NFT space set ablaze

Among Monday's big movers is MANA, native token of Decentraland, a virtual reality (VR) world straight out of Ready Player One.

No doubt poised to play, MANA was jolted 12% higher in the past 24 hours as of Monday at 9 a.m. (EST) following the news of Ethereum-run Decentraland's decision to lease out space in its metaverse to iconic Atari, which, along with Decentral Games, is launching Atari Casino. Users will be able to access the casino using MANA, as well as DAI, and Atari’s native token, ATRI.

Decentral Games, part of Decentraland, is looking to capitalize on the non-fungible token craze by giving away exclusive NFT prizes during the casino’s launch (BeInCrypto).

Bitcoin rallied over the weekend on the news of landmark $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief legislation passing in the U.S. Senate. On cue, BTC popped, from $48,000, where it had been languishing, range-bound, to above $50,000.

But then earlier today, BTC lost ground as macro realities (surging dollar) seemed to set in.

BTC's all-time high was about $58,640 on Feb. 21. It’s 14% off that mark. As of Monday morning at 7:45 a.m. (EST), BTC had dipped 1% over 24 hours, to $50,000. BTC is up 12% since last Monday. As 9 a.m. got nearer, so too did $51K, with BTC bolting back into the green.

A surging U.S. dollar, goosed by the vaccine-progress-spurred possibility that the economy is about to get wildly stronger, was a boilerplate hung around the neck of Bitcoin earlier today. As we wrote this, BTC seemed to shrug it off.

Few pretend to actually know where BTC is heading long-term. Ranges given by the staunchest bears/bulls literally run from zero to infinity.

Technical indicators watched by traders suggest the short-term trend is bullish. Solid support lines are being described as being cemented in the mid-40K range. The medium-term trend is bullish based on the assumption that short-term worst-case scenarios indeed do hold.

Eligible Americans will get $1,400 payouts. Some of it surely will flow into BTC.

Things have a way of coming full circle, don’t they?

A 2006 Banksy print, “Morons,” depicting an auctioneer auctioning off a framed satirical caption poking fun at art auctions, was turned into a non-fungible token (NFT) minted on SuperFarm, a cross-chain DeFi protocol. Then it was incinerated by a group of crypto investors said to have acquired the original last month for $100,000. The group, BurntBanksy, just auctioned the “Morons” NFT for $382,000 on OpenSea.

Meanwhile, the Twitter platform’s first ever tweet, by CEO Jack Dorsey, is being tokenized and auctioned off, with bids already exceeding $2 million.

In a move that seems NFT-focused, Dorsey's Square recently announced it would be acquiring a majority stake in music streaming platform Tidal, paying over $290 million (Blockonomi).

On Friday, in a move that further oxygenated the NFT craze blaze and marked another verse in a long-playing music industry story song, Kings of Leon announced that they would be selling their latest album as an NFT.

In 1900, music was dominated by Big Vaudeville. Early phonograph recordings, seen as a vehicle to promote sheet music, were made out of brittle shellac resin. More than 100 million "shellacs" were being sold annually by the 1920s – just in time for the music industry to face a competitive threat from a new form of technology, the radio.

The music industry will be scrambling to cash in on the NFT craze as artists look to establish relevance in an industry that is heavily tied to young people and to live touring, which was upended by the pandemic.

Billboard has begun charting tokenized releases in a sure sign that the NFT space is fully ablaze.