NFTs

After the Rise of AI and NFTs, Some Top Art and Tech Artists Unplug

Published

5 months ago

17 June, 2024

After the Rise of AI and NFTs, Some Top Art and Tech Artists Unplug

ONE OF THE STRANGEST FEELINGS In my recent memory, it occurred after a week off, not just from work, but from my computer as a whole, the longest I’ve ever spent without it in my adult life. No laptop meant no typing, and when I returned to the keyboard, my fingers found common typing movements strange. It made me want to disconnect in a deeper way – and I’m not the only one. I felt a sense of relief when I saw the mold that artist Faith Holland has loosened on her battered laptops and smartphones, allowing it to slowly corrode the devices, in her recent “Death Drive” exhibition at the Microscope Gallery in New York.

Recently, some of today’s most compelling artists and writers – big names in the 2010s art and technology scene like Holland, as well as Hito Steyerl and Ryan Trecartin – have been questioning the ubiquity of seemingly inescapable consumer technology, looking ahead to history, based on the premise that somewhere along the way humanity went wrong. They’re going Paleolithic, Amish, or back to earth. Holland’s 2015 solo debut at Transfer Gallery in New York, “Technophilia,” included a series of videos that she uploaded to a porn website and also showed at the gallery. In them, she played with the internet’s misogynistic logic: porn with feminist twists, including one of Holland preparing to give oral sex but instead turning around to suck the camera: she consumed the gaze that was ready to consume her .

Four prints from the series “AI Forced to Confront Its Own Death”, by Faith Holland, 2023, on display in the exhibition “Death Drive”, 2023, at Microscope Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Microscope Gallery, New York

“Death Drive” marks a shift from playing with the rules of technology to operating them against technology itself: Holland describes the show as emerging from the pandemic, from experiencing mass death online in the form of Zoom funerals and depressing infographics. She became aware of the thousands, if not millions, of years these devices will outlive humans and decided to help speed up the process.

She also trained an AI to “grow” (generate images of) mold, which she printed on aluminum, her logic being that “by teaching an AI system to reproduce mold, it could also prepare the technology to imagine its own organic death.” ”

In the 2010s, Steyerl and Trecartin were trying to carve out space for the democratic ambitions of the early Internet – harnessing this tool’s power to distribute access, information and voice in an ostensibly egalitarian way – while also inviting skepticism about the ways in which Various platforms monitor us and can also reproduce inequality. Steyerl is considered an authority on the social impacts of technology: in the 2010s, she produced dialogue-changing films and essays that attempted to show how opaque technological systems and the ideologies they embodied worked. Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s exclusive hour(s) multi-channel videos have captivated the art world at once with such frenetic energy that viewers often feel exhausted just watching one. The duo’s practice captured how endless push notifications and countless open browser tabs can produce ADHD symptoms in even the most chemically balanced brains. They managed to convey the excess of it all and left viewers painfully aware of the fact that there is now more images and data being captured and regurgitated online than the human mind can comprehend. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would lead the way offline.

BUT LIKE THE DECADE came to an end, something changed: Critics, myself included, were perplexed by Steyerl’s 2019 show at the Park Avenue Armory, in which she appeared as a journalist in an installation about gun violence in the United States that featured well-known news figures. And as her writing began to blur absurdity and authority in ways that didn’t always translate—and seemed irresponsible in the age of misinformation—an Artspace headline about her essays from the same year asked, “What is she talking about?”

Whether in response to such criticism or of her own volition, she changed things dramatically. She abandoned that authoritarian tone and returned to the absurdist roots found in her best works, such as How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) and Liquidity Inc. (2014). In their new video, Animal Spirits (2022), a group of artists fantasize about giving up and becoming shepherds. They are inspired by Nel, a former historian who left the city to become a “quantum” pastor (whatever that means) and an eco-influencer. Nel paints her face to avoid detection by autonomous surveillance drones and makes rants against ecofascists, “Disney ecologists” and NFT brethren. The self-described “desperate artists” gather on Zoom to lament the fact that their shows are being postponed indefinitely due to Covid-19 and that their interest in the rat race is waning. They lean toward the more enjoyable aspects of lockdown life, like being alone and slowing down.

Two screens showing cave paintings flank suspended terrariums.

