The Coolest Things in Web 3 | 2.14.2023
NFT x AI Art, DeGods to Bitcoin, and Azuki Telling New Stories
*Hits Blunt* Let’s Put The AI On The Blockchain
People have been talking about ways to combine AI and blockchain since I can remember the two words being a part of the lexicon. Who can forget the good old days of IOTA? For the most part the combination of these two things has made zero sense.
Blockchains are slow and trust minimized, and AI is fast, expensive and centralized. But with the explosion in generative AI over the past year and the recent pump in AI-related tokens the past few months you knew there would be experiments or at least grifting in this buzzword-filled space.
Today we have what I consider one of the cooler attempts at bringing these two worlds together: MechMinds.
The general idea here is simple: each NFT grants you access to an AI-assistant, a MechMind, that only you can talk to if you own the NFT and connect your wallet on their website. Since I haven’t aped in yet I was not able to try but they say these are Davinci-trained AI models that each have their own personality and IQ.
Harkening back to the current “burn” meta that we are experiencing in NFT land, you can take multiple MechMinds and merge their IQ together, essentially burning one and combining it with another.
This was a free mint with almost no details that dropped yesterday and has already shot into the top 5 in daily trading volume. Maybe the AI meta continues but in the NFT world as you can see many ways this sort of thing can go. So far the price has already shot up from 0 to 0.03 ETH on massive volume so the interest seems to be there.
Degods Coming Over to Bitcoin
As if Bitcoin Ordinals didn’t have enough hype, one of the biggest current projects, DeGods, is inscribing a collection to the Bitcoin blockchain.
All 535 DeGods going on the Bitcoin blockchain as Ordinals will be minted in the same block. More details on this to come but it just shows the true power of Bitcoin as the source of truth for anything in the space. We will see if other projects put parts of their collections as inscriptions as well but I do not think this will be the last time we see this.
Azuki Universe is Expanding
Jay and Jelly is a cute name for a cartoon series. Unclear if that is exactly what Azuki is planning for this new set of characters but it’s clear they have ideas around how to expand their IP outside just their current collection. Their Twitter account for Beanz is focused just on this and the founder has made statements about attracting non web 3 folks to the brand.