This week has arguably been the most eventful in the NFT industry thus far this year. The three biggest stories surround CryptoPunks being the hottest Bitcoin NFT on the market, Rhianna selling a song as an NFT with royalty sharing, and LeBron James NFTs rocketing after he broke a scoring record. Here’s what’s happening:

CryptoPunks Heat Up

There’s no question that Bitcoin NFTs are the talk of the metaverse at the moment. But you can’t talk about Bitcoin NFTs without talking about CryptoPunks. The values of these pixellated punk NFTs created by Larva Labs are going through the roof. 

Ordinal Punks, a CryptoPunk-related Bitcoin NFT includes 100-pixel avatars that live on the Bitcoin blockchain. Although these punks look similar to the original 2017 collection, Ordinal PUnks are not direct clones of the original collection. In order to make the collection, the creators used open-source algorithms and CCo Punk sprite sheet to generate entirely new Punks. 

These punks are selling for around 9.5 BTC, well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. 

Rihanna Song NFT Comes With Royalties

In other news, Rihanna offered a song as a non-fungible token through anotherblock – a Web3 startup. The offering on Thursday gave the holders of the NFT the right to receive partial streaming royalties. 

This may prove to be a fundamental shift in music. anotherblock works with rights holders that include producers, writers, and the artists themselves to get them to divest a percentage of their streaming royalty rights. These streaming royalties are then sold as NFTs. 

Why would a producer, writer, or musical artist want to give up a percentage of royalty streaming rights? The same reason any company would offer equity to an investor. Musicians can now sell a portion of royalties to help fund activities like marketing, song development, and recording. 

LeBron’s Scoring Record Sends NFTs Soaring

LeBron James is one of the best NBA players who’s ever lived – and he proves it time and time again. He did so again on Tuesday when he scored his record 38,388th point. That beat Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record that’s been in place for 39 years. 

Since LeBron scored his record-breaking point, there’s been quite a bit of hype around his NFTs on NBA Top Shot. In fact, sales of packs that could have an NFT of his record-breaking shot were jaw-dropping. 

So far, LeBron James-related NFT sales have climbed to more than $250,000. 

We’ll See You Next Week

That’s it for this week. Come back next Friday for the top stories in the Metaverse.