In recent days, there has been a significant uptick in the daily sales volume of nonfungible token (NFT) trading cards belonging to the former President of the United States, Donald Trump.

According to market analytics aggregator Cryptoslam, sales volumes on January 18 and January 19 saw surges of 800% and 600% respectively when compared to sales volumes on January 17.

Following reports that the former president was seeking to rejoin Facebook and Twitter in advance of the 2024 presidential election campaign, some experts believe that the rekindled interest could be due to his imminent return to social media networks. This speculation comes after it was reported that the former president was seeking to rejoin these networks.

On December 15th, a collection of 45,000 self-themed trading cards was released, and the price of each card was originally set at $99 USD.

Customers who purchased the collection were instantly placed into a sweepstakes with “thousands of prizes,” some of which included one-on-one meals, zoom calls, and games of golf with the previous President.

They sold out very rapidly and achieved daily sales volumes of more than $3.5 million, but after that, their sales volume sank to a baseline of around $26,000 by the end of 2022.

Yuga Labs, the company that created Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), has blocked the secondary trade of its “Sewer Pass” non-fungible tokens on markets that do not provide full support for creator royalties.

It is possible to mint the Sewer Pass, which serves as an admission pass to its new skill-based non-flip-to-win game called Dookey Dash, but only for those who are members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club or the Mutant Ape Yacht Club.

According to the statistics provided by NFT Price Floor, The Sewer Pass has had a large amount of transactions on secondary markets, with a floor price of 1.81 ETH (which is equivalent to $2,809) and sales volumes of 15,627 ETH (which is equivalent to $24,267,411).

Secondary sales of the collection have already brought in more than $1.2 million in income for Yuga Labs, which is based on a 5% creator royalty charge for the collection.

According to the announcement, “Neopets Metaverse” will be a play-and-earn virtual pet game based on the original, and it would enable users to “grow, care for, personalise, and combat with their Neopets” on the blockchain. The game will be based on the original “Neopets.”

Neopets was established in 1999, and its parent business has high hopes that its newest product, Neopets Metaverse, would reintroduce “the magic of Neopets in a wonderfully fresh light to old-time gamers, as well as recruiting and fostering a new generation of Neopians.”

The news has been received with a lacklustre reaction from the community, with some members speculating that the community’s earlier attempt to create a Neopets metaverse was unsuccessful.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a pair of haptic gloves that they hope will allow users to experience the feeling of touch in the metaverse.

The HaptGlove is an untethered and lightweight glove that will enable users of the metaverse to interact with virtual items in a manner that is much more realistic by communicating a sense of touch and grip. The innovation was developed by HaptLabs.

When users put on the HaptGlove, they are able to sense when their virtual avatar’s hand touches something, as well as tell how hard the object is and what shape it is. This is made possible by the HaptGlove restricting the user’s finger positions, which enables users to sense when their virtual avatar’s hand touches something.

According to NUS, the HaptGlove will also be valuable in other fields, such as education and medicine, since it will enable surgeons to practise their procedures in a “hyper-realistic environment” and will provide students with the opportunity to gain practical knowledge via hands-on practise.

Although the idea of haptic gloves is not new, as for example, Meta is now working on their own version of them, NUS say that theirs is capable of providing users with a far more realistic feeling of touch in comparison to other haptic gloves that are already on the market.

It has been suggested by those working on metaverse games that because virtual reality is such an immature technology, it is difficult to incorporate it into metaverse products. As a result, games like The Sandbox and Decentraland have not yet fully incorporated virtual reality clients into their gameplay.

Rarible, a marketplace for NFTs, made the announcement on January 18 that it was going to extend its marketplace builder to accommodate Polygon-based NFT collections.

The cryptocurrency exchange Binance made an announcement on January 19 that it would be tightening its rules for NFT listings. As part of the new regulations, the exchange will require sellers to complete Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and have at least two followers before they can list their NFTs on the platform.

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