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The Bitcoin price has made a V-shape recovery from $3,600, following a capitulation-esque fall on March 12. Since then, the crypto market has recovered rapidly, similar to gold in previous crises, cryptocurrencies could perform strongly in the medium to long-term. As CryptoSlate previously reported, gold demonstrated a close correlation with stocks in the early days of past financial crises. As time passed, gold broke out of the correlation, ultimately outperforming stocks. Bitwise Global Head of Research Matt Hougan said in a letter to investors that crypto may see a similar pattern as gold, which makes the medium to long-term trend of the asset class highly optimistic. Real demand, real buyers in crypto In 2008, after the subprime mortgage crisis swept across the U.S. causing financial wreckage, all asset classes plunged in a short period of time. In the next 12 months that followed, the price of gold increased sharply, making 2009 to 2011 the best performing years in gold’s history. Hougan wrote: “Toward that end, we are reminded of what happened to gold following the 2008 crisis. Although the initial deflationary impact of that crisis drove gold prices down sharply, prices rebounded rapidly in 2009 and beyond as the government’s response to the crisis rippled through the system. In fact, 2009-2011 was one of the strongest three-year return periods in gold’s history.” Bitcoin has seen a fast-forwarded version of gold’s swift recovery in the 2000s. When the U.S. equities market was still struggling to rebound, BTC began to see a firm recovery from $3,600. Within less than a month and a half, its price rose by more than two-fold. Based on the historical performance of gold in the aftermath of crises and the rising perception of Bitcoin as digital gold, Hougan said that Bitwise Asset Management remains increasingly bullish on the intermediate and long-term outlook for crypto. He wrote: “It is chiefly for this reason that we are increasingly bullish on the intermediate- and long-term outlook for crypto. We are in unprecedented times, seeing anomalous and unexpected developments in financial markets, including gold, and witnessing extraordinary fiscal and monetary responses to the coronavirus pandemic. In such an environment, a small allocation to crypto in a diversified portfolio seems increasingly prudent. We are hearing this from clients, and seeing it in our inflows.” Recovery is backed by actual retail demand The shift in the volume of major crypto assets from futures exchanges to spot trading platforms in recent weeks has shown that the market downturn was actively bought by retail traders, rather than by existing traders in the futures market using high leverage or debt to push up the market. The fast rebound of crypto assets, which many existing investors in the cryptocurrency market did not anticipate, could solidify the image of cryptocurrencies as a potential store of value and safe haven over the long-run.
IOHK has announced that Daedalus 1.0.0 mainnet wallet has finally launched and is now available to every user of Cardano (ADA). The launch of Daedalus comes after 18 months of work and marks the beginning of a series of important launches from IOHK that will bring about Shelley, the blockchain’s staking era. The company has also released the independent code audit carried out by security experts, R9B
Bakkt, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) crypto subsidiary, suffered its second high-profile executive exit last week after CEO Mike Blandina stepped down. While the rumored institutionalization of cryptocurrency remains a far-fetched vision, several empty promises and misplaced hypes question Bakkt’s integrity as a company. Third executive in four months As reported on Bloomberg, Blandia resigned the Bitcoin futures bourse after just four months on the job. He now joins J.P. Morgan to head its payments technology division. Interestingly, the U.S. investment bank was poised to develop its JPM coin in 2019, but not much has transpired on that front since. When Ethereum Blandia joined Bakkt as CEO in December 2019, he vowed to oversee the exchange’s expansion in key markets, explore newer product offerings, and even launch a retail application for everyday payments. Previously, Blandia had stints at PayPal and Google, both centered in the payments division. Bakkt’s new CEO is David Clifton, previously at ICE as head of M&A and integrations. XRP Adam White continues his role as company president, and no further announcements on the exchange’s future exist at press time. Promises, hot air, and zero substance Formerly, Blandia replaced U.S. senator Kelly Loeffler, who was recently in the headlines for gaining millions in the stock market based on insider information. Loeffler was extensively praised in 2018-19 for bringing in institutional tools for the cryptocurrency market before her administrative appointment. But Bakkt’s poor, non-existential performance in the recent months has begged larger questions — are institutions even interested in Bitcoin exposure at all? Crypto fanatics once regarded Bakkt as Bitcoin’s “killer app” — a so-called slang for products/services that revolutionize industries and rival products. Popular crypto commentator Scott Melker tweeted: The @Bakkt news is arguably the most bullish event for institutional investors in the history of bitcoin. PHYSICALLY delivered futures (require the holder to either produce actual bitcoin or take delivery from the exchange) backed by the New York Stock Exchange. We are maturing. The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) August 16, 2019 However, since its launch in September 2019, Bakkt has no substantial metric or use case to boast about. On the first hour of trading post-launch, only five contracts changed hands. At the end of the session, only 28 contracts were traded — a number smaller than the worse ranked crypto exchanges. The exchange’s main selling point — that of physical-settled Bitcoin futures — turned out a disappointing farce. Only 63 percent of contracts were reportedly settled in the digital currency. Myth: Bakkt futures fully backed by bitcoin. Reality: Bakkt futures 37% backed by dollars or treasuries. Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) December 2, 2019 Bakkt’s daily volumes continue to remain woefully low — only 200 June BTC contracts — and any developments about the much-hyped Starbucks application seem buried. Most who expected Bitcoin prices to rise substantially after the launch were in for a surprise, the currency fell 50 percent in the months to come, exactly a day after Bakkt’s launch. Among a rotating door of executives, low volumes, absent mobile applications, lies about daily Bitcoin settlement, a former executive involved in insider trading, and questionable margin statements – Bakkt comes across as an “institutional” leader no better than “unregulated” crypto exchanges.
“Standing on the stones” was the phrase to describe the last resort of the many desperate, hungry, unemployed London workers in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Men who had no fixed employment would rock up early in the morning, thronging in masses to await any possible job tickets that were dispensed two or three times a day. 150 years later, the London docks are the base for businesses at the interface of finance and technology. Today, fintech entrepreneurs stand on the stones of what remains of the beating heart of trade in the London Docks. Fintech workers like those at Level39 now find themselves “slamming the keys” as they work in offices high above the Docklands’ West Wood Quay, now called Canary Wharf. In doing so, these innovators continue the vibrant trade history of the London docks. Canary Wharf was named because the docklands’ primary trading partners were the Canary Islands, a Spanish group of islands 3,760 miles from London on the coast of West Africa. Curiously, the islands themselves were named after the large native dogs inhabiting the islands. Since the Docklands are located on the Isle of Dogs, it was only fitting to name them Canary Wharf. From 1802 to 1939, this area of London was one of the busiest docks in the world. Harking back to the time when innovation played a vital role in establishing the backbone of society, you can now see a return to these values as a new breed of fintech craftsmen embed themselves in the heart of Canary Wharf. Designed by world-famous architect, Cesar Pell, One Canada Square established Canary Wharf as a new financial centre. It was completed in 1991 and was initially the tallest skyscraper in London (it is now the third). It has been followed by another thirty skyscrapers that serve as residential and business establishments. Set on the 39th floor of One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, the eponymously-named Level39 is a prime example of how a company can successfully provide a space and community for tech startups and scaleups. Level39’s Ecosystem Development Manager, Nancy Gonzalez-Rivera, told CryptoSlate: “Over the past nine years, Level39 has grown significantly, now occupying 80,000 sq ft in One Canada Square and boasting a vibrant community of over 180 member companies, operating in fintech, cyber security, smart cities, green tech, and most recently, life sciences and medtech.” One Canada Square indisputably paved the way for establishing Canary Wharf as one of the main financial centers of the world. But it almost didn’t happen. A billion-dollar bet that almost went horribly wrong In the mid-80s London needed to build a new financial hub. At one point while One Canada Square was being constructed, the private group financing the construction was unsure whether establishing Canary Wharf would be a giant failure. The increasing construction costs and lack of an underground transportation line connecting it to the rest of London were the critical factors. The London financial scene had already changed in the mid-80s when deregulation of the stock exchange occurred and the market went digital; Canary Wharf was primed to address that reality in a way that would facilitate its role as not just a financial center, but the leading fintech center of the world. How Level39 provides fintech infrastructure Some of the biggest names in fintech which have made Level39 home have grown to become billion-dollar brands. Heavyweights such as Revolut and Etoro have helped it develop a strong reputation within the fintech and crypto communities. Of course, taking the leap towards entrepreneurship is not for the faint-hearted. Being associated with Level39’s infrastructure facilitates credibility and strength for the ambitious entrepreneurs diving head-first into the innovative and enigmatic waters of fintech, providing safe sailing to succeed. Research conducted by the Harvard Business Review found that people who co-work demonstrate higher levels of thriving than their co...
Surely the greatest irony in the blockchain space is that there has never been any agreement on “the best” consensus model. Bitcoin and Ethereum are widely lauded for pioneering the concepts of blockchain and smart contract platforms respectively, but both also come under heavy criticism for their lack of scalability. The scalability challenge is largely due to their use of the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus method. Therefore, teams of developers have been focusing for years on devising a different method for achieving consensus among network participants. One that removes the bottlenecks caused by PoW, but still achieves the security of decentralization, while maintaining the right balance of incentivizing honest actors and deterring bad ones. So far, there have been dozens of attempts at solving this quandary. However, only a few have emerged as main contenders, namely proof-of-stake (PoS) and delegated proof-of-stake (dPoS.) However, a new horse just entered the race. It’s not a new consensus protocol – rather, a means of speeding up consensus. A blockchain project called Solana is developing a secure, scalable blockchain that can handle up to 50,000 transactions per second on its testnet. How does it achieve this? It uses a feature called Proof of History to determine the passage of time, which, in turn, considerably reduces the weight of consensus. Proof of History, Explained Proof of History (PoH) aims to lighten the load of the network nodes in processing blocks by providing a means of encoding time itself into the blockchain. In a regular blockchain, reaching consensus over the time a particular block was mined is as much a requirement as reaching consensus over the existence of the transactions in that block. Timestamping is critical because it tells the network (and any observer) that transactions took place in a particular sequence. In a PoW scenario, the successful block miner is the first to find the correct nonce, which requires a certain amount of computing power to perform. However, PoH uses a newer cryptographic concept called Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs.) A VDF can only be solved by a single CPU core applying a particular set of sequential steps. No parallel processing is allowed, so it’s easy to define exactly how long it takes to apply those steps. Therefore, the passage of time is evident. PoH solves the time challenge, and thus reduces the processing weight of the blockchain, making it lighter and faster. Solana combines PoH with a security protocol called Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Tower BFT), which allows participants to stake tokens so they can vote on the validity of a PoH hash. This protocol penalizes bad actors if they vote in favor of a fork that doesn’t match the PoH records. Furthermore, Solana deploys proof-of-stake (PoS) as a means of determining who can participate as a block validator. The Evolution of Blockchains So how does Proof of History stack up to its predecessors? Proof-of-Work There are some similarities between Proof of Work and the Proof of History feature. Mainly, that both methods rely on a defined expenditure of computing power to produce blocks, or hashes as they are known in PoH. Like Bitcoin and most other PoW blockchains, Solana also uses the SHA-256 algorithm. This may raise the question of whether an ASIC could significantly speed up solving the VDF function in PoH. Solana believes that this isn’t a challenge and that the processing power of most ASICs would be within an acceptable range of what’s available to the wider network. Because PoH removes the timestamping burden from the network, it results in a far lighter, faster blockchain than anyone has been able to achieve so far using PoW. The incentive mechanisms are protected by combining with Tower BFT. Regardless, PoH can work together with Proof of Work as well, thereby improving its scalability. Proof-of-Stake Proof of Stake (PoS) has been the long-promised solution to Ethereum’s scalability. In PoS, net...
A couple of days ago, we published an article on Planetwatch. In it, I toyed with the idea of a crypto mining super box that could mine different cryptocurrencies. Well, a few hours after it went live, I received an email from a reader informing me that there was indeed such a device. It is called the Match X M2 Pro and costs a whopping $2,900. Initially, I was skeptical. The email was from a total stranger on the internet who was, for all intents and purposes, shilling a token in which he had invested. However, after I dug a little deeper, I found something to be explored. Proof of Participation The description of the miner states that it uses a “Proof of Participation” model for mining; Proof of Participation (POP) model, M2 Pro offers a new type of mining in which the amount of tokens mined is determined by the value of the miner’s participation in the network itself. With POP mining, as opposed to the more common POS or POW, a miner proves his participation in the network by mining “data blocks,” which use next to no power. In fact, the power consumption for the M2 Pro is minuscule, 4-6W. It looks very similar to a home WiFi router because internally, it is very similar and has similarities to Helium miners. The difference is that MXC claims to be compatible with large machines, not just small IoT devices. Oh, and you can mine Bitcoin with it too! Proof of Participation is the principle behind the MXC token created by The MXC Foundation, a Berlin-based non-profit organization. MXC is an open-source Machine Xchange Protocol that connects Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology with the blockchain. What to mine So how on earth does a 4W device mine Bitcoin in any real sense? Consumers own the gateway devices that receive rewards based on the POW protocol. Above them are supernodes run by staking partners who also receive MXC rewards. The infographic below details how the protocol works. Sensor owners connect to the gateway owners via LPWAN. These then connect to supernodes which are created through token staking. The supernodes are, in turn, connected to full nodes, which are operated by parachains and link directly to the data buyers. The MXC protocol reviews each node based on its participation in the network and removes any that are no longer active. Miners are then rated based on their participation. Rewards are then distributed based on this rating. The system promotes decentralization and for more users to join the network, making the network more secure. Multi-token mining The M2 Pro can mine DHX and MXC tokens by design. It can identify itself on the network to mine both tokens. However, this is the juicy bit. The MXC Foundation is about to announce the results of their pilot program to mine Bitcoin using an LPWAN device such as the M2 PRO. The project was called the Das Kaiser Projekt III and was available to the entire M2 Pro network towards the end of last year. To be a part of the project, you need an M2 Pro miner, miner health of 90%+, and 6,000 MXC tokens locked into staking. How does it mine Bitcoin without hashing? It doesn’t. The device uses the POP protocol to measure participation in the network just as it does with its native token. Miners can then ‘mine’ Bitcoin through their devices and receive their BTC rewards in their wallets. Whether we should call this mining is now up for debate. Squirreled away on their website, they explain the process in more detail. When ‘mining‘ Bitcoin, the network leverages the collective network strength and reliability into a cloud mining unit that acts as a unified bidder to request for a swap for BTC in a predictive AMM market. So they are not mining Bitcoin, then? DKP II utilizes a powerful scraping tool to scan transactions and liquidity orderbook to set a forward-oriented valuation of BTC to ensure maximum bidded swap between POP mining rewards and BTC’s POW mining rewards. The short answer is, unsurprisingly, no. A 4W device is not capable of hashing at th...
Proof of Work has gotten a bad rep over the past few years as mining firms have grown along with the environmental ramifications. As the CEO of a blockchain studio, I have struggled with the environmental impact of the miners. I am personally responsible for the creation of many blocks across many chains. Whether we’re minting NFTs, creating smart contracts, or developing a dapp, the Studio has done a lot of work across the blockchain arena. But we also know first-hand that mining creates a super-secure environment for the transactions – security is the bottom line of blockchain transactions, after all. So, I wanted to find out for myself: is mining going anywhere? Is Ethereum 2.0 marking a shift in a new direction? Here’s what I discovered. To what extent is Proof of Work really impacting the environment? The headlines might not be lying this time around. As we move towards a common goal to save the planet, reduce pollution and go green, Proof of Work falls into the pollutant field. In this case, numbers do speak for themselves. Reports show staggering figures, with energy consumption surpassing that of entire states. And not small ones. Proof of Work is utilized by the great Bitcoin, the second runner-up, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, etc. If we know that the biggest volume of transactions comes from Bitcoin and Ether mining, you can only imagine the environmental impact coming from the immense computing power required. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Here are the numbers. Studies show that Bitcoin mining alone consumes seven times Google’s total electricity usage. Let’s look at it from another angle. Bitcoin uses 122.87 Terawatt-hours yearly; that’s more than The Netherlands, Argentina, and UAE. But they are not combined, each. Ethereum takes second place by consuming 99.6 Terawatt-hours, more than Belgium, the Philippines. When we translate this into carbon dioxide emissions, BTC leads with 96 million tons, while ETH mining emits 47 million tons. Reports show that the crypto market contains 15,000 cryptocurrencies and 400 exchanges. That is the other data we need to consider. If we know that the market is constantly growing, the amount of energy needed will only increase over time, while the mining efficiency will decrease. One of the leading polluters of our planet is global CO2 emissions. If we know that this is the case, why add to the already shocking numbers pollution-wise with a mechanism that increases emission? If our goal is to cut down on pollutants, and if there is a safer alternative, why not switch? Ethereum is already putting in the efforts with Eth2.0. But will the others do the same? Is Proof of Stake a good alternative? Speaking of alternatives, Proof of Stake comes to the rescue. Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are similar, though. They both represent mechanisms utilized on the distributed network through which the participants can agree on which transaction block is added to a specific blockchain. The difference? The process of reaching that same endpoint. PoW demands large amounts of computing resources and energy, which generate new, validated blocks. Proof of Stake revolves around staking. Staking is a bit like voting, as participants, also known as validators, stake a certain amount of cryptocurrency behind a block they wish to add to the blockchain. The pledged coins are thus locked while the transactions are verified but can be unstaked if you wish to trade them. PoS requires crypto holders to “vote” for legitimate transactions approval. But what’s in it for these validators? Well, the reward for voting on legitimate transactions is receiving newly created crypto over time. So, the “stakers” get rewards, and planet Earth gets less pollution. The primary advantage is that PoS avoids the need for investing additional sums of money into powerful computing equipment that consumes large amounts of electricity. This is why PoS was created in the first place – as a response to the ever-growin...
Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has teamed up with crypto-focused payment solutions provider MoonPay in order to integrate direct credit and debit card payments on its platform. In a press release published on April 1, MoonPay CEO and co-founder Ivan Soto-Wright noted: “MoonPay’s mission is to unlock ownership and onboard the world to Web3. To be successful, we have to make the process as simple as possible. MoonPay has done that for crypto. And now, in partnership with Opensea, we’re doing it for NFTs as well.” ⛵️Sail the @opensea with your card 💳 Soon, you will be able to buy NFTs with @Visa, @Mastercard, @Apple Pay, @GooglePay and more. MoonPay (@moonpay) April 1, 2022 Per the announcement, the partnership would allow OpenSea customers to purchase NFTs via MoonPay’s NFT Checkout service using payment methods such as MasterCard, Visa, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The integration of these new payment methods will be implemented in several phases, MoonPay explained, and will allow OpenSea users to “easily purchase an NFT using a debit or credit card, sidestepping the need to first acquire cryptocurrency.” Catching up to competition MoonPay’s NFT Checkout service went live on January 27 and was touted as the “industry-first NFT plug-and-play solution that allows users to purchase an NFT instantly with a credit or debit card.” “By expanding the reach of NFTs to anyone able to pay with a card, we’re not only drastically scaling NFT adoption: we’re opening up new revenue streams for businesses, new royalty sources for artists, and altogether bringing the benefits that NFTs offer to a much wider brand ecosystem.“ Annnnd we’re live 🔴 Introducing NFT Checkout: the world’s only solution that allows users to purchase an NFT instantly with a card 🛒 💳 Details👇 MoonPay (@moonpay) January 27, 2022 Coincidentally, NFT marketplace Nifty’s—one of OpenSea’s competitors—has announced a similar partnership with MoonPay just a few days ago. Likewise, digital art online auction platform Nifty Gateway has already been supporting card payments for some time now. In January, the upcoming Coinbase NFT marketplace also partnered with MasterCard ahead of its launch reportedly slated for later this year.
Snoop Dogg, also known as prominent non-fungible token (NFT) collector Cozomo de’ Medici, has been busy with all things crypto lately. Just today alone, the rapper dropped a new music video in blockchain-based game The Sandbox—where he will also hold a virtual metaverse concert later this year—as well as confirmed an upcoming Twitter Spaces meeting with Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson. House he built According to a press release shared with CryptoSlate by The Sandbox’s parent company Animoca Brands today, “House I Built” from Snoop Dogg’s latest album B.O.D.R. is the “very first music video produced in The Sandbox metaverse.” The rapper explained: “The ‘House I Built’ track draws a parallel between how I’ve constructed my life and career and how I’m building out my Snoopverse virtual world in The Sandbox. Whether in the metaverse or the universe, it’s about keeping it real, being yourself, and making the most of every opportunity.” A metaverse music video 🎤🎥 – House I Built. Checc it ‼️ Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) April 1, 2022 In the video itself, made with the platform’s free content creation tools VoxEdit and Game Maker, Snoop Dogg is represented as a pixelated 3D avatar à la Minecraft. Notably, the clip also features special guests such as DJs Blondish and Steve Aoki. Meanwhile, the music video is something akin to an opening act launched ahead of Snoop Dogg’s full-fledged virtual concert that will be held in The Sandbox “later this year.” The platform’s CEO and co-founder Arthur Madrid further added: “Today in The Sandbox, Snoop Dogg is building the Snoopverse, a place where his avatar can perform exclusive concerts only accessible to his fans. Snoop’s new, first-of-its-kind, metaverse music video ‘House I Built’ provides a tangible example today but there is more coming very soon.” ‘That Cardano and this Web3 stuff’ At the same time, Snoop Dogg also confirmed today that on April 5 he will join Charles Hoskinson, the founder of the Cardano blockchain and a co-founder of Ethereum, on Twitter Spaces—and “this will be fun.” This will be fun 🎥 #Cardano Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) March 31, 2022 In his turn, Hoskinson similarly confirmed this, noting “Yes, I’ll be with Snoop on the 5th. I have the best job in the world.” Apparently, at least some part of the conversation will be dedicated to a new partnership between Snoop Dogg and Cardano-based platform Clay Nation that will “bring you iconic collectibles, unreleased music, & limited edition ‘pitches’.” Previously, Clay Nation minted—and sold out—a collection of “original handmade Clay NFTs” that also serve as “entry to Clay Nation Festival & moulding the metaverse.” “It’s a collection of 10,000 digital characters with algorithmically assembled, handcrafted clay traits. Each unique character is a one-of-a-kind NFT, stored on the Cardano blockchain. Just like in the non-clay world, no two members of Clay Nation are the same.” Further details of the new partnership will be revealed during the Twitter Spaces meeting with Snoop Dogg, Charles Hoskinson, and crypto investor Champ Medici on April 5, at 6 p.m. UTC.
Today we are talking to Michael Pearl, the COO of Kirobo. Kirobo claims to be the “safety net for DeFi”. Their goal is apparently to make crypto management as “safe and convenient” as online banking. Recently I wrote about how Vitalik still does test transactions before sending large amounts of ETH. Kirobo claims to solve this problem. Pearl states, “we don’t reverse the blockchain, the blockchain is the blockchain. we work with smart contracts that allow us to create. an escrow.” He claims there is no third-party risk between the user and Kirobo as if their service were to go down then transactions can simply be claimed back via a smart contract call if the transaction is not confirmed. The only part of the system that goes through Kirobo is the authentication of the passcode. The rest is entirely decentralized. This safe transfer contract is one of their suite of products. Learn about their inheritance product and others in the interview below. For those looking to watch the inheritance advert, we talk about you can view it on their YouTube channel.
Turkish prosecutors are asking courts to jail suspected crypto scammers in the country for thousands of years, per available information. According to reports from local media, the suspects are part of those involved in the $108 million scams involving the Thodex crypto exchange. The prime suspect in the case, Faruk Fatih Özer, founder and CEO of Thodex, is currently at large and declared wanted. Thodex crypto exchange CEO is on the run Last year, we reported that Thodex informed users that it was going offline for 4 – 5 days due to a sale process. The platform, which handles millions of dollars in transactions daily, was one of the major crypto platforms in the country. Users expressed concerns on Twitter when they couldn’t access their accounts or withdraw their funds, leading to police raids all over the country. As a result, there were allegations that about $2 billion of investor money was lost. At that time, about 62 people were arrested and detained during the investigation process. At the time, Özer claimed he only traveled to discuss deals with foreign investors and would soon return to Turkey. But prosecutors alleged that he fled to Albania and issued a red alert for his arrest through Interpol. But it appears that efforts to arrest him remain abortive as he’s still at large. However, the Albanian authorities have arrested some people who allegedly provided shelter for the criminal mastermind. Prosecutors continue case Though the prime suspect is yet to be found, prosecutors are pressing on with the charges. The charges include fraudulent use of information systems, founding a criminal organization, and using bank or credit information systems as a tool. If found, Ozer could face a jail term of 40,564 years upon indictment. While Chainalysis estimated that around $2 billion was lost, the indictment has revealed that the total loss due to the exchange collapse is $24 million (356 million lira). Scams, hacks, and the crypto industry While Thodex was just one of the several crypto scams that happened last year, the industry has witnessed several scams and hacks this year too. Just recently, Ronin revealed that it was hacked for over $600 million. Apart from that, the space has recorded a number of mind-blowing exploits in recent weeks. The prevalence of these harmful activities has continued to hamper the adoption of the crypto space and led to more calls for industry regulation. Thus, with the recent slew of arrests and prosecution of criminal masterminds in the space, investors would have more confidence in the space as they would believe that their investments are being protected by the law, thereby boosting investors’ confidence and improving adoption.
Sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) reached a record $25 billion in 2021. However, signs in the data of slowing growth towards the end of the year point to concerns. Repeated media reports of hacking, theft — and, perhaps most pressingly, fraud — haven’t helped. As the example of impersonation of comic book artist Derek Laufman shows, many mainstream creators and NFT users are not fully aware of the security and authenticity risks they are exposed to while minting and providing custody for NFTs. Furthermore, digital creations attached to NFT’s, for example, art, are often stored off-chain and not always stored in robust environments. A few months ago, all NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains were scraped and made available as a 19.5 Terabyte collection via an online link. Their owners probably assumed that their NFTs were on-chain and therefore wholly intact and relatively secure. However, in many cases, only the metadata data is hosted on-chain. The images are usually jpegs hosted on standard web2 servers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), or via distributed storage systems such as IPFS. If these services go offline (as in the case of AWS several times last year), the images hosted off-chain could disappear entirely. How Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) can help Fortunately, a robust solution to the safe storage, authentication, and verification of NFTs now exists. Trusted execution environments (TEEs) enable NFT issuers to execute code in a secure environment and without modification, providing high security. TEEs get over the hurdle of different developers generating code in an environment that they don’t fully control and where there are numerous other entities active at the same time. They allow players in the environment to ignore threats from the “unknown” others because a TEE guarantees the strongest level of isolation that is possible today and thus ensures the highest level of security. Computation within the TEE cannot be accessed by another program — including the operating system. VERITIC provides NFT infrastructure, including a TEE which can be used to solve NFT authentication challenges such as misplaced or stolen keys and lost metadata. VERITIC’s TEE is highly resistant to attacks. It can limit access to just specified individuals and the Casper native key management capabilities add additional security to NFTs. A seal of approval for NFTs The solution’s TEE ensures that the code being executed and the input is genuine and provides proof that no third party was involved in the minting. This provides a ‘seal of approval’ for NFT creators who have minted within the TEE as they can provide a reference showing the provenance of the NFT. Secure custody is critical as NFT authenticity rests on the fact that a copyright holder who rightfully mints NFTs and sells them can only prove they minted the NFTs by first demonstrating custody of the creator keys. Safe custody of the keys used to sign them is therefore essential for artists to prove they created the artwork. Conversely, losing the Private Keys would render the artist unable to authenticate the creation of their work. With the new TEE solution, we should start to see the end of NFT fraud and impersonation, as artists and creators can now prove they created an NFT by linking the NFT metadata, creator keys, and the NFT token itself and storing them together on immutable IPFS cloud storage (with Filecoin via Seal Storage Technology) or within a swiss vault. Deploying a TEE is an essential next step in providing any NFT project with access to a highly secure environment where privacy and security can be applied in an isolated execution, enabling enterprises to utilize NFTs at scale. It is the seal of approval of authenticity that any NFT creator or buyer should insist on.
