Welcome to “This Week in the Metaverse,” where Fortune brings together the most exciting news in the world of NFTs, culture, and the Metaverse. E-mail [email protected] with tips.
The world of luxury wines and spirits has an authenticity problem.
The 2016 documentary sour grapes, which centers on a fake wine that swindles collectors out of millions of dollars, shows that when it comes to luxury liquor, sometimes it’s hard to know what you’re buying. In another case, more than a third of a batch of 55 bottles of rare vintage Scotch whiskey were found to be fake after being tested by the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center in 2018.
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A company, BlockBar, is trying to solve this problem by selling NFTs tied to collectible wine and wine bottles from brands such as Johnnie Walker, Hennessy and Remy Martin. Instead of buying and selling physical bottles through auction, collectors can cut out the middleman and use crypto to buy alcohol as NFTs on BlockBar’s marketplace, said CEO and co-founder Dov Falic. luck.
It also widens the pool of potential buyers for premium wines and spirits, Falic said, which can pay off for long-term investors.
“Luxury wines and spirits have done better than the S&P 500, better than luxury watches, but it’s a small niche that only a few people have access to,” he said.
It may seem strange that you can’t touch a bottle you might have paid hundreds of dollars for, but Falic says it can be a plus for collectors who don’t have experience storing alcohol. BlockBar stores bottles in one of two temperature-controlled rooms (one for wine and one for liquor) in Singapore.
“You don’t want to keep a lot of money in your home, if you’re looking at it as an investment,” he said.
Collectors who view a wine or spirit as more than an investment can trade their NFT for the actual bottle, but BlockBar will burn the NFT, preventing the buyer from selling the wine for a secondary market (at least through an NFT).
Artist spotlight: Valerii Veduta
Valerii Veduta and his family were displaced after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but he has long lived with the effects of the war.
“I was almost born and raised as an artist in this war,” he said luck.
Veduta comes from a small village in southern Ukraine located on a land barrier called Arabat Spit, located between the Crimean Peninsula and the Sea of Azov. When Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, it created a land border, which he knows well. Veduta took this contested border as inspiration for his first photography collection, gray outlinewho caught non-military objects that looked like military equipment at night.
Flash forward to 2022, and Veduta is back in Kyiv and has just released the NFT project Wartime Family Album which describes the hardships inflicted on his family by the invasion.
The collection, sold on the Voice digital art market, consists of a series of photos from Kyiv, including a photo of a bombed-out building near his home and a photo of his wife and son playing with maps close a window between two airstrike alerts.
Veduta developed all the photos with Ukrainian soil as the printing pigment to give them a yellowish color before turning them into NFTs, which showed their life during the invasion, he said.
“It involves more of a will to live,” Veduta said.
Courtesy of Valerii Veduta
In other news:
Metathe social media giant that has dedicated billions to its metaverse efforts was ordered by UK regulators this week to sell the film company. Giphy. This is the first time that Meta has had to unwind one of its acquisitions, and it’s a bump in the road for a company that has also faced reports of low popularity in Horizon Worlds.
Courtesy of Sandbox
Crypto Winter also sent a chill to the land market in the metaverse, with data reported by Bloomberg from the analytics company WeMeta which shows the average land price of Decentralized and The sandbox fell 80% from early November 2021 to early October. However, some are taking advantage of the reduced purchase price.
Does your company hire a metaverse main officer? as Bloomberg Reporter Matthew Boyle said, the companies hiring for this position, such as LVMH and P&G, looking for a resource person for their efforts. These brands are chasing consumers beyond their expectations to learn how Metaverse will change the way they work. “They see it as a branding opportunity, down the line, a way to connect with customers,” Boyle said. said on the Bloomberg Crypto Thursday podcast.
Courtesy of Bicycle Playing Cards
Big fan of poker? What about NFTs? Now you can combine the two with Bored Ape Yacht Club– themed playing cards Bike. The 130-plus-year-old brand acquired Bored Monkey #1227 in June and will put the photo on the cards next year.
Courtesy of 11:11 Media
at Paris Hilton content company 11:11 Media launched a metaverse experiment called Cryptoween on Roblox this week and expanded it to The sandbox Friday. By collecting Halloween candies and playing mini games, players can enter a raffle that will give them a chance to win SAND and NFT cryptocurrencies on the platform.