Jack Kubinec

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



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 <a href="https://www.propdates.wtf/prop/317">publishes</a> on-chain updates regarding the film’s progress and how funds are being spent. <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gdInCNXaLvKA5Vrxe6aCTiOtE67jNpG6/view">Scripts</a> have also been made public ahead of the releases.&nbsp;



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.&nbsp;



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 <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/08/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-mutant-mayhem-box-office-1235453107/">cost</a> $70 million to produce.&nbsp;



Five of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWETBcBsxPA">movie’s</a> eight chapters have been funded, and the next three episodes, running around 10 to 11 minutes each, will be <a href="https://houseofnouns.wtf/nouns/proposals/425">released</a> over the next eight months or so. If completed, the full movie will run around 80 minutes, Roy said.&nbsp;



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.&nbsp;



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.&nbsp;



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/nouns-fork-two-dao-treasuries-spending">Nouns DAO is forking again</a>



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.&nbsp;



“Frankly, alright, I don&#8217;t think any of them have a special affiliation with crypto,” Shen said. “They&#8217;re actually here because it&#8217;s an alternative way for them to have a revenue source and artistic freedom that they otherwise wouldn&#8217;t have…it&#8217;s really about what are the new use cases that crypto can enable? And this is very clearly one of them.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Web3 games migrate networks in record numbers</h2>



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” <a href="https://research.game7.io/state-of-web3-gaming-2023">report</a>.



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, <a href="https://x.com/ChampionsIO/status/1656256600405934081?s=20">promising</a> an end to “bloated gas fees.”&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">One interesting stat:</h2>



<ul>
<li>Bitcoin ordinals, a protocol that enables NFT storage on bitcoin, <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics?category=btc">generated</a> 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.</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Also of note:</h2>



<ul>
<li>Disney partnered with Dapper Labs to release collectible pins for Disney characters as NFTs. Notably, the product’s <a href="https://www.dapperlabs.com/newsroom/dapper-labs-announces-disney-pinnacle">marketing</a> shied away from using the term “NFT” to describe the pins.</li>



<li>SocialFi platform Friend.tech released a global <a href="https://www.friend.tech/account">feed</a> where users vote to rank posts. Votes are <a href="https://x.com/confugen/status/1725450313102983389?s=20">allocated</a> to users based on key prices.</li>



<li>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, <a href="https://twitter.com/LensProtocol/status/1724064920139133146">for instance</a>.</li>
</ul>



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