Maple Finance is a protocol that is becoming a staple for many institutions across crypto. Maple allows accredited institutions such as hedge funds or market makers to access to undercollateralized loans. This is a unique primitive so far in DeFi that allows certain parties to borrow crypto assets without having to initially lend funds. (Add a sentence here briefly describing your main points for the article) The mechanics are simple: a group of institutions known as pool delegates create lending pools that allow other institutions to borrow funds at a fixed rate. The accrued interest is distributed between the lenders and protocol treasury. Lending funds is allowed to anyone for some of these pools, while other pools are permissioned and only certain institutions are allowed to deposit. The demand for this service has skyrocketed with the protocol recently achieving more than $1 billion of funds borrowed from their pools. Their TVL coming mostly from the amount lended stands currently at $873.52m, more than a 40% increase since the start of the year. The protocol token MPL is acting accordingly, with a 150% price rally in just a month: The protocol earns a considerable amount of revenue that is shared between pool delegates, lenders, and the protocol treasury. Besides protocol governing rights, the MPL token holders can earn staking rewards for providing liquidity as backstops for liquidations and participate in liquidity mining rewards of some pools. Additionally, token holders have the power to make use of the fees that have accrued to the Maple Treasury. The recent TVL surge has put Maple on the map for many. Nowadays many investors take a ‘value’ approach for investing in DeFi tokens and search new investing opportunities into profitable protocols with revenue accruing tokens. And as can be expected, it seems that some of these investors move considerable sizes. For instance, it can be seen in the next chart how the amount of transactions over $100k that involved MPL was close to 90 and it is in an upward trend not seen before: This suggests that there has been a growing interest among institutions to use MPL, given that $100k transactions can act as a proxy to these entities and whales. Transaction analytics are useful to gauge the interest of investors on the token and the size that they are transferring, but does not help much to establish if they are accumulating or distributing its tokens. Ownership indicators such as the flow of the largest holders of the token can help depict better the situation. In the next chart can be seen an indicator that shows the variation over time of the netflows of large holders (those owning at least 0.1% of the circulating supply). The value is extracted daily, a positive value means that those large holders are accumulating more tokens (and hence probably buying), while negative values show the opposite. In the chart can be seen how in a single day these large holders accumulated more than 146k MPL, almost $8M: Due to Maple’s revenue model it can probably be expected that the value of the MPL token could be moderately tied to the performance of its TVL and borrow amounts. These numbers are an accurate proxy of the state of affairs in institutional adoption that is onboarding in DeFi. As such, Maple appears well-suited to fill this gap, and can be expected to continue its takeover over the next years while the traditional finance yields remain at depressed levels.
As one could have expected, April fools day sent Crypto Twitter off the charts this time. At CryptoSlate we really had to think twice before falling for any of the amazing “news” coming out of the social media platform. Anyway, we collected a few of the best tweets on Crypto Twitter during the day. Enjoy! Let’s begin with Ryan Berckmans’ tweet on Solana’s amazing plan to shut down its consensus layer and settle on Ethereum. 1/ BREAKING: Solana to shut down its consensus layer and settle on Ethereum👇 Ryan Berckmans – ryanb.eth (@RyanBerckmans) April 1, 2022 Adam Cochran, Partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, thinks it’s time to sell all ETH and go full bananas on Cardano. 1/6 Why after a recent change I'm going all in on Cardano. Sold my ETH holdings and took the plunge, let's talk about why 👇🧵 Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) April 1, 2022 This one is only partially a joke. This is how the EU parliament functions (sic!) when voting on “unhosted wallets”. Tweet by asscrusader420, “professional bagholder.” how is EU voting on one of the most impactful pieces of crypto legislation in its history asscrusader420 (@asscrusader420) March 31, 2022 Ethereum Overlord Vitalik himself seems to be in a joking mode as well. Or wait, is this really a joke? Vitalik defending Bitcoin maximalism? Nah, bro, must be a joke. In defense of Bitcoin maximalism: vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 1, 2022 While we’re into Vitalik, according to the extremely well positioned observer Crypto Gucci, Vitalik is actually ditching Ethereum altogether (he’ll be apologized for being sick and tired of the darn thing), and is going all in on Solana (what else?). BREAKING: Vitalik Buterin announces he is leaving the Ethereum ecosystem to help make Solana the currency of the world, a thread🧵 Crypto-Gucci.eth ᵍᵐ🦇🔊 (@CryptoGucci) April 1, 2022 Our matador on The Hill, Jake Chervinsky is, however, not so much in a joking mode. According to Neeraj K. Agrawal, Communications Dude at Coincenter, he’s applying to become the U.S. Department of State’s Ambassador to the Metaverse. Not bad of a career move. if selected i will work to build lasting peace with the metaverse Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) April 1, 2022 And, yeah, we sort of agreeing on this one. Craig Wright is everybody’s April fools joke Graham (@Shenanigrahams) April 1, 2022 Yours truly aint gonna be worse. Here’s my proud announcement on my appointment as to the Swedish government’s advisor on Bitcoin’s transition to proof-of-stake. As a toxic #Ethereum maximalist, I'm happy and proud to announce my appointment as an advisor to the Swedish government on #Bitcoin's proof-of-stake transition. May the EVM be with you. László Dobos.eth ᵍᵐ 🦇🔊💰 (@larsdobos) April 1, 2022
The blockchain-based start-up sets out to solve connectivity and identification issues around the African continent and has already started to assemble the infrastructures that will enable the growth of its comprehensive all-in-one blockchain ecosystem. Through its partnership with K3 Telecom, 3air proposes wireless broadband internet, digital TV, and IP telephony access to areas where cable service is not possible or would not be viable, guaranteeing connection speeds of up to 1.000 Mbps per end user. The 3air Ecosystem Issues like connectivity or access to proper personal identification are still very present in most African countries, gaining a special relevance when they translate into difficult barriers in business relations. The 3air blockchain platform is taking on the ambitious task of creating a solution that will not only solve connectivity and allow access to high-speed internet, but also tackle the personal identification problem with the introduction of the Digital Identities feature – a trustless, secure, and private way for users to maintain credit scores, medical history, or proof of education as verifiable information on the blockchain. At the base of the entire ecosystem will be 3AIR, an Ethereum based utility and governance token on the SKALE blockchain. The 3AIR Token Serving as the sole currency available in the 3air ecosystem, 3AIR will grant its platform’s users access to services such as monthly subscriptions to TV and internet services, digital identities while enabling users to take advantage of the several adoption incentives that will be incorporated into the platform. These adoption incentives take different forms and serve different purposes. From Rewards and Loyalty programs using gamified structures and granting access to cashback, airdrops, or NFT coupons, to a Referral system designed to boost the market’s trust indexes and prevent fraud by allowing users to recommend services or businesses to their friends, family, or associates. Furthermore, by positioning itself as a secure and trusted bridge between users and service providers, 3air aims to help transform digital payments into a seamless and common activity in African countries. As with 3AIR, even the unbanked percentage of the population can complete bankless transactions and pay for the services included in the ecosystem, while the service providers receive the equivalent amount in the respective fiat currencies. The ecosystem has been devised to include a number of supplementary features that not only make the user’s life easier but also drive the token’s adoption. Staking rewards, access to microloans or the development of governance solutions are a few of the additional attributes envisioned for the token, however, 3air’s vision is to keep developing their blockchain platform into an all-purpose ecosystem serving identity, payment, community, governance, and marketing needs and striving to become a reference for the telecom sector.
The 19,000,000th Bitcoin has just been mined at block #730003. This leaves just 2 million for the rest of us. It seems that some outlets were reporting the news a little prematurely to start the party early. Running your full node is the only way to ensure you use up-to-date information. However, we are now officially over the line and we have had enough confirmations to report the news. You can’t blame people for wanting to celebrate early as it is a momentous day. Miners will not mine the 20,000,000th Bitcoin until around 2026, so it is a day to commemorate. Bitcoin certainly is enjoying the moment as the price rallies back above $46,000. The 19,000,000th bitcoin was just mined. Only 2 million more bitcoin to go. Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) April 1, 2022 There were 3,158 transactions in the block that broke the barrier, totaling 42,043 BTC. It was mined by a mining pool called viaBTC. There is a debate online about which block mined the 19 millionth coin as different nodes appear to show contradicting information. Until we receive more confirmations, we may not know exactly which block it was, but it is in a range between 729998 – 730007 by my calculations. Where are we in Bitcoin history? If you’re wondering where we are in the Bitcoin timeline, here’s a snapshot of the current progress of Bitcoin. We have had three halvings since the first Bitcoin was mined. At that point, there was a 50 BTC reward per block. We are now down to 6.25BTC per block. This will continue until around block 84,000 when it drops to just 3.125 BTC per block. The table below shows we are in the 4th era. The last Bitcoin will be mined in the 34th era when the reward will be just 0.00000001BTC per block. This is anywhere between 120 – 140 years from now, long after we’re all gone, so we can only speculate what will happen then. Miners will need to continue mining to keep the network running and secure; and there are several options for what will motivate them to do so. However, the most obvious is that miners will own plenty of Bitcoin and still receive fees from transactions. Who knows what one satoshi will be worth in over a hundred years?
This year, a crackdown on digital assets has been at the top of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) plan. This was made clear by the SEC chair Gery Gensler in January when he said: “If the trading platforms don’t come into the regulated space, it’d be another year of the public being vulnerable.” Since then, the SEC has used its agencies exclusively to obtain information and run investigations on crypto exchanges. Yesterday, it took another step towards its goal. It obliged crypto trading companies to consider all assets they hold for their customers as their own capital, including them on their balance sheets. In addition to the fiat currencies, the nature and amount of crypto assets held for customers will also be disclosed in detail. The new rule will be effective as of June and apply to all publicly listed crypto trading companies. Currently, crypto trading companies record and disclose the digital assets they hold in custody on behalf of their customers separately. This system is also used by brokerages as well. The new requirement will separate crypto exchanges from brokerages and significantly enlarge the exchanges’ balance sheets as of June. For example, while Coinbase listed $21.3 billion in assets and liabilities in last year’s balance sheet, it also said it had $278 billion in cryptocurrency and currency in customer custody. Why does the SEC want to know? According to the announcement, the SEC is worried about the negative impact of technological, legal, and regulatory risks of cryptocurrencies on their operations. The announcement states: “The obligations associated with these arrangements involve unique risks and uncertainties not present in arrangements to safeguard assets that are not crypto-assets, including technological, legal, and regulatory risks and uncertainties.” Technological risks include the safeguarding of assets and third parties who may be affected by the high volatility of crypto assets. Legal risks refer to the lack of precedent on how crypto custody would be dealt with in court. On the other hand, regulatory risks are about having a few regulatory requirements for holding crypto. At the same time, the exchange companies may not comply with the new regulations that exist, which increases risks to investors. With the new rule, the SEC hopes to expose more data on crypto exchanges to help investors with their allocation decisions. The ruling says: “The staff believes that the recognition, measurement, and disclosure guidance in this statement will enhance the information received by investors and other users of financial statements about these risks, thereby assisting them in making investment and other capital allocation decisions.”
The ongoing war in Ukraine has firmly placed the importance of assets like Bitcoin and gold in the front seat of the global financial system, according to financial asset management firm VanEck. The firm believes that under an extreme scenario where gold or Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency of the world, the value of the digital currency is predicted to be between $1.3 million to $4.8 million. The current geopolitical situation has led various economic analysts to surmise that the rising political tensions will give rise to a new monetary order where Bitcoin and gold will play more dominant roles. Bitcoin’s real valuation is over $1 million According to VanEck, the extreme implied price of more than $1 million was calculated by using aggregate M0 and M2 money supply and dividing it by the global gold or bitcoin reserves in a scenario where they are the globe’s go-to reserve assets. Per the report, the sanctions being imposed on Russia have led to reduced demand for hard currencies like the US Dollar. The two often compared assets are the biggest winners of this change in the existing financial order. Explaining the methodologies for arriving at its predictions, the firm wrote: The money liability is divided by the reserve asset. We used current reserve holdings in troy ounces for gold, and we used the current exchange rate to convert the monetary base liability into U.S. dollars. We use base money because the econometrics are good (globally), and it’s understandable – it’s just currency-in-pocket/circulation and demand deposits. Under the framework, the firm concluded that “the framework estimates gold prices of around $31,000 per ounce and potential Bitcoin prices of around $1,300,000 per coin.” Russia-Ukraine effect on Bitcoin While the world appears focused on the war in Ukraine, the importance of Bitcoin and the crypto industry in difficult times has risen astronomically. The slew of sanctions being imposed on Russia has forced many countries into rethinking how they can cut their dependence on the Western financial system to prevent a scenario where their country’s economy could be targeted by the weaponization of the global financial system. Amid all of this, several crypto proponents have begun to talk about the Dollar’s demise and the rise of Bitcoin as a global reserve currency. The value of Bitcoin has risen by roughly 35% since the Russia-Ukraine war began and citizens of both countries have turned to digital assets as a hedge against the falling value of their national currency. This performance seems to have renewed optimism among investors who are pouring in massively for the coin.
U.S District Judge Andrew Carter dismissed a lawsuit against Binance as the claimants have waited too long to bring their case. The claimants alleged in the suit that Binance violated securities laws by selling unregistered tokens and failed to register with the appropriate authorities. Rather than try the case on those grounds, Judge Carter rejected the claims on the basis that more than a year had passed before the claimants filed for legal action. A statute of limitations refers to a set time when legal proceedings can be brought. This varies depending on the offense and the state/local jurisdiction. But in New York, where this lawsuit was brought, “petty offenses” have a one-year statute of limitations. “Most felony offenses have a five year statute of limitations period. Misdemeanor offenses have a two year statute of limitation period, while petty offenses generally have a one year statute of limitations.” Was justice served, or did Binance get a lucky break? Binance wins the case on a technicality In 2017, the claimants had used the Binance platform to buy EOS, QSP, KNC, TRX, FUN, ICX, OMG, LEND, and ELF tokens, which subsequently tanked in value. It’s alleged that Binance had wrongfully sold the tokens and failed to warn them of the risks involved with cryptocurrency trading. The claimants sought to recover the sum they had paid to acquire the tokens. Judge Carter ruled that the investors waited too long before bringing legal action. He also determined that U.S securities laws did not apply as Binance was not a domestic exchange, even if it used U.S servers to offer its service. “Plaintiffs must allege more than stating that plaintiffs bought tokens while located in the U.S. and that title passed in whole or in part over servers located in California that host Binance’s website.” The claimants argued that the statute of limitations began running one year before the April 2020 lawsuit. This was when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had released guidance that potentially characterized their tokens as securities, thus alerting them to the alleged wrongdoing by Binance. Dubious claims Arguing that Binance should not have sold those tokens because they may be unregistered securities absolves the claimants of responsibility in the matter. However, if investors are to celebrate their wins, they must also accept their losses. Moreover, it doesn’t tally that losses incurred were due to purchasing unregistered securities. Instead, losses likely occurred as they bought at the peak of the 2017 bull market. Most crypto investors, who stayed in the game, were holding unrealized losses until Bitcoin managed to break $20,000 again in December 2020. In other words, the bear market saw the drawdown of all tokens; even those that are not deemed as securities by the SEC. Regardless of how Judge Carter arrived at his ruling, it would seem justice prevailed.
Last week’s 210% swing to the upside saw renewed interest in Zilliqa. Since peaking at $0.26 last May, a prolonged drawdown followed. It began with a vicious sell-off with $ZIL finding support at the $0.06 level. Although bulls attempted to fight back, after hitting resistance of around $0.13, the downtrend continued its path in September. A local bottom was found at $0.03 in mid-February. This was proceeded by a tight trading range between $0.03664 and $0.04432. However, last week’s explosive breakout confirmed a convincing break of the near seven-month downtrend. With that, investor interest in Zilliqa has returned. But can $ZIL build on this momentum and sustain the reversal? Zilliqa breakout takes the market by surprise During the downtrend period, Bitcoin and other Layer 1s saw sizeable gains, particularly from September to November 2021. But with Zilliqa floundering at the time, some took this as evidence the project was dead. It was only the last month or so that the technicals indicated a change. The week beginning March 14 saw the price peek marginally above the downtrend line. But it wasn’t until the following week’s explosive breakout that wider market sentiment flipped. In an email to CryptoSlate, Zilliqa’s Head of NFT & Metaverse Sandra Helou said the pump wasn’t surprising to those close to the project. She further commented the price move was “no mistake” considering the team’s focus on growing the ecosystem, even during the lull period. “The recent pump while it was surprising to the rest of the market to those already invested in Zil and aware of our ecosystem growth and vision it wasn’t a surprise. Zilliqa has always been referenced as a sleeping giant and with our focus and attention across many aligned verticals for growth, it’s no mistake this movement in price is happening.” $ZIL price analysis The past few days show $ZIL is acting conversely to the broader crypto market. While the market saw modest gains at the start of this week, $ZIL experienced a slight dip as bulls regrouped following the weekend breakout. Similarly, Wednesday sees a continuation of bullish form for $ZIL with an +80% swing to the upside on the daily candle, while the rest of the market consolidates with a minor bias to the sell-side on Wednesday. Large volume occurring with the price spikes suggests a sustained move. However, traders should note that the Relative Strength Index (RSI,) on the weekly time frame, has crept over 70 into overbought territory. Taken in isolation, that doesn’t necessarily signal an imminent drawdown, only that bull fatigue could be a factor in coming price action over the short term. Esports on the rise Supporting this reversal are several significant fundamental developments. First off is the exceptional growth of esports in recent times. Referring to research conducted by technology consultants Activate, Syracuse University pointed out esports viewership in the U.S will exceed that of every professional sports league, except the NFL, in 2021. Likewise, a global esports market report conducted by Newzoo two years ago found that 2019 revenue hit $950 million. However, off the back of further integration into popular culture, Newzoo’s latest revenue estimate for 2022 comes in at $1.8 billion, almost double that of 2019. Helou said Zilliqa’s strategy in this area is to combine esports with play-2-earn, which has also shown a significant uptick in popularity recently. That way, the firm is positioned to capitalize on growth across both fronts. “Zilliqa is strongly positioned to lead blockchain and gaming evolution. With projected $200 Billion dollars up for grabs by 2024 in P2E industry, Zilliqa is positioned to capitalize on this growth.” Metapolis is coming But perhaps the most significant factor in recent price action is Metapolis, which launches as an early access event in Miami on April 2. Commenting on Metapolis, Helou said the Metaverse-as-a-service (MaaS) concept sets it apart from competing Metaver...
The Graph’s hosted service is about to be integrated into the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution built on optimistic roll-up technology, according to a press release from Boba Network. The Graph is an indexing and query layer for web3, sometimes referred to as the “Google of Web3.” The beta integration means Boba developers can leverage the indexing and querying capabilities of The Graph’s Hosted Service to deploy data services that were not possible before. The Graph is a protocol that enables its users to aggregate, process, and archive data from blockchains and other networks using open-source APIs called subgraphs. The main purpose is to help developers access all available data to improve and augment their own decentralized applications. Develop products that were impossible before “By implementing The Graph’s data indexing and query solutions, Boba Network projects will be able to develop their own custom products in ways that were impossible before. This will make it a core piece of infrastructure that will help Boba Network evolve and deploy more elaborate services onto their network, including social networks, exchanges, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs),” the announcement reads. According to the press release, this is all possible because of the way The Graph collects and analyzes blockchain data, then stores it into various indices, called subgraphs. Any application built on a network supported by The Graph can query a subgraph and expect to receive a rapid response. All queries are posed via GraphQL which is a popular querying language that was first released by Facebook for the purpose of gathering data applicable to a user’s news feed. The Graph currently supports indexing data from 31 different networks including Ethereum (ETH), NEAR, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon (MATIC), Avalanche (AVAX), Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam, and IPFS. “Supporting Layer 2s like Boba Network on The Graph makes it possible for developers to build scalable dApps with subgraphs, enabling lower transaction costs and rich data UIs.” Eva Beylin, Director at The Graph Foundation, said. Makes it possible to create sophisticated algorithms The Boba Network is a hybrid compute layer that scales and augments Ethereum by mitigating its computational limitations. Boba implements an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) equivalent on an optimistic rollup layer-2 that enables smart contracts to scale and deliver an enhanced user experience in the form of faster transactions and lower gas fees. According to the announcement, Boba’s unique Turing hybrid compute technology means that developers can build dApps that trigger code off-chain on web-scale infrastructure, which makes it possible to create sophisticated algorithms that would otherwise be far too expensive and slow to execute on-chain. The network also implements special Liquidity Pools to facilitate quick exit onto Ethereum, as well as bridges that let users move NFTs between networks. Alan Chiu, founder and CEO of Boba Network said: “The Boba Network stands to be aided immeasurably by this beta integration with The Graph. Utilizing The Graph’s data retrieval services will be a massive benefit for Boba developers and the products they create. I can’t wait to see what innovative new solutions come to light in the wake of this news.”
EU lawmakers voted in favor of stricter rules on the transfer of funds to unhosted crypto wallets on Thursday. Unhosted crypto wallets are defined as wallets not hosted by a third party or financial institution. This includes noncustodial online wallets like MetaMask, Trust and Exodus, as well as cold storage options such as Trezor and Ledger. In essence, the legislation would apply to every wallet in the EU where the individual holds or can access the on-chain private keys. The proposal was sold on the idea that crypto could disturb financial stability and be used for criminal purposes. Under the rules, firms, such as crypto exchanges would be required to obtain, hold, and submit information on entities involved in transfers. Ernest Urtasun, a member of the EU Parliament who was key in driving the proposal forward, said these measures would make it easier to identify suspicious transactions, freeze assets, and discourage the use of crypto in criminal activity. However, the knock-on effects of this legislation could see the end of crypto innovation in the EU. The ramifications of spying on unhosted crypto wallets In a recent podcast, co-founder of Real Vision, Raoul Pal predicted the total crypto market cap could 100x by 2030. That would put the value of all cryptocurrencies at between $250 and $350 trillion by his estimation. If this comes to pass, crypto would become the world’s fastest-growing asset class, in the shortest time frame. While some question the likelihood of that happening, what cannot be doubted is the growing adoption of digital assets. Cryptocurrencies with multiple use cases that are solving real-world problems are going to be massive. Whether we get to the level suggested by Pal, in the time frame given, is a different point altogether. By attacking unhosted wallets, EU lawmakers will effectively hinder adoption and innovation. But rather than reign in criminality, which is a fallacy given that criminals prefer cash, it will lead to the flight of innovation and capital from the region. Crypto YouTuber Lark Davies points out that over the long term, this legislation will mean the EU will lose out on benefits presented by digital asset technology. “The countries that adopt this technology the fastest will be the ones to benefit from it the most. These kinds of legislation do not help in that regard.” What now for EU citizens? Although EU lawmakers voted 93 to 14 in favor of passing the proposals, with 14 abstentions, the process still needs input from EU member states before it’s drafted into law. This offers a way in which the proposal can be overturned or scaled back. Head of Strategy & Business Development at Unstoppable Finance, Patrick Hansen, who has been instrumental in bringing awareness to the situation, said “We have lost a battle, but this is far from over.” Should the worst happen, the EU will undoubtedly wave goodbye to the transformative benefits of cryptocurrency. What’s more, EU citizens will simply move to transact peer-to-peer and/or use DeFi protocols instead of centralized services.
Popular blockchain detective Zachbxt has revealed details about a possible rug pull that occurred on the Bored Bunny NFT collection, leading to the loss of around $20.7 million. According to Zachbxt, the project is a clear rug pull. His investigations reveal that the team behind it has been involved in other shady NFT projects in the past. But the past two, Ancient Cats Club and Crazy Camel, pale in value compared to this. The investigation also identified the three main people behind the project: Slavi Kutchoukov, Amir Adjaouti, and Remy Goma. The Bored Bunny slow rug pull The Bored Bunny NFT was announced in December 2021, with lots of promises. The developers claimed it to be a pfp project with 4999 NFT and a mint price of 0.4 ETH. The project became popular through marketing involving celebrities like Floyd Mayweather, Jake Paul, David Dobrik, DJ Khaled, French Montana, and Chantel Jeffries. 4/ Here are all the marketing videos that were produced for BB: French Montana: David Dobrik: Chantel Jeffries: Floyd Mayweather (Two times): zachxbt (@zachxbt) March 31, 2022 The project launched with many promises and sold out within hours, with the team making 2000 ETH from primary sales alone. However, further analysis of the project by the pseudonymous bax1337 on Twitter revealed signs of insider trading. Bax, who works with Convex Labs, discovered that before the actual reveal, a dev wallet bought the Celeb/Influencer NFTs. Following the first mint, the team launched another collection tagged Bored Bad Bunny NFT. This contained 1111 NFTs and minted for 0.4 ETH too. The third collection, Bored Mutant Bunny, came out a few days after. It had 3000 NFTs and went for 0.25 ETH. Unlike the first two, it didn’t sell out as people were beginning to question what the developers were doing. The team’s undoing, however, was that most of the funds generated from minting went to multiple centralized exchanges such as Binance. A further look at the team’s history would reveal that they are not first-time offenders as they have been attached to other projects that had sour endings. Bored Bunny denies wrongdoing The official account of Bored Bunny has come out to deny this, claiming the reason for the lack of communication was due to receiving multiple emails. Hi Bored Bunny Members⁰Hope you are all well, I come back to you to give you some news about myself and some explications about the project. Primarily, the reason of my absence this last month was that I have been through a lot of the emails, messages in private. 1. BoredBunny (@BoredBunnyNFT) March 29, 2022 The team is now suggesting handing over the control of the project to a Discord Moderator, but the floor price of the project has fallen to 0.082 ETH on OpenSea. Per data from Nansen, one in three NFT collections ends up as a “dead” project due to little to no trading activity. The trading activity of the Bored Bunny collection seems to have stalled following the developer’s shady activities. However, the recent arrest of the masterminds behind the Frosties NFT rug pull opens a new frontier for investors looking to recoup their lost funds.
Update: The stolen Mutant Ape Yacht Club #8662 apparently belonged to the Taiwanese pop superstar Jay Chou, which seems confirmed by himself via a post on Instagram. Chou lost NFTs in the phishing attack at a total value of $550,000, including the aforementioned MAYC, a Bored Ape Yacht Club ape that was gifted to him by famous Taiwanese singer Jeffrey Hwang, aka Machi Big Brother. Chou also lost two NFTs of the Doodles collection, which seems to confirm that the Doodles Discord server has been compromised as well. One of the most famous and definitely the largest NFT collection in the world by market value, got their Discord server hacked by an unknown hacker. The hacker gained access to the Discord server that hosts Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Kennel Club, all three NFT collections from Yuga Labs. The team behind the Discord server confirmed the hack in a brief tweet not containing much information or any details of the hack or its modus operandi. According to security company PeckShield, the hacker managed to post phishing links in the Mutant Ape Yacht Club channel. “We are not doing any April Fools stealth mints” This link was meant to be seen as a “stealth NFT mint” and one Mutant Ape Yacht Club owner apparently fell prey to the phishing attack and Mutant Ape Yacht Club #8662 was stolen from the user.
