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Publications
- Microsoft Adds Dedicated AI Key to Windows 11 Keyboard
- We’re Not Here to Sell You Another ChatGPT’: Perplexity AI CEO
- Logan Paul Launches CryptoZoo NFT ‘Buyback,’ Files Countersuit As Legal Battles Rage On
- Solana’s LFG Token Lures Ethereum Users, Plans Second Airdrop and Grants Program
Solana's “Less Fn Gas”
- Saga Airdrop Coming Ahead of Blockchain Launch—Here’s Who Is Eligible
- Emerge Weirdest News Stories of 2023
- XRP surged more than +27% in the last hour, following a tweet made by crypto newswire “DB” about twenty minutes ago.
- the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. in terms of trading volume, today announced it is halting payments to and from Silvergate bank.
Citing recent developments around the San Francisco-based crypto bank and “out of an abundance of caution,” Coinbase said it is “no longer accepting or initiating payments to or from Silvergate.”
- A scene from a promo video Adidas released for its metaverse NFT collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club, PUNKS Comic, and gmoney. Image: Adidas
Elon Musk and Tesla Accepting Bitcoin 'Opened Door' for Adidas' Web3 Plans
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Elon Musk and Tesla Accepting Bitcoin 'Opened Door' for Adidas' Web3 Plans
The EV company's short-lived experiment with Bitcoin helped crypto advocates at Adidas "start the conversation" around blockchain, said its Web3 lead.
Stephen Graves
By Stephen Graves
Mar 2, 2023
2 min read
A scene from a promo video Adidas released for its metaverse NFT collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club, PUNKS Comic, and gmoney. Image: Adidas
A scene from a promo video Adidas released for its metaverse NFT collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club, PUNKS Comic, and gmoney. Image: Adidas
When Elon Musk announced that Tesla would accept Bitcoin as payment for its cars, it proved to be a short-lived initiative. But the EV company's move opened a door for Adidas' plans to use blockchain, said the sportswear company's Web3 lead Erika Wykes-Sneyd.
"Elon Musk helped to open that door for us, just a little bit, so we could capture people's imaginations internally," Wykes-Sneyd told Decrypt at the NFT Paris conference. "We did use it as a slipstream," she added—one that enabled Web3 advocates at the company to "start the conversation" around what Adidas could do with blockchain technology.
- What happens when you combine a dubious crypto project, a rekt investor, and a wealthy founder enjoying his profits? A fight in an upscale shopping center, of course.
Prominent Venezuelan crypto influencer Newman Perez was earlier this month confronted at a Colombian shopping center by a man who accused him of stealing his funds. The confrontation, caught on camera, was uploaded to TikTok, shared on Twitter, and has since gone viral.
- Federal Reserve leaves interest rates low. Image: Shutterstock
Crypto Bank Custodia Is Taking on the Fed—Here’s Everything You Need to Know
Features
Long Reads
Crypto Bank Custodia Is Taking on the Fed—Here’s Everything You Need to Know
Getting a master account would grant Custodia access to the FedWire network, which surpassed null quadrillion worth of transactions for the first time last year.
By Stacy Elliott
Mar 2, 2023
6 min read
Stacy Elliott
Federal Reserve leaves interest rates low. Image: Shutterstock
Federal Reserve leaves interest rates low. Image: Shutterstock
On the eve of the Federal Reserve Board’s deadline last week to reconsider Custodia Bank’s application to become a member institution, CEO and founder Caitlin Long told Decrypt she doubted it would be approved.
She was right.
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The Fed denied the application, saying in a short announcement that Custodia’s business plan is “inconsistent with the required factors under the law.“ When the board initially denied the application on January 27, it was more specific: “The firm’s novel business model and proposed focus on crypto-assets present significant safety and soundness risks.”
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But there was other news, too. U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl denied a motion to have Custodia’s lawsuit against the Fed dismissed. That makes it more likely (but doesn’t guarantee) that the question of whether the Kansas City Federal Reserve properly handled Custodia’s application will be answered in court.
“From our perspective, we were pushed into this,” Long said about the lawsuit.
