that prove they have completed web3 programing courses. For example, LongZai has a certificate for a course on “Advanced Solidity Syntax.” Very cool and we expect this will be more common in the future. Check it out at lazy.com/longzai

It’s been a wild ride for NFT and crypto enthusiasts in 2022. From the continued mainstreaming of NFTs—who could have predicted Trump would launch an NFT collection!?—to the collapse of FTX, it’s been a year of innovation and setbacks. As 2022 comes to a close, it’s a great time to look ahead to what the future might hold.

Here are three predictions we’re thinking about:

1. “NFTs stand on the cusp of the greatest adoption curve in history.” — RedPhone.eth

The crypto storyteller RedPhone.eth has released their annual “69 Theses” — a fascinating philosophical analysis of where crypto is headed in the year ahead. One of their strong claims is that NFTs are about to see massive adoption by the largest Web2 players. They write:

“Facebook, Instagram and Reddit have entered the chat. Now, NFTs stand on the cusp of the greatest adoption curve in history. All the Web2 participants will likely enter in 2023 (Amazon, Google, Apple, etc.) and NFTs will go parabolic… perhaps not in price but in minting and trading and exposure to new crypto participants.”

Read the full 69 Theses.

2. “For a long time, I have been bullish on blockchain identity but bearish on blockchain identity platforms.” — Vitalik Buterin

Earlier this month, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, released a detailed blog post entitled “What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me.” It is well worth reading for an insight into what the ultimate Ethereum insider sees as the most promising directions for crypto in 2023. Most interestingly, although Vitalik never uses the term “NFT,” he does devote significant attention to POAPs, or proof of attendance protocol, a technology that is built using NFTs. He writes:

“For a long time, I have been bullish on blockchain identity but bearish on blockchain identity platforms. […]An Ethereum-based Twitter alternative (eg. Farcaster) could use POAPs and other proofs of on-chain activity to create a “verification” feature that does not require conventional KYC, allowing anons to participate. Such platforms could create rooms that are gated to members of a particular community – or hybrid approaches where only community members can speak but anyone can listen. The equivalent of Twitter polls could be limited to particular communities.Equally importantly, there are much more pedestrian applications that are relevant to simply helping people make a living: verification through attestations can make it easier for people to prove that they are trustworthy to get rent, employment or loans.”

Read Vitalik’s full blog.

3. “There’s the signal and the noise. In crypto, 99% of it was noise. But there’s real value and signal there. […] Now crypto will get its act together.” — Mark Cuban

One of the most vocal proponents of crypto’s technological potential has been Mark Cuban, the founder of Lazy.com. In a recent interview on Jon Stewart’s podcast, Mark explained that crypto’s future is bright and the collapse of FTX, 3AC and Luna could be the catalyst for crypto to get its act together.

Listen to the full interview on The Problem with Jon Stewart.

What are your predictions for NFTs in 2023? Send us your thoughts and we might feature them in a future newsletter.

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This week’s featured collection: Ideka_Art_Studio

Ideka_Art_Studio is the collection of Inge De Knop, aka Ideka, an artist from Diksmuide, Belgium. Ideka makes abstract pieces using “flow art” or acrylic pouring in a surrealistic style. The results are stunning! Check it out at lazy.com/ideka_art_studio

The use cases for NFTs continue to expand as cities and institutions embrace their potential for funding cultural preservation.

We love NFTs because they are so full of potential. Digital art and collectibles are cool. But there is so much more that NFTs are capable of. Lately we’ve been exploring a new use case for NFTs: cultural preservation & restoration.

NFTs are already useful as a way to track and verify the ownership and provenance of cultural artifacts, such as works of art, historical documents, or other items of cultural significance. Monuverse, a project based in Italy that is working in partnership with the Office of Cultural Heritage for the City of Milan, takes this a step further. They are using NFTs to fund the preservation of The Arch of Peace, one of Milan’s most iconic monuments.

Elsewhere, NFTs are being used to help prevent the theft or destruction of historical or culturally significant items, and can also provide a way for people to securely and verifiably donate or contribute to the restoration of these items.

For example, in October of this year, The Kharkiv Art Museum in Ukraine launched “Art Without Borders,” a new NFT collection on the Binance NFT marketplace to raise funds for the preservation of cultural heritage. Fifteen artworks from Kharkiv Art Museum’s holdings were digitized and sold as NFTs.

Perhaps most interesting of all is the example of Tuvalu, an island nation under threat from rising sea levels. Recently Tuvalu declared itself “the first digital nation.” Tuvalu’s foreign minister told the COP27 climate summit that the nation plans to build a digital version of itself in the metaverse in order to preserve its history as it faces erasure due to climate change.

The role of NFTs continues to expand as the technology matures. Tracking the ownership of unique artworks and funding the preservation of cultural landmarks is just a tiny glimpse of the important role NFTs will play in the years ahead.

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This week’s featured collection is PapaAfrica

PapaAfrica is “hustling in the metaverse.” Their collection of Ethereum NFTs ranges from Runner to Friendship Bracelets and Valhalla. Lots of great art! Browse their collection at lazy.com/papaafrica

There is a saying in crypto: “The bear market is for builders.” And we are seeing this now in the NFT ecosystem as big technological changes are underway that will decide the future of royalties with the potential to permanently schism the NFT community.

Here’s a brief summary of events to get you up to speed: As we discussed in Newsletter #70, in recent months there have arisen NFT marketplaces that do not pay royalties to creators. This has led to anger from artists who are losing out on income.