View of the installation Animal Spirits, by Hito Steyerl, 2023, in the exhibition “Contemporary Cave Art” at Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photo Andrea Rossetti/Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin, Paris and Seoul

The group of artists – played by real artists Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Rabih Mroué and James Bridle – conspire to audition together for a reality show called Shepherd School. Halfway through the play, everyone is categorically rejected. Mockery of the blockchain and the metaverse follows: In the metaverse, animals fight to the death and “Every time an animal is burned, an NFT is minted and registered on the blockchain as a unique digital asset.” A group of pastors get fed up with the “animal gladiator metaverse shitshow” (and, it is implied, the notorious environmental effects of blockchain). So they create their own exchange system: Cheese Coin. A narrator “explains” that cheese is what happens when milk turns to stone and seeks immortality. Like many technospheres, it’s just its own circular logic and looks silly from the outside. At Documenta 15 and Esther Schipper in Berlin, Steyerl showed the video as part of a mind-bending installation: herbs in spheres hanging in the terrarium were connected to sensors. When a visitor’s movement triggered a sensor, it instructed an AI to animate Paleolithic cave paintings projected on the wall.

Even before Steyerl changed course, Trecartin and Fitch in 2016 moved their studio from Los Angeles to rural Ohio, where they built a compound on a 32-acre property dotted with a giant lazy river. Their exhaustion was palpable at “Whether Line,” their 2019 show at the Prada Foundation in Milan, where they set up a prefabricated barn inside the museum, leaving half the space empty. To get to the barn, we had to navigate winding pillars, as if we were in a long roller coaster line, without the crowds. Inside the barn, a video took viewers into some version of the artists’ lives in Ohio, where disillusioned technology abandoners, a rural queer community and Amish neighbors feuded. (Trecartin plays a rural Amish woman named Neighbor Girl.) The various parties dispute things like loud music and property lines; one neighbor registers another as “historic”, as if it were a building. This means she must ask permission to change even the way she waves hello. It’s not a romantic vision of the simple life, but still, a pink-haired person explains, “that’s why we’re here in the countryside, to enjoy it, to reverse the curse.”

A winding cage that resembles a roller coaster line houses a prefabricated barn from the inside out.

View of the exhibition “Lizzie Fitch | Ryan Trecartin: Be Line”, 2019 at Prada Foundation, Milan. Photo Andrea Rossetti/Courtesy Prada Foundation, Milan

THE BACKGROUND TO These artists’ recent works have been a general disenchantment with technologies that have lost their initial promise. The New York Times recently reported on the “Luddi Teens” of Brooklyn, a group of young people who are leading the “smartphone liberation movement.” Twitter, whose predecessor was a DIY invention of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention, is now a billionaire’s toy, its content having degenerated from free speech to disinformation along the way.

At the same time that Steyerl, Trecartin, and Fitch were altering their trajectories, author Tao Lin, who once turned tweets and emails into novels, was working on his 2021 novel, Leave Society—a piece of autofiction about recovering the symptoms of the “dominator”. society.” Lin borrowed the term from Riane Eisler’s classic 1980s book The Chalice and the Blade, which distinguishes partnership societies—primitive cultures that worshiped goddesses and nature—from domineering or patriarchal societies like ours. ( It turns out that in real life Lin didn’t leave society, but was canceled – first for questionable behavior with a 16-year-old when he was 22, and again for anti-vaccine preaching on Twitter.)

The Leave Society accuses Google of having “natural health sites censored, banned and blacklisted because their parent company since 2015, Alphabet, had ties to pharmaceutical companies,” and calls Wikipedia a tool to “aggregate[ing] the mainstream.” Lin’s protagonist, Li, decides to stop just looking things up online after realizing that “at some point public education taught him that everything was already figured out, that new discoveries would be in the news.” Instead, he tries to approach the physical and natural world around him with openness and curiosity.

