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Metaverse Weekly: Ape’s, Chikn’s & a Whiff of Meta

Over the past week, numerous announcements, partnerships, and developments have been announced that have the potential to impact the metaverse space. The market cap of the metaverse cryptocurrency sector ends the week hovering around ~$29 billion USD. Most of the sector was down in price over the past week, though recently released ApeCoin (APE) ended the week up on a 15% gain.

APECOIN
Price action of APE over past seven days. Image credit: CoinMarketCap

Among top mentions in the metaverse market this week include these key players:

  • Avalanche NFTs & DeFi Kingdoms
  • Meta
  • Fidelity
  • Coinbase

Chikn NFTs Arrive in DeFi Kingdoms

The popular gamified DEX DeFi Kingdoms (DFK) recently made a major expansionary move to the Avalanche network. On Avalanche, DFK is utilizing the Synapse bridge to create a brand new realm called Crystalvale. This new realm will come along with a new power token in CRYSTAL.

This expansion to Avalanche has opened up DFK to an additional partnership with Chikn, the young NFT project featuring chickens (and soon roosters) as yield-generating NFT mints.

Chikn has a unique economic structure, deploying three separate tokens to power its ecosystem.

Those three tokens are:

  • Chikn – an upgradeable chicken-inspired NFT that lays $EGG
  • EGG – the governance and utility token for the ecosystem
  • FEED – harvested via the chikn.farm app, FEED is eaten by chikn to entice upgrades and higher yields.

These three tokens provide functionality and a self-sustaining economic system. Now, with an added utility to Chikn NFTs with the coming integration to DFK, both projects can cross-pollinate their user bases to facilitate new growth in the metaverse sector.

Chikn NFTs
Chikn NFTs

Facebook-Rebrand Meta Reveals Hefty NFT Costs

The parent company of Facebook, Meta, recently announced an eye-opening 47.5% cut on NFT sales stemming from its virtual reality platform called Horizon Worlds. This cut makes Meta the most expensive in the entire industry and it isn’t even close.

The fee can be broken down into two different parts. The first part is an immediate 30% hardware platform fee which covers Meta Quest store sales while the remaining 17.5% fee comes from the Horizon Worlds platform.

A comparison between fees across NFT marketplaces is provided below by Twitter user @dustdust213

The massive platforms of Looksrare, Rarible, and OpenSea have substantially lower fees of only 2-2.5%, laughable in comparison to the massive cost pressure Meta is putting on its own creators.

Investment Giant Fidelity to Launch New Metaverse ETF

Fidelity Investments announced its intentions to launch a new metaverse-branded exchange traded fund (ETF). The ETF, called FMET, will enable interested investors the ability to invest in a metaverse-specific fund, providing exposure to the fast-growing asset class.

Assets that can be expected to receive consideration for the fund include the following stocks & cryptocurrencies:

  • Meta
  • Nvidia
  • Unity Software
  • Microsoft
  • Decentraland
  • Axie Infinity
  • The Sandbox

This opportunity provides a brand new on-ramp for metaverse projects to receive liquidity and investment assistance. With new buyers stemming from the Fidelity channel, growth can be more readily achieved moving forward.

This announcement also further solidifies the broader interest in metaverse applications from external investors.

Coinbase Developing a BAYC Movie Trilogy

The most interesting development over the past week was the major Coinbase announcement of a coming Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) trilogy. BAYC is one of the most prominent NFT collections in the world today, with a floor market cap of over 1 million ETH (~$3 billion USD).

Users have the opportunity to participate in the project. The call for the community to participate is essentially a casting call. Those holding BAYC NFTs can deposit them to a Coinbase Wallet and connect them to the degentrilogy.com website to participate, bringing any ideas for characters and storylines.

The very first instalment of this new trilogy is said to premiere in June 2022.