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

Beeple's 'CryptoPunk 2077' goes live at auction

Beeple's Everyday #5017 sold at auction through NODE Foundation, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to transforming how digital art is experienced. 

The piece, built in Cinema 4D, Octane and Photoshop, was the first in the “Everyday” series to feature a CryptoPunk. It carried a fair market value of $125,000 and closed at $106K in USDC, a digital currency pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar.

The winning bidder received both the NFT and a 36-by-36-inch oil on canvas painting shipped physically.

Pudgy Penguins brings its trading card game to Target and Barnes & Noble stores nationwide

Pudgy Penguins rolled out Vibes Series 3 trading cards to Target stores across the U.S. this week, bringing total cards in circulation to 15 million, per a press release shared with Cointelegraph. 

The Ethereum-based brand developed the card game with Orange Cap Games, with original artwork and characters from the Moonbirds collection, another digital collectibles project. 

Pudgy Penguins has been building its physical retail presence since 2023, when its toys landed in more than 2,000 Walmart stores, and CEO Luca Netz confirmed in May 2024 that over 1 million toys had sold in the prior 12 months. 

NFT holders in the collection also reportedly earn 5% of net revenue from physical products featuring their individual penguins.

Chainlink joins 47 banks across South Korea and Europe to improve international money transfers 

Blockchain data network Chainlink, which connects real-world financial information to blockchain systems, just launched Project Pangea with two banking groups. Partners include Qivalis, a euro stablecoin consortium of 37 European banks, and UniKA, an alliance of more than 10 South Korean commercial banks.

The project targets the Europe-South Korea trade corridor, one of the world's 15 largest trade routes by volume, reportedly processing over $150 billion in goods and services annually. 

Right now, foreign exchange settlements between the two regions take 48 hours to clear. But Project Pangea is designed to speed up that lag time with regulated stablecoins, digital tokens tied one-to-one to currencies like the euro and South Korean won, alongside a payment-versus-payment settlement system where both sides of an exchanged currency trade clear simultaneously.

Base expands its AI agent toolkit with 13 new app integrations

Coinbase's blockchain network Base announced an expansion of Base MCP, a toolkit allowing AI agents, software programs that execute tasks autonomously, to perform financial actions directly on the blockchain without human input for each step.

The update adds 13 app integrations, including OpenSea, that give agents the ability to transact, trade, lend, mint and buy onchain. 

According to the Base MCP quickstart guide, developers can connect the toolkit to AI assistants including Claude and ChatGPT in under five minutes.

Ethereum Foundation cuts 40% of budget and 54 staff in major restructuring

The Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit supporting development of the Ethereum blockchain, announced it is cutting roughly 40% of its annual budget as it shifts toward an endowment model.

Co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on X the Foundation is cutting its annual budget as part of a planned shift toward a long-term endowment model, moving from spending about 15% of remaining funds per year before 2026 to a target of 5% per year after 2030. 

Buterin said the cuts involve real tradeoffs, and that Ethereum is shifting its security approach from running multiple independent software versions as a backup system to using AI to verify that code behaves correctly. 

Along with software streamlining, Ethereum’s privacy research team is folding into other departments rather than operating on its own. Its annual developer conference DevCon will also get smaller to trim size and costs.

Buterin said the longer-term goal is to slow down new feature development once the blockchain’s current upgrade plan is finished and keep future changes limited to security fixes, similar to how Bitcoin's underlying protocol rarely changes.

Disney+ and Dapper Labs drop Americana 250 collectible pins on Flow blockchain for July 4

Disney+ and Disney Pinnacle, a digital collectibles platform built by Dapper Labs on the Flow blockchain, are releasing a six-pin Americana 250 set timed to the U.S. 250th birthday on July 4.

The set features the classic Disney founding six, Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Goofy and Pluto, each shaped to fit a segment of an American flag when collected together.

The Mickey pin is available now as a free claim for Disney+ subscribers, with the remaining five dropping July 4 via capsules in two finishes, Lux Marble and Color Splash. The drop will close July 11.

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