Writing in the New Yorker, Andrea Long Chu accused Leave Society of “naïve prelapsarianism,” an attitude that David Graeber and David Wengrow brilliantly analyze in their 2021 book, The Dawn of Everything, a search for the origins of inequality. The two anthropologists looked at anthropological studies of Neolithic societies like Çatalhöyük (also one of Lin’s favorites) and found examples of cities (not nomadic cultures) that thrived before implementing any hierarchical social orders. They conclude that, from the beginning of time, our ancestors were self-conscious political actors. Some narratives believe that when agriculture emerged and brought with it the division of labor – that is, not everyone had to spend their time securing food, but they were free to do other things, such as making art – this caused inequality, which is the unfortunate price of a sophisticated society. They argue, instead, that it was people – not agriculture, or any other invention – who caused inequality. “If something has gone terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it is hard to deny that something has happened,” they write, “then perhaps it started to go wrong precisely when people began to lose the freedom to imagine and Act. other forms of social existence.”

As much as we dream of reversing human “progress” – and these artists are in fact offering dreams, as their projects still require participation in the world of art and collaborations with technology – there may be other, more viable movements. If Graeber and Wengrow are right, technology does not determine the course of history: people do. As long as the robots don’t go rogue…

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NFTs

RTFKT Announces Project Animus Reveal, Launches Egg Unboxing Event Amid Mixed Reactions | NFT CULTURE | NFT News | Web3 Culture

Published

3 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

RTFKT Announces Project Animus Reveal, Launches Egg Unboxing Event Amid Mixed Reactions | NFT CULTURE | NFT News | Web3 Culture

RTFKT, the innovative creator-led company renowned for its cutting-edge sneakers and metaverse collectibles, has officially unveiled its highly anticipated collection, Project Animus. This project marks a significant milestone in RTFKT’s journey, introducing a new dimension to its digital universe after a long period of development. However, the initial market response has been disappointing, with the revealed Animi trading at a floor price of 0.05 ETH, significantly lower than the eggs’ floor price of 0.09 ETH.

The Genesis of the Project Animus

Initially introduced in October 2022, Project Animus introduces a unique ecosystem of digital creatures called Animi. These Animi are designed to enhance Clone X’s avatars, offering an immersive and engaging experience for the community. The recent reveal showcased a diverse range of Animi species, each with distinct design traits and elemental attributes, breaking away from traditional trait-based rarity systems.

A New Digital Frontier: The History and Evolution of Project Animus

The Animus Project is RTFKT’s latest intellectual property, promising to revolutionize the NFT space with its unique digital creatures. The journey kicked off on October 8, 2022, with an interactive teaser event called “The Eggsperience.” This livestream event allowed attendees to explore a virtual Animus Research Facility, generating intrigue and excitement among the community.

Renowned artist Takashi Murakami played a significant role in the project, revealing the first Murakami-themed Animus creature, Saisei, on April 30, 2023. This collaboration added a layer of artistic prestige to the project, further elevating its status within the NFT community.

Animus Egg Incubation: A Journey from Egg to Animi

Clone X NFT holders had the opportunity to claim an Animus Egg until March 1, 2024. This was followed by the Animus Egg Hatching event, which ran from May 7 to June 4, 2024. During this period, holders of several RTFKT NFTs, including Clone X, Space Pod, Loot Pod, Exo Pod, and Lux Pod, were able to use a points-based system to increase their chances of hatching rarer Animi. The limited supply of Project Animus Eggs is capped at 20,000, with no public sale planned.

Mixed market reception

Despite the excitement and innovative features, the market reaction to the reveal of Project Animus has been lukewarm. Animi is currently trading at a floor price of 0.05 ETH, significantly lower than the eggs’ floor price of 0.09 ETH. This discrepancy has led to disappointment among some collectors who had high expectations for the project.

What Awaits Us: The Future of Project Animus

Following the reveal, RTFKT plans to release a collection of exclusive Animus Artist Edition characters. Holders of Clone X Artist Edition NFTs are guaranteed to get one of these special editions. The distribution will include 88 Special Edition Animus, with 8 Mythic (Dragon Sakura), 40 Shiny, and 40 Ghost Animus. The odds of receiving a Special Edition Animus are the same for all Eggs hatched, regardless of the points accumulated.

The remaining Animus characters will be distributed among unhatched Eggs, encompassing Special Edition Animus, as well as Cosmic Animus and Murakami Element from Generation 1, Generation 2, and Generation 3.

Conclusion

RTFKT’s Project Animus represents a bold step forward in the NFT space, combining cutting-edge technology with artistic collaboration to create an immersive and innovative digital ecosystem. However, the initial market reception highlights the challenges of living up to high expectations in the ever-evolving NFT landscape. As the project continues to evolve, it promises to deliver unique experiences and opportunities for its community, solidifying RTFKT’s position as a leader in the metaverse and digital collectibles arena.

