Web3 Watch: Nouns DAO-funded movie releases second installment

The second installment of The Rise of Blus, an animated movie being funded in chunks by the Nouns DAO, released Wednesday. 

Produced by crypto-native animation studio Atrium, the movie’s $3 million budget is contingent on a string of governance proposals passing. In contrast to the film industry’s black box status quo, the studio’s founder Supriyo Roy periodically publishes on-chain updates regarding the film’s progress and how funds are being spent. Scripts have also been made public ahead of the releases. 

Several of the movie’s producers worked on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Roy told Blockworks, giving the Nouns movie’s animation a similar flavor to the Marvel hit. 

The Rise of Blus has a crew of 45 people and an estimated final budget of $2.78 million, Roy said. For context, the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated movie cost $70 million to produce. 

Five of the movie’s eight chapters have been funded, and the next three episodes, running around 10 to 11 minutes each, will be released over the next eight months or so. If completed, the full movie will run around 80 minutes, Roy said. 

The Rise of Blus follows a boy named Gi who lives in the floating city of Blus and wants to be an adventuresome “rover” rather than follow his father in becoming a boring “recycler” when he grows up. The Nouns NFTs’ signature “Noggles” feature prominently in the movie. Roy said the movie’s main conceit is the glasses providing freedom of choice. 

While never mentioning NFTs or crypto, the movie seemingly pays homage to its origins. The second installment introduces viewers to an apparently important fictional substance named ether — which is also the name of the currency used to auction Nouns. 

Read more: Nouns DAO is forking again

But Maria Shen, general partner at Atrium investor Electric Capital, said crypto may not matter much to the animators being funded by the DAO’s treasury. 

“Frankly, alright, I don’t think any of them have a special affiliation with crypto,” Shen said. “They’re actually here because it’s an alternative way for them to have a revenue source and artistic freedom that they otherwise wouldn’t have…it’s really about what are the new use cases that crypto can enable? And this is very clearly one of them.”

Web3 games migrate networks in record numbers

65 Web3 games changed networks so far this year, up from 48 last year and 12 the year before, according to Game7’s “State of Web3 Gaming” report.

Leading destinations for games were layer-2s Polygon, Immutable and Arbitrum. 73% of games that changed networks this year chose an Ethereum virtual machine (EVM)-based chain, the report said.

The RPG “Champions Ascension” moved from Ethereum to Polygon in May, promising an end to “bloated gas fees.” 

One interesting stat:

• Bitcoin ordinals, a protocol that enables NFT storage on bitcoin, generated over $4 million in transaction fees Thursday, according to Blockworks Research. Daily ordinal fees were in the $10,000 to $20,000 range for much of October.

Also of note:

• Disney partnered with Dapper Labs to release collectible pins for Disney characters as NFTs. Notably, the product’s marketing shied away from using the term “NFT” to describe the pins.
• SocialFi platform Friend.tech released a global feed where users vote to rank posts. Votes are allocated to users based on key prices.
• Lens Protocol released V2 of its decentralized social infrastructure. It teased Smart Posts where content can be directly monetized — like a payment pop-up on blog posts, for instance.

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