The bank is a Wyoming-chartered special purpose depository institution, meaning that it can custody crypto on behalf of its customers. It originally filed its application for a federal master account in October 2020, a month after San Francisco-based crypto exchange Kraken did the same for its own crypto bank. By early 2021, a representative of the Kansas City Fed told Custodia its application featured "no showstoppers,” according to the lawsuit.
At the time, Long thought a decision was imminent.
- Tether is the issuer of the USDT stablecoin. Image: Shutterstock
Tether Has No Exposure to Sinking Crypto Bank Silvergate, Says CTO
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Tether Has No Exposure to Sinking Crypto Bank Silvergate, Says CTO
The company behind the world's biggest stablecoin has no links to troubled bank Silvergate, according to Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino.
Mat Di Salvo
By Mat Di Salvo
Mar 3, 2023
2 min read
Tether is the issuer of the USDT stablecoin. Image: Shutterstock
Tether is the issuer of the USDT stablecoin. Image: Shutterstock
The chief technology officer of Tether has said his company has no exposure to Silvergate, as companies across the crypto industry line up to distance themselves from the troubled bank.
Silvergate is a U.S. bank that caters to the crypto industry, which has historically struggled to obtain banking, but has been rocked by financial woes as of late.
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The San-Francisco bank last month revealed a null billion net loss, as well as a decline in customer deposits of roughly $14 billion in the last quarter of 2022.
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Yesterday, it delayed its annual 10-K report filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission because it needed “additional time” to allow an independent accounting firm to complete certain audit procedures.
Now, its stock is plunging fast and crypto companies are severing ties with the firm. America’s biggest crypto exchange Coinbase earlier today said it was halting payments to and from the bank. In a Thursday tweet, Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino said: “Tether does not have any exposure to Silvergate.”
Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin and most-traded cryptocurrency, is apparently doing well—despite the crypto industry’s current brutal bear market.
It reported last month that it still generated $700 million in profits in Q4 2022, despite processing $21 billion in redemptions last year.
Its stablecoin, USDT, is the third-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum, with a market cap of $71 billion.
And it changes hands more than any other digital asset: its 24-hour trading volume stands at over $34 billion, according to CoinGecko.
- HyperPlay, a Web3 gaming launcher, is now live via early access. Available for all major platforms but optimized for MetaMask users, the app was co-developed by Web3 gaming DAO Game7 and the pseudonymous JacobC.eth, a former MetaMask operations lead.
- Snoop Dogg. Image: Shutterstock
Snoop Dogg Joins Crypto Casino Roobet as ‘Chief Ganjaroo Officer’
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Snoop Dogg Joins Crypto Casino Roobet as ‘Chief Ganjaroo Officer’
The iconic rapper takes his next step into Web3, this time with crypto gambling.
Jason Nelson
By Jason Nelson
Mar 1, 2023
2 min read
Snoop Dogg. Image: Shutterstock
Snoop Dogg. Image: Shutterstock
Crypto makes strange bedfellows. Roobet, a crypto casino game platform, announced today a partnership with music icon Snoop Dogg.
“Turns out, I’ve been a kangaroo this entire time,” Snoop Dogg said in a surreal press release, referencing Roobet’s kangaroo mascot. “These guys are doing something different. This partnership just feels natural, and we’re going to blaze a trail for the future of online entertainment.”
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Launched in 2019 as a division of Raw Entertainment B.V., Roobet claims over 3 billion wagers have been bet on the site, even though it only operates in select markets—excluding the United States.
“Roobet took amazing care of me even before they knew who I was, bringing the ultimate player experience, and I been sayin’ Roooooo ever since,” Snoop said. “We share the love of doing new things, and we care about our fans—so we’re gonna change the game and do it better than it’s ever been done.”
- Otherside is a metaverse world being developed by the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Image: Yuga Labs
How Yuga Labs Could Have Avoided Otherdeed Ethereum NFT Mint Chaos: Infura Co-Founder
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How Yuga Labs Could Have Avoided Otherdeed Ethereum NFT Mint Chaos: Infura Co-Founder
Infura co-founder E.G. Galano sees recent NFT minting and gas fee issues as history repeating itself.
