Raw Light Express - Issue #1

Welcome to the beginning of my Raw Light series!

This is a way to share with you brief yet honest updates through what I believe is the most exciting time to be an artist, creator, community builder and technologist as the NFT space evolves.

Longer form content I occasionally add to my linked Medium profile and shorter form content goes straight to Twitter. The Raw Light series will act as the layer in between… weaving everything together.

I’ll cover both art & collectibles plus insights I’ve gathered from numerous chat groups, spaces and clubhouse rooms in the NFT metaverse. None of us can cover it all but I hope my voice can shine just a little extra light on our journey together!

https://institut.co/ - launched their marketplace this week with a roster of impressive artists both existing NFT natives and those for whom this will be their first foray into NFTs. They’re not by application but invitation (and I don’t mean Foundation type invitation so don’t ask me!) They’re an existing physical art gallery and this is a smart move to bridge both traditional artists into NFTs as well as NFT’s back to a physical gallery! Follow them on twitter.com/institutco

https://ethereals.wtf/ - with an awesome team behind the project and talented artist Jimmy Danko this is getting a lot of attention! I’m on the pre-sale list for Oct 1st minting with Public Mint starting Oct 7th. Elijah Wood appears to be a fan retweeting it out this week too but I’m hooked on the ghostly theme… I was obsessed with ghost stories as a kid. I was the weird one doing ouija boards in the school chapel to talk to the dead and teachers had to tell me to stop spreading ghost stories because I was scaring some of the younger kids!

https://woodiesnft.com/ - Just minted and sold out this week I managed to score 2 mint passes and then in a photo comp through the awesome FOTO Vault (more on that next issue) I was able to win an UltraDAO Mint Pass that meant I could mint one of the first 111 Woodies… and I got #11 🙌

Not only were they very smart using Mint Passes to avoid gas wars they also have raffles through October for those who hold onto their Mint Pass instead of redeeming their Woodie straight away. Raffles are giving away core characters in the evolving Woodies Lore but after raffles are done yoou’ll still be able to mint your Woodie too… it’s a win win. I’ve got a good feeling about this one, as does everyone I talk to and the art is just amazing, especially for pfp’s so my current Twitter pfp is my #11 😉

Woodies are also now in the top 10 biggest contributor to a charitable cause from NFTs to date! Check out the tweet below which proceeds from all trade activity goes to ❤️ Before anyone questions the environmental impact of all these Woodies being generated on Ethereum… consider this response on the tweet below “Best guess is 90 kilograms (of carbon generated) per nft which for Woodies would equate to 720 tonnes. So I guess what you should be saying is ‘thank you for removing 30,667 tonnes of co2 from the atmosphere! (from all the trees planted)”

https://www.frogland.io/ - with a really refreshing British charm it reminds me of Wind in the Willows (think Toad of Toad Hall) and their homepage sporting a little green Mini. The key artists are well known visual FX guys who have won awards for Harry Potter and a host of other famous movies. They’ve developed frog characters entirely in 3D which I love because they don’t look ‘too perfect’, they’re quirky and simple yet high res 3k images with amazing attention to detail plus fully metaverse ready. Development of a fully shared metaverse called NewPangea is now underway with Gutter Cats and Wicked Craniums and the project lead has a deep history in VR headsets and gaming so expect something good!

Foundation announced they’re adding ‘Collections’! See Jen Starks tweet below - profiled by FND to launch this feature it’s looking bloody good I must say.

Known Origin are rolling out step pricing for editions which is a very nice way to incrementally raise the value with each sale automatically set when minting.