PeckShieldAlert @BoredApeYC Discord compromised, MutantApeYachtClub #8662 has been stolen.://mintboredapeyc[.com]/ is #phishing site. Do NOT fall prey to it.
PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) April 1, 2022 The team behind the BAYC said in a tweet that they had “caught it [the hack] immediately”, though obviously not fast enough to stop any thefts, and warned users not to mint any NFT using a link posted on its Discord. The tweet from the team also reminded users that “we are not doing any April Fools stealth mints/airdrops etc.” “STAY SAFE. Do not mint anything from any Discord right now. A webhook in our Discord was briefly compromised,” the BAYC team wrote in the tweet. “We caught it immediately but please know: we are not doing any April Fools stealth mints / airdrops etc. Other Discords are also being attacked right now.” STAY SAFE. Do not mint anything from any Discord right now. A webhook in our Discord was briefly compromised. We caught it immediately but please know: we are not doing any April Fools stealth mints / airdrops etc. Other Discords are also being attacked right now. Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) April 1, 2022 “#PeckShieldAlert @BoredApeYC Discord compromised, MutantApeYachtClub #8662 has been stolen.://mintboredapeyc[.com]/ is #phishing site. Do NOT fall prey to it,” security firm PeckShield tweeted, and published the Ethereum address of the hackers. Doodles’ Discord hacked too? In response to the announcement from the BAYC team, Piyush Khemka, software engineer at Meta, pointed out that “there is a very sophisticated scam going around right now in the Crypto space.” “There is a very sophisticated scam going around right now in the Crypto space. Couple of hackers bought some verified accounts & are pretending to be BAYC founders. They are charging 0.33 ETH to mint new digital coins. Stay safe out there people. Crypto is truly the wild west!,” Khemka tweets. There is a very sophisticated scam going around right now in the Crypto space. Couple of hackers bought some verified accounts & are pretending to be BAYC founders. They are charging 0.33 ETH to mint new digital coins. Stay safe out there people. Crypto is truly the wild west! Piyush Khemka (@piy9) March 24, 2022 Also, other users have warned about similar exploits and maybe hacks, on the Doodles’ Discord server, Doodles being another hot and highly valued NFT collection. At press time, the Doodles team has not responded to these alerts. 🚨🚨🚨 DOODLES DISCORD ALSO HACKED. NOT AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE, BE CAREFUL!!! 🚨🚨🚨 Farokh.eth (🎙, 🎙) (@farokh) April 1, 2022
Having recently won the third parachain auction slot and going live on the Polkadot mainnet this year, , Cosmos, and all major layer 1 blockchains. It offers a range of technology solutions and financial incentives via its Build2Earn and Astar Incubation Program for Web3 developers to build on top of a secure, scalable and interoperable blockchain. We just keep on climbing ⚡️ Astar Network | WASM + EVM HUB on Polkadot (@AstarNetwork) March 30, 2022 The TVL represents the token value that has been staked on Astar and demonstrates the long-term confidence of the project’s investors and community. Even more impressive is that the $1 billion figure represents 45% of the TVL on Polkadot. Earlier this year, the network raised $22 million in a strategic funding round led by Polychain with high profile investors such as Alameda Research, Alchemy Ventures and Crypto.com giving their support to Astars vision. Build2Earn With their Build2Earn programme Astar wants to revolutionize how developers are incentivised to build blockchain software and harness a self-sustaining ecosystem for the future. Smart contract developers can receive a basic income from Astar tokens that have been staked against any dApp that they create. Through this dApp staking programme, developers are free to work on dApps that they are passionate about, independently, without requiring investment from third parties prior to development. What makes Astar Network stand out from the crowd? Astar is supporting both Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly. Developers can deploy existing Solidity contracts as well as Polkadot native smart contracts. It also supports bridges. After only three months of being live on the Polkadot mainnet, Astar Network has already bridged over $180M in Ethereum assets. The success of Astar to date is also attributed to the quality of the dApps being built on top of the blockchain. Astar Network already has 40+ dApps on its network, including some DeFi protocols that have already amassed huge popularity in the Polkadot ecosystem. Partners in high places Interestingly, one of the world’s leading tech giants Microsoft has recently partnered up with Astar to assist them with their incubation program. Microsoft has agreed to assist chosen businesses from the Astar Incubation Program with marketing support and mentorship. All approved projects will get exclusive access to the Microsoft for Startups Founders hub bringing the two technology companies closer together. Parachains bring recognition Astar Network has capitalized on its parachain slot, using every opportunity to advance its features, developer community and partnerships. Polkadot’s technical advancements paired with the flexibility of Substrate has attracted the second largest developer community. Now that parachains are live, it is time to showcase the developers capabilities to the world. When projects participate in a crowdloan for a parachain slot they often gather the support of their communities in exchange for their native token. Equilibrium won the most recent parachain slot with over 610,000 DOT and 1,685 contributors . Unique Network is positioning its project for the next parachain with over 524,000 DOT contributed from 2,271 contributors. Each parachain brings unique functionality and use-cases to the ecosystem.
As an interactive NFT, Mariupol is a living piece of art. It consists of 13 different layers, with each layer having between two to four unique states. The master owner of Mariupol can choose the final appearance from amongst these states. Mariupol will be available for 14 collectors; one master NFT and 13 layer NFTs. The bidding will be open to anyone, and the collected funds will be donated to Voices of Children to provide psychological support to child victims of war The NFT will be showcased at Non-Fungible Conference, which will take place on April 4th and 5th in Lisbon, Portugal. The event will host numerous talks, panels, and workshops and exhibit artworks of more than 100 artists. Mariupol will be showcased on a giant screen throughout the event at the center stage. Contributors and Inspiration The artwork has been created under the supervision of The Guild, an independent and decentralized artist-led collective. In addition to The Guild members, a contributing artist group had members from the Museum of Crypto Art and Non-Fungible Conference. Async Art also contributed to the creation of Mariupol with its dynamic NFT technology. The artists involved said a major influence was Picasso’s Guernica, where he expressed the horrors of the bombing of Guernica city in 1937. As a modern reinterpretation of Guernica, Mariupol also aims to encapsulate the brutality of war. Each contributing artist depicted their interpretations of the war, hoping it serves as a reminder that we should not let history repeat itself. Founder of Non-Fungible Conference, John Karp, commented on the purpose of Mariupol and said: “Like everyone on this continent, and in this world, I am horrified by the images we are getting from Ukraine of innocent civilians being bombed once again. The horror, disgust, and pain forces people to act.” He further elaborated: “It makes bystanders want to do something. I hope this artwork can be a testament to the power of community and collaboration and proof that, while there is still too much evil and suffering in this world, there is plenty of good left.”
A few weeks after rumors circulated about possible insider trading in recent Meebits NFT purchases, there are now speculations that Alexandre Arnault, the son of the third richest man in the world, might also be involved in using inside information to purchase some of the rarest HypeBears NFT in a blind auction. HypeBears are a new 10,000 digital best collection with unique outfits and apparel. The collection allowed buyers to bid during the pre-reveal, which meant no one knew what each bear looked like. Did Arnault have prior knowledge of the HypeBears? But it appeared like Alexandre Arnault, an executive at Tiffany & Co, had an idea of what the bears looked like, unlike other bidders. This was because Arnault targeted certain HypeBears and was willing to pay more for those NFTs. He bid 32% more for HypeBear #9021 and 58% more for HypeBear #7777. He did the same thing for seven other bears. When the identities of the HypeBears were revealed, Arnault bid on five of the ten rarest HypeBear NFTs and won three, including #7777 and #9021. While this might have been a coincidence, the odds of him bidding for the rarest tokens are very low unless he knew them. According to Convex Labs, the odds are 1 in 440,000, making it very slim. Although there’s no clear proof of insider trading, evidence suggests that. On February 10, when HypeBear was revealed, the creator of the HypeBear project, Ernest Siow, tweeted a screenshot of him and Arnault on a video call captioning it. “Great catchup brother! Let’s now check out our bears.” There are suspicions that Siow might have tipped him off during the video call. But it’s impossible to determine this as there is not any regulatory investigation into the matter. NFTs lack regulatory clarity NFTs aren’t considered securities which means insider trading rules don’t apply. In a way, this has enabled bad actors to be involved in suspicious activities. Apart from that, the lack of regulatory clarity has also allowed these bad players opportunities to feast on unsuspecting individuals. Earlier this month, NFT Ethics called out certain investors on Twitter, claiming they bought Meebits NFT based on non-public information. Most of them bought several Meebits a few days before Yuga Labs announced that it had purchased CryptoPunks and Meebits IP rights. Arnault’s spokesperson has denied that he had information about the bears’ attributes. But he was able to gain over $20k in profits after selling some of those rare NFTs in his collections.
Peer-to-peer payments processor Circle Internet Financial today announced that it has chosen the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, also known as BNY Mellon, to become a primary custodian for its USD Coin (USDC) reserves. In the press release, Circle CEO and co-founder Jeremy Allaire noted: “As we continue to see exponential growth in USDC, the opportunity to work with BNY Mellon is one way we build bridges between traditional financial services and emerging digital asset markets, without sacrificing trust. Together, we will leverage our respective areas of expertise to innovate and build the financial ecosystem of the future.” Building trust, stability and resilience in the digital asset economy is foundational to our mission. Alongside @BNYMellon we’re creating a stable and resilient financial ecosystem for the future. Circle (@circlepay) March 31, 2022 Bridging traditional and digital finance USD Coin is currently the fifth-largest cryptocurrency thanks to its market capitalization (the total current price of all USDC tokens in circulation) of about $51.8 billion, according to CryptoSlate. Per the press release, the new partnership between Circle and 237-year-old BNY Mellon will “facilitate an exchange of expertise on a range of topics across digital and traditional markets.” This includes integration of traditional and digital capital markets, investment management, digital asset custody, cash management for fiat and non-fiat payments, and the “exploration of digital cash for purposes of settlement.” Great to see. Congrats to my friends @circle and @BNYMellon. Nice job. John W. |🇮🇪🇺🇸🇪🇸🇪🇺| (@_JohnWhelan) March 31, 2022 BNY Mellon’s appointment as a primary USDC custodian also “supports the broader marketplace and brings value to clients, founded on our role at the intersection of trust and innovation,” said Roman Regelman, the bank’s CEO of asset servicing and head of digital, adding: “We are at a point in the evolution of our industry where the digitization of assets is presenting new and exciting opportunities to a broad range of market participants. BNY Mellon continues to provide products and services to players in this evolving market.” As CryptoSlate reported, USDC has been silently catching up to Tether’s USDT stablecoin over the past months. Still, with a market capitalization of just over $82 billion, the latter is currently the largest dollar-pegged coin in the sector—but it looks like the race is on.
Bitcoin dropped $2,000 from $47,500 to $45,500 in four hours after news broke that the EU is set to cripple innovation in the blockchain space. Today, the European Parliament voted in favor of outlawing ‘unhosted wallets’ within the European Union. Unhosted wallets According to their terminology, an unhosted wallet is a non-custodial wallet managed entirely by an individual. This includes cold wallets such as Ledgers, Trezor, and SafePal, as well as hot wallets like MetaMask, Trust Wallet, MEW, and many others. The only crypto wallets allowed will be ones held by exchanges that require all users to complete KYC checks. KYC stands for Know Your Customer and is typically within the centralized finance industry to protect against money laundering. If you wish to use an unhosted wallet, you must register it with an exchange while revealing your entire identity. Our go-to man in the Twitter field, Patrick Hasen of Unstoppable DeFi, broke the news in a 15 part Twitter thread. Hansen told us: The EU Parliament’s vote on the TFR is a big disappointment and a big threat to individual privacy and the use of self-custody wallets in the EU. It introduces unfeasible wallet verification requirements and unjustifiable reporting requirements for crypto companies that would have massively detrimental effects for EU citizens and companies alike. Fortunately, we still have the upcoming trilogue negotiations to prevent the worst.” ‘Unhosted wallets’ will not be banned from existing within the EU, but you will not be able to interact with an exchange to convert your crypto into fiat or vice versa. Can DeFi survive in Europe? Further, DEXs will now require customers to register and prove their identity before being able to interact on the blockchain. This completely defeats the point of DeFi. If I have to register with a company and hand over my ID to transact, then that information will need to become centralized and is vulnerable to attack. One of the best parts of DeFi is the ability to interact with ease and without risking having your privacy stolen. How or where DeFi companies who operate entirely on the blockchain will store the data of their customers’ records is unknown. This will add additional regulatory and financial overheads to every DeFi project in the EU as they now have to store every customer’s private and sensitive information. Alongside this news came the decision to require all wallets users interacting with exchanges to undergo KYC checks. Currently, the limit is 1,000 EUR, above which you are required to register with an exchange and reveal your personal information. With the new legislation, any customer using an exchange will need to undertake the KYC process. Technically you should still be able to send transactions between personal unhosted wallets for any amount. However, the most challenging aspect is if you want to send crypto from an exchange wallet to a friend who lives outside of the EU. For your friend to receive their crypto, they would have to register with your exchange. Our goal is always to be impartial, but this seems simply ludicrous to me. How long do we have? Companies will have nine months to adapt to the new ruling and then 18 months to ensure they fully comply with the new regulations. Whether any European DeFi companies will stay in the EU after this ruling is enacted is up for debate. Given the nature of the industry, they should be able to relocate outside of Europe to skirt these regulations. Non-custodial wallets cannot quickly be banned outright due to the decentralization by design. A European citizen cannot be stopped from interacting with a DeFi project outside of the EU that does not require KYC, so this may be Europe simply shooting themselves in the foot by alienating innovative companies. For example, Portugal, a hotspot for DeFi and blockchain innovation, will surely not be happy with the result of this vote. There is still time for the act to be amended as it now passes to trilogies wh...
Amazon India just tweeted out a teaser about a potential partnership with Decentraland, that may also involve phone maker OnePlus. The company said “something new is on the horizon” with a metaverse hashtag, which can only lead us to one conclusion. Amazon India is possibly about to jump into the virtual land space. Something new is on the horizon. #OnePlus10Pro5GOnAmazon #metaverse @decentraland Amazon India (@amazonIN) March 30, 2022 The company did not disclose any details or tweet further after the initial teaser and the specific nature of its partnership with Decentraland or what form it might take is unclear. Amazon’s relationship with blockchain Although Amazon does not officially accept cryptocurrencies for its products it has been involved in the blockchain space for a number of years now. The company has often posted job offers looking for developers proficient with blockchain technology. In fact, its job postings often spark speculation about its plans and whether or not it will begin accepting crypto or perhaps create its own blockchain. Currently, Amazon offers a “Managed Blockchain Service” which allows its customers to build scalable private blockchains or even connect them to public networks using open source code ledgers like Hyperledger and Ethereum Fabric. India’s relationship with crypto India is currently ranked second in the world in terms of cryptocurrency adoption. A vast number of its billion plus populace is digitally literate and have been involved in the crypto space since its infancy. Some blockchain projects even originated from the country. The country recently released official regulation for virtual assets and intends to impose a 30% tax on crypto starting April 1. The rules have been called restrictive and too strict by some and there are calls for the government to reconsider, however, it has had no impact on the day to day trading volumes in the country, with more Indians coming into the crypto fold every day. Meanwhile, the Indian state of Maharashtra is using Polygon’s blockchain technology to issue caste certificates.
Luna Foundation Guard has doubled down on its Bitcoin (BTC) strategy after purchasing an additional 2,943.00002511 BTC for $139 million. Data from block explorer Blockchain.com shows the company’s wallet received the BTC in five transactions. Two of these transactions carried 2,943 BTC. Following these purchases, the wallet’s balance rose to 30,727.97959166 BTC. According to Blockchain.com, the wallet made its first BTC purchase on January 21, 2022, where it bought over 9,000 coins. Not a single satoshi has left the address since then. While the initial purchase drew a lot of attention to the wallet, people became increasingly interested in its activity after it started buying massive amounts of BTC almost every day after March 22. A few days before this, Terraform Labs founder and CEO Do Kwon said the company plans to add over $10 billion worth of BTC to the reserves of its stablecoin, TerraUSD. Plans to become the largest BTC HODLer With today’s purchases, Terra has inched closer to toppling Tesla as the second-largest BTC holder. According to Bitcoin Treasuries, the electric vehicle manufacturer currently HODLs 43,200 BTC. MicroStrategy, which holds 125,051 BTC, is also in Terra’s sights. However, it might be a formidable opponent considering its subsidiary, MacroStrategy, took out a $205 million loan from Silvergate Bank yesterday to purchase more BTC. Nonetheless, Kwon seems determined to secure more BTC than any other entity, including Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of the Bitcoin network. His ambitions stem from the belief that reinforcing UST’s reserves with BTC would guarantee its success. After Terraform donated $1.1 billion worth of Terra Luna (LUNA) to the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), which seeks to expand the Terra ecosystem, Kwon said, “We will keep growing reserves until it becomes mathematically impossible for idiots to claim de-peg risk for UST.” At the moment, UST has a market cap of $16,333,540,255, which makes it the 14th largest crypto and the fourth-largest stablecoin after Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and Binance USD (BUSD). On the other hand, LUNA is trading at $105.58 after losing 1.36% in the day. LUNA’s current price denotes a 3.79% plunge from its March 29 all-time high of $109.66. Update: 31 Mar – The article originally incorrectly stated Terraform Labs purchased Bitcoin, when in fact it was Luna Foundation Guard who made the purchase.
Commenting on the wave of gang violence that has swept El Salvador, Bitcoin maximalist Max Keiser claims this is a false flag event by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He added that it’s a “pitiful shame” that some Bitcoiners refuse to join the dots and see it for what it is. For El Salvador 🇸🇻, breaking free of the financial terrorists at the IMF (@IMFNews) means simultaneously crushing violent gangs in the streets sponsored by the IMF and other global fiat-banking terrorists. Some #Bitcoin’ers refuse to accept this and it’s a pitiful shame. Max💙🇸🇻 (@maxkeiser) March 30, 2022 Keiser has often publicly slandered international bankers and what he calls their “fiat Ponzi scheme.” A well-known example of this was during an interview at Bitcoin Miami 2021 when he tore up a ten-dollar bill calling it garbage. “Here’s a ten-dollar bill, this is garbage. Your people in South Africa, you have your rand, right? That’s going to zero. This is going to zero too, euros are going to zero, the yen is going to zero, the Chinese currency is going to zero. It’s all going to zero against Bitcoin.” In response to the gang violence, Keiser calls on Bitcoiners to not “be cucks” and reject the false narratives. Gang violence in El Salvador surges in record killing spree El Salvador is under a state of emergency following gang violence that saw the shooting of random people in the streets of its capital San Salvador on Saturday. The country’s Parliament invoked emergency powers Sunday morning, which suspended some civil liberties. This move includes widening the scope of arrestable offences, restricting public gatherings, and enabling the interception of communications. The measures will last for 30 days. Sixty-two people died, marking the bloodiest day in the country’s history since the end of its civil war in January 1992. Upon election, it’s alleged that the Bukele administration had negotiated a secret truce with gang leaders by providing financial incentives and preferential treatment to keep the peace. However, Paul J. Angelo, a fellow of Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, speculates that gang leaders are now trying to change the terms of the alleged deal. “The terms of the previous pact with Bukele’s government may have been untenable and the gangs may be trying to change the terms of that pact.” Is this really about Bitcoin? Keiser takes a different view on the matter. Rather than gang leaders striving to negotiate better terms, he claims international bankers are behind the violence in a false flag event. This, Keiser states, is an attempt to stop Bitcoin. A false flag operation is an act committed that disguises the actual source of responsibility and blames another party. It was international bankers then. And it’s international bankers (@IMFNews) today. #Bitcoin can’t be stopped; it’s true – but let’s try to work to make sure as many people survive banksters as possible – who will live to enjoy #Bitcoin Like 🇸🇻 is doing RIGHT NOW! Max💙🇸🇻 (@maxkeiser) March 31, 2022 Sharing anecdotal evidence of Keiser’s claims, game developer Manuel Abarca said he noticed a greater frequency of violence during the Bitcoin conference last year. He wonders if it’s coincidental that the imminent rollout of volcano bonds is met with the country’s worst day for gang violence in recent history. When we had the Bitcoin conference in ES last year there was a spike in violence, the police could handle it Now we have the volcano bonds in the works, also foreign investments, we had more than 60 deaths in one day Someone offered money to them, gangs dont do things for free Manuel Abarca (@manuel_abarca_) March 31, 2022 Volcano bonds, if successful, would turn the legacy finance system on its head. In that, for the first time, a nation-state would have generated funding via Bitcoin.
According to recent data, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, might be planning to launch its crypto exchange. The company has filed for eight new trademark applications of the Meta logo covering crypto tokens, blockchain software, virtual currency exchanges, financial and currency trading, and digital, crypto, and virtual currencies. Trademark lawyer Mike Kondoudis, who specializes in NFT and metaverse trademarks, shared the trademark numbers on Twitter. He also said that“these filings reflect the company’s strategy for moving into the metaverse. Meta clearly has significant plans for the virtual economy that will drive it.” Meta Platforms has filed 8 trademark applications for its Logo. The applications cover: ▶️ Crypto tokens ▶️ Blockchain software ▶️ Virtual currency exchanges ▶️ Financial + Currency trading ▶️ Digital, crypto, and virtual currencies#NFTs #Metaverse #Cryptocurrency Mike Kondoudis (@KondoudisLaw) March 23, 2022 Crypto trading potential – Meta Exchange The rise in metaverse popularity means that NFT real estate could sell for $1 billion in 2022. Moreso, regulation around digital assets is currently at the forefront of government policy. As assets and land in the metaverse become more commonly tradable across social media, it would be an obvious step for Meta to add NFTs to the Facebook Marketplace. This week’s application would allow them to be so under the Meta brand from a trademark perspective. However, NFTs could be deemed a financial asset and subject to financial trading laws in the U.S. If this were to happen, and Meta wanted to offer NFT trading on its platform, it would need to protect its brand within this category. Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that NFTs would be coming to Instagram, so, in some ways, this is already in play. However, there are other legal and regulatory minefields to cross other than simply trademarking your brand to be legally allowed to trade financial assets. While there is no direct news regarding whether the trademark signals a Meta crypto exchange is coming anytime soon, it does seem increasingly possible that it could be in the pipeline. We know that Meta wants to be at the forefront of metaverse technology. It’s literally in their name and mission statement. The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. Our company’s vision is to help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to reflect our commitment to this future. A metaverse-focused exchange would be a logical step in the road to conquering the metaverse. Meta cannot control every metaverse project without investing hundreds of billions of dollars. The market cap of Sandbox alone is currently $4.2 billion, while the decentralized nature of blockchain means they can’t just buy the competition as they did with Instagram. So, another method would be to become a hub for all metaverse projects—a centralized location for trading metaverse tokens, NFTs, and other digital assets. The Meta exchange would be a portal into the metaverse for all projects. From there, it may also make sense to list popular coins such as Ethereum and Bitcoin as on-ramps to the metaverse for crypto investors. Suddenly, you have Facebook as the centralized heart of the global metaverse. With Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, they already control a large percentage of daily international attention. Will they be able to capture the metaverse too? Meta in the metaverse Meta has also filed for trademarks of new names, Meta Portal and Meta Horizon, to cover VR, AR, social networking, and mixed reality software. Horizon is a metaverse project on the Meta-owned Oculus platform. Including the Meta name into the branding may indicate a broader movement for the company to open up the metaverse beyond VR. Meta’s plans for crypto dominance have taken a tumble in recent years. Their stablecoin project, Diem, was a spectacular failure and was sold to Silvergate earlier this year. However, this activity was all done ...
Fans of Formula1 will be pleased to know that Alfa Romeo wants to leave its mark in the metaverse. Joining a sleuth of leading brands making their way into virtual worlds, Alfa Romeo is entering the Everdome metaverse to provide a new virtual experience for fans and the larger racing community. Alfa Romeo Formula One (F1) group Orlen will have a new home in the Everdome metaverse. Using Ultra-HD photogrammetric scanning technology, Everdome wants to create hyper-realistic digital environments, powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. Users can create their own photo-realistic avatars and explore a digital landscape that is almost indistinguishable from our own. Sports brands continue to enter the metaverse The Metaverse is an ideal place to enhance the racing experience for fans, giving them a way to be interactive participants in the racing industry. Everdome is on a mission to develop the most hyper-practical metaverse that will unite brands and individuals to build a vibrant Web3 experience for everyone. Many of the major sporting brands that the public are familiar with are recognizing the potential of the metaverse and visualize a completely new way of communicating with their fans. This paired with the ongoing growth in land sales across various metaverses makes the prospect of occupying land very interesting for all brands. Frédéric Vasseur, Team Principal Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN said: “We are taking a massive step to enter the metaverse, and Everdome has the expertise and technology we need to create a new sports-viewing, immersive experience. Everdome will allow us to leverage the team’s intellectual property with ease, deploying a hyper-realistic experience that will elevate everyday life by blurring the lines between reality and verse existence.” .Meanwhile, Rob Gryn, CEO of Metahero and Everdome said: “Joining the Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN as their Official Partner is an honor, and an event that we feel will benefit both brands and teams going forward. The synergy between sports and future technology has never been more apparent – whereas engaging with a brand’s community and fanbase are priority #1. We feel this partnership will provide an opportunity for both Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN and Everdome to deliver for both communities.” What does the partnership entail? Through this partnership, Everdome will be providing Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN with a place where fans and the wider racing community will come to interact with the team and brand in the team’s own virtual real estate. Through the creation and help of nonfungible tokens, land deals, commercial centers and the greatest symbols available, Everdome will characterize life in the virtual world, giving a spot to brands and people to connect in the most noteworthy conceivable quality. The Sauber Group of Companies manages and operates the Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN. Since its founding in 1970, the passion for racing has been at the heart of Sauber. This innovative Swiss company has been developing race cars for championship series for over 50 years. The company launched a long-term partnership with Alfa Romeo in 2018 and, as it celebrates 30 years of competition in Formula One, it enters the 2022 championship under the team name Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN. The metaverse is an open, virtual home for brands that wish to further engage their fans. Fans can expand on their role as a spectator and become an active participant in the Alfa Romeo community.