Now, in an unexpected turn of events, OpenSea has announced plans to cajole NFT creators to blacklist marketplaces that don’t pay royalties.

In a series of tweets yesterday, OpenSea declared that “the revolutionary potential of creator fees has been under attack for months” and therefore, “It’s an existential imperative for the space to preserve creator fees.”

In other words: the fully decentralized ethos of crypto is breaking down as the largest NFT marketplace begins to enforce its vision on the community. The result may be two disconnected NFTs ecosystems: one that respects royalties, the other that is wild and free.

The reaction to OpenSea’s moves have been strong:

For their part, OpenSea has responded to critics by adjusting their plans slightly. It is too early to know exactly how their implementation will change.

Right or wrong, OpenSea’s moves will have a big impact on the future of NFTs and what the NFT ecosystem looks like during the next bull cycle. We’ll be following these developments closely.

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This week’s featured collection is Kalskie

Kalskie is an entrepreneur, trader and creative. They collect Ethereum NFTs such as Crookz, White Rabbit Zero and Chains. Browse their collection at lazy.com/kalskie

How to securely store your NFTs.

If you have some NFTs that you don’t plan on selling or trading anytime soon, it might be a good idea to put them into secure storage. That way you don’t have to worry about accidentally losing them: peace of mind is priceless.

Here are three ways to create your own impenetrable storage system:

Option #1: Cold Wallet

A cold wallet is a wallet that is not connected to the internet. There are many different ways to create a cold wallet, but the easiest is to download a new web browser (such as Firefox) onto your computer and install a fresh copy of MetaMask. Use the fresh copy of MetaMask to generate a new seed phrase. Important: Print out the seed phrase and store it in a safe place. Now send your NFTs to the new MetaMask’s address. Connect your new address to your Lazy account to confirm that they have arrived and then uninstall the new MetaMask and delete the web browser that you downloaded. You’ve now created a cold storage wallet. If you want to access your NFTs, you’ll need to re-install MetaMask and import your seed phrase. If you lose your seed phrase then your NFTs are gone forever! Also, this only works if your computer is virus-free before installing the new web browser.

Option #2: Hardware Wallet

A hardware wallet is a device that stores your seed phrase and requires you to physically confirm with a button press every blockchain transaction before it is approved. Three of the most popular hardware wallets are: Trezor, Ledger and Grid+ Lattice1. Be sure to get a hardware wallet that supports the blockchains you use. Hardware wallets are not cheap—and they won’t prevent you from approving malicious transactions—but they are still one of the best ways to secure your crypto assets. To put your NFTs into storage using a hardware wallet, you would simply transfer them to the address generated by your hardware wallet and then put the device in a secure location.

Option #3: Multisig Wallet

A third option worth considering is a multi-signature (“multisig”) wallet. This is a special kind of cryptowallet that requires two or more wallets to approve every transaction. Normally used by distributed teams, multisig wallets can also be used by individuals to create a secure storage system. For example, you could create a multisig wallet that requires you to approve transactions using wallets on two different computers. That makes it much more difficult for a hacker to steal your assets and it also gives you an opportunity to carefully consider whether you want to approve a transaction. The most popular multisig wallet for Ethereum is Gnosis Safe.

Once you’ve transferred your NFTs to a secure wallet, connect the wallet to Lazy.com so the NFTs are still visible on your profile. What are your most prized NFTs? Send us an email and tell us why you’re storing them long term.

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This week’s featured collection is Arcaraai

“My best friend says I do cubistic cartoons,” writes Arcaraai. “I disagree and want to get additional feedback. I established a rather coherent style, however, my work is categorized as ‘abstract’ which isn’t exactly the hip thing these days… Yes, I use AI to some extent. But you wouldn’t notice.”

Take a look at Arcaraai’s unique artworks at lazy.com/arcaraai and let us know what you think!

A man rides a roller coaster and maintains a straight-face despite the terrifying turns, loops and curves… the caption reads “Crypto OGs right now.”

No wonder this tweet has garnered hundreds of likes: there is a lot of truth in the meme. For those of us who have been following cryptocurrencies for many years, recent events—from the crash of 3AC to FTX—and the ongoing fears of wider contagion are reminiscent of the many terrifying collapses the crypto ecosystem has overcome in the past.

Remember Mt. Gox? Pirate40’s ponzi? The ICO craze? BitConnect? The list goes on. Yes, this time is different. However, as Mark Twain famously wrote, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

So what gives “crypto OGs” their ability to maintain a straight-face during this cycle’s rollercoaster?

For many, it is an understanding that the technologies underlying crypto, such as blockchains and smart contracts, are here to stay and that their full potential is still becoming clear. From this perspective, crypto today is akin to the early days of the internet. Imagine giving up on the internet because of the dot.com crash in the late 1990s.

Being straight-faced during recent events doesn’t mean being oblivious to the real risks that these downturns entail. Nor does it mean ignoring the damage that is being done to people’s livelihoods with each collapse. Instead, it means realizing that although the crash may continue, or worsen, eventually it will end and when it does a new chapter for crypto will be written.

The collapse of Mt. Gox proceeded Ethereum’s smart contracts. The ICO crash came before Uniswap and DeFi. The demise of FTX happened before the invention of… ? Let’s stick around and find out.

Regardless of whether you are a crypto OG or a newcomer, we hope you doing alright in these difficult times. What strategies have you discovered for maintaining equanimity? Send us an email with your ideas.

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