Summary: RTFKT has unveiled Project Animus, introducing a unique ecosystem of digital creatures called Animi designed to enhance Clone X avatars. Despite the excitement, market response has been mixed, with Animi trading at a lower floor price than eggs. The project kicked off with an interactive event in October 2022, featuring collaborations with artist Takashi Murakami. Following the reveal, RTFKT will release special edition Animus characters. The total supply of Animus Eggs is limited to 20,000, with no public sale planned.

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NFTs

The Olympics have reportedly ditched Mario and Sonic games in favor of mobile and NFTs

Published

3 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

The Olympics have reportedly ditched Mario and Sonic games in favor of mobile and NFTs

The long and historic partnership between Nintendo and Sega to create video games for the Olympics reportedly ended in 2020 as event organizers sought opportunities elsewhere.

Lee Cocker, who served as executive producer on several Mario & Sonic Olympics titles, said Eurogamer the International Olympic Committee let the licensing agreement lapse because it “wanted to look at other partners, NFTs and esports.”

“Basically, the IOC wanted to bring [it] “Turn inward and look for other partners so you can get more money,” Cocker added.

The 2024 Summer Olympics kicked off in Paris last week, but there were no Mario & Sonic games available in time for the event to begin – the first time this has happened since the original release in 2007 to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

Over the past two decades, there have been four Mario and Sonic adaptations for the Summer Olympics, as well as two for the Winter Olympics.

This year, instead of a Nintendo/Sega title, the IOC released Olympics Go! Paris 2024, a free-to-play mobile and PC title developed by nWay, which has worked on several Power Rangers games.

Olympics Go! allows players to compete in 12 sports and unlock NFTs from the Paris 2024 digital pin collection.

The original Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games was announced in March 2007 and marked the first time the two mascots – once archrivals in the console wars of the 1990s – appeared together in a game.

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NFTs

DraftKings abruptly shuts down NFT operation, leaving collectors panicking over vast holdings of digital tokens

Published

3 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

DraftKings abruptly shuts down NFT operation, leaving collectors panicking over vast holdings of digital tokens

DraftKings, the daily fantasy sports and sports betting company, abruptly shut down a program called Reignmakers on Tuesday, posting a notice on its website and associated app and sending a mass email to some subset of its user base. Reignmakers, which the company launched in 2021, offered pay-to-play competitions in NFL football, PGA Tour golf and UFC mixed martial arts. The decision to eliminate the entire program, DraftKings says, was not made lightly but was forced “due to recent legal developments.”

DraftKings has yet to specify what “recent legal developments” are troubling its now-dead Reignmakers product. The company was sued in U.S. District Court in 2023 by a Reignmakers player named Justin Dufoe, who accuses the company of dealing in unregistered securities, taking advantage of relatively unsophisticated “retail investors,” and failing to market and support Reignmakers to the degree necessary to return to its users the financial benefits expected. DraftKings filed a motion in September to dismiss Dufoe’s complaint, but that motion was denied on July 2. A scheduling conference was held by the parties on July 29; Reignmakers was permanently shut down on July 30. A DraftKings spokesperson reached by Defector on Wednesday declined to confirm whether Dufoe’s complaint is the “recent legal development” that forced the company’s hand.

Users of the Reignmakers NFL product, who in recent days began murmuring on social channels about a notable lack of DraftKings activity so close to the start of the NFL preseason schedule, were caught off guard and, in some cases, devastated by the news. Members of the DraftKings Discord server, where all Reignmakers-related channels were abruptly shut down and locked following the announcement, flooded a general channel in various states of panic, sharing news, theorizing, lamenting, and, in some cases, openly worrying about whether it would be possible to recoup any decent fraction of the genuinely impressive sums of money they had invested in this DraftKings product.