Popular cryptocurrency wallet and trading service Blockchain.com has teamed up with blockchain-based domain names registrar Unstoppable Domains, adding support for all of the latter’s extensions in order to “simplify Web3 identity and payments for its 81 million wallets” today. In a press release shared with CryptoSlate, Amadeo Pellicce, a senior product manager at Blockchain.com, explained: “Replacing complicated addresses with human readable domains on Blockchain.com allows users to send and receive crypto as easily as sending an email, and we’re excited to now support every Unstoppable Domain.” 1/ GM to all 37 million @Blockchain users! You can now transfer crypto with ALL Unstoppable domain endings like .x, .nft, & more! 🙌 We cannot wait for you all to join our ever growing community #UDfam 💙 NFT domains keep getting more powerful by the day! 💪 Learn more 👇 unstoppable.x (@unstoppableweb) March 31, 2022 A push to make Web3 user-friendly According to the announcement, this partnership aims to ease the Web3 onboarding process for new customers by offering user-friendly domain names instead of “overly complicated” alphanumeric blockchain addresses. As a result, crypto enthusiasts will be able to claim human-readable and easy-to-remember addresses across Web3 in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Namely, Blockchain.com now supports domains such as .x, .nft, .wallet, .coin, .bitcoin, .dao, and .888 within its wallets. Sandy Carter, the senior vice president of Unstoppable Domains, added: “With millions of people using Blockchain.com Wallet in more than 200 countries every day, it’s partners like these who help make NFT domains and simple crypto payments more accessible to the next influx of users.” Per the release, the registrar “provides top-level NFT domains that are minted on the blockchain, with zero gas fees or renewal fees,” so once such an address is bought, “it’s yours to own and manage forever.” Unstoppable Domains offers 10 different extensions currently, including .blockchain (marked as “coming soon”), .bitcoin, .coin, .crypto, .dao, .nft, .wallet, .x, .zil, and .888, which users can access natively via Brave and Opera browsers as well as through extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Good things come in pairs Simultaneously, Blockchain.com also announced the closure of a new funding round today which propelled the company’s valuation to around $14 billion, placing it among the most valuable crypto enterprises. The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and saw major participation from Baillie Gifford & Co. Subsequently, Blockchain.com said it is planning to implement NFT trading and ditto hosting via its native wallet and launched a waiting list for the upcoming service.
China’s social media and messaging app, WeChat, has banned more than 12 public accounts linked to non-fungible token, or NFT, trading. Most of the banned accounts belong to small and medium-scale NFT exchanges in the country. A search for these accounts showed they no longer exist on the platform. Existing subscribers got a message saying the accounts don’t have a “legal permit or license to publish, disseminate, or engage in related business activities.” WeChat blocks access to NFT accounts Many have described this as a preemptive move by Tencent-owned WeChat to avoid government scrutiny. Two of the accounts affected by the ban, Spirit Leap and Huasheng Meta, said that they were reported. The ban comes as NFTs and domestic digital collectibles have become more popular in China, which has led to concerns of a speculative bubble within the central government. Given that China didn’t hesitate to ban crypto assets, there are fears that the same will happen to NFTs. In a written statement, a WeChat spokesperson stated that the platform enforced “regulation and rectification on public accounts and mini-programs that speculate on or resell digital collectibles.” The representative further stated that public accounts could “display and support the initial sale of digital collectibles,” however, any promotion or resale is prohibited. Operators also have to show “proof of cooperation with a blockchain company that has been recognized by the Cyberspace Administration of China.” NFT, crypto, and China The ban on the resale of NFTs is a result of stringent crypto regulations in the country. Lawmakers in the country appear focused on preventing speculation that’s rife with digital assets. The ban on crypto in China has been effective so far, leading to a 90% drop in Bitcoin trading volume within the country. However, it has also resulted in an increased focus on NFTs, which has been criticized by state-backed media in recent months. In November, the People’s Daily questioned the NFT investment fever and described it as only hype. Other publications have called it a bubble. The fear of regulations has pushed Big Tech companies in China, such as WeChat and Topnod, to censor NFT activities. Topnod, a digital collectible platform owned by Ant Group, punished 56 accounts for reselling digital collectibles for profits.
Led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners with major participation from Baillie Gifford & Co, wallet provider and exchange Blockchain.com raised new funding that values the company at about $14 billion, more than doubling its worth in a sign that cryptocurrency firms continue to attract capital and investments, regardless of the turbulent venture capital markets, and macroeconomic- and geopolitical uncertainties. The financing round rockets Blockchain.com into the ranks of the most valuable crypto companies, Bloomberg News reported. An early pioneer of key infrastructure for the Bitcoin community Founded in 2011, Blockchain.com began its journey as a blockchain explorer servicing the Bitcoin blockchain and as an early pioneer of key infrastructure for the Bitcoin community. The Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain explorer also provides an API that allows companies to build on Bitcoin. Later the company also provided the most popular and widely used crypto wallet. Added to the above products and services, Blockchain.com also facilitates trading through its website and app, as well as allowing users to buy and store digital tokens. Blockchain.com, led by Chief Executive Officer Peter Smith, closed a funding round in March 2021 that raised $300 million at a $5.2 billion valuation in a round that included Lightspeed and VY Capital. The U.K.-based company’s single largest investment as of April 2021, was from Edinburgh-based Baillie Gifford, which put $100 million into Blockchain.com. At press time, the amount of funding included in this round has not been disclosed. How long can Blockchain.com stay in the U.K? Blockchain.com may be facing regulatory hardships in the U.K. Last year, blockchain.com said it was moving its U.S. headquarters from New York to Miami. The company is leasing a 22,000-square-foot (2,044-square-meter) office in Miami’s Wynwood arts district, and will eventually employ about 300 people in the building. This week, Blockchain.com added its name to the list of companies withdrawing from the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) temporary register for crypto-asset licensing. The UK’s FCA released a notice in 2019, condemning all crypto businesses to comply with their AML/CFT rules by 9 January 2021 and acquire their licenses. However, by December 2020, most companies were not ready to meet the deadline, so the FCA established a Temporary Registration Regime (TRR) to allow crypto-asset firms that have already applied for licenses to continue trading. They also extended the final deadline for compliance to 1 April 2022. As the extended deadline approached and the pressure from the lawmakers increased, the FCA announced another extension on the TRR on March 30th, three days before the deadline. NFT trading is next This extension was only applied to 12 firms — including Revolut, Copper, and Blockchain.com’s crypto wallet — that were obtaining their licenses. However, Blockchain.com withdrew its application on Mar. 29th, choosing to operate in Europe via a Lithuanian registration instead. At the moment of writing, it’s unclear whether Blockchain.com will be able to, or whether it wants to, operate out of the U.K. The company has 37 million verified users with 82 million wallets created, and more than $1 trillion transacted, according to its website. Not unlike its competitor Coinbase, Blockchain.com is planning to implement NFT trading and ditto hosting enabling users to trade NFTs using the company’s native wallet. Users interested in NFT trading on blockchain.com may sign up on a waiting list until the NFT service is launched.
Waves said on March 31st that it is aiming to hit 5 million active users and $10 billion in total value locked, or TVL, on the Layer-1 blockchain and projects built on top of it as part of its 2022 roadmap. The announcement comes days after the launch of its growth engine in the U.S., dubbed Waves Labs. Waves is currently in version 1.0, with approximately 2 million active users wallets and 250 validators. The blockchain processes roughly 100k transactions on a daily basis and has a TVL of $2 billion. The roadmap describes the company’s plan to move to version 2.0 and what that will look like. Waves Labs Waves Labs will be headquartered in Miami and act as a growth engine for the Waves blockchain. It will primarily focus on pushing mass adoption and raising awareness in the U.S. market. Waves Labs will be led by a team of crypto and fintech experts which include Head of U.S. operations Aleks Rubin, Head of Ecosystem Coleman Maher, Marketing Lead Jack Booth, and V.P. of Finance and Operations Tiffany Phan. “I am excited to lead this dynamic team as we expand visibility and enhance the utilization of Waves protocol in the North American market.” Rubin, a former banker who has 20 years of experience in corporate finance, said. Meanwhile, Waves founder and lead developer Sasha Ivanov will act an advisor for the company. Waves Labs was launched on March 28th and is currently in the process of hiring additional staff. It will also be involved in setting up a $150 million accelerator fund to attract developers and projects to the Waves ecosystem. Waves 2.0 Waves said that it intends to continue making protocol updates to improve the system’s speed and security. The first order of business for Waves is implementing a new consensus method based on Practical Proof-of-Stake Sharding, or PPOSS, starting in Spring 2022. Waves will also simultaneously work on developing a Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible network which will then be connected to the current network. Waves’ “multi-nuclei” ecosystem includes a number of other key points in the 2022 roadmap. The main ones are integrating a DAO Framework for new governance models; cross-chain finance via bridges; and a metaverse.
The first Metaverse as a Service (MaaS) has been announced on the Zilliqa network. Named, Metapolis, the newly announced metaverse project will be supported by an IRL early access event in Miami on April 2. The price of ZIL broke $0.12 Sunday morning from a low of $0.043 just the day before. This marks a 159% price increase in less than 24 hours. At present, the only way to get access is via the competition hosted on this Reddit post. Prizes include tickets to the event or a limited edition NFT and T-Shirt. More information should be released on Discord at 12 pm EST Wednesday, March 30 via a Metapolis AMA with the leadership team from Zilliqa. This is not just any old metaverse announcement. Zilliqa has partnered with Agora, a global talent awards app. Through the partnership, it is possible that creators will be able to upload content to the Agora app and, through community voting, have their work added to the Metapolis metaverse. Further, winners of Agora awards currently receive up to $150,000 in grants. Helou, Head of Metaverse and NFTs and Zilliqa said, “We are excited for this partnership as we are able to bring not only creativity to life within the metaverse but also open borderless access for creatives worldwide to connect in the digital world. The partnership between Agora, Zilliqa and Metapolis means we are at the forefront of web 3 innovation.” Zilliqa has also secured partnerships with some of the leading esports organizations in the world. Ninjas in Pyjamas, RRQ, and MAD Lions. ZIL branding will now appear on “team jerseys, content creator hoodies, and integrated marketing campaigns.” The new Head of Gaming and Sports at Zilliqa believes that “that gaming will be the sector that drives the next exponential growth in blockchain users. These types of partnerships can accelerate that adoption.” However, given the recent reaction and backlash to the addition of blockchain services to existing games, this is clearly going to be a difficult task. How Metapolis is being built The Metapolis project will be built on Unreal Engine, Unity, and Nvidia Omniverse. The use of Unreal Engine will mean graphics comparable to Fornite, Street Fighter 5, Valorant, or Gears of War. Unreal Engine is developed by Epic Games and is one of the most popular game development tools on the market, especially for consoles and PC. Unity is the world’s leading mobile game engine with an estimated 45% market share of the mobile games market. Popular Unity games consist of Hearthstone, Cuphead, Rust, and Monument Valley. Nvidia Omniverse is a developer ecosystem designed to “make it easier for developers to share assets, sort asset libraries, collaborate and deploy AI.” The game engine market is expected to explode over the next 5 years as end consumers become more accustomed to what to expect from a game built in a specific engine. The Zil price surge following the Unity and Unreal Engine announcement is a prime example of this. How will Metapolis work? Ahead of the AMA, there is limited information regarding specific details of how Metapolis will be experienced by users. The use of Nvidia Omniverse is likely to be used in tandem with the Agora partnership to allow the easy creation of 3D content and collaboration amongst users. The goal of Agora is to open up opportunities to people around the world to create. A metaverse of global community content creation where creators can be directly reimbursed through NFT sales sounds like an innovative way to approach that goal. In terms of direct gameplay, there are a few possibilities. Unity and Unreal Engine are not compatible with each other. You build a game with one or the other. Therefore, it is possible that the metaverse ecosystem will be built out in Unity to allow it to run well on both desktop and mobile devices. The community projects inside the metaverse may then be built using a collaboration of Unreal Engine and Nvidia Omniverse. This, however, would require a lot of testing to get the ...
Gamers collectively review bombed card-based auto battler Storybook Brawl after crypto exchange FTX acquired it. Last week, FTX announced it had purchased Storybook Brawl developers Good Luck Games for an undisclosed sum. The firm will integrate into FTX Gaming as part of the group’s broader gaming strategy. FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried described this strategy as combining gaming and crypto transactions. But gamers fear this is part of an industry-wide trend that will ultimately leave them out of pocket. Gamers want “no part” of FTX in gaming Bankman-Fried said he and the FTX team couldn’t stop playing the free-to-play Storybook Brawl game when it launched on early access. With that, he saw an opportunity to integrate “gaming and crypto transactions” in a way not previously been done before. “We saw an opportunity to be the vanguard for the ethical integration of gaming and crypto transactions in a way that hasn’t yet been done in this space.” However, gamers, unhappy with the (added) commercialization of gaming via blockchain technology, made their feelings known. The most upvoted game review on Steam gave a not recommended thumbs down rating. It read: “The developer was recently bought out by a crypto company (FTX) that plans to use the game as a testbed for NFT monetization strategies. No thanks.” Similarly, the next most upvoted review said the reviewer wants “no part” of the FTX setup with Good Luck Games, nor do they want crypto in gaming. “Good Luck Games was acquired by FTX, a cryptocurrency company, as a way to “help crypto make inroads with gamers.” I want no part of that and I don’t want crypto “making inroads” in things I’m interested in. Uninstalled.” The path to crypto integration isn’t clear In a recent interview, Good Luck Games founder Matt Place described his struggles as an independent developer and how working with small budgets hamstrung his ideas. Commenting on the FTX deal, Place said his operation now has the funding to do what it really wants to do. Particularly in extending the budget to put together more visually appealing projects. Place said his team is currently exploring the integration of gaming and crypto. But he doesn’t yet know how the two could work together in a fun way for the benefit of gamers. “We’re going to explore looking at blockchain as kind of a new technology. How can we leverage that to actually to make value, to create fun for players?” He assured fans by saying there is no mandate from FTX to force such an integration. Meaning Good Luck Games is free to discard the crypto element if they cannot determine a way to create value for gamers using blockchain technology.
Announced Wednesday in a blog post by Dan Reecer Chief Growth Officer at Acala and Karura, the two Polkadot protocols will integrate with Wormhole, the multi-chain bridging platform connecting blockchain networks. “As the first EVM+ integration on both Karura and Acala, this cross-chain interoperability will enable Acala and Karura users to enjoy asset integrations and access to over $200B of liquidity from leading layer-1 networks,” the blog post reads. 🪱🕳️ Acala & Karura are integrating with @wormholecrypto, making the parachains the cross-chain liquidity gateway into @Polkadot and @KusamaNetwork for @avalancheavax, @BNBCHAIN, @ethereum, @FantomFDN, @OasisProtocol, @0xPolygon, @solana, and @terra_money! Acala (@AcalaNetwork) March 30, 2022 For readers not too familiar with the different projects on Polkadot (DOT) and Kusama (KSM), Karura is an EVM-compatible network for all things DeFi on Kusama, and Acala is the decentralized finance network behind the Acala USD (aUSD), a decentralized, multi-collateral, crypto-backed stablecoin serving as the native stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. Connecting the broader Polkadot ecosystem with layer-1s According to the announcement, Karura will be the first to join Wormhole, “in the following weeks”, followed shortly after by Acala. The purpose of the integration is to connect Karura and Acala, and the broader Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, with eight layer-1 chains to begin with. Other ecosystems will follow at a later time. According to the post, across all chains, the Wormhole bridge currently has $3.6 billion in total value locked. Karura and Acala will continue after this integration by building up liquidity on both networks, then beginning to open the Substrate-based EVM+ for the first DApp launches on the networks. Wormhole is a bridge protocol that allows cross-chain messages to contain abstract data and enables developers to create applications on or utilizing Wormhole. By integrating with Wormhole, Acala, and Karura developers and users will be enabled to use a token bridge to bridge wrapped assets between supported chains. The integration will also open up for ERC721 (Ethereum) and SPL NFTs (Solana) tokens to be transferred between Ethereum (ETH), Avalanche (AVAX), Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), Oasis (ROSE), Terra (LUNA), Fantom (FTM) and BNB Chain. Finalizing the merge of the two stablecoins According to the announcement, “Acala and Karura will benefit from Wormhole’s consensus abstraction, speed, and upgradeability mechanics. Consensus abstraction ensures the transaction process remains lightweight to facilitate high throughput during cross-chain transactions, severely limiting bottlenecks and congested usage. Wormhole Guardians protect the protocol from malicious actors and hacking attempts via observation and attestation of all Wormhole transactions.” The Wormhole integration will be the first time Karura and Acala are able to communicate and exchange value. This will enable Acala to finalize the merge of the two stablecoins, aUSD and kUSD. “The union of aUSD and kUSD allows aUSD to serve all parachains in both the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems as the native, decentralized stablecoin, creating capital efficiency, utility, and enhanced liquidity. This will also enable aUSD to be minted on both Acala and Karura with initial collaterals including DOT, ACA, KSM, KAR, LDOT, and LKSM,” the blog post reads. Acala intends to employ aUSD as the bridge connecting foreign tokens from different blockchains. Furthermore, the Wormhole integration will allow for foreign tokens such as USDC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, or LUNSA to be brought to the Acala and Kusama ecosystems. Users will be able to trade the assets or have Acala potentially approve them as collateral for minting aUSD. Readers be aware of bridges Another advantage of the Wormhole connection, as per the announcement, is the opportunity to increase aUSD yield and utility; the multi-chain interoperability encourages developers ...
Since March 2020, the global crypto market has skyrocketed by a phenomenal 900%, with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. When looking at the current UK economy and trajectory for 2022, it’s easy to understand the industry’s appeal for experienced and more novice retail investors alike. Achieving meaningful returns from savings is far from a reality in the current climate. The Bank of England recently opted to keep interest rates at 0.1%, and interest rates in Europe are actually below zero. As a result, diversifying portfolios and taking on more risk is the only way to achieve returns –a balanced portfolio is now recognised as 5% in higher risk, higher reward assets like cryptocurrencies, even for low-risk portfolios. With so little opportunity for reward elsewhere, investors who would have previously been horrified at the thought of watching their portfolio swing up and down by over 30% can now appreciate the unique benefits that this market can offer. Crypto confidence In fact, a recent survey found that around 97% of people are now confident in cryptocurrency as an investment vehicle, and 55% consider it to be a long-term wealth-building strategy. Of course, this steep upsurge in the crypto market is by no means down to retail investors alone. A survey conducted by London-based crypto fund Nickel Digital Asset Management revealed that 82% of the 100 investors and wealth managers expect to increase their exposure to digital assets between now and 2023. The primary reason for investing more in digital assets is the long-term capital growth prospects, according to 58% of the respondents. Many are naturally concerned about the risks this poses for retail investors. Crypto was designed to open up investment opportunities to everyone, challenging a financial system where only the rich can get richer. Exclusionary practices are creeping in Take launchpads, for example – these are designed to allow investors to access a project in the early stages of investment. Still, some of these require investors to hold thousands of dollars to participate. Unless we prioritise equal participation opportunities, we risk creating another financial system that faces the same issues as its predecessor. Other experts in the trade, however, have an entirely different view. For one, while a lot of the industry expressed concerns that Bitcoin liquidity may soon become an issue due to institutional investors’ participation, this isn’t something that we have seen come to fruition. Institutional investors can “anchor” the current market whales. In contrast to individuals, financial institutions are mainly limited in their ability to manipulate the markets on any significant scale, so their active involvement may actually contribute to more secure prices. Many institutional investors work very closely with the regulating bodies to develop clear policies and guidelines. With over 8,000 cryptocurrency scams in the US in 2020 alone, this can only be a development set to benefit retail investors. Governments are waking up Outside of the work being done by institutional investors entering the market, governments and regulators around the world are clamping down considerably on the industry in a bid to protect the interests of individual investors. The Central Bank of Singapore has issued new guidelines to restrict manipulative trade practices by crypto trading service providers in the island nation. The aim, of course, is to protect the interests of retail investors who may not entirely appreciate the potential risks involved in crypto trading. The Biden administration also released a report that includes specific proposed legislation to bring new regulation to stablecoins. The proposed bill would essentially classify stablecoin issuers as banks, subjecting them to similar oversight aimed at protecting consumers. Regulation = bad? For some, there is a significant lack of trust in the abilities of official bodies to regulate the crypto market properly. Ho...
Polygon has just launched a new self-sovereign, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) identity service. Called Polygon ID, the solution will enable users to verify their credentials and identity without ever revealing any personal information. The solution aims to front-run the know-your-customer (KYC) regulation that will put incredible pressure on cryptocurrency companies around the globe. A decentralized solution for KYC Privacy and anonymity are the cornerstone of Web3 culture, representing everything its users hold dear. However, the huge growth seen in the Web3 market, driven by DeFi and NFT industries, has made it a target for regulators. Market watchdogs around the globe have been racing to regulate the burgeoning industry and gain some semblance of control over its fast-growing market. This push for regulation translates into more stringent KYC requirements for companies operating in the Web3 sphere. For crypto service providers, KYC means requiring their users to provide personally-identifying information such as passports, government-issued IDs, and biometric data. And while this relieves the pressure from regulators, it presents a slew of other problems, which include infringement of privacy and data leak risks. This rising concern is what Polygon set out to address with its new ID solution. Polygon ID is one of the first such solutions to be powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography and represents the first milestone in Polygon’s ambitious roadmap for 2022. The scalable blockchain platform has made zero-knowledge cryptography the centerpiece of its strategic vision for the next couple of years and has committed $1 billion to fund projects exploring and implementing the technology. Polygon ID, the company told CryptoSlate, is the latest product in this rapidly growing portfolio. The ID solution will leverage the Iden3 protocol and the Circom ZK toolkit to provide a decentralized and self-sovereign platform for organizations, businesses, and users. It can be used to construct a variety of identity and trust services, including dAccess-as-a-Service, KYC and KYB attestation, as well as distribution channels. For end-users, Polygon ID offers a decentralized way to KYC by enabling them to create a digital identity that can confirm their access rights without divulging their personal information. Polygon told CryptoSlate that this is a major step forward over traditional forms of digital identification as it removes all redundancy and middlemen from the process. “Polygon ID is private by default, offers on-chain verification and permissionless attestation. There is nothing in the digital identity space now that ticks all these boxes,” said Mihailo Bjelic, Polygon’s co-founder. “It is also a great showcase for how zero knowledge proofs can help us create a better world.” It also allows for the construction of new forms of reputation, opening up new possibilities for companies in the Web3 space. According to Polygon, its new ID solution can be used to provide decentralized credit scores for financial primitives and social payments in DeFi and enable a decentralized Sybil score that could create new decision-making and governance models in DAOs. Polygon ID could also be used to create player reputation profiles for Web3 games and facilitate private P2P communication and interactions on social applications. Polygon’s convenient privacy set that’s set to be delivered this year Based on the expressible claim standard, Polygon ID offers advantages over other forms of digital verification such as NFTs and verifiable credentials (VCs). While NFTs have become ubiquitous in the Web3 world, they lack the privacy and cost-efficiency needed to make them an effective verification solution. Verifiable credentials, on the other hand, offer a higher degree of privacy as they enable selective disclosure and can support ZK cryptography. However, they’re limited when it comes to expressibility and composability—all features required when implement...
The dawn of the metaverse raises new questions about user protection and data-driven advertising. This new world is hinging on immersive technology that could allow companies to collect new kinds of personal information and even biometric data. In a worst-case scenario, Web3 and the metaverse could be just as bad for user data security as are the Web2-based business models most of us love to hate, maybe even worse. How do we as an industry avoid falling into the old trap of surveillance capitalism? Web3 technology itself holds the key to answering these questions and mitigating the risk. There are different definitions of what Web3 actually is; one key definition is that data should reside on the user or client-side, not on the server-side. The latter is the prevalent model of today and the main reason why the user is not in control of her data. Web3, on the other hand, is the exact opposite – the user is in control of the data through everyone’s wallets. But being in control also means handing out data when or where needed, and a key technology enabling the control of personal data is so-called decentralized identifiers or DIDs. DIDs are designed to decouple from centralized registries DIDs have already been standardized through W3C and some blockchain projects are working on implementing the standard to be used by ordinary blockchain, Web3, and metaverse users. According to the DID standards documentation, DIDs are “a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity. A DID refer to any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) as determined by the controller of the DID. In contrast to typical, federated identifiers, DIDs have been designed so that they may be decoupled from centralized registries, identity providers, and certificate authorities. Specifically, while other parties might be used to help enable the discovery of information related to a DID, the design enables the controller of a DID to prove control over it without requiring permission from any other party.” One of the blockchain projects deeply involved in developing and implementing DIDs is Ontology. Ontology is a public blockchain project that helps other projects to put reputation and decentralized identity in front and center; things like data management, data sourcing, integrating data from different feeds and locations, and with a focus on cross-chain collaboration as well. The metaverse changes the way audiences engage To help us understand the risks, and how to minimize those risks of surveillance capitalism in Web3, CryptoSlate talked to Erick Pinos, America’s Ecosystem Lead at Ontology. Erick is also President of the Blockchain Education Network (BEN), a seven-year-old global network of blockchain clubs, students, professors, and alumni. According to Pinos, what sets Ontology apart is the tools and the infrastructure to manage digital identities, and manage data – storing data and keeping it privacy-preserving for the user – that Ontology develops and provides to others. “I think the metaverse is going to change the way audiences are engaged because up to this point it’s been very straightforward – here is the product and the service you can chose to interact with or not – but now with the metaverse, especially when we get more into things like VR and experiments with AR, now we’re interacting with these services in a 3D space, as opposed to just see it on our screen,” Pinos says. This is going to change the relationship between the consumer and the product or service, because the consumer can feel it’s a tangible thing that’s right there in front of her, especially for VR. Even today, people are able to spend some time in these virtual worlds and just hang out. That has already changed the way that people interact with others and with these services. Collecting data in a 3D space Services in a metaverse virtual world can collect user data by seeing user behavior, instead of just ...
