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

Parallel Drops New Whitepaper for Solana AI Survival Sim Game

Parallel Studios, the creator behind its eponymous Ethereum trading card game, unveiled further plans for “Colony,” an AI-driven game that will, according to the whitepaper released March 14, be built on Solana.

The new venture introduces autonomous AI avatars that can evolve and transact, pushing the boundaries of web3 gameplay. There are currently 11,001 Parallel Avatar NFTs on Ethereum, which could be used on Solana and in the new game. The whitepaper also mentions the possibility of $PRIME token holders voting to mint more NFT avatars on Solana through a new “breeding” mechanism.

A free-to-play version will be available, but players must own an NFT avatar to earn additional rewards.

For more background on Parallel, check out our recent blog post, Between the Lines of Parallel’s Genre-Defining Trading Card Game.

Black Mirror NFTs Sell Out

Last week, the “Black Mirror Experience: Smile Club” NFT collection sold out in under three hours, proving fans of the dystopian hit series may just be the perfect audience for NFT-driven interactive storytelling. 

Powered by the music tech platform PIXELYNX and leading web3 studio Animoca Brands in collaboration with licensing group Banijay Brands, the series draws inspiration from the famed “Nosedive” episode of the Netflix anthology. 

To kick things off, allowlisted fans who submitted a smile through their computer videos could mint custom characters on Coinbase’s Layer 2 blockchain, Base. According to the creators, a live episodic saga will soon unfold, giving holders the chance to follow interactive quests and earn rewards based on “social standing.”

Optimism Reveals ‘We Heart the Art’ Contest Winners

The Optimism Foundation’s “We Love The Art” contest culminated this week, spotlighting impressive winners in the categories of artificial intelligence, generative art, music, and 1-of-1 art.

With a specific focus on celebrating the innovation on low-gas Superchain platforms (Optimism, Zora, and Base), the contest rewarded eight artists with prizes of up to 50,000 $OP each from a total pool worth $3.6 million USD. 

Winners include Shavonne Wong, Mitchell F. Chan, The Park, Aly x Bloody White, Pegasus, Cam Murdoch, 0xfff, and Sam Hains.

The contest drew over 7,000 entries, and on-chain media company nftnow published exclusive interviews with each of the winners.

Tokenbound Partners with LayerZero Labs to Enable Omnichain TBA Transactions

If you’ve been among the NFT collectors asking “wen cross-chain?” — as in, you imagine an interoperable future in which digital items work across all blockchains and online ecosystems — such a reality may be dawning.

Tokenbound, the open-source developer toolkit behind ERC-6551, or the “backpack wallet” token standard giving every NFT its own wallet address, has teamed up with omnichain protocol developer LayerZero Labs to revolutionize NFT transactions. 

Specifically, this partnership enables NFT holders with Ethereum-based Tokenbound Accounts (TBAs) to move and interact their NFTs across multiple chains like Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Base, and Linea. This breakthrough facilitates new opportunities and functionalities, such as engaging on social media platforms with NFTs or partaking in a wider variety of decentralized applications (dApps) across ecosystems. 

All in all, this development is a significant milestone in interoperability, potentially expanding the utility of NFTs beyond digital art.

Indian Railways Rolls Out NFT Train Tickets

On March 13, Indian Railways introduced NFT train tickets for two semi-high-speed trains. The initiative comes just in time for Holi, an Indian holiday known as the festival of colors, and pays tribute to the tradition through the tickets’ vibrant artwork. 

This pilot program aims to enrich travel experiences by offering a verifiable blockchain-based ticket record as both a digital keepsake and a functional pass of admission. The rollout signals a potential leap in NFT adoption and will serve as a test of NFT ticketing security to combat forgery, duplications, or other ticketing errors. 

According to the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a public sector enterprise that oversees train travel under India’s Ministry of Railways, there’s no extra cost to purchase an NFT train ticket. “The NFT ticket and digital memorabilia will be issued without any additional charge,” IRCTC posted on X. “It will be delivered through WhatsApp and SMS link to the confirmed passengers.”

If expanded, such initiatives could appear in more daily railway bookings and showcase blockchain’s utility in the public sector.

VeVe Launches Marvel NFT Comics Featuring Spider-Man and X-Men

Ethereum digital collectibles platform VeVe has teamed up with Marvel to launch over 300 NFT comics featuring the likes of Spider-Man and X-Men. 

Costing slightly more than a normal digital comic book, these NFT versions come with varying levels of rarity, the ability to resell, and unique features like augmented reality reading.

The drop aims to provide an immersive fan experience, blending traditional comic collecting with digital innovation. According to Decrypt, VeVe says this partnership marks, “just the beginning of its alliance with various brands in the comic book industry.”

Introducing Seaport 1.6

OpenSea and the Seaport Working Group are excited to unveil Seaport 1.6 — the latest generation of the most advanced NFT marketplace protocol in the EVM ecosystem. 

Seaport 1.6 introduces a new capability enabled by the recent Ethereum Dencun upgrade called Seaport hooks 🪝. Similar in spirit to Uniswap v4 hooks, Seaport Hooks allow developers to build applications that greatly expand the utility and liquidity of NFTs.

For more information, read the entire blog post here.