Kate Irwin
By Kate Irwin
May 10, 2022
4 min read
Otherside is a metaverse world being developed by the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Image: Yuga Labs
Otherside is a metaverse world being developed by the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Image: Yuga Labs
Last week, Yuga Labs’ massive Otherdeed NFT mint, for virtual land deeds in the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse realm Otherside, clogged the Ethereum mainnet with transaction demand. This triggered a gas war and network chaos that could have been prevented altogether, according to E.G. Galano, the co-founder and general manager of Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura.
While Yuga Labs saw $561 million in trading volume in just 24 hours, the mint became the sixth-largest source of burned Ethereum ever, as collectors burnt more than $157 million in ETH on April 30. The mint was dubbed a “nightmare scenario” for buyers, as thousands of transactions failed. Yuga later refunded those with failed transactions.
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If you ask Galano, much of this chaos was just blockchain history repeating itself.
“It’s very reminiscent of some of the early NFT projects, whether that’s CryptoKitties or some of the early ICOs, that didn’t bake in a mechanism to try to spread out that load over a larger amount of time,” Galano said in an interview with Decrypt. “There’s a few different mechanisms that people have used so that it’s not like everybody has to rush to get their transaction in on the very first block when the sale is live.”
Infura Co-Founder E.G. Galano Talks Otherside NFT Mint, Ethereum Gas Fees
Infura co-founder and general manager E.G. Galano talks to Decrypt's Kate Irwin about what Infura does, how the Bored Ape Yacht Club could have avoided the hiccups with its Otherdeed NFT mint, other hot NFT collections like Moonbirds, and Ethereum's gas fee issues.
Go to video page
While Yuga Labs implied that the Ethereum mainnet was to blame, Galano sees the blockchain as having worked as intended.
“For what happened to the network itself, that’s just the transaction throughput on the network, and the gas price auction working as intended,” he said. “There’s a limited amount of capacity for transaction throughput when you’re dealing with any decentralized blockchain.”
In his view, the Otherdeed chaos was preventable if the Yuga Labs team had put in more legwork to prepare for the enormous demand of the mint.
Infura recently assisted the PROOF team with the highly successful mint of Moonbirds NFTs. Galano cited the Moonbirds team’s focus on pre-registrations as one key factor for why that mint went so smoothly. The PROOF team also “proactively reached out” to Infura beforehand to help assess and address any potential backend issues.
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Despite Otherdeed transactions clogging the Ethereum mainnet almost immediately, users kept on trying to mint. In the wake of the fiasco, many NFT collectors wonder whether super-high-demand NFT mints like Otherdeed will continue to cause problems on Ethereum, and what can be done to solve it.
Galano points to the current speculative nature of NFT PFP collecting as part of the problem.
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“My opinion on how gas auctions like this will go is it’s heavily impacted by the speculative nature of the market right now, where there’s really no set floor price for a lot of these things—or if there is, it’s wildly volatile,” Galano said. “And people are looking at these NFTs as collectibles, so some of them have a much different investment thesis that sets their price tolerance for that gas fee much higher than others.”
Otherdeed’s hiccups could have also been prevented by launching the NFTs on an Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain with a higher block gas limit, like Polygon, Galano suggested.
But at the same time, the Infura exec is so bullish on Ethereum that he doesn’t think any of the rival chains are really necessary. He cited Ethereum’s anticipated merge and move to proof of stake, optimistic rollups, and sharding as measures that will increase the network’s capacity.
“My controversial view is that everything could exist on Ethereum, from a technical perspective,” Galano said. “There’s nothing that’s being done outside of Ethereum that couldn’t be adopted within Ethereum. But you could argue that there are things that were done on Ethereum that could’ve been done on Bitcoin if people were willing to make the changes to the Bitcoin protocol to make that happen.”
- Blockchain software company Alchemy has launched a new product called Spearmint, which aims to make the NFT allowlist signup and management process easier for creators.