A new study has shown that android and iPhone users are at risk of their crypto being stolen through a “sophisticated malicious cryptocurrency scheme.” The cyber security company, ESET, discovered that malicious apps mimicking Coinbase and MetaMask have been growing in circulation. ESET revealed that these hackers now use fake websites with ads placed on legitimate sites to distribute the malicious apps. They’re also using telegram and Facebook for the purpose. Users of MetaMask and Coinbase wallet in China are the primary target, but it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to other climes. According to Lukáš Štefanko, the ESET researcher who uncovered the scheme, it’s important for people to be careful about which mobile app they use for managing their funds. With prices of digital assets mostly below their ATHs, some would expect hackers to be less interested in digital assets. But this hasn’t stopped them from exploiting panic withdrawals in the face of the market slump. These apps pose a further threat as some of them use unsecured HTTP connections to send the victim’s secret phrase to the attacker’s servers. This makes it possible for those behind the scheme and any other hacker eavesdropping on conversations to easily steal victim funds. The research echoes earlier warnings from regulators about the risk of cryptocurrency. Earlier this month, the European Union’s securities, banking, and insurance watchdogs warned that crypto investors could lose all their money. They added that crypto investors should be aware of the risks of investing in the space. MetaMask releases new iOS integrations In another development, MetaMask, the popular Ethereum wallet, has rolled out a new payment gateway for its mobile app. According to available information, iPhone users would now be able to use Apple Pay to buy crypto using their credit or debit card connected to their wallet. 📣 MetaMask Mobile v4.3.1 is LIVE with some exciting updates: Buy crypto on iOS with Apple Pay (@sendwyre), more transparency when interacting with sites, & support for gasless transactions where relevant. Does it get any better? Yes it does! We now have dark mode! 🌑 1/🧵 MetaMask 🦊💙 (@MetaMask) March 28, 2022 Before now, MetaMask depended on Transak and Wyre for its card transactions. However, this new update would now allow users to use their cards stored in Apple Pay to buy ETH and deposit as much as $400 daily into their wallets. This means that there would be little to no need for users to first transfer their Ethereum holdings from a centralized exchange to the MetaMask Wallet. The ConsenSys-owned Ethereum tool announced this v4.3.1 update that comes with features like the dark mode, an aesthetic feature that most apps have been adding recently. And a better protection feature that protects users when they are sending tokens and interacting with contracts.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released a notice in 2019, condemning all crypto businesses to comply with their AML/CFT rules by 9 January 2021 and acquire their licenses. However, by December 2020, this deadline was still far from being met. Therefore, the FCA established a Temporary Registration Regime (TRR) so that crypto-asset firms who have already applied to obtain their licenses can continue trading. They also extended the final deadline for compliance to 1 April 2022. Since the announcement, many from the FCA’s list of unregistered cryptoasset businesses have shut down. While some did not pay any attention to the regulatory call, some applied and got rejected. Many firms who tried have publicly voiced their distress with FCA’s extreme measurements and withdrew their applications. A CEO of a crypto firm who opted to relocate said: “We decided some time ago to say ‘screw them” In the end, only 33 firms were able to finalize their registrations among hundreds. As the extended deadline approached and the pressure from the lawmakers increased, the FCA announced another extension on the TRR on Wednesday, three days before the deadline. Details of the extension This extension was only applied to 12 firms (including Revolut, Copper, and blockchain.com’s crypto wallet) that were obtaining their licenses. As a result, only these firms will be able to continue trading crypto assets as unregistered entities. The rest of the unlisted crypto companies are still expected to stop their business activities by 1 April. The FCA showed the slowness of the licensing process as the justification for their second extension. An FCA spokesperson said: “The temporary register closes on Friday, for all but for a small number of firms where it is strictly necessary to continue to have temporary registration. For example, this is necessary where a firm may pursue an appeal or have particular winding-down circumstances.” Why are lawmakers angry? This extension may have prevented certain crypto businesses from retreating from the UK, but lawmakers said it was unnecessary as it includes only a small number of companies. Many Members of the Parliament voiced their frustration with the extension soon after it was announced. The lawmakers were mainly furious that the FCA couldn’t keep up with their already extended deadline due to their insufficient internal procedures. Chair of the Treasury select committee, MP Mel Stride, said: “It is disappointing to hear that the FCA hasn’t fully met its already-extended deadline, which the committee strongly encouraged it to meet. I look forward to receiving a full explanation for the delay.” Supporting Stride, Chair of the UK Parliamentary Group on Crypto and Digital Assets, Lisa Cameron said: “The lack of clarity from the FCA has presented huge challenges to firms in terms of business certainty. We are now hearing of firms actively leaving the UK due to the FCA’s approach, which will cost the UK in terms of jobs, talent, and revenue.”
Crypto regulation is the hot topic of 2022. The fear of a global cryptocurrency ban seems to have almost wholly subsided as adoption takes us past the point of no return. Banning crypto now is practically impossible. Yet, the lack of an upcoming blanket crypto ban does not mean that there will be no changes. Most, if not all, crypto projects either fall outside current regulatory frameworks or are subjected to incompatible policies meant for existing financial assets such as traditional securities. Is regulation even possible? Unlike fiat investments, there are no protections for individuals investing in crypto. For example, if a bank goes bust in the U.K. and you lose your money, the FSCS will pay you £85,000 per firm. In the U.S., the FDIC the standard deposit insurance is $250,000 per depositor, per bank. The European equivalent, EDIS, pays up to €100 000. Given today’s world of social engineering, it seems sensible that we should accept some regulations to allow governments to issue protection for investors. However, there is a real question about whether we need such help from governments. Perhaps it should be up to the crypto community to create these systems? Projects such as Nexus Mutual offer cover for contract bugs, economic attacks, including oracle failures and governance attacks for around 2.6% per year. Do we need traditional solutions for disruptive technologies? Further, is it even possible for governments to create fundamental, impactful regulations for crypto? It seems like smart contracts are born for this, and a cross-chain global crypto DAO would be my preference over traditional governments where most politicians don’t even understand what blockchain means. I’d like to see a cross-chain DAO, somehow secured by a trustless voting system, issued to the world’s validators of the top crypto projects. I have no idea how this would work in a way that wasn’t susceptible to exploitation, but there must be a possible world where we can achieve this. In this world, the crypto community could vote through the blockchain to ensure safe practices and deposit insurance. If one chain got hacked, the DAO could payout from its cross-chain treasury to repay investors. Perhaps it’s a dumb idea. Message me on Twitter if you think it is, and tell me why. I’d love to explore the alternatives to government regulation with you. Regulation & globalization It is unlikely that the crypto community will be able, or allowed, to regulate itself any time soon. Therefore the need for some form of government regulation is inevitable. When new technologies are allowed to grow exponentially without formal regulation, we can have potentially socially devastating consequences. However, this is not just a new technology; this is a unique global monetary system. Whoever controls the regulation potentially controls the future financial system as a whole. Credit Suisse claims that we are witnessing the birth of a “new world monetary order.” They posit that a digital renminbi will be much stronger in the coming months due to the current world economic crisis. Crypto is not going away, and it shows the potential to replace the current system. This creates a new battleground. Controlling crypto regulation may be the only way centralized governments can retain their grip on the global economy. Globalization has three facets, economic, political, and cultural. I doubt that few would advocate for there to be only one culture and one political system for the entire planet. Why then are we settled on a single economic system? Economic globalization has made trade more accessible, services more efficient, and outsourcing more practical. However, the agendas of the U.S., E.U., and China control most of the system. Crypto will allow all the benefits of economic globalization without centralized control. No one likes losing control, especially not global superpowers. The U.S. as a leader of crypto regulation In Biden’s recent executive order, the U.S. ha...
Tezos (XTZ) is up 28 percent in the past three days, well-outperforming Bitcoin which has increased by 11 percent in the same period. Three major factors are behind the strong momentum of the cryptocurrency. Three factors that are pushing the price of Tezos are thriving ecosystem supported by large grants for projects, stable asset portfolio of the Tezos Foundation, and an optimistic medium-term technical structure of XTZ. The Tezos ecosystem is thriving with grants Since August 2019, within merely seven months, the foundation has given out 78 grants in total to new projects. In its Q2 2020 report, Tezos Foundation president Ryan Jesperson said that the ecosystem is rapidly growing and the interest of projects to build on top of the blockchain network is widely increasing. Jesperson said: “The rapid growth of the ecosystem is clearly evident with rising interest to build on Tezos from those both inside and outside of the Tezos community. In September 2019, the Tezos Foundation announced its second cohort of Tezos ecosystem grants with 14 projects approved out of 38 applications. More recently, we were thrilled to announce the third cohort of ecosystem grants, with 21 new projects receiving grants out of 90 applications.” As a governance protocol that operates as a foundation of blockchain applications and platforms, it is one of the few protocols that would largely benefit from having a large number of developers working on the infrastructure of its blockchain network. Projects that received grants from the Tezos Foundation in the likes of BUIDL Labs and Blockmatics will teach new developers to code smart contracts on top of the blockchain. Over the long-term, the grants will lead to a consistent expansion of the blockchain’s developer community, increasing productivity on the network. Strong financials of the foundation The official Q2 report states that as of January 31, 2020, the Tezos Foundation had $635 million in assets. In 2017, the blockchain project raised around $232 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum in a token sale. The current portfolio of assets that the foundation has is 173 percent higher than the capital it raised during its token sale around three years ago. A financially healthy foundation is critical in maintaining a fast growth rate of a blockchain ecosystem and encouraging more projects and developers to expand the network. XTZ Cryptocurrency is still in a price discovery mode The term “price discovery” is used in trading when an asset sees a new record high. When an asset breaks past its all-time high, it seeks for the next ceiling and it typically overextends to the upside. Tezos reached its record high at $3.9 on February 19, rising by 200 percent in a single month from $1.28. The cryptocurrency achieving a record high merely two months ago and its price rapidly recovering in a v-shape rebound since March 12 — when the Bitcoin price fell to $3,600 as the global stock market crashed — indicates a highly positive medium-term technical trend for XTZ.
Through the implementation of metaverses, crypto projects can revolutionize how people interact with one another. Not only that, these virtual worlds open up pathways for digital asset ownership and in-game monetization, which has the potential to transform many industries. To help deepen your understanding of this flourishing area, this article will discuss the best metaverse crypto projects for 2022, highlighting their features and value potential for the months and years ahead. The 5 Best Metaverse Crypto Projects for 2022 Presented below are five of the most exciting metaverse crypto projects with the greatest potential in 2022. We’ll explore each of these projects individually in the following section, touching on why they are deemed to have such high-value propositions. Silks – Best Metaverse Crypto Project for 2022 Decentraland – 3D Metaverse World with Monetization Possibilities Enjin – User-Friendly Metaverse Platform for Creating NFTs The Sandbox – Exciting Metaverse Project with Incredible Customization Bloktopia – Skyscraper-Based Metaverse Project with VR Capability A Closer Look at the Most Exciting Metaverse Projects The projects listed above have incredible transformative potential – especially within the growing area of play-to-earn (P2E) gaming. Let’s dig a little deeper into each of these projects, covering the intricacies that make them so exciting. 1. Silks – Best Metaverse Crypto Project for 2022 Silks is an upcoming metaverse project that looks to build on previous P2E games’ success – and take things one step further. Put simply, Silks is a blockchain-enabled P2E game that will offer a feature-packed metaverse based on the thoroughbred horse racing industry. Within this metaverse, players can purchase Silks avatars and own Silks horses, which are derivative digital representations of real-world thoroughbred horses and are structured as NFTs. This enables Silks to offer a self-sustaining marketplace in which players can trade Silks horses and benefit from value increases. The exciting thing to note about these Silks horses is that the link to real-world horses is achieved through the use of extensive datasets containing information on the thoroughbred horse’s bloodlines, development history, and racing results. Although these datasets will be centralized at first, they will become entirely decentralized over time as Silks expands and their user base grows. The data used to create this link between Silks horses and the real world is verified via a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which rewards miners in $SLK – Silks’ governance token. The 1-to-1 link between Silks horses and their real-world counterpart forms the basis of the metaverse’s P2E elements. As noted in the Silks whitepaper, Silks horse owners will earn rewards when their real-world counterpart wins a race, while owners can also earn rewards through an innovative staking mechanism. These rewards will be denominated in $STT – Silks’ non-inflationary transactional token. Silks players can also earn ‘breeding rewards’ when their Silks horse’s real-world counterpart is retired and becomes a broodmare or a stallion. Since a new crop of Silks horses will be minted each year to coincide with yearling (one-year-old thoroughbred horses) auctions, any offspring from the retired horse which are sold on the market will see the owner of the parent Silks horse receive rewards in the form of $STT. Finally, due to the vast swathes of real-world data employed by the Silks metaverse, this also provides scope for Silks players to monetize their expertise through ‘pinhooking’. This refers to the buying and selling of Silks horses before they have run their first race in the real world. Silks players with in-depth knowledge of the thoroughbred racing industry can profit from the volatility of an unraced horse’s value – providing another exciting avenue to generate income. VISIT SILKS 2. Decentraland – 3D Metaverse World with Monetization Possibilities An...
Socios.com, a blockchain company that specializes in so-called “fan token” cryptocurrencies, has signed a three-year agreement with legendary soccer player Lionel Messi who will now become the firm’s global brand ambassador, according to a press release shared with CryptoSlate. “We are welcoming to our family someone who, as sports fans, has inspired and brought joy to each and everyone [sic] of us, regardless of our nationality and the teams we support,” Paco Roche, a senior PR manager at Socios.com, told CryptoSlate in an email. “A man who has redefined what can be done with a ball and is unanimously considered part of football’s legacy.” Good morning. Yes, it really happened. Socios.com (@socios) March 30, 2022 Per the announcement, Socios and Messi plan “to build a more inclusive, exciting and rewarding future for fans across the world.” Meanwhile, their first collaborative promo campaign will run under a “Be more” slogan. While the company did not officially reveal any sums of money involved, a source close to the deal recently told Reuters that the agreement is ostensibly worth more than $20 million. Notably, the payments reportedly won’t involve any cryptocurrencies. “Since I played my first professional game the passion of the fans has been a driving force that has helped inspire me to be my very best. Fans deserve to be recognised for their support. They deserve opportunities to influence the teams they love,” Messi said in the announcement. “Socios.com exists to enhance the fan experience, to enable fans to ‘be more.’” So far, more than 130 various sports organizations have teamed up with Socios, including Paris Saint-Germain, FC Barcelona, Juventus, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Napoli, Valencia, Atlético de Madrid, Manchester City, Arsenal, UEFA, and many others. While the popularity of fan tokens and the number of organizations issuing them are constantly growing, these digital currencies regularly face criticism from regulators. For example, the U.K. Advertising Standards Authority banned two of Arsenal FC’s token ads for “for taking advantage of consumers’ inexperience in cryptoassets” last December. In June 2021, the Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission also ordered crypto exchanges to delist all fan tokens as well as Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and NFTs, alleging that such assets had “no clear substance” or “underlying value.”
As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, cryptocurrencies are taking on an important role in the conflict, but not in the capacity of evading sanctions on Russian entities or oligarchs. On the contrary, crypto has proven itself to be very useful in supporting Ukraine as users around the world have donated over $56 million in cryptocurrency to addresses provided by the Ukrainian government alone. This is “showcasing not just the crypto community’s generosity but also virtual assets’ unique utility for cross-border payments,” Chainalysis report on the matter reads. As most readers know, the United States and many of its allies in the EU and elsewhere have taken unprecedented actions against Russia, including adding Russian oligarchs, their family members, and their businesses, as well as all major state-owned banks and many energy exporters, to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN). Western powers have also removed select Russian banks from the SWIFT system, essentially cutting them off from the global financial system, and sanctioned Russia’s central bank, preventing it from using its $650 billion in reserves to mitigate the impact of the sanctions. There’s no evidence sanctions evasion is happening Many are now wondering how Russia’s business and political elites could use cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin (BTC) or ether (ETH), to evade sanctions. “While there’s no direct evidence this is happening, It’s a reasonable concern as Russia accounts for a disproportionate share of several categories of cryptocurrency-based crime, and is home to many cryptocurrency services that have been implicated in money laundering activity,” the report reads. As Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin explained while testifying before the U.S. Senate, if cryptocurrency-based sanctions evasion is happening, it would probably look more like typical money laundering activity, in which relatively small amounts of cryptocurrency are moved gradually to disparate cashout points, rather than all at once in huge transactions. Chainalysis’ report goes on to list the different ways sanctions could be evaded and dismisses all of them. First, if Russian crypto whales – wallets with more than $1 million worth of crypto – would try to move these funds, it would show. Between the start of the invasion and the 21st of March, Chainalysis tracked just over $62 million worth of cryptocurrency sent from Russia-based whales to other addresses, many of which are associated with OTC desks and exchanges, some of them high-risk. “While spikes in this activity are common, Russian whale sending hit its highest levels in roughly eight months during the week of February 28 soon after the invasion, reaching $26.5 million. On-chain activity alone can’t tell us if these transfers constitute sanctions evasion, as we don’t know if the whale wallets are controlled by sanctioned individuals and entities,” the report reads. Sbercoin to zero Chainalysis also looked into the newly created cryptocurrency issued by Russia’s biggest bank Sberbank, which was put on the sanctions list at the beginning of the war. The Sbercoin, as it is named, had previously been announced in late 2020. According to CoinMarketCap, Sbercoin has seen roughly $4.5 million in total transaction volume, all on one popular decentralized exchange. Sbercoin’s price has dropped over 90% since its launch and currently sits at $0.00003329 as of March 28, 2022, with a market cap of $113,089. Sbercoin is thus obviously not used for sanctions evasion. Chainalysis also looked at other cryptocurrency services and usage typologies that could indicate sanctions evasion by Russian entities, but so far, on-chain indicators for these don’t show much out of the ordinary. Russia has a large ecosystem of services, and it’s reasonable to expect that sanctioned Russian entities may try to use these services to evade sanctions by moving their wealth through them. No exc...
Anyone who seeks to help Russia bypass economic sanctions will be held accountable by the US government, says Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo. This follows the punitive measures that the US and its allies have imposed on Russia for its decision to invade Ukraine. Treasury Department warns anyone against helping Russia bypass sanctions Since the conflict started on February 24, it has led to a massive humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe, with millions of people displaced and thousands dead. The heavy sanctions imposed against Russia have also left its economy tottering as the country becomes more isolated. Speaking on the CNBC program Street Signs Europe, Adeyemo stated that there’s no evidence that Russia has been able to evade the sanctions. But he added that the US is aware that they’re trying to do this and will use every means possible to avoid the sanctions. Adeyemo specifically mentioned opaque shell companies and cryptocurrencies as ways Russia could evade the sanctions. He said, “What we want to make very clear to crypto exchanges, to financial institutions, to individuals, to anyone who may be in a position to help Russia take advantage and evade our sanctions: We will hold you accountable.” Reiterating what appears to be a veiled threat against anyone seeking to help Russia, he added that the US will ensure that “Russia does not have the ability to get around the sanctions that we have put in place in order to make it harder for them to prosecute the illegitimate war that they have in Ukraine.” His specific mention of crypto doesn’t come as a surprise, given world powers’ emphasis on digital assets in recent weeks. The G-7 major economies, including the US, UK, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and Italy, recently pledged to make it impossible for Russia and its allies to use digital assets to evade sanctions. Russia can’t use crypto to evade sanctions Stakeholders within the cryptocurrency industry have explained that a country like Russia can’t rely on crypto to evade economic sanctions. According to a new report from CryptoSlate, the Vladimir Putin-led Administration is unable to use crypto to evade sanctions. But that’s not convincing enough for authorities who believe the anonymity of crypto makes it the perfect tool to evade sanctions. While concerted efforts make it impossible for Russia to use crypto, Ukraine has been leveraging cryptocurrency to finance its defence. Since the conflict started, the country has received over $65 million in crypto donations.
The Bitcoin community is reacting strongly to calls by environmental NGO Greenpeace and Ripple Co-founder Chris Larsen for a change in the consensus model of the digital asset. Larsen’s Ripple association gives concern Larsen, the chairman of Ripple, donated $5 million to a Greenpeace Campaign seeking to change the Bitcoin code. The “Change the Code, Not the Climate” campaign aims to change the Bitcoin proof of work consensus model to a more energy-efficient alternative. While the idea might seem wonderful, many in the BTC community have outrightly criticised it. Many of the criticisms focus on Larsen’s reputation, especially as an executive of Ripple. Ripple is currently involved in a lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the sale of XRP, which the commission considers to be an unregistered security. Most industry leaders are suspicious of Larsen’s true motive. Though he claims to be acting in his personal capacity, his affiliation with Ripple, has led many to question whether he has true intentions for Bitcoin. Bitcoin migrating to PoS is rife with risk Beyond that, many experts claim that any likely migration of Bitcoin from proof of work to any other consensus model is rife with risks. Doing so will require more than a hard fork but a full redesign of the entire network. According to David Morris, the request will involve changing the technical parameters of Bitcoin which will be a much more complex change to the entire architecture. Morris pointed out that the Ethereum 2.0 migration, which Larsen cites as an example, isn’t a direct continuation of the Ethereum chain. Instead, it’s a complete transition to a new system as the Beacon Chain has been running parallel to Ethereum mainnet for several years. The transition in this has been carefully managed and involved years of effort. Another Bitcoin advocate, Gigi, argued that PoW is necessary for Bitcoin to enjoy its current security and be effective for conflict resolution. They argued that PoS isn’t just insecure. But “without PoW, any system will become political, moving conflict resolution to a quorum.” We need proof-of-work to have (1) a trustless tie-breaking mechanism, (2) a costly signal that doesn't allow money creation out of thin air, and (3) a trustless timing mechanism that is cryptographically stable.://t.co/f9SzjyrXhD Gigi ⚡🧡 (@dergigi) March 29, 2022 A fellow at Bitcoin Policy Institute, Jyn Urso also debunked the claims of Greenpeace. The climate change physicist accused climate NGOs of working with the traditional financial system to play on the emotions of those who care about climate change. PoS is the existing system. It makes it easy for the wealthiest to make decisions. @Greenpeace, If we are serious about environmental justice, then we must begin with economic fairness. PoW is the only protocol that guarantees this. PoS is not our friend in this fight. /end jyn urso (@jyn_urso) March 29, 2022 In the Twitter thread, Urso stated that PoS only gives power to the wealthiest. She added that “If we are serious about environmental justice, then we must begin with economic fairness. And only PoW guarantees that.”
Today, Nova Labs (formerly Helium Inc) announced $200M in Series D financing at a $1.2B valuation with investment from Tiger Global, a16z, Nokia, and Alexis Ohanian. Volvo, Cisco, and Accenture are now starting to utilize the Helium Network, causing a breakout year where the company became the fastest rollout of a wireless network in history. Alexis Ohanian, Founder of Seven Seven Six: “In two years since its launch, the Helium Network has completely upended the wireless industry by putting the power of connectivity in the hands of the people. Nova Labs is a prime example of how new incentive models can drive real change, and we’re excited to see what they introduce next.” The network has seen over 4,000% growth and aims to reach 1 million hotspots before the end of 2022. There are currently over 3.5M people waiting for delivery of a Helium hotspot, some waiting over six months (me included!). The company behind the network has rebranded to Nova Labs to create separation between them and the decentralized network. What is the Helium network? Helium is a proof of coverage network that allows users to mine rewards by sharing their WiFi signal with the Internet of Things (IoT). Devices such as weather stations, street lights, air quality monitors, fire alarms, fitness trackers, door locks, and much more need access to the internet to run. However, they require such low bandwidth that even if you shared your network with 50 IoT devices, you could still binge Netflix in peace without worrying about buffering. The potential for smart devices in our cities is exponential. The Planetwatch network I wrote about last week uses Helium with its smart air quality sensors designed to help make the world a cleaner place. From item trackers that help find lost dogs to bicycle hire companies needing to pinpoint their itinerary and beyond, the internet of things opens up a whole world of smart technology. However, many items such as smart dog collars rely on free WiFi or Bluetooth to be effective. This is where Helium comes in. Users share a tiny amount of their WiFi bandwidth with IoT devices so that they can be located and connect with the rest of their network. As a result, smart devices that were merely a pipedream have become viable. The Helium Network launched in 2019 and surpassed 500,000 Hotspots in over 52,000 cities across 169 countries. The People’s Network Users need to buy a LoRaWAN gateway to connect to the ‘People’s Network.’ The devices can connect up to 10 miles away, which is required to validate the network. Once you have a machine hooked up to the network you will receive rewards in the native token, HNT. Like with any mining technology, there are plenty of websites that will estimate your rewards. The current price of HNT is around $24, and when you consider the miners are about $500, a reward of 100-200 HNT per month seems extremely attractive. However, that was 10 months ago. Most users expect 3-5 HNT per month. That would still work out at ROI in 4 months. As long as the rewards don’t continue to drop that is. Further, the Internet of Things is set to double within the next three years to 27 billion IoT connections. This means more devices needing to use the network and, thus, potentially, higher rewards for network participants. It is an exciting project, and now Nova Labs have hit a billion-dollar valuation alongside commercial partnerships with key players. The ‘People’s Network’ may be just that. Update: clarifying HNT rewards.
Opera, the developer of its eponymous multi-platform web browser, added support for eight major blockchains today as part of its “giant leap into web3.” “Opera, the company behind the world’s first native web3 browser with built-in crypto wallet, today announced adding support for several major blockchain ecosystems, including Solana, Polygon, StarkEx, Ronin, Celo, Nervos, IXO and Bitcoin,” the company revealed in its blog. Per the announcement, the integration will allow users to “get access to the vast ecosystem of Polygon or Solana dApps or the benefits of Layer 2 DeFi via StarkWare-powered DiversiFi.” Additionally, Axie Infinity players can manage their non-fungible token-based creatures by accessing the Ethereum-based Ronin Network (which, ironically, was hacked for over $615 million just yesterday). 🚨We’ve got massive news.🚨 We are excited to announce we are adding support for several major blockchain ecosystems, including @solana, @0xPolygon, StarkEx by @StarkWareLtd, @CeloOrg, @NervosNetwork, @ixoworld, and @Bitcoin! Opera Crypto (@Opera_Crypto) March 30, 2022 The launch has also extended users’ access to proof-of-stake blockchain as well as Ethereum’s Layer-2 solutions Polygon and StarkEx, Opera said, adding: “By gaining entry to these blockchains, users can benefit from lower gas fees and faster transactions while minimizing their carbon footprint and still leveraging Ethereum’s robust decentralization and security.” Overall, the integration of multiple major blockchains and Layer-2 networks at once “is a key strategy in Opera’s mission to remain chain agnostic” and enable millions of its users to access Web3 “in an environmentally-conscious way.” “Ultimately, Web3 is on its way to becoming a mainstream web technology and users won’t need to know they’re interacting with it. They need to get a superior user experience and a true benefit,” added Jorgen Arnesen, EVP Mobile at Opera. As CryptoSlate reported, Opera commenced beta testing of its dedicated Crypto Browser in late January. With an integrated cryptocurrency wallet and web3 support, Opera’ Crypto Browser Project is designed to work with a variety of decentralized applications. The browser also provides a so-called Crypto Corner, granting users access to the latest blockchain news, airdrops and events.
Bitcoin is trustless and permissionless — anyone can use it without having to provide their real-world identity. This leads many people to think of Bitcoin as an anonymous network, where transactions are private, however in reality this is far from the truth. Bitcoin can work without a trusted third party in part because it is radically transparent — the entire transaction history is recorded and verified by everyone (well, every full node) and so is publicly available for anyone to analyze. This full transaction history provides a structure known as the ‘transaction graph’ which is essentially how transactions are connected together, and shows how the bitcoin has moved between different addresses. This public information can reveal a lot about the nature of transactions and be used to track the movement of funds and de-anonymize individual addresses. For example, although an individual bitcoin wallet address can be generated and used anonymously, much of the activity on Bitcoin is linked to real-world identities via regulated exchanges and custodians who are required to share customer information with authorities. Using this information, companies that specialise in blockchain analysis can link any purchases or transactions back to the identity of the person who first purchased the coins. The public nature of the transaction graph threatens the promise of Bitcoin as a fungible currency, where all coins have equal value, and can be used privately. Fortunately, there are several techniques that can be used to significantly improve the privacy of transacting with bitcoin that work by essentially obscuring and breaking the transaction graph. What is a CoinJoin? The most well known of these is called a ‘CoinJoin’ — this is essentially a combination of many separate individual transactions into a single larger one, such that it is not possible to link the transaction inputs (the origin of the coins) to the outputs (the destination addresses of the coins) with the on-chain data. All the outputs in a given coinjoin transaction are effectively indistinguishable and share the same history. There are several different services and wallets that can perform coinjoin transactions, such as Wasabi and Samourai. Each of these relies on a centralised ‘coordinator’ that enables anonymous strangers to coordinate to build the combined transactions, which charges fees for the service. One important limitation of coinjoins, is that to maintain the indistinguishability of the transaction outputs, every participant must use the same value input. CoinJoins have been used on the Bitcoin base layer for many years, and a substantial quantity of bitcoin has gained anonymity as a result. However, they are relatively expensive in terms of transaction fees as each coinjoin transaction must be confirmed on-chain. In addition, the ‘anonymity set’ (i.e. the number of coin histories your output could be linked to) is limited to the number of people you have directly been in a coinjoin transaction with (therefore usually requiring many transactions to get a good anonymity set). What is a CoinSwap? More recently another privacy-enhancing technique has been gaining attention, so, called CoinSwaps — which are essentially an exchange of coins (i.e. transaction outputs) between owners where no link is created in the on-chain transaction graph. This can be thought of as a transfer of the ownership of coin off-chain — if users can securely swap ownership of coins with different origins without any trace of this on the blockchain, then the assumption of using the transaction graph to track ownership is broken. One way to imagine this process is that a number of people, each with a specific amount of bitcoin paid to a private key secured on a device (like an OpenDime), could meet, each throws their OpenDime into a pot, shake it up, and then each pick one at random. Ownership of individual transaction outputs has changed, but is completely off-chain. As in the case of c...