Reignmakers is nominally a daily fantasy contest—users build lineups of players and then pit those lineups against other users’ lineups for cash prizes—but it’s actually a distributor of nonfungible digital tokens (NFTs), originated and sold by DraftKings, and then frequently resold on a dedicated secondary marketplace also hosted by DraftKings. At the lineup-building level, Reignmakers functions like a card-collecting game, with artificial scarcity driving the prices of the most coveted cards to insane, eye-popping heights. Reignmakers NFTs are tiered and offered in timed drops designed to heighten the sense of scarcity. A user can enter a lower-tier contest using a collection of NFTs that may have cost a few hundred dollars in total (or that were earned by purchasing random packs of NFTs that offer generally low odds of scoring top assets) and throw their lot in with hundreds of casual users competing for relatively unimpressive rewards. Random packs at the lowest tier would have prices as low as a few dollars; mid-tier cards—Star and Elite tiers, I’d guess—could cost a player upwards of $1,000.

But players interested in hunting down the biggest payouts, not just from games but from leaderboard prizes and other assorted prizes, would need to enter higher-tier games, and to enter the higher-tier games, a user’s collection needed to include higher-tier NFTs. DraftKings ensured that these cards were extremely scarce and could only be purchased directly on the marketplace at prices that any reasonable person would consider utterly insane.

For example, the highest-tier Reignmaker contests (called the Reignmakers tier, of course) have in the past been limited to listings with at least two of the highest-tier, rarest NFTs (also the Reignmaker tier) plus three NFTs from the second-highest tier (Legendary). NFTs at these tiers are expensive. Not just expensive in the way that, like, a steak dinner is expensive, but expensive in the way that buying even one of them should trigger a mandatory visit to a gambling addiction counselor, if not sirens and a straitjacket. Back in 2022a Reignmaker-level Ja’Marr Chase NFT from something called the Field Pass Promo Set could be purchased directly from the DraftKings Reignmaker Marketplace for a whopping $32,100.

Screenshot via YouTube

Reignmakers users purchased NFTs at various levels with the expectation that owning them would convey better odds of winning contests hosted on DraftKings. This was the gamification element of Reignmakers, which emerged several months after DraftKings began trading and minting its NFTs. But as with all NFTs, a very large part of the real appeal for its buyers was the expectation, however insane, that these worthless, virtually worthless, infinitely duplicable digital images would increase in value over time. Now that both the Reignmakers game and the Reignmakers marketplace have been shut down, Reignmakers NFT holders are worried that their investments may have suddenly lost all monetary value. One Discord user described Tuesday as “a bad day to wake up and realize you have $2,000 worth of unopened NFL Rookie Packs”; Another user asked the group if they should expect “a refund” on the $10,000 they’ve already spent on Reignmakers NFTs this year. A pessimistic Reddit user posted tuesday that they would sue DraftKings if they were forced to take a total loss on a Reignmakers NFT collection worth approximately $100,000.

The game (scam?) was built to make numbers like these not only possible, but somewhat easily achievable. A user who intended to compete from a position of strength in multiple overlapping high-profile contests at the same time, and who had been in the blockchain madhouse for a period of years, could easily have spent six figures on Reignmakers NFTs. DraftKings used non-gaming incentives to entice players to spend more and more money, much like casinos give away free suites to players who over-bet on blackjack. Another Reddit user lamented the loss of the additional prizes and ranking bonuses he had hoped to earn in the upcoming NFL season by having a portfolio of NFTs that had reached the highest levels of value and prestige. “I was already loaded up on 2024 creation tokens and rookie debut cards,” said this Reignmakers userwho claimed his portfolio was finally “close to the top 250 overall.”

Dufoe’s complaint says the NFTs minted by DraftKings for Reignmakers qualify as securities, function like securities, and should be regulated as securities. In its motion to dismiss, DraftKings attempted to position its NFTs as game pieces — eye-wateringly expensive, yes, but essentially the same thing as Magic: The Gathering cards or Monopoly hotels. The court, in resolving these arguments, applied what’s known as “the Howey test,” referencing a case from 1946 in which the U.S. Supreme Court established a standard for determining whether a specific instrument qualifies as an investment contract. Judge Dennis J. Casper, in ruling against DraftKings’ motion, concluded that Dufoe could plausibly argue that Reignmakers’ NFT transactions represent “the pooling of assets from multiple investors in such a manner that all share in the profits and risks of the enterprise,” arguing that DraftKings’ absolute control over the game and marketplace effectively binds the financial interests of the company and the buyers, the latter of whom depend on the viability of both for their NFTs to retain any value.

