This week our HUG family grew a little larger, we saw many of our friends and their hard work acknowledged with nominations for awards at NFT NYC, and are also coming together as a community to mourn senseless loss and put an end to gun violence in the US.

Our HUG family grows

• groupHUG continues to to go global... this time to Korea! We are honored to welcome a new member to the HUG family - our first Korean project, Ruler of the Land.  ROTL is a hugely successful, established Korean manhwa (comic) IP with a 28+ year history, more than 5.4 million copies sold and over 1 billion views. We can't wait to share their creativity with new audiences in the lead up to their mint on June 1. This is going to be BIG!

• hedgeHUG applicants have been shortlisted! We met shortlisted applicants for the June cohort of hedgeHUG, our accelerator program for pre-mint projects! We received over 150 applications for this first round, and the community had to make an incredibly difficult choice of voting for their favorites. The final cohort will be announced soon, and if you missed out this time, don’t worry as there will be many more future hedgeHUG cohorts to be a part of! 🦔

Update on groupHUG and artist-in-residence applications - we sent out an update to all applicants, and expect to get to your applications next month!

Everything you need to know for NFT NYC

Vote for us for the 2nd Annual NFT Awards

Thank you so much for nominating us for the 2nd Annual NFT Awards at NFT NYC last week! We are thrilled to have made the final cut of nominees for two awards:

• The Diversity Award

• Best NFT Project for Creators

Championing diverse creators is not just a side project for HUG. We don’t just say the words, we live by them. To learn more about why you should vote for us, check out our tweet!

Many of our other friends and family have also been nominated for awards, including Curious Addys, Eyes of Fashion, The Royals, Meta Angels, BFF and Honey Badges. How amazing is our little corner of Web3? Show them all some love by voting! 

Party with us and our friends from BFF and Okcoin!

We are hosting not 1, but 2 events at NFT NYC!

• June 21, 8-11pm ET: We are teaming up with our Web3 besties, BFF and Okcoin to throw a party of a lifetime! Enter the raffle for tickets here (100 available for HUG holders; must be verified in our Discord).

• June 22, 530-8pm ET: Join Randi and Debbie for a casual happy hour, brought to you by our friends at L'Oreal USA. Registration is full, but join the waitlist here. (P.S. There is a lot of attrition at such events around large NFT conferences, so your best bet may be to just show up!)

Work with us to #EndGunViolence

We can’t end this week's newsletter without acknowledging the unimaginable tragedies that have occurred in the past couple of weeks in the US and the sensless loss of so many precious lives. It has affected us all deeply and we want to highlight some positive actions that our community is taking to #EndGunViolence.

• Our founder, Debbie is coordinating a fundraiser through endaoment.org, which is targeted for May 31 and has drawn the support of so many incredible artists. Stay tuned for details.

• groupHUG member Girlies is launching an NFT raffle with many wonderful artists donating their work to support Everytown, a movement of parents, students, survivors, educators, gun owners & concerned citizens fighting to end gun violence and build safer communities.

Things to look forward to this week 👀

• More details on our #EndGunViolence fundraiser

• Catch up with Randi on Crypto Café where she is joined by iconic Fashion Designer Rebecca Minkoff to talk about Fashion-Tech, Metaverse Fashion Week, teaming up with Roblox, the future of Fashion and much more!

• Pride month officially kicks off on June 1

• Partnerships, more DEI initiatives, and new HUG community leaders, all to be announced at our weekly alpha on Tuesday at 4pm ET. Set your reminders here.

P.S. Feeling fuzzy? Struggling to keep up with everything HUG? We created a snazzy Google Calendar, which you can add to your own here!

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That's all for this week, Huggers! If you're in the US, enjoy the long weekend and if not, please still remember to take some time off from Web3 to touch grass and spend time with your loved ones. See you next week!