In September, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the leading crypto exchange in the country, Coinbase, were at loggerheads over the crypto firm’s proposed yield program which the financial regulator considered to be a direct violation of its securities law. While the exchange has since dropped its plan to launch the program in the United States, it has gone ahead to introduce the decentralized finance (DeFi) yield product in 70 other countries. Coinbase introduces DeFi yield in 70 countries According to a press statement released by Coinbase on Thursday, the crypto exchange will be providing exposure to DeFi for its customers who are looking to put their digital asset to work. For a start, users would be able to lend and borrow assets, like DAI —a Stablecoin. DeFi has tremendous potential to help increase economic freedom, and we’re excited to be able to provide a trusted and accessible way to participate. DeFi, no doubt, has recorded tremendous growth in this year. However, access to the space is still very much limited as it involves some level of technicalities that an average user might find difficult to navigate. Coinbase looks to democratize access to the space by introducing its global customers to what many analysts have predicted to be the future of the world’s financial system. How it will work To enjoy Coinbase’s DeFi yield program, customers in the 70 countries would opt-in with their DAI stablecoin. This means that customers would deposit their DAI tokens with Compound Finance, the leader in the decentralized protocol. It should be noted that the interest on this yield product might vary sometimes. According to Coinbase, the annual percentage yield (APY) for DAI supply was between 2.83% and 5.39% in the month of October. The Brian Armstrong-led exchange revealed that it would be covering the transaction fees attached to this product, however, it beseeched its users “to make an informed investment decision” as it cannot guarantee that there wouldn’t be losses.
Dtravel, a blockchain-based travel website will now permit customers to make payments in cryptocurrency. The customers will also be able to make payments in its native token TRVL to book 250,000 homes spread across 20,000 destinations. The decentralized home-sharing platform is backed by the leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance, allowing customers to rent vacation homes at premium tourist destinations. It was launched by Travala.com, a centralized booking outlet that allows customers to book accommodations and flights by making payments in crypto token AVA. Dtravel will now accept payments in cryptocurrency Dtravel says that customers can now use its recently launched TRVL cryptocurrency token to make payments. Customers using TRVL will also get additional benefits such as travel rewards and governance participation. The platform further stated that they will continue to add more destinations to diversify their service portfolio. The token launch which was conducted two weeks ago hosted 60,000 participants across several cryptocurrency platforms, after which the token was listed on Bybit, MEXC Global, and Gate exchange. Dtravel primarily functions as a Decentralized Autonomous Platform (DAO) allowing TRVL token holders to take part in the company’s core decision-making procedures. The platform is led by the executives of Expedia and Airbnb who received tokens in exchange for their funds invested in the said venture. “Offering the Dtravel community an expanded range of accommodation options in these early stages of the project is critical for ensuring the community continues to grow globally, not just in tourist hot spots. The speed at which we’ve been able to increase the number of homes on Dtravel will be instrumental in accelerating the home-sharing economy’s transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 which — in the case of Dtravel — enables both hosts and guests to shape the platform through ownership and governance,” says Cynthia Huang of Genesys Partners, the initial development team of Dtravel. 💥 $TRVL trading is live on #KuCoin! 📍Trade: 📍#TRVL + @kucoincom info:👉 Dtravel 📍 (@DtravelDAO) December 9, 2021 The TRVL token was recently listed on Kucoin and is also available on Binance Smart Chain’s PancakeSwap. Customers can also make use of the AnySwap cross-chain bridge to seamlessly swap between the BEP 20 TRVL token and the E20 TRVL token.
Sanctor Capital, a blockchain-focused investment firm, announced that eight new projects have completed its Y-Combinator-style program. In a press release shared with CryptoSlate, the company said that the hand-selected Beta Class graduated from its Turbo six-week program after receiving mentorship from executives and experts in the industry. Sanctor’s graduates span NFTs, interoperability, privacy, and the metaverse The blockchain-focused investment firm will be hosting its second Demo Day on December 14th. The online event marks the end of the intense six-week program and will see the eight teams present what they have been working on. Aside from demos from the projects, the event will include four panels featuring industry leaders from Sandbox, Infura, MetaMask, Aztec Network, Secret Network, Forte, Metalcore, and OneOf. This is the second class to complete Sanctor Capital’s program, with the Sanctor Turbo Alpha Class graduating in September this year. “A tremendous amount of innovation is happening right now, from infrastructure development to a host of new user experiences that are shaping the future of the internet,” Han Kao, Founder of Sanctor Capital, told CryptoSlate. Judging by this innovation, it’s safe to assume that the next few years will see a heavy focus on the crypto industry’s most novel parts—metaverses, GameFi, and NFTs. Out of eight Sanctor’s mentees, three are focused either on blockchain-based games or metaverse environments that feature gaming. Raini is a gaming and collectibles platform that features curated art drops and a play-to-earn game The Lords of Light. Blast offers tournaments-as-a-service infrastructure, while Sandstorm developed a metaverse hub for conducting events and facilitating item sales in the virtual world. Another graduate focused on NFTs is KnownOrigin, one of the oldest creator platforms in the crypto space. However, if it’s judging by Sanctor’s program, the future of the crypto industry will not only be a gaming-focused one—it will be decentralized, permissionless, private, and cross-chain interoperable. Brink has been working on automating on-chain operations to improve trading, while BlockVision will enable users and dApps to interact with blockchains through a decentralized index network. Substrate-based network ZCloak will utilize zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy, while Sumer will use synthetic assets to provide liquidity for wrapped assets moving across blockchains. “The debut of Sanctor’s Beta Class is representative of this trend as these worlds converge to introduce an entirely new category of dApps and games that are being built with decentralization at its core,” Kao noted. For more information, visit sanctor.com. Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post brought to you by Sanctor Capital.
With the year coming to an end in the next 22 days, the chance of Bitcoin meeting its $100k target is getting slimmer with each passing day especially as the coin recently witnessed a price correction that took it below the $50k level again. As it stands, it appears experts are beginning to give up on the $100k prediction of the flagship crypto-asset with some already looking forward to 2022 as the year when BTC would finally reach the price. Bitcoin to $100k in 2022 One such is the senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg’s research, Mick McGlone, who wrote in a tweet that 2022 would favor Bitcoin and Gold, as both would hit $100k and $2k, respectively, due to deflationary forces. Analysts have speculated that the next U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) data coming on Friday would show a significant 6.7% year-on-year increase. According to McGlone, this increasing inflationary pressure would have a ripple effect on commodities prices and equities. However, this inflation rate could help push the value of BTC and golf to new highs. “$100,000 Bitcoin, $50 Oil, $2,000 Gold?” He continued that “Peaking commodities and the declining yield on the Treasury long bond point to risks of reviving deflationary forces in 2022, with positive ramifications on Bitcoin and gold.” Bitcoin’s failed $100k movement One of the most popular predictions for Bitcoin this year was that its value was going to break the $100k price. Members of the crypto community had expected an upward price movement of the digital asset after it reached its new $68k ATH in early November. However, the market witnessed a massive sell-off which saw the coin drop to as low as $42,000 before rebounding to its current price of $48,379. Already, some crypto analysts have stated that we might have witnessed the coin’s ATH for this year.
The latest survey conducted by Coinbase revealed that the U.K. holds the second-highest level of cryptocurrency awareness in Europe. Using Qualtrics, an independent research firm, Coinbase surveyed over 8,000 consumers across Europe to gain a better understanding of how aware its residents are of cryptocurrencies. Brits and Spaniards hold the highest level of crypto awareness in Europe In a bid to capture a bigger part of the European market, Coinbase researched the sentiment Europeans had towards cryptocurrencies. Surveying 8,000 people across various markets revealed not only that there’s a high degree of crypto awareness among Europeans, but that they’re actively planning on owning more of it. According to the survey shared with CryptoSlate, Spaniards leads the way when it comes to crypto awareness with 80% of consumers are familiar with digital currencies. Trailing closely behind is the U.K., where 66% of adults are familiar with the asset class. A third of those familiar with crypto either own or have owned cryptocurrencies in the past. Spain also holds the highest rate of ownership, with 46% of Spaniards owning cryptocurrencies. Coinbase’s research also found a positive correlation between familiarity with cryptocurrencies and investment in the asset class. “As consumers gain a better understanding of the digital currency, they are increasingly inclined to buy more of it,” the company concluded in the report. Out of all the Brits that invested in the asset class, over 54% plan on increasing their holdings in the next years. While these might not look like revolutionary numbers, it’s important to note that investors in the U.K. are pretty new to crypto. The survey found that over half of those who purchased cryptocurrencies in the country did so either in 2019 or later. When it comes to other European countries, the numbers remain similarly high. The Dutch take third place when it comes to industry awareness, with 64% of the Dutch saying they’re familiar with cryptocurrencies. Germany and Italy stand at 60% and 58%, respectively, while France holds a similar amount of awareness at 56%. And while these numbers show Europe is a promising crypto market, Coinbase believes that more education around digital currencies is needed. The company said it will ramp up its efforts to educate European consumers about the industry and enable them to profit from the market in a safe and responsible manner.
The Russian Attorney General’s Office (Genprokuratura) is actively working on a swathe of new amendments to criminal law that would allow law enforcement agencies to legally confiscate illicitly gained Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, attorney general Igor Krasnov revealed to RIA Novosti today. “We have developed amendments to a number of regulatory legislative acts so that cryptocurrencies in illegal circulation will not only be recognized as the subject of a crime but there also will be a way to legally seize and confiscate them,” he told the outlet. As it stands today, cryptocurrencies are classified as property by Russian courts when it comes to criminal cases. However, this is not enough to form “unified and sustainable law enforcement procedures,” Krasnov explained, so a separate legal definition of “cryptocurrencies” also needs to be introduced. “I believe this should be facilitated by introducing the concept of cryptocurrencies and other virtual assets to criminal law by adding the relevant legislative norms,” he added. Legal uncertainty However, the agency’s latest crypto-focused initiative is nothing new, according to Nikita Soshnikov, director of regulated crypto exchange Alfacash and former head of Deloitte CIS. Speaking to CryptoSlate, he pointed out that similar talks have been ongoing in Russia since at least 2019. “Currently, no legal frameworks for confiscation—and, most importantly, the subsequent sale of confiscated property in the form of cryptocurrencies—exist in Russia. But that didn’t stop law enforcement agencies from seizing such property,” Soshnikov explained. In February, for example, a military court in Moscow ordered the confiscation of BTC from two former FSB investigators, Aleksey Kolbov and Sergey Belousov, who were sentenced to 12 and 9 years in prison, respectively, for extorting $1 million in Bitcoin. “How was it done? In the usual ‘physical’ way—the memory card on which these coins were stored was confiscated. But then there’s another question—how to get access to cryptocurrencies in other cases?” Soshnikov noted. “It is impossible to transfer crypto without a private key, this is precisely its fundamental advantage over other financial instruments.” Not your keys, not your coins? Similarly, not only the Genprokuratura was already able to confiscate illicit cryptocurrencies in the past but it also can file requests to seize assets held on centralized crypto exchanges. However, it currently cannot force an exchange to comply. “In general, large centralized crypto exchanges have long been cooperating with law enforcement agencies, mainly in Western countries. None of them want to quarrel with the authorities, especially in those regions whose residents are of particular interest as users and investors—the United States, Great Britain, EU countries, etc,” said Soshnikov. And this is ostensibly one of the main reasons why decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, are seeing an ever-increasing influx of new users—all the while Bitcoin deposits on their centralized counterparts keep gradually shrinking. “Users flow to decentralized trading platforms en masse, which, due to their architecture, even technically cannot transfer users’ assets to anyone,” Soshnikov concluded.
A new report from trading platform CoinList analyzed the future of the crypto industry following a survey of almost 5,000 of its users. Respondents weighed in on everything from the dominance of specific blockchain platforms to use cases for NFTs and showed that the market has its hopes set pretty high for 2022. The market believes we’re heading towards an exciting year In its end-of-the-year crypto report, token issuance platform CoinList surveyed nearly 5,000 of its community members, who shared their predictions on Bitcoin’s price, Layer-1 platforms, use cases for NFTs, and everything in between. CoinList enables users to buy, trade, and earn new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. It was among the first platforms to offer users novel cryptocurrencies such as Filecoin (FILE), Flow (FLOW), and Solana (SOL) and was, at least in part, responsible for the rise in popularity they saw in the past year. When asked what type of projects they would like to see more of on CoinList next year, the majority of users said gaming. The same enthusiasm was applied to decentralized finance, with over 52% of the survey’s respondents saying they would like more DeFi tokens available. Trailing closely behind were NFTs, with 41.6% of its users supporting the asset class that exploded in 2021. The part of the market that believes the future of the industry lies in gaming also has pretty strong opinions on which games will propel its growth. According to the survey, Gods Unchained has the biggest potential to become the most popular blockchain game next year, followed closely by Axie Infinity. With even the legacy tech giants such as Facebook joining in on the craze, the market firmly believes that metaverse environments and gaming will become the main use cases for NFTs next year. While CoinList and its users acknowledged Ethereum’s position as a leader in DeFi, the survey showed that there was still significant demand for other blockchain platforms. More than half of the respondents said they planned on interacting with Solana the most in 2022. Over 55% of users said that they believed Solana would be the closest to Ethereum’s market cap by the end of 2022. Binance Smart Chain was the second most popular choice, with just over 48% of respondents saying they will be using it in 2022. Just over 38% of users believe that it has the potential to be the third-largest blockchain by the end of next year. Trailing closely behind was Polkadot with just 47.8%, whose parachain auctions propelled it to the top of the DeFi market this quarter. Scaling platforms Polygon and Avalanche were chosen by 25% of respondents, while Cosmos and Terra both remained below 20%. The market’s focus on DeFi doesn’t mean it isn’t looking forward to interacting with Bitcoin. According to the survey, almost half of CoinList’s users believe Bitcoin will be worth between $100,000 and $150,000 in 2022. Over 28% of respondents believe it will stay below $100,000, while only 6.1% believe it will surpass $250,000. El Salvador’s ambitious Bitcoin plans have led many to consider the impact introducing a cryptocurrency as legal tender would have on other countries. Over 87% of the survey’s respondents are confident other central banks would follow in El Salvador’s footsteps and accept digital assets as legal tender. Just 12.7% believe that this is a far-fetched idea that won’t gain traction.
Meta Platforms cryptocurrency wallet, dubbed Novi, will enable sending and receiving money through the popular messaging app–WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a unit of Meta– a tech giant formerly known as Facebook. The pilot program is open to a limited number of users in the US, according to Novi head Stephane Kasriel, who announced the launch on Twitter. Testing transactions “Using Novi doesn’t change the privacy of WhatsApp personal messages and calls, which are always end-to-end encrypted,” according to Kasriel, who added that the pilot will be extended following the users’ feedback. We’re still very early in the Novi pilot journey, so we made the decision to test this new entry point in one country to start and will look to extend it once we’ve heard from people what they think of this new experience. Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) December 8, 2021 The payments feature is included in WhatsApp as a new attachment option, and there is no cap on the number of transactions that can be made through the messaging app. Users can include payments to messages–”without ever leaving a WhatsApp chat”–in a similar way they do with photographs–tapping the “+” icon and selecting “Payment” from the menu. Novi wallet is designed for transferring money instantly and with no fees, with payment made through USDP–a stablecoin issued by blockchain trust company Paxos, which is pegged to the US dollar. Turbulent launch Meta’s cryptocurrency strategy has changed since the company first announced its plans in 2019. Initial plan was to develop a cryptocurrency called Libra, which was supposed to be linked to a Facebook digital wallet–dubbed Calibra. Calibra wallet was rebranded into Novi in 2020 and its October launch caused quite a stir. CryptoSlate reported that the launch was met with stiff opposition from the US lawmakers, who wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg to discontinue the digital wallet project. “Facebook cannot be trusted to manage a payment system or digital currency when its existing ability to manage risks and keep consumers safe has proven wholly insufficient. We urge you to immediately discontinue your Novi pilot and to commit that you will not bring Diem to market,” read the letter, signed by the members of the US Senate Banking Committee. Novi launch continued despite the hostilities and was available for download on Apple and Google’s app stores. In its response to the letter, Diem, formerly known as Libra, stated that the legislators might have misunderstood “the relationship between Diem and Facebook.” “Diem is not Facebook. We are an independent organization, and Facebook’s Novi is just one of more than two dozen members of the Diem Association. Novi’s pilot with Paxos is unrelated to Diem,” read the press release.
Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms on the market, has announced plans to develop a decentralized version of its infrastructure on Celo. According to the company’s announcement, the move is set to open up new opportunities for creative projects to come to life. The king of crowdfunding is making a bit bet on decentralization The first and one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world is making a big bet on the future of decentralization as it unveiled plans to migrate its infrastructure to the blockchain. In a Thursday announcement, Kickstarter said that it will begin developing an open-source protocol that will create a decentralized version of its core functionality. The protocol will be launched on Celo, an open-source, carbon-negative blockchain platform. The company said it chose the novel blockchain platform due to its underlying technology and community. “We’re inspired by the Celo ecosystem’s thoughtful approach to building the technology they want to see in the world,” Kickstarter said in the announcement. “Celo’s efforts around minimizing environmental impact (and focus on global accessibility through mobile access to blockchain), reminds us that the best way to get better systems is to build better systems.” The decentralized version of Kickstarter will be developed by a newly-founded subsidiary. Alongside a new company, Kickstarter will also establish an independent governance lap that will be tasked with overseeing the development of the protocol’s governance. And while the company put a significant focus on sustainability, its decision to enter into the world of blockchain was met with heavy criticism. Hundreds of Kickstarter’s users took to Twitter to say that they will be looking into another crowdfunding platform if the company didn’t withdraw its plans to launch on a blockchain. Criticisms ranged from saying that the company should invest more resources into improving its current infrastructure to calling the crypto industry a money-laundering scam that’s terrible for the environment. I am really, really disappointed in Kickstarter for pivoting in this direction and if this comes to pass, I won't be using or recommending them as a platform in the future. This is fucked. Katee Robert – only sorta here (@katee_robert) December 8, 2021 Kickstarter could use their development budget to improve so many things about their platform, but instead have decided to chase crypto-fads. Missing from the article — any way in which moving to cryptocurrency improves the platform for creators or backers. John Brieger ✈️ PAX U (@DasBrieger) December 8, 2021
In their bid to better understand the crypto industry and its operations, US lawmakers invited the chief executive officers (CEO) of some leading crypto exchanges to a major hearing tagged “Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding Innovation in the United State.” Brian Brooks criticizes SEC One of the invited executives was the pro-crypto former head of the United States Office of the Comptroller of Currency who is now the CEO of a leading crypto exchange, BitFury, Brian Brooks, who seized the opportunity to criticize the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulatory efforts of the industry. According to the former top government official, the SEC, through its regulatory actions, has been pushing some crypto-related firms outside the shores of the United States. Brooks cited the example of Fidelity who recently moved its Bitcoin ETF product to Canada because the Gary Gensler-led commission refused to approve its application in the United States. You’ll recall that the US SEC has been reluctant in approving a Bitcoin Spot ETF because it believes it exposes investors to the volatile nature of the digital asset. However, players in the space have severally criticized this decision by the regulator saying its preference for a futures-backed ETF and refusal to approve a spot ETF could even be a violation of US laws. On the growth of Stablecoins The former Binance.US CEO also questioned why only banks would be allowed to issue stablecoins when the regulators refused to grant bank charters to major stablecoin issuers like Tether, USD Coin and others. On the other hand, the CEO of Paxos, Charles Cascarilla, pointed out that the US has to step up its activities in the Stablecoin industry if it does not want the US Dollars to lose its status as the reserve currency of the world. According to Cascarilla, if a US CBDC project is not kickstarted or the US Dollar-backed stablecoin space is not regulated, it could have a ripple effect on the crypto industry generally. Recently, the authorities released a Stablecoin report where they stated that only insured depository institutions should be allowed to issue stablecoin. Within the last one year, the Stablecoin industry has seen tremendous growth as the market cap of the space has grown to over $150 billion. The top two major issuers, Tether and USDC alone account for over $120 billion of this growth.
MegaFans, a California-based mobile gaming company, successfully launched a charity event designed to support CodetoInsipire.org, the first coding school for women in Afghanistan. The event consisted of a play-to-earn tournament that used donated NFTs and crypto prizes to entice gamers to participate in a fundraising event. Mobile gaming platform used for charitable causes According to a press release shared by MegaFans, the event was developed in partnership with DCentral, Launchpool, Listen Tokens, and Stamina, all of which donated NFTs and crypto tokens to support the cause. The event took place during DCentral, one of the largest NFT and DeFi conferences in the U.S. “One of the principles of MegaFans is to support women in GameFi. CodetoInspite.org and its program participants all take huge risks. MegaFans, Launchpool, Listen Tokens, and Stamina all agreed to support this important cause and we felt DCentral was the best place to launch this initiative,” said Jeff Donnelley, the founder and CEO of MegaFans. MegaFans launched the charity event to celebrate its first profitable month since it launched earlier this year—the company surpassed their return on advertising spend (ROAS) in November. A portion of the company’s profits was used to launch a new eSports tournament and provide NFTs and crypto prizes to the tournament’s winners. The company offers free-to-play and play-to-earn games ranging from quick-play contests to monthly tournaments with prize pools worth up to $10,000. Winners receive prizes either in the platform’s native token (MFANS) or NFTs, which are distributed on OpenSea.io using Polygon.
It’s a whole different story today; since the highs set at the peak of 2018’s bubble, altcoins have fallen off dramatically by dozens and dozens of percent, crushed under the pressure of a dominant Bitcoin that has benefited from a strong first-mover advantage and sell-offs in the altcoin market. But, according to a fund manager and a flurry of fundamental signs, it may be time for Ethereum to start to reclaim some of its lost gains. Ethereum may have finally printed a “major cycle low”: fund manager Late last year, ETH traded as low as 0.016 BTC. But, when Bitcoin maximalists were certain the altcoin was well on its way to zero, it reversed, with the trading pair attempting to double when it nearly reached 0.029 BTC just earlier this year. According to Mohit Sorout — partner at crypto fund Bitazu Capital — it is “quite possible that ETH has printed a major cycle low [against Bitcoin],” pointing to the below chart, which he claims shows a bullish “weekly market structure.” As to why exactly it signals upside is likely, he pointed to two factors: ETH/BTC has begun to print consecutive higher lows and higher highs, indicative of a reversal And the directional movement index (DMI) indicator has recently crossed bullish. Quite possible that $ETH/ $BTC has printed a major cycle low. Weekly market structure is bullish👀 Mohit Sorout 📈 (@singhsoro) April 25, 2020 It’s not only Sorout’s technical analysis that signals the Ethereum low is in, as there are also two fundamental factors corroborating the sentiment the bottom is in. Last Saturday, the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade got its latest testnet named “Topaz.” According to Etherscan data, there are around 20,000 active validators on the network, suggesting that members of the Ethereum community are excited about this major technical upgrade. As reported by CryptoSlate previously, the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade — which will make the network purportedly dozens of times faster and usable than the previous iteration — is expected by analysts to have a decisively positive effect on the price of the cryptocurrency. Furthermore, we’ve seen ETH investors start to accumulate more of the cryptocurrency, with institutions also starting to siphon large sums of capital into the altcoin. It may be a tad too early to tell Despite these signs, there is one crypto wild card that could discredit the idea that Ethereum has found a low against Bitcoin: the block reward reduction, or the halving, taking place in just over two weeks from the time of this article’s publishing. Crypto trader known as “Pentoshi” explained that with the halving near, he is reducing his exposure to altcoins due to the uncertainty around the event, which strongly decreases the chance Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies will outperform BTC. He wrote: “The halving [is] near. If Bitcoin pumps, altcoins get rekt. if it dumps, altcoins get rekt.”
Following delays to the ERC-20 converter, Cardano developers Input Output (IO) announced this week that the testnet version is now live. The first ERC-20 token to get the converter treatment is SingularityNet’s $AGI, which IO was keen to stress can now take advantage of lower fees, higher transaction capacity, and enhanced security. Interoperability between different chains is an ongoing issue that holds back the crypto sector. With the imminent release of the mainnet ERC-20 converter, investors pin their hopes on this sparking life into $ADA, which has suffered price stagnation of late. What is an ERC-20 converter? Talk of an ERC-20 converter first gained traction in July last year when IO CEO Charles Hoskinson mentioned it during a video post. Essentially, the ERC-20 converter is a tool that enables the migration of Ethereum ERC-20 tokens to the Cardano chain and back again if users so choose. “By enabling the migration of ERC20 tokens to Cardano, we focus on delivering a value proposition that leverages Cardano’s advantages over Ethereum. In particular, Cardano’s higher capacity for transaction processing and lower fees when compared with Ethereum’s high cost and often congested traffic.” Ethereum is the leading smart contract platform with the biggest network effect. From that point of view, the ERC-20 converter makes sense in terms of attracting some of the $105 billion total value locked in Ethereum DeFi over to Cardano. SingularityNet is the first partner to take the plunge. Its CEO Dr. Ben Goertzel called the converter critical in realizing his project’s ambitions for a decentralized AI platform. “it will yield not only a far faster and more economical AI network, but also a massively superior foundation for adding advanced new functions to SingularityNET and moving toward realizing our vision of decentralized AGI.” What’s more, IO’s commercial team says they are in the process of securing other migrations to the Cardano chain. Delays to the Cardano ERC-20 convertor The previous update on the ERC-20 convertor came in late August as IO Project manager Francisco Landino said they were nearing a testnet launch. Landino said the original plan was to do two releases. One for the Ethereum to Cardano bridge, and the other to bridge Cardano to Ethereum. But in the process of completing the first release, the team realized there were duplicated tasks with the second release. It made sense to delay both releases and solve all the issues in one go. As ever, this did little to rebuff Cardano’s reputation as a project plagued by delays. But IO has always maintained that security and getting things right the first time takes priority over rushed releases.