Reignmakers users are different from Monopoly players in at least one crucial way: A person who buys a Monopoly board has no expectation from Hasbro that those little red and green pieces will appreciate in value. It’s a game! No matter what any hysterically conflicted party may say to the contrary, that’s not what NFT collecting is. DraftKings had been selling Reignmakers NFTs for months before they were gamified, and Dufoe, in his complaint, cites public comments made by DraftKings spokespeople that seem to explicitly position Reignmakers NFTs as assets with independent monetary value beyond their utility in Reignmakers contests. Judge Casper, in his ruling on the motion to dismiss, cites a Twitter account associated with a podcast run by DraftKings CEO Matthew Kalish, who in a tweet described NFTs as “the opportunity to invest in startups, artists, operations, and entrepreneurs all at once.” This is probably the kind of thing that NFT peddlers should stop saying. This advice assumes, of course, that NFTs will continue to exist as instruments on the other side of this and other lawsuits.

DraftKings has posted a worryingly sparse FAQ at the bottom of the your ad Tuesday, anticipating but largely failing to address questions from players who see this as yet another in a long line of brutal blockchain rug pulls. In a hilarious reversal of existing Reignmakers policy, Reignmakers users are now allowed by DraftKings to withdraw their Reignmakers NFTs from their DraftKings portfolios and into their personal NFT wallets, where those NFTs will have precisely zero value, to anyone, for the rest of all time. There’s also vague language about Reignmakers users having the option to “relinquish” their NFTs back to DraftKings in exchange for “cash payments,” subject to “certain conditions” and according to an as-yet-unspecified formula that will take into account, among other things, the “size and quality” of a player’s collection.

Reignmakers users are not optimistic. Those who claim to have been victims of other blockchain market crashes are warning their peers on Discord and Reddit to expect payouts that amount to pennies on the dollar; in the absence of any clarifying information, users are unsure whether cashing out their NFTs from Reignmakers to their personal NFT wallets, for reasons that completely pass any and all understanding, would effectively preclude the possibility of delivering these silly digital tokens back to DraftKings. It remains to be seen what exactly DraftKings has in mind with the “certain conditions” attached to the delivery process. There is much that has yet to be resolved. A DraftKings spokesperson contacted by Defector indicated that more time would be needed to answer a list of specific questions and issued a statement noting that it is “in DraftKings’ DNA to innovate and disrupt to provide the best possible gaming experiences for our customers.” The original complaint is embedded below.

Do you know anything about the demise of Reignmakers, either from the consumer side or from the DraftKings side? We’d love to hear from you. Get it in touch!

NFTs

There Will Be No More ‘Mario & Sonic’ Olympics Because of NFTs

Published

3 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

There Will Be No More 'Mario & Sonic' Olympics Because of NFTs

Nintendo and SEGA have been teaming up with the Olympics for several years now in the popular Mario & sonic in the Olympic Games series, but a new report claims the International Olympic Committee has abandoned the series in favor of new deals in eSports and NFTs.

According to Eurogamer“A veteran behind the series,” Lee Cocker, told the outlet that the IOC chose not to renew its license with SEGA and Nintendo, letting it expire in 2020. “They wanted to look at other partners and NFTs and eSports,” Cocker told Eurogamer. “Basically, the IOC wanted to bring [it] turn inward and look for other partners so they could get more money.”

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games is a series that has been running since 2008, with six main games covering the regular and Winter Olympics. In the games, players could control various characters from the Mario and Sonic franchises and compete in Olympic sporting events.

It’s no secret that NFTs are a big part of this year’s Paris 2024 Olympics. Olympics Go! Paris 2024 is a mobile and mobile-connected game your site states that players can “join the excitement of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with nWay’s officially licensed, commemorative NFT Digital Pins collection honoring Paris 2024!”

As for eSports, Saudi Arabia will host the ESports Olympic Games in 2025. This is part of a partnership with the Saudi National Olympic Committee (NOC) that is expected to last for the next 12 years and is expected to feature regular events.

IOC President Thomas Bach said: “By partnering with the Saudi NOC, we also ensure that Olympic values are respected, in particular with regard to the game titles on the programme, the promotion of gender equality and the engagement with young audiences who are embracing esports.”

In other news, Someone claimed they’re suing Bandai Namco because Elden Ring is too difficult.

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