Spearmint is a free product NFT creators can use to automate much of the allowlist creation process using Spearmint’s tools. According to a statement, Alchemy claims users can create an allowlist on Spearmint in under 10 minutes and connect it to a project’s application and smart contract “with a few simple lines of code.”
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At launch, Spearmint will be able to support NFT projects on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
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Why do NFT creators use allowlists? NFTs—unique blockchain tokens that signify ownership over digital assets—have sometimes slowed down networks like Ethereum when “mints” (i.e., primary sales) happen, causing Ethereum gas prices to soar and “gas wars” to occur (the CryptoKitties and Yuga Labs’ Otherside land mint are two good examples of gas wars in NFT history).
The concern around gas wars and a desire to create anticipation and exclusivity cause many NFT creators to create “allowlists,” which essentially are lists of certain wallet addresses, typically limited to the number of NFTs available in a given collection, that are cleared to mint that collection.
“We’ve consistently heard from the thousands of NFT projects we’ve worked with that minting is the most critical and most broken part of building with NFTs,” Alchemy said in a statement on the reason it created Spearmint.
- News
Coins
Alchemy Launches Dapp Builder for the Next Billion Web3 Developers
The blockchain developer says its new tool can spin up decentralized applications in 4 minutes.
Jason Nelson
By Jason Nelson
Feb 27, 2023
3 min read
Image: Alchemy
Image: Alchemy
The goal of mass adoption is a common refrain for the blockchain industry, but there’s a steep learning curve in onboarding the masses to Web3. Alchemy hopes its new Create Web3 Dapp or CW3D platform will help bring more people into decentralized technologies.
“Our overall mission and vision is to bring blockchain or Web3 to a billion people,” Elan Halpern, Product Manager at Alchemy, told Decrypt in an interview. “The way we really see that happening is by empowering developers.”
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- Animoca Brands is the company behind NFT game The Sandbox. Image: The Sandbox
Maximizing Profits Will ‘Kill’ Web3: Animoca Brands Chairman
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Maximizing Profits Will ‘Kill’ Web3: Animoca Brands Chairman
Yat Siu described royalties as the gas that keep an economy of creators humming.
André Beganski
By André Beganski
Feb 27, 2023
4 min read
Animoca Brands is the company behind NFT game The Sandbox. Image: The Sandbox
Animoca Brands is the company behind NFT game The Sandbox. Image: The Sandbox
Creator royalties have taken a back seat in the NFT space as marketplace OpenSea recently slashed fees in response to its new rival Blur, which has surged ahead in terms of trading volume on NFTs in part by charging zero trading fees and not enforcing creator royalties.
Creator royalties, however, provide an ongoing revenue stream to NFT projects beyond their initial sales—typically a 5% to 10% cut when a token is resold—and many companies are now being led astray, Animoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu told Decrypt at NFT Paris.
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Decrypt Editor in Chief Dan Roberts interviews Sun Yiu, chairman of Animoca Brands.
Decrypt Editor in Chief Dan Roberts interviews Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands.
“This is all about grabbing market share, and it’s at the expense of the creators,” he said, adding that the recent shift away from royalties is “wrong for many, many reasons.”
Siu described royalties as an essential component of the creator economy, comparing it to the fuel that drives an engine or even the gas fees charged to process each transaction on Ethereum’s network.
Animoca Brands is the company behind The Sandbox. Image: The Sandbox
Animoca Slashes Target For Metaverse Fund to null Billion: ‘It Could Be Less’
Animoca Brands will aim to raise null billion for its metaverse investing fund in the early part of this year, softening previous ambitions to raise as much as $2 billion. “We had initially look...
News
Business
3 min read
Alys Key
Jan 5, 2023
The chairman of Animoca Brands, the company behind projects like the Ethereum-based metaverse game The Sandbox, said that culture is the cornerstone of economic activity in today’s society, whether that be in Web3 or beyond, and can’t be taken for granted.
“Culture is the biggest soft power and perhaps the biggest driver of economic growth,” Siu said, pointing out that the world’s richest man is co-founder and CEO of LVMH Bernard Arnault, which owns brands including Gucci, Tiffany & Co., and Hennessