Welcome to the OpenSea digest. Let’s look back through the biggest NFT and web3 news of the week.

Rebecca Rose's "Popol Vuh" debuts at Mexico City's Anahuacalli Museum

Digital artist Rebecca Rose's animated piece "Popol Vuh" debuts this weekend at the Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli in Mexico City, as part of 8NAP Art's Digital Encounters exhibition, she said in an X post.

The artwork revisits a moment from painter Diego Rivera's life, when he released his watercolor collection into the wild as an act of letting go, Rose wrote.

Ahead of the debut, Rose said art collector Benny, known online as Redbeard, acquired the piece in a private sale. She credited his advocacy for digital art and his ties to the community, noting she first met him at in-person NFT events where he spoke on panels.

Blockchain game studio Proof of Play shuts down, open-sources its code

Proof of Play, the game studio behind pirate-themed blockchain game Pirate Nation, announced Aug. 4 it is shutting down.

The company said it aimed to prove blockchain gaming could power a new decentralized internet, but it couldn't build a business to support the idea at scale. 

Proof of Play is open-sourcing its code, including the Pirate Nation Unity app and smart contracts, and releasing its artwork, logos, and Founder Pirates NFT collection under a CC0 license, a public copyright waiver letting anyone reuse the work without permission.

The Pirate Nation Foundation, a separate group, will keep supporting the project's $PIRATE token. Another Proof of Play game, Shiba Story Go!, sold to a third party and will keep running independently.

Samsung plans to add stablecoins to Samsung Wallet on hundreds of millions of Galaxy phones

Samsung revealed plans to add stablecoin support, a type of cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value by tying itself to the U.S. dollar, to Samsung Wallet.

During its Galaxy Unpacked event on July 22, Samsung reportedly showed a mockup wallet balance labeled $USDC, but has not yet confirmed whether it has an official partnership with Circle, $USDC’s issuer, nor a launch date or which blockchain network the stablecoin will run on.

POAP, the digital attendance badge platform, is shutting down after five years

POAP, the blockchain company known for turning event attendance into digital collectibles, is winding down, co-founder Isabel Gonzalez announced Aug. 3. 

Since launching at a Denver hackathon in 2019, POAP minted nearly 7.6 million badges for more than 46,000 organizers, according to the platform's figures. In her announcement, Gonzalez pointed to collaborations with organizations including American Express, Warner Music Group, and Bayer.

“POAP meant something to a lot of people,” said Gonzalez. She added that crypto's funding patterns have made it hard to build a lasting business without compromising what made POAP meaningful in the first place.

The company has not set a final shutdown date. The badges live permanently on public blockchains, so collectors will be able to keep their tokens regardless of what happens to POAP's company. Access to the company's website, gallery and supporting tools remains uncertain long term.

Wells Fargo will launch tokenized deposits for corporate clients this fall

Wells Fargo plans to launch tokenized deposits this fall, letting corporate and commercial clients eventually move money around the clock instead of waiting on standard banking hours, the bank said in an Aug. 4 announcement.

Tokenized deposits turn customer funds into digital tokens on a blockchain, a shared digital ledger that records transactions, so the bank can settle payments nearly continuously while keeping the money inside the regulated banking system.

The pilot program will start with U.S. dollar to British pound transfers on Wells Fargo's own blockchain platform, and Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo called the launch a step forward for the bank's payment options.

Wells Fargo plans to add more clients, countries and currencies through 2027, and the move follows a March trademark filing for WFUSD, a wordmark analysts read as a possible tokenized-deposit or stablecoin brand.

Immutable launched a Seven Deadly Sins NFT adventure

Blockchain platform Immutable opened its Seven Deadly Sins NFT Adventure on July 30, giving players a free mint according to a post from the company on X. 

Players complete quests within the game and reportedly earn web3 rewards through MARBLEX, a blockchain gaming platform. Immutable runs as a layer two network, a system built on top of Ethereum that processes transactions separately to cut costs and boost speed, and it uses zero-knowledge rollups, a method that bundles transactions off the main Ethereum network before confirming them, to keep minting and trading free of gas fees. 

AI company Krea will host a webinar on training AI to match a brand's art style

AI image platform Krea will host a webinar Aug. 12 to show other brands how to train a custom model on their own visual style, building on a case study the company published about its work with NFT collection Doodles.

Doodles trained a custom LoRA on Krea's Krea 2 model to reproduce its signature look, after mainstream image models kept missing details like exact eye placement and palette colors. A LoRA is a smaller add-on model trained on a focused set of images, in this case based on Doodles' internal style guide. Krea says brands interested in the same approach for their own visual identity can register for the Aug. 12 webinar.

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