While crypto enthusiasts would want the world to believe that projects in the space, especially those in decentralized finance (DeFi) have little to no use for centralized intermediaries, the recent outage of one of Amazon’s server in US-East-1 region has again brought the question “how decentralized are decentralized finance projects?” to the fore again. dYdX suffers outage On Tuesday, dYdX revealed that the exchange suffered an outage due to the fact that Amazon Web Services went offline for a brief period. The decentralized exchange confirmed this in a tweet where it revealed that “due to a major AWS outage, dYdX exchange is currently down.” Due to a major AWS outage, dYdX exchange is currently down. We are experiencing greater latency across services and impaired functionality with endpoints not working and the website not loading. For the most up to date status updates, subscribe to: dYdX 🦔 (@dydxprotocol) December 7, 2021 The above wouldn’t have been an issue if the exchange was just another exchange or another website running on the AWS. However, being a project that lays claim to being decentralized, it raises a thousand and one questions about the level of its decentralization. Speaking on this, the exchange stated that some parts of its operations still rely on centralized services of firms like AWS. Though it noted that its goal is to become fully decentralized so as to avoid a repeat of this scenario. While the exchange failed to reveal its operations that are currently centralized, a look at the DEX note reveals that it uses a “centralized order book” to match buying and selling orders. Other crypto projects that suffered from the outage It is worth noting that dYdX is not the only crypto-related project running on Amazon Web Servers, centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.US were also one of the victims of the outage as users gave scathing remarks about their dependence on a centralized intermediary like AWS. One Coinbase user wrote that “Imagine if a bank told you that you couldn’t access your money. Jesus Christ Coinbase, get it together — you’re worth over $60 billion,” Binance, on the other hand, drew angry responses on Twitter when it revealed that it was experiencing some issues due to the AWS outage. Aside from this, a good number of Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes are also being run on AWS though these blockchains appear undisturbed from the recent outage.
After 9/11, “the US government for the first time was able to take control of an infrastructure that had already begun to work its way into every home, every workplace and now, every pocket,” said Snowden, referring to smartphones. Snowden said this new form of authoritarianism and form of oppression began taking place because of 9/11 and thanks to technology. “Covid-19 has killed far more people then 9/11 terrorist attacks, however that act changed US national policy (toward the rest of the world) for two decades in very harmful way. We went to wars that we could never extricate ourselves from, and most importantly, we reinterpreted the Constitution of the United States, what all of our laws meant, in secret,” he said. The US took advantage of the technology upon which smartphones were built, he explained. That technology “is what really changed, I think, in a historic way” as the “United States operated in secret with first mover advantage,” Snowden said. He explained that the US then operated in concert and conspiracy with its five Anglophone allies, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada to “basically try to establish what they would describe as information dominance on the internet.” Snowden, a former NSA intelligence analyst turned whistleblower, described how invasive their control became as they were able to spy on anybody worldwide by simply entering their email or IP address into surveillance software. And this is what gave birth to what was in 2013 described as global mass surveillance.” Snowden said Facebook, Amazon, Apple, spy on people, listen in and control and influence our lives with information and advertising knowing that today’s generations mostly only read headlines. Gavin Wood, and his unique perspective Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot and Chairman of Parity Technologies, participated in a video-panel discussion with Edward Snowden. In it, Wood, an Ethereum co-founder, gave his very particular viewpoint with his unique form of expression, which comes with his more calculated and mathematical perspective. The minute cryptocurrencies stop being decentralized, “they will cease to have this value proposition that bitcoin had, and they will become just like another form of centralized service, not entirely different to Amazon, Google, Facebook.” Wood is credited with coining the term Web3, which he predicted will be “a very interesting social experiment. “We’re gonna see just how much the world cares about privacy, self-sovereignty and transparency, knowing that the rules–the assumptions about how a system or service works–are true.” Wood, also an Ethereum co-founder, said that looking ahead, in about ten to 20 years, “I hope the “massively multi-user application framework –global services that we broadly refer to as the Web’–will provide us with ‘de facto’ guarantees.Hard guarantees on the rules that are open and transparent–that we can read, whether it’s in code, whether it’s in English–and a credible belief that they will be followed is what was missing in the pre-blockchain, pre-peer-to-peer world.” David Chaum, the privacy-preserving computer scientist David Chaum, a computer scientist, cryptographer, and pioneer in privacy-preserving technologies, took the virtual stage at the BlockDown as well. He too expressed his opposition to centralized entities, including governments, banks, and social networks because they collect people’s data and use it to their advantage. “I know that if I lose access to my Bank of America account, I just call someone on the phone and they can reset my password if they verify my identity. This is because banks own their customer data and, by having it, they have power over their accounts. Access to personal data has also become natural on social networks, such as Facebook,” Chaum pointed out. Chaum also made his position against the centralization of money and cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, very clear. “Decentralization is the opposite of centralization, tha...
Earlier this week, the newly appointed CFO of the leading NFT marketplace, OpenSea, Brian Roberts, hinted that the crypto startup could be looking to raise new funds through an initial public offering (IPO). However, this revelation received a lot of backlash from the crypto community who felt betrayed by the thoughts of the NFT marketplace going public when its success had been tied to the engagement of the community. OpenSea debunks IPO rumors Brian Roberts, in a series of tweets, has revealed that OpenSea had no immediate plans to go public. According to the CFO, “there is a big gap between thinking about what an IPO might eventually look like & actively planning one.” There was inaccurate reporting about @OpenSea's plans. Let me set the record straight: there is a big gap between thinking about what an IPO might eventually look like & actively planning one. We are not planning an IPO, and if we ever did, we would look to involve the community. Brian Roberts (broberts.eth) (@BKRoberts) December 8, 2021 He continued that even if the NFT marketplace ever considered going public, it was going to “look to involve the community.” The former Lyft CFO, however, failed to clarify how the platform plans to incorporate the community into this plan. You would recall that shortly after the IPO revelation on Monday, members of the crypto community expressed their displeasure with the move believing that the NFT marketplace was looking to abandon them and focus on institutional investors. Would we see an OpenSea airdrop? With this new statement from the company, many crypto enthusiasts believe that the leading NFT site could still perform an airdrop and also incorporate a governance model to its functionalities. OpenSea did not release any official statement on this. If OpenSea were to gift users with an airdrop, it means it wouldn’t be able to go public and this would place it on the same path of projects like Ethereum Name Service (ENS), UniSwap and dYdX who have, at different times in the past, rewarded users with an airdrop. However, for a company that generates as much revenue as OpenSea, it might be easier to seek funding through the traditional means like Coinbase did earlier in the year. This way, it easily would be able to bypass any securities law violations that might have been brought against it. It is worth noting that the crypto startup has a $1.5 billion valuation after it raised around $100 million in July this year.
On Wednesday, key executives at six major crypto firms testified before the House Financial Services Committee, saying shoehorning existing rules doesn’t work. Over a near five-hour stint, representatives from Coinbase, Circle, FTX, Bitfury, Paxos, and Stellar fielded questions to educate lawmakers on understanding the intricacies of cryptocurrency, ransomware, investor protections, and banking the unbanked. But most of all, the execs called out existing regulations and how they are being applied to digital currencies, saying a new regulatory framework is needed. Existing regulations fit poorly with crypto Commenting on the situation, the CEO of Paxos, Charles Cascarilla, said shoehorning existing banking laws onto crypto is not the way to approach the issue. “The solution is not to shoehorn digital asset operations into a regulatory system designed for earlier generations of financial assets.” Similarly, Brian Brooks, the CEO of Bitcoin mining firm Bitfury, called the existing regulatory approach hypocritical. In particular, he spoke about the enforcement of securities laws and how cryptocurrencies do not get the same treatment (as, say, registered stocks) in any case. “Does it make sense to bring enforcement actions challenging certain crypto assets as unregistered securities, but then fail to allow those assets to be registered and trade on a national securities exchange?” All in all, the underlying theme of the session was to prompt Congress to establish new rules to take into account differences between crypto-assets and other instruments, to regulate the space more even-handedly. They implied that without this, the crypto industry, and financial innovation in the U.S, would suffer. Hoskinson details the problem At the end of last month, social trading platform eToro delisted Cardano and Tron for its U.S customers, citing “the evolving regulatory environment” as the reason. In turn, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson weighed in with his thoughts on how U.S regulations are stifling the crypto industry. Much like the execs during Wednesday’s House Financial Services hearing, Hoskinson called for a new regulatory framework specific to cryptocurrencies. In pointing out flaws within the existing framework, he said regulators have failed to determine adequate definitions. “we need to move to a system for regulation that has much better definitions about things. So we really don’t have a good definition of virtual asset service provider in the United States. We don’t really have a definition of what is a utility token.” Thus, insinuating that it is madness to regulate an industry based on ill-defined terms.
Just a week after it acquired 7,002 BTC, MicroStrategy announced that it has grown its Bitcoin holdings once again. According to the latest Form 8-K document it filed with the SEC, the company purchased approximately 1,434 BTC between November 29th and December 8th. MicroStrategy makes another move in its bid to buy all the Bitcoin MicroStrategy paid $82.4 million in cash for the pleasure, at an average price of $57,477 per Bitcoin. This is a steep increase from Bitcoin’s average market price last week, which managed to break through the $50,000 resistance only for hours at a time. The latest purchase puts MicroStrategy’s total Bitcoin holdings to 122,478 BTC. Its entire Bitcoin reserve was acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $3.66 billion at an average purchase price of around $29,861 per Bitcoin. MicroStrategy has purchased an additional 1,434 bitcoins for ~$82.4 million in cash at an average price of ~$57,477 per #bitcoin. As of 12/9/21 we #hodl ~122,478 bitcoins acquired for ~$3.66 billion at an average price of ~$29,861 per bitcoin. $MSTR Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) December 9, 2021 The company’s Bitcoin holdings are worth over $6 billion at press time, meaning that Michael Saylor’s bid to accumulate as much crypto as possible has already nearly doubled in value. And while many were struck with yet another big purchase made in less than two weeks, it’s worth noting that the company didn’t use any of its revenue or profits from its software business. In its filing with the SEC, MicroStrategy said that it issued and sold just under 120,000 shares for $82.4 million, at an average gross price per share of approximately $693.1. The shares were issued under the Open Market Sale Agreement the company made with Jefferies in June this year. The agreement allows MicroStrategy to issue and sell shares of its Class A common stock through Jefferies from time to time in a bid to raise up to $1 billion.
Hardware crypto wallet manufacturer Ledger has made a slew of announcements during the first day of its Ledger Op3n conference in Paris, including the upcoming launch of its brand new crypto-linked debit card and support for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Dubbed “Crypto Life,” the new debit card is powered by Ledger’s technology and will allow holders to seamlessly spend and receive cryptocurrencies without having to sell or buy them first. BREAKING: We are launching the Crypto Life card, powered by Ledger – in partnership with @BaanxGroup. You'll be able to manage your crypto life through your @Ledger wallet, convert to fiat at time of purchase, and more. Join the waitlist here:#LedgerOp3n Ledger (@Ledger) December 9, 2021 The card will also be integrated into the Ledger Live software (also used in Ledger Nano hardware wallets), allowing its holders to track their portfolios as well as “buy, trade, access the worlds of Defi and NFTs, and more.” “Everyone should be empowered to truly own their money, and this new card expands the number of ways to not only get paid in cryptocurrency, but transact with it anywhere,” said Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier in an announcement shared with CryptoSlate today. Residents of the U.K., France, and Germany will be able to get their hands on “Crypto Life” in the first quarter of 2022 while Americans will have to wait until Q2. At launch, the card will support Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple’s XRP, Baanx (BXX), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), and stablecoins such as USDT, EURT, and USDC. NFTs on the go Another big announcement is the addition of NFT support to Ledger’s wallets, albeit still in “an experimental mode.” Starting already this month, hardware wallet users will be able to view, send, and receive NFTs in Ledger Live. To this end, Ledger has teamed up with NFT marketplace Rarible and plans to launch “a unique Discover section” in January 2022. This integration will allow users to connect their Ledger wallets to Rarible and manage their NFTs directly within Ledger Live, the company explained. “Our integration with Ledger, leveraging its state-of-the-art security, marks a major milestone in our mission to improve how users interact with their NFTs, and will provide NFT holders with an increased sense of comfort knowing their digital collectibles are safely stored,” noted Alex Salnikov, co-founder and head of product at Rarible. Single-window trading Finally, Ledger has announced new partnerships with two major U.S. cryptocurrency trading platforms—FTX and Coinbase. As a result of the former, Ledger users in 150 countries will be able to trade across 300 digital asset pairs on FTX directly through the Ledger Live application. Meanwhile, users of the Coinbase Wallet browser extension will gain the ability to self-custody their crypto with Ledger hardware wallets. “We’ll start rolling out support for hardware wallets in the Coinbase Wallet Extension early next year, and we’re excited to share more announcements on how we’re making Coinbase Wallet the safest and most secure way to participate in Web3 over the coming months,” added Max Branzburg, VP product at Coinbase.
“The market opportunity for bringing the Metaverse to life may be worth over $1 trillion in annual revenue and may compete with Web 2.0 companies worth ~$15 trillion in market value today.” – Grayscale Metaverse report. Have you heard about virtual real estate in #Decentraland recently? Takeaways from Grayscale's #metaverse report were mentioned in @BusinessInsider. More here: $MANA Grayscale (@Grayscale) December 7, 2021 Launchpool Labs, the chain agnostic community-centric incubator, powered by Launchpool, that offers incubation via a bespoke model that serves co-building the MVP and MVC (minimum viable community), as well as raising pre-seed / seed rounds, is announcing its first metaverse engine incubee, as per a release shared with CryptoSlate. After successfully incubating its first five projects (NOWwhere, BrickTrade, Megafans, Nifty Football, Unicred), and raising over US $2million in pre-seed and seed from its loyal community, Launchpool Labs is welcoming the Ozone Metaverse team as the next project to join the incubator. “We are very excited to release this first metaverse engine incubated project to our community. During the next several weeks, we will be working closely with the team,” said Roxana Nasoi, Managing Director at Launchpool Labs. She added, “The Launchpool community is eager to be part of their journey, and we have seen massive interest in metaverse and gaming projects on our launchpad. We believe that members of our Investor Club – powered by Bronze & Gold NFTs for access, will enjoy taking part in the Ozone Metaverse seed raise ($400k), as well as being part of their early community.” The world-renowned sports clothing line @adidasoriginals joins in the #Metaverse in collaboration with the biggest #NFT projects like @BoredApeYC, @gmoneyNFT and @punkscomic.#cryptotwitter #adidas Launchpool ($LPOOL) (@LaunchPoolXYZ) December 4, 2021 “We are thrilled to join Launchpool Labs and introduce our project to the world together. This partnership will set the stage for a long-term collaboration with the web3 ecosystem, crypto communities and we look forward to empowering everyone with the best Metaverse technology available to date.”, says Jay Essadki, Co-Founder, CEO at Ozone Metaverse. “With Facebook parent company taking the name Meta and signalling where they believe the future lies, it’s clear Metaverses have a bright future. Ozone Metaverse’s proprietary technology gives them a unique selling point that I believe will put them front and centre in the race for crypto Metaverse supremacy.”, says Rich Simpson, CEO and Co-Founder at Launchpool, and Ozone Metaverse Advisor. About Launchpool Labs The Launchpool Labs incubator is part of the broader Launchpool Ecosystem, along with Launchpool’s regulatory compliant pre-IDO guaranteed allocation platform and Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator program with Alphabit Fund. “This incubator allows us to support early stage projects, by granting them the right technical, operational, legal, marketing, and community support, and by involving our most loyal community members in pre-seed and seed raises” explained Nasoi. Contact: Roxana Nasoi pr@launchpool.xyz About Ozone Metaverse Ozone Metaverse offers a proprietary 3D graphic and game engine, metaverse-as-a-service, NFT marketplace engine, and multi-chain integration for Web3, with simple, no code, no limits technology. Supporting Wallets: Metamask, Phantom, Blocto. Supporting Chains: Ethereum, Solana, Flow. Contact: Public Relations Team, pr@ozonemetaverse.io
Over a five-hour-long educational hearing before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday has confirmed–the US Congress is ready to listen. In a bid to ward off aggressive regulation, six senior executives from leading crypto firms, including Bitfury, Circle, Coinbase, FTX, Paxos and the Stellar Development Foundation, gave a crash course on the point of crypto and what needs to be done in order for the US to take the lead. Industry and community engagement in DC finally bearing fruit? “Let’s be clear, this technology is already regulated. The question for policymakers is whether you know enough about this technology, which is neither fish nor fowl, to have a serious debate,” Committee ranking member Patrick McHenry said in the opening remarks. The Republican, who called the crypto sector the “next generation of the internet” set the tone of the hearing asking what needs to be done to ensure that the “crypto revolution happens in the US and not overseas.” Each of the testimonies tried to provide a constructive answer to this burning question, as the hearing unraveled in a supportive tone. “Today’s HFSC hearing was the most positive, constructive, & bipartisan public event on crypto I’ve seen in Congress–ever. I mean that literally,” Jake Chervinsky, Head of Policy at Blockchain Association, commented on Twitter. According to the notable crypto lawyer, the crypto industry and community engagement in Washington is finally bearing fruit. “We’ve made shockingly big progress,” he added, crediting Blockchain Association Executive Director Kristin Smith for leading the charge in DC. I credit @KMSmithDC. I wouldn't have taken this job if not for her. Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) December 8, 2021 Focus on stablecoins A big part of the hearing was dedicated to stablecoins–tokens pegged to traditional, government-backed currencies, which offer crypto traders a lifeline in the volatile market. Their key role in the market–underpinning the DeFi ecosystem–drove the sector to exponential growth. Issuance of stablecoins surfaced as one of the hottest regulatory topics, as the CEOs challenged some of the regulatory tendencies surrounding the sector. These refer to proposals to limit stablecoin issuance to insured depository institutions, or IDIs– outlined in the recent President’s Working Group report on stablecoins. “The point of crypto is to have true decentralization,” Bitfury CEO Brian Brooks said, adding that “the projects that succeed will be the projects that achieve that.” “Is it consistent to take the position that only banks should be allowed to issue stablecoins, but then fail to grant bank charters to the largest issuers of stablecoins?”–asked Brooks. totally agree. this part floored me. "Do we trust big banks more, or open source software more?" blowing my mind how far we've come to hear the former top banking regulator saying this in congress Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) December 8, 2021 The former Comptroller of the Currency also added that “there will come a time, gradually then suddenly, when the attractiveness of the dollar relative to other currencies could change,” while arguing that stablecoins have the potential to boost the US dollar’s utility and help it fight off the rising inflation. Circle Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO Jeremy Allaire took the role that US stablecoins could play even further–underscoring their potential to support the global dominance of the US dollar. “The United States and the US dollar are winning the digital currency space race today,” Allaire said–noting that China’s CBDC is lagging behind. While assigning them strategic importance, Allaire noted that “it’s important that the barrier to entry in the stablecoin space not be so high that startups that are innovating as money services businesses can’t participate.”
DeFi lending protocol Unbound Finance (UNB) set the stage for its native governance token launch–announcing IEO on Huobi Primelist. Unbound Finance is built as an aggregator layer over the existing Automated Market Makers (AMMs) that power decentralized exchanges (DEXs) on Ethereum and other blockchains. The protocol allows users to leverage their idle liquidity pool tokens (LPTs) for interest-free crypto loans–issued in the form of synthetic assets, starting with Unbound’s native stablecoin UND and uETH. Initial DEX offering (IDO) announcements Token sale and trading will start on one Huobi Global, on December 14. Excited to work with the best in the space. IEO on Huobi Primelist : 14th December 2021@HuobiGlobal $UNB Unbound (@unboundfinance) December 7, 2021 The announced initial exchange offering (IEO) on Huobi Primelist, will be followed by listing on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap, Balancer, PancakeSwap, Quickswap, and Curve, as well as multiple centralized exchanges (CEXs). Unbound IDO on Polkastarter, Red Kite and GameFi, announced for December 13, will precede the Huobi listing. Holders of the protocol’s native token UNB will be active members of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), since its governance utility leverages voting rights on all protocol changes, including whitelisting pools for UND minting and setting Loan-To-Value parameters. Enabling the inter-flow of liquidity across multiple chains DEXes are powered by AMMs, which incentivize users to provide liquidity in exchange for a portion of transaction fees and free tokens–also known as farming yield. However, these AMMs are typically siloed from each other, which can cause friction for users wishing to deploy funds across multiple protocols and chains. Tarun Jaswan, Unbound Finance Founder and CEO, built the protocol envisioning a derivative layer that would unlock the liquidity trapped in various DEXs across multiple chains–”making them more capital efficient.” Unbound is a derivative layer on top of DEXes of all these chains making them more capital efficient and enabling the inter-flow of liquidity amongst all these chains. Unbound (@unboundfinance) November 23, 2021 Unbound is currently live on the Ethereum mainnet and the testnets of BSC, Polygon, Harmony and Avalanche, with deployment on Solana, Fantom, Arbitrum, KCC, HECO, Polkadot, Klaytn and Tezos coming soon. Backed by some of the top-tier VCs of the blockchain industry–including Pantera Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Ledger Prime, Kucoin, Gate, and MEXC, to name a few–Unbound has raised $8 million in the private sale rounds.
Andre Cronje, best known for creating the popular yield aggregator Yearn Finance (YFI), recently argued on Twitter that the DeFi sector should ditch the old buzzword and stop calling itself “decentralized”–in favour of a more accurate descriptive term. Although Cronje, who made a substantial contribution to the DeFi space, is ready to “retire” the coined term–not everyone agrees that it’s time to abandon the ideology. Terminology “Time to retire “decentralized finance,” wrote the prolific developer, known for his unique opinions. Time to retire "decentralized finance". We aren't decentralized, the old guard will keep trying to use it as their "attack" vector. "Open finance" or "web3 finance" is probably most accurate. Andre Cronje (@AndreCronjeTech) December 7, 2021 “We aren’t decentralized, the old guard will keep trying to use it as their “attack” vector,” he added in a disheartening tone, as he proposed a couple of alternative coined terms. According to Cronje, “open finance” or “web3 finance” present some better-suited options that would describe the sector more accurately. Cronje’s unreserved commentary is tough to challenge–thanks to his vast experience and track record. After launching Yearn in 2020, Andre made a move that granted him a somewhat legendary status in the crypto community–he chose to distribute all YFI tokens amongst liquidity providers, without withholding any for himself, or the Yearn development fund. Some of Cronje’s recent projects include the decentralized stablecoin exchange protocol Fixed Forex, and Keep3r Network, which facilitates the interaction between those looking for external developers and job executors–known as Keepers. He was also involved in developing Fantom–a highly scalable Layer 1 blockchain. While some industry insiders agreed with Cronje, others argued that decentralization represents a spectrum. Jacob Franek, the former co-founder at crypto market analytic CoinMetrics, said he’s been “pumping ‘open finance’ since 2018.” Been pumping “open finance” since 2018 Jacob Franek (Hiring for DAOs) (@panekkkk) December 8, 2021 Ideology However, not everyone is ready to abandon the terminology–nor the ideology. “I respectfully disagree”– chimed in Terraform Labs Co-Founder and CEO, Do Kwon. I respectfully disagree. The old guard wants to hoard power, we want to let go DeFi has taught us that the less you own, the more you have – decentralization should always be the north star ⭐️ Do Kwon 🌖 (@stablekwon) December 7, 2021 “The old guard wants to hoard power, we want to let go,” added Kwon in his response, arguing that “decentralization should always be the north star.” Terraform Labs’ blockchain protocol Terra deploys a suite of algorithmic decentralized stablecoins, which, according to Kwon, are a lifeline of DeFi. There is no DeFi without a decentralized stablecoin. Do Kwon 🌖 (@stablekwon) July 8, 2021 The network’s UST stablecoin, promoted for its superior scalable design, is surging in popularity, –leveraging broad yield-bearing and interchain usage.
At the beginning of the month, Bitcoin dropped to a three-month low of $46,500 in a market-wide flash crash that wiped over 18% of its value in a matter of hours. According to a report from analytics company Santiment, a spike in an often-overlooked metric preceded both this month’s crash and last year’s March sell-off and could be used to predict future price swings. Tracking the ROI of Bitcoin transactions reveals an interesting pattern Bitcoin’s latest crash has left the entire crypto market in shambles, dragging almost every single token deep into the red. The sharp 18% price dip caused a fair amount of short-term panic among sellers and even managed to shake the confidence of long-term holders. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt were best seen when looking at Bitcoin’s Network Realized Profit/Loss (NPL) chart, an often overlooked metric that tracks the total ROI of all daily Bitcoin transactions. To come up with the indicator, Santiment takes each unit of Bitcoin that moves on the blockchain and assumes its acquisition price was the price at which it last moved. Once the unit changes addresses again, it assumes this to be the selling price. The difference between the acquisition and sell price shows whether the coins moving on the blockchain are being “sold” at a profit or at a loss. This month’s crash triggered one of the largest drops in Bitcoin’s NPL and suggested that a significant amount of BTC transferred over the weekend was moved at a loss. And while a single spike on a chart certainly isn’t enough to be considered a good predictor of market sentiment, it’s worth noting that a similar dip occurred during Bitcoin’s May correction. According to Santiment, at the time, the dip in Bitcoin’s NPL pointed to wholesale capitulation and rising panic among “weak hands.” “On the whole, a significant drop in Bitcoin’s NPL could be indicative of rising FUD among some BTC holders, making moves in expectation of further downtrend,” Santiment said in its report.
Four leading virtual currency firms have joined hands to form a Japanese Metaverse association. The association seeks to promote metaverse tech developments and share essential information with industry experts throughout the world.” The association was established by virtual currency trading platform FXcoin, crypto wallet provider Ginco, crypto-asset investment solutions provider Intelligence Unit, and digital asset management firm Coinbest. Four crypto firms join hands to promote metaverse technology The Japanese metaverse association seeks to promote the advancement of Metaverse in the country by gathering relevant information about the concept of Metaverse and sharing it with crypto experts throughout the world. As per the official post, “JMA will be the platform for serving information exchange and creating synergy among companies and individuals involved in the business of metaverse.” The association also aspires to assist Japan in becoming one of the “leading” countries that actively support the evolving metaverse technology. The association also intends to serve global crypto organizations by delivering crucial information related to Metaverse and helping them improve the concept by delivering core insights. Tomoo Onishi, founder of the Japanese Metaverse Association and CEO of FXcoin wrote on the official website “Economic activities in the Metaverse are carried out by people and companies, and people can interact with each other through their avatars. They can buy, sell, and rent land, as well as build buildings and hold events such as live concerts and auctions. In other words, there are various business opportunities in the Metaverse, just like in the real world The association, founded on 7th December 2021, will actively encourage Japan to take charge of the developing Metaverse industry and assist the country in becoming a “collection point” of information for global crypto companies and organizations Metaverse gaining momentum in Japan The concept of Metaverse has been gaining tremendous popularity in Japan. Recently a Tokyo-based virtual reality company HIKKY had managed to raise approximately $57 million to expand its metaverse operations. Another leading Japanese gaming platform Gensokishi Online had earlier announced the launch of their crypto metaverse Metaworld, followed by Japanese tech giant SoftBank investing $150 million in a South Korean metaverse venture.
