Equality in NFT art, SEC targets Bored Apes and Meta’s new VR headset
Welcome to This week in the Metaverse, where Fortune rounding up the most interesting news in the NFT world, culture and metaverse. Email [email protected] with tips.
When it comes to NFT art, most of the attention—and most of the sales—go to male creators. A study by the research agency Art Tactic from November found that a whopping 77% of all NFT art sales go to men.
In an effort to change this stark disparity, NFT marketplace MakersPlace partnered with Excedrin, by UK healthcare company Haleon, to launch Equal Bytes, an accelerator program focused on female artists in the Web3. A minimum of 100 artists will be accepted and receive guaranteed bids of around $800 (with gas fees covered) for a piece of art they create. Applications for the program are open until 2 November.
“It shouldn’t be like this in digital art. There should be a place for equity for everyone, but it still remains that less than 20% of sales go to female artists,” says Rishi Mulgund, pain relief brand director at Haleon.
The Equal Bytes cohort will be selected from a group of talented Web3 artists, including Shurooq Amin, a Kuwaiti artist who turned to NFTs and digital art after an art exhibition of hers was censored by the Kuwait government.
Amin, the first Kuwaiti artist to feature NFT art, said she has faced criticism and attacks for her art, which explores gender differences, homosexuality and questions taboos in the Muslim world. Still, digital art and NFTs can be a way for women, especially in Muslim-majority countries, to freely create and sell art when traditional markets are not made available to them, she said.
“You don’t need to be represented by anyone. You don’t have to wait for someone to discover you. You are already your own boss,” Amin said.
All the pieces will be displayed in an online exhibition at MakersPlace and auctioned off on November 21st. And while the minimum bid for each piece is $800, competing bids can push prices much higher.
Metaverse as a service?
It’s no secret that companies are increasingly experimenting with the metaverse. One of the companies helping other companies create and test their own so-called metaworlds is Surreal Events, a two-year-old firm that has already created virtual worlds for clients including the Atlanta Braves and Epic Games.
Surreal’s platform uses pixel streaming, which allows Unreal Engine-based metaworlds to run in a browser without any downloads, giving businesses a chance to prototype, deploy and manage realistic-looking virtual worlds that could launch in about six weeks.
One of Surreal Events’ key selling points is that it gives companies a chance to quickly roll out a metaverse experience, rather than spending months testing something that might flop, CEO Josh Rich said. Fortune.
“It’s more than a white paper, and it’s more than screenshots on a Discord server,” Rich said. “It’s an actual live environment that can be pushed out as a prototype, or to the community, as you build the runway for takeoff.”
Epic Games has already used Surreal Events’ platform to create Detroit Lab, a virtual innovation center open to everyone.
In other news:
The The Security and Exchange Commission has the NFT industry, and now apparently Bored Ape Yacht Club the creator Yuga Labs, in its sights. Bloomberg reported in March that the agency had opened an investigation into the NFT industry. This probe apparently includes some NFTs from Yuga and the cryptocurrency it has adopted for its Otherside metaverse, ApeCoin.
Meta rreleased his graduate Quest Pro VR headset this week. But with a $1,500 price tag, some doubt a mainstream metaverse is within reach—despite the billions Meta has invested.
CNN closed its NFT marketplace, Vault by CNN, which sold digital versions of CNN reports and related art. The company said it would compensate collectors with roughly 20% of the original coin price for each NFT, but some still felt rattled by the news network.
Snoop Dogg is the king of NFTs, or at least pays for them, according to a study by CoinGecko. The rapper, who goes by the name Cozomo de’ Medici on crypto Twitter, paid $7.08 million for digital artist XCOPY’s Right click and Save as guy. To take the top spot, Snoop beat out Gary Veeits purchase of 3.9 million dollars CryptoPunk #2140 and Justin Bieberits purchase of 1.3 million dollars Boring monkey #3001.
After there were reports that 1.2 billion dollars metaverse Decentralized country registered 38 active users in a 24-hour period, an unlikely critic, Ethereum’s co-founder Anthony D’Onofrio, so in a tweet that the whole concept of the metaverse is “stupid.”
Speaking of Decentralized country, Felipe Escudero, the founder of architecture studio Estudio Felipe Escudero in Quito, Ecuador, unveiled the tallest multi-purpose tower in the virtual world. The structure, The Crystal Tower, rises 548 meters high and is filled with an observation deck, a gallery and a public event lawn the size of two virtual football pitches. Visit here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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