Major video game publisher Ubisoft has revealed Quartz, the company’s new platform that will allow players to earn, collect, and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the form of so-called Digits—“the first NFTs playable in AAA games and running on energy-efficient technology.” “Each and every Digit is a high-quality asset and a unique, collectible piece of a Ubisoft world,” the company said. “The first three Digits will be rewarded to early adopters for free on December 9, 12, and 15.” Introducing Ubisoft Quartz 💎We're bringing the first energy efficient NFTs playable in a AAA game to Ghost Recon: Breakpoint! Try it in the beta from December 9 with three free cosmetic drops and learn more here: Ubisoft (@Ubisoft) December 7, 2021 Coincidentally, the company has chosen its “live service” shooter Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint for this NFT debut—a game that was almost unilaterally lambasted on release for its technical issues coupled with an abundance of microtransactions. Mainstream gaming meets NFTs NFTs are a special type of non-interchangeable, cryptographically unique tokens that cannot be replicated or counterfeited. Thanks to these qualities, they became quite popular among collectors and their prices can reach tens of millions of dollars. In their turn, Ubisoft’s Digits will be represented in the company’s games as various cosmetic items that players can use to change the appearance of their characters, weapons or vehicles, for example. “Between the uniqueness of each item, materialized by the serial number engraved on them, and the higher control offered to players to use their Digits or trade them with others in a safe and secure environment, Ubisoft Quartz offers new and exciting ways for our community to engage with Ghost Recon Breakpoint,” explained Baptiste Chardon, blockchain product director at Ubisoft. According to the announcement, Digits will leverage Tezos (XTZ), an open-source decentralized blockchain based on a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol. Unlike proof-of-work (PoW) networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, PoS blockchains are much less computationally and energy-intensive. “We have been focusing on the exploration of this energy-efficient alternative, driving us to leverage Tezos, the Proof-of-Stake blockchain technology Ubisoft Quartz relies on,” noted blockchain technical director Didier Genevois. “This type of blockchain achieves the same results while using significantly less energy than Proof-of-Work protocols.” As an example, he noted that a transaction on Tezos is equivalent to 30 seconds of video streaming, “while on Bitcoin, it is equivalent to watching one year straight of video streaming!” “Ubisoft Quartz is a new experience that will co-exist with existing systems, most notably the current in-game store available in Ghost Recon Breakpoint. And keep in mind that the first Digits will be free for our players to claim,” Chardon added. Gamers’ breaking point However, comments on Twitter showed that many regular gamers don’t share Ubisoft’s enthusiasm when it comes to new monetization tools, despite Chardon reassuring that “Digits are cosmetics only” and “would not unbalance the experience for our players.” This attitude is partly understandable since Ubisoft has become notorious in recent years for adding controversial monetization systems in its games. Apart from cosmetic items, the company is also known for offering numerous “boosters” that have seemingly become mandatory in most of its projects. Ubi coming in with another reason that I feel like “AAA” devs need to collapse and let the industry heal. Unfinished games all over the place, greed running rampant, not caring about their quality anymore, all of them need to vanish so we can reset stuff. Captain Coco (@ImNovaG) December 8, 2021 For example, many accuse Ubisoft of intentionally creating “problems,” such as slow and tedious progression and character levelling, in popular series like Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry—only to se...
Non-fungible token (NFT) issuing protocol Charged Particles is partnering with SportsIcon to produce crypto-collectibles featuring legendary Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi ‘Gigi‘ Buffon, it said in a release shared with CryptoSlate. Charged Particles is a protocol that allows users to deposit ERC-20 tokens (ANY tokens) into an NFT. A scarce NFT (e.g. Art, Collectible, Virtual Real Estate, In-Game Item, etc.) can now be transformed into a basket holding a number of other tokens. The Principal amount can be time-locked inside the NFT, and through integration with Aave’s aTokens, the programmable yield from these DeFi yield-generating assets is just a few clicks away. Buffon NFTs Buffon, 43, is an Italian professional footballer who plays as a goalkeeper for Serie B club Parma. He is regarded as one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time and has made over 1,100 professional career appearances. And his NFTs are coming. “We are excited to announce a collaborative Nested NFT with Gigi Buffon who has partnered with SportsIcon, with art from The Guild NFT,” said Charged Particles in the release It added, “We’re absolutely thrilled to be a part of this and are eager to unveil what we’ve been working on in the upcoming weeks.” The Gigi Buffon Nested NFTs is coming this July, featuring 4 NFTs nested inside a single NFT. Each NFT will focus on the most amazing moments of Gigi Buffon’s career. Joining in on the collaboration is crypto-artist collective ‘The Guild,’ which continues to set itself apart in the NFT Space and is launching the second “Nested NFT” with Charged Particles. SportsIcon creates iconic NFTs centered around the careers of the world’s greatest athletes, like Gigi Buffon, who many consider being the greatest goalkeeper of all time. “Through SportsIcons relationship with Buffon, and our relationship with The Guild NFT; we’re able to come together for the first of many amazing collaborations!” said Charged Particles in the regard. Disclaimer: CryptoSlate holds a financial position in Charged Particles.
Will record labels and streaming services exist in the future? According to The New York Times, music artists complained about the payment systems in streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. What if artists could benefit directly from their fans? The NFT music Royal platform is getting a lot of attention Two weeks ago, artist-investment platform Royal closed a $55 million Series A funding led by a16z, which also included venture capital Coinbase Ventures, and artists like The Chainsmokers, Kygo, and Disclosure, according to Royal official Twitter. Royal is an NFT music platform founded by Justin Blau, AKA 3LAU, and JD Ross, the co-founder of Opendoor, where artists give their fans direct ownership of their songs and the possibility of receiving royalties, so if the artist succeeds, the fan also succeeds, it’s an equal distribution of benefits, according to Royal’s website. Electronic DJ and founder Justin Blau said: “A true fan might want to own something way earlier than a speculator would even get wind of it. Democratizing access to asset classes is a huge part of crypto’s future.” Its latest release song is called “WAVEFORM”, which gives its owner 100% of the rights and it is open for bidding right now until December 7 at 6:05 pm CET, according to Royal`s official OpenSea account. Royal’s first NFT drop was called “Worst Case”, which gave 50% of the ownership to its fans through 333 tokens, launched last October. Other known blockchain-based music platforms like Opulous and Audius, which have also been growing over the past months. A new era in music concerts The traditional way of going to a concert or to a festival is changing. Last October we saw the first two festivals hosted on a metaverse. Decentraland hosted its first Metaverse Festival including performances by top DJs/producers such as Deadmau5 and 3LAU. Roblox, through a partnership with Insomniac, hosted the Insomniac World Party, which brought the Electric Daisy Carnival to the metaverse, shown in the picture below, including artists like Kaskade, Zedd, Kygo, Alan Walker and many more, according to Roblox´s website. The adoption of NFTs in the music industry is growing faster every day, from NFT music platforms to metaverse festivals. It would not be a surprise if in the future music concerts or festivals like Coachella, issued their tickets as NFTs.
The entire world, including the Bitcoin industry, has been ravaged by the coronavirus outbreak over the past few weeks; indeed, to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, authorities have been forced to enact emergency measures, thereby shutting down thousands of businesses and resulting in millions laid off around the world. In short: the economic impact has been huge. It’s no surprise, then, that governments have been forced to react. Canada announced a CAD$82 billion stimulus package, the European Central Bank upped its large-scale asset purchase operations, and Hong Kong pledged to send its citizens HK$10,000 each. But the U.S. has gone big. Really big. Announced in a press conference on Mar. 24, White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow believes that the United States Government’s stimulus package will “come to roughly $6 trillion.” Reports indicate that $2 trillion of this sum (if passed) will be direct cash payments to businesses and individuals who are suffering under the stress of the coronavirus outbreak and that the rest of the $6 trillion (a remainder of $4 trillion) is for the Federal Reserve. To contextualize the staggering sum that is $6 trillion, I shared the below message. $6 trillion is the same as one-third of America’s entire GDP, 130% of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, enough money for $850 for every human being on Earth, or enough money to buy 900 million Bitcoin at current prices — if 900 million BTC existed, that is. Here's some perspective on the astronomical number that is $6 trillion. $6 trillion is the same as – 1/3 of America's GDP– 130% of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet– Enough money for $850 for each human being on Earth– or 900 million Bitcoin Crazy. Nick Chong (@_Nick_Chong) March 24, 2020 Bullish for Bitcoin Although none of this stimulus will go directly towards Bitcoin, analysts believe that this money will only dramatically boost the value proposition of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Preston Pysh, a prominent market analyst and podcaster, recently commented on the importance of the stimulus to Bitcoin in a podcast with Anthony Pompliano, a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. On the checks that will soon be spent to American households, Pysh remarked that there are many millennials (and presumably those in other demographics) that are ready to allocate a fair portion of these checks towards Bitcoin because they see the value in this technology and in a sound, digital money in a digital world where scarcity has fittingly become fleeting. More broadly, analysts believe that this stimulus may be the impetus of a great bout of inflation, similar to the one seen after the abolishment of the gold standard. BitMEX Research wrote in a recent report that considering the influx of monetary and fiscal stimulus that has begun, there is a high chance Bitcoin will see dramatic appreciation: “In our view, in this changed economic regime, where the economy and financial markets are set loose, with no significant anchor at all, not even inflation targeting, it could be the biggest opportunity Bitcoin has seen, in its short lifetime.” This has been corroborated by Su Zhu, CIO and CEO of Three Arrows Capital. Per previous reports from CryptoSlate, the investor believes that the U.S. dollar is set on a path for inflation it “will be hard to turn back from,” which will likely be a factor that will fuel Bitcoin’s rally to “$50,000 relatively quickly.”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed his vision for ETH 2.0 in a blog post this week titled “Endgame.” He spoke of developing trustlessness and censorship resistance to levels by his accepted standards. To achieve this, he laid out a “plausible roadmap,” with several surprises, including a proposed second-tier of staking using fewer network resources. The final release of ETH 2.0 is something of a running gag within the crypto community. Moreso every time gas fees spike on increased network activity. But given Ethereum’s sizeable network effect and the promise of lower gas fees, more decentralization, and better security, it appears investors, as a whole, are willing to wait. The endgame To meet accepted standards for trustlessness and censorship resistance related to Ethereum 2.0, Buterin detailed a “plausible roadmap” to achieving this. Starting with a second staking tier that will lower resource requirements for block validation. Buterin proposes transactions get split into (100) buckets, with a Merkle or Verkle tree root following each bucket. As these “tree root” processes allow for large-scale data verification by someone who only has the tree’s root, the idea is to increase proof efficiency, thus scalability. “The transactions in a block are split into 100 buckets, with a Merkle or Verkle tree state root after each bucket. Each second-tier staker gets randomly assigned to one of the buckets. A block is only accepted when at least 2/3 of the validators assigned to each bucket sign off on it.” He also mentioned employing roll-up/privacy technology, such as fraud proofs and zk-SNARKs, for an added layer of security on top of the bucket system. Ethereum Layer-2 platform Polygon is due to host the zk Summit this Thursday, in which they plan to reveal a significant announcement to do with zero-knowledge technology. Buterin sees value in introducing data available sampling (DAS). This essentially offers a light version of the blockchain, meaning block validation can happen without keeping a complete record of the entire blockchain. Finally, to improve censorship resistance, Buterin proposes the creation of secondary transaction channels to handle block validation on a distributed basis. In this setup, block production is centralized, but block validation is trustless and decentralized. When is a finalized ETH 2.0 getting released? The phase 0 Beaconchain rollout occurred over a year ago, on December 1, 2020. This laid the foundation for Ethereum 2.0 and also introduced staking. The current phase devs are working on is “the merge.” As Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 are running in parallel, merging the two chains is necessary to take the upgrade forward. Official estimates put the merge date at Q1 2022. But, considering the delay in setting off the “difficulty time bomb,” some say June 2022 is a more likely date. The time bomb is a process to make Ethereum mining progressively more challenging until it becomes unprofitable to mine ETH. The idea is to gradually transition from a Proof-of-Work chain to a Proof-of-Stake chain. The final implementation is “Shard chains,” which refers to managing transaction load across 64 shard chains for improved scalability. The estimated date is given as “sometime in 2022.”
Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group has expanded its crypto derivatives offerings by launching Micro Ether Futures. The number one and most diverse marketplace for derivatives has now launched two micro cryptocurrency products in this year alone. CME launches micro Ether futures According to the global head of Equity Index and Alternative Investment Products, Tim McCourt, the Micro Ether launch shows the growth and liquidity of cryptocurrency futures and options. Micro Ether units will be one-tenth (0.1) of the Ether, and this futures product allows several market participants to hedge the price risk of their spot Ether. It also provides a more flexible way to execute trading strategies for Ether without losing the features of the larger-sized Ether Futures on CME. Other key stakeholders have also expressed how Micro Ether futures falls within the CME Group goal of offering the best trading options for users. According to the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Product Development at Interactive Brokers, Steven Sanders, the wide range of futures products on the CME Group gives active traders and institutional investors the chance to take advantage of market opportunities with less exposure to risks across markets. The Micro Ether futures product further shows CME Group’s status as an innovator and market leader. The Group offers the most diverse categories of assets derivatives for clients. It enables clients to trade options, future, OTC, and cash while allowing them to optimize their portfolios and analyze data. Ethereum’s price still trading sideways While the announcement is over 24 hours old, the value of Ethereum and other digital assets have not reacted positively to the news as the market keeps trading sideways. According to Ethereum data on CryptoSlate, Ethereum has seen its value rise by close to 4% in the last 24 hours. However, within the last seven days, ETH’s value dropped to as low as $3700 —during this period, the wider crypto market also experienced a massive drop in price.
Global cryptocurrency exchange Binance has reportedly set up a $200 million fund that will directly invest the company’s stake in the emerging crypto gaming and metaverse sector of the digital space. As per the official blog post, Binance will be collaborating with Hong Kong-based Animoca brands through Binance smart chain $1B growth program. Binance and Animoca Brands to invest in blockchain gaming ventures Binance smart chain $1B growth program intends to sponsor and “incubate” early gaming startups that are built on Binance Smart Chain protocol. As per the official post, Binance and Animoca brands will be contributing $100 million each to the program, allowing the shortlisted gaming projects to accelerate and expand their crypto niche in the GameFi domain. According to Animoca Brands’ co-founder Yat Siu, the gaming projects that will be shortlisted via this initiative will also be entitled to receive additional benefits apart from funding. “Early GameFi projects require funding to build their products, and need industry expertise for open-world gameplay and tokenomics, as well as networking opportunities to establish growth in the blockchain gaming and open metaverse. This investment program will provide these necessities to the projects that we think have the potential to make blockchain mainstream.” Siu added The program aims at helping early GameFi projects that require early phase funding to create their products. The program will help such projects acquire steady momentum in the market and will help increase their visibility in the emerging GameFi and metaverse sector. Binance has recently become a hub for increased user activity after the network had undergone a significant network upgrade. The official post also outlines how Binance has become one of the leading crypto exchanges hosting over 2.1 million active addresses. “BSC is one of the largest blockchain ecosystems with over 2.1 million daily active addresses in the past weeks. In 2021, games and play-to-earn opportunities on BSC have gone through a significant uptick in traffic and unique wallet interactions.” the post further reads. This is not the first time when Binance has actively invested in a fund to boost crypto activities. In October, Binance had created a $1 billion fund for BSC to increase the adoption of crypto assets globally.
Social trading platform Enso Finance has announced a month-long “vampire attack” on six decentralized finance (DeFi) index projects in a bid to siphon their combined liquidity of nearly $1 billion. “Liquidity is the fuel that powers DeFi and it is the essence of Enso’s platform,” noted Enso co-founder Connor Howe. “We want to show the community just how innovative we are, and there’s no better way of doing so than incentivizing existing users to migrate. This is the first time anyone’s attempting to attack six protocols at once, so we’re very anxious to get started!” We’re coming for your liquidity and users 🩸 Bringing back the fun from defi 1.0 into 2.0. Connor (@ConnorSB13) December 7, 2021 According to Enso’s website, the platform’s schtick is to provide users and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) with tools to “create trading strategies with endless possibilities and share the alpha with your friends and the Enso community.” Meanwhile, a vampire attack is an attempt to transfer liquidity—represented by various digital assets that users lock up on a platform—from one project to another. The most noteworthy vampire attack so far occurred last year when SushiSwap, a fork of popular DeFi protocol Uniswap, tried to syphon the latter’s liquidity. What we do in the indices The attack will be conducted against projects such as Index Coop, Set Protocol, PieDAO, dHEDGE, Powerpool, and Indexed Finance. Each of them is focused on various crypto index products that are pegged to prices of assets such as DeFi tokens or NFTs. According to metrics tracker DeFi Llama, the total value locked (TVL) on these platforms currently amounts to around $930 million. Index Coop ($409 million locked) and Set Protocol ($453 million) are responsible for the lion’s share of this sum. Meanwhile, PieDAO ($13.8 million locked), dHEDGE ($20.8 million), Powerpool ($18 million), and Indexed ($11.4 million) have roughly $64 million in liquidity combined. Naturally, a “vampiric” platform usually tries to incentivize users to transfer their assets by offering some enticing benefits. In Enso’s case, the project promised to reimburse gas fees as well as airdrop its ENSO governance tokens and unique NFTs to early adopters.
The government of British Overseas Territory Gibraltar has announced it will use blockchain technology in a pilot scheme to deliver public services. “The pilot rollout will trial blockchain technology to achieve greater interconnectivity between government departments, individuals, and organisations.“ The rollout will use blockchain technology to trial interconnectivity between departments, individuals, and organizations. What’s more, the setup will be administered by Mexican exchange Bitso and blockchain developers IOVlabs. Both firms were praised as integral to the Gibraltar government’s work in distributed ledger technology. Especially in the close working relationship established and the valuable expertise they provide. Gibraltar positioning itself as an innovative jurisdiction Blockchain refers to a distributed database network. While cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin operate on blockchain technology, rightly or wrongly, crypto is often seen as merely for speculative purposes. Nonetheless, blockchain as a transparent and immutable system offers many more uses other than cryptocurrency. The proposed blockchain solution will integrate and improve Gibraltar’s existing eGov system. Initially, it will enable users to store government-issued and certified credentials. While not explicitly stated in the press release, this is assumed to mean documents such as driving licenses and passports. The Minister for Digital and Financial Services Albert Isola said Gibraltar is adopting blockchain in line with its forward-thinking intents as an innovative jurisdiction. “Gibraltar has successfully positioned itself as a forward-thinking jurisdiction for innovative businesses developing and offering blockchain-related solutions” Isola added that by integrating this technology into the region’s public services, he hopes it will improve the way people interact with the government. “The implementation of blockchain technology into our processes in partnership with our stakeholders working here will further improve the way in which our community interacts with the government.” Barriers to blockchain adoption While Gibraltar’s approval and use of blockchain represent a massive coup, there are still challenges when it comes to greater adoption of the technology. An article by data-driven marketing firm TechTarget highlighted some problems limiting wider blockchain adoption. This includes a shortfall in employee skills. TechTarget state that, as an emerging technology, there aren’t enough suitably qualified workers to go around. What’s more, the expense and difficulty of acquiring talent puts off many organizations from even trying. Trust also represents an area of concern, with some firms wary of the technology itself and other (anonymous) users on the network. “This challenge cuts in two directions: Organizations may not trust the security of the technology itself, and they may not trust other parties on a blockchain network.” The lack of a universal standard forces organizations to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Competing blockchains cannot generally talk to one another, and organizations fear adopting a chain that will fall away. Without universal interoperability, organizations are cautious about taking the plunge.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, recently revealed she doesn’t hold any Bitcoin, arguing conflict of interest. According to Ocasio-Cortez, known by the moniker AOC, investing in cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, would prevent her from doing her job “as ethically and impartially” as possible. No Bitcoin “I do not believe members of Congress should hold/trade individual stock and I choose not to hold any so I can remain impartial about policymaking,” said AOC in an Instagram story on Monday. “I also extend that to digital assets/currencies,” she added, replying to a follower inquiring if she invests in Bitcoin. AOC argued that “having access to sensitive information and upcoming policy” presents a clear conflict of interest. While AOC made her stance on the matter abundantly clear, not all members of Congress shy away from investing in crypto. STOCK Act While in office, members of Congress are permitted to buy, sell and trade stocks and other investments. However, according to the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, passed in 2012, members of Congress are required to disclose their individual sales and purchases within 45 days following the transaction. The STOCK Act’s key provisions were weakened in 2013–reducing the safeguards against insider trading. Crypto-friendly Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis disclosed purchasing a substantial amount of Bitcoin back in August. Her investment worth between $50,001 and $100,000 marked one of the first congressional cryptocurrency purchases, according to Quiver Quantitative. The alternative data company that tracks personal trading activities by US Senators and Representatives revealed that the only other significant bet in crypto was made by Pat Toomey. The Pennsylvania Senator disclosed acquiring up to $15,000 of Grayscale Ethereum Trust and up to $15,000 Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in June.
While all categories of blockchain have been blazing hot in 2021, gaming took the top spot with nearly 13% of all investments. With the seasons seemingly moving from DeFi to NFT and now to GameFi, the second half of the year was overtaken by huge gaming announcements and figures. For example, on August 6th, Axie Infinity generated $17 million in revenue, surpassing even Honor of Kings. What makes GameFi so appealing, and what will happen once this initial burst of momentum wears off? The term GameFi, short for Game Finance, was coined by Mary Ma in the 2019 Wuzhen World Blockchain Conference hosted by 8BTC, MixMarvel’s CSO, and refers to the integration of finance with gaming. The primary means by which games generate their own financial ecosystems is via NFTs and liquidity mining. In this way, games become “Play to Earn”, or P2E in short. Features that GameFi differs from traditional gaming: Ownership of assets: In GameFi, through on-chain smart contracts, the game’s assets belong to the player rather than the developer. Tradable assets in crypto markets: With the ownership of the assets, players can trade these assets, either NFT or tokens, in the open Crypto markets with other players. Transparent data: All GameFi game codes are open source and transparent, and developers cannot simply change these codes. A player can also participate in-game upgrades and changes via a DAO, giving them a greater degree of participation. Current Status of GameFi Despite its promise, there are still several major problems most projects face in the GameFi industry. As an investor, you should assess the projects based on their likelihood of overcoming these challenges. Small player base There are roughly 3 billion traditional gamers, whereas the user base of GameFi is still only a fraction of DeFi’s total of 1.33 million. In the era of mobile gaming, on-chain games are predominantly based on the web, meaning it is unlikely to enter the mainstream until there are significant developments in mobile on-chain gaming. Another reason that traditional gamers are not flocking to GameFi en masse is that it requires players, at this stage, to understand concepts such as cryptocurrency wallets, key phrases, and gas fees. Congestion and high gas fees Great games require frequent transactions, which puts a high demand on the network’s TPS (Transactions Per Second) and gas fees. The popularity of CryptoKitties in 2017 caused serious congestion on the Ethereum network, for example. One response to this has been to build out ad hoc infrastructure to support popular games, like Ethereum migrating Axie Infinity to a sidechain. Poor playability Even the most popular GameFi projects still look like traditional 3A games. In many cases, there is much room for improvement with playability—making the games purely money-making methods for many players rather than a fun activity that can generate some income. This raises the question of whether integrating the money motive in games necessarily makes them less fun. If a particular game doesn’t generate enough income in the GameFi space, the player will leave to another. Therefore, this creates a cycle where developers are rewarded for focusing on the finance rather than the gaming aspect of a project. One example of this is CryptoBlades, which saw a mass exodus of players in July after the game reduced its SKILL (the native token) rewards sending token prices plummeting. Hence, it takes longer than expected for players to recoup their initial investment, causing a more and more serious problem of players losing. The same thing happened with Axie Infinity. In the game, the token Smooth Love Potion (SLP) is an important source of revenue for players to earn from the game. When the price of SLP fell, it led to a decrease in Axie Infinity’s revenue. Axie Infinity once helped people in countries like the Philippines to make a living at the beginning, but now players’ daily income from the game is less than the local minimu...
According to Economic Times, Indian crypto exchange WazirX has opened an account with Kotak Mahindra Bank that will allow the exchange to send and receive payments from investors. With this new collaboration, Kotak Mahindra has become the first Indian bank to embrace the crypto community after suffering through a major payment freeze imposed by high-level banks for almost 8 months. Kotak Mahindra Bank to initiate business with WazirX WazirX has opened an account with Kotak Mahindra that will help facilitate the exchange to pay and receive money from investors. The ET report outlines that the account will become operational once the mandatory paperwork has been filed and documented. “WazirX has opened an account with Kotak which can be used to receive and pay money to investors trading on the exchange. The account is yet to become operational. Paperwork, KYC, and some testing is on,” a person familiar with the case told Economic Time The ET report further highlighted that the Bank is also looking forward to initiating business with other prominent exchanges such as ZebPay to expand its service portfolio. About a year ago, WazirX closed its account with ICICI Bank, India’s second-largest private bank following the news of RBI expressing qualms about cryptocurrency trading in the country. WazirX had later shifted its operations to MobiKwik, which is a digital wallet payment service in India, to send and receive money from investors trading on the exchange. Back in 2018, the Indian government had adopted a rigorous stance on crypto by restricting its trade in the country. The ban was later struck down by the Supreme Court of India allowing banks to trade cryptocurrencies as long as they conduct due diligence and comply with the anti-money laundering regulations. The news of Kotak forming a partnership with WazirX comes at a time when the Indian government is one step away from introducing a crypto bill in the parliament. As per Economic Times, the new cryptocurrency bill will be examined by the union cabinet first before it is introduced in the parliament later this week.
AI robot Sophia is set to be tokenized and auctioned as part of a Metaverse project called “Noah’s Ark.” Binance is launching this campaign as an Initial Game Offering (IGO). It will feature 100 “intelligent NFTs” available for auction on December 16 and be known as “The Transmedia Universe of Sophia beingAI.” “The IGO will showcase a history-making limited-edition one hundred Intelligent NFTs featuring Sophia beingAI. The collection will be known as, “The Transmedia Universe of Sophia beingAI.” As the world’s first, IGOs promise a new level of innovation in crypto funding. But what exactly are they? What is a Binance Initial Game Offering (IGO)? Up to 2017, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) were the industry standard in how crypto projects raised money. The ICO scene birthed many big-hitting projects, including Ethereum and NEO. But ICOs hit trouble following a series of high-profile exit scams, including OneCoin, headed by self-proclaimed “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova. Ignatova’s “global tour” convinced investors to part with a reported $4.9 billion before she disappeared with the funds in 2017. As expected, this and similar incidents tarnished the term ICO, leading to their demise. Since then, different types of fundraising concepts have come into play, such as Security Token Offerings (STOs) and Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs). In a world-first, Binance, using Sophia and the Noah’s Ark project, is launching the IGO concept. IGOs operate in much the same way as any other fundraising concept but are exclusively related to gaming projects. As such, they can include early-access passes, weapons, characters, and exclusive skins for early investors. “The collections can launch either via auction, flat rate sales, or mystery boxes. IGOs can be conducted over several rounds, offering a different number of assets each round with a tiered price structure.“ What is Noah’s Ark? Noah’s Ark is billed as an “intelligent metaverse” that intends to preserve and evolve humans’ culture and collective intelligence. Sophia comes into play as a virtual anime version in this metaverse and will be known as “Sophia beingAI” – an intelligent NFT (iNFT). While NFTs are generally inanimate, Sophia beingAI, as an iNFT, is reportedly able to interact independently with people inside Noah’s Ark, much the same way as Sophia does in real life. Commenting on this, Jeanne Lim, the co-founder of beingAI, said Sophia beingAI would provide a link between humans and technology to help us attain states such as unconditional love. “As one of our AI beings, we hope Sophia beingAI will bring together humanity and technology to help humans attain our true nature of unconditional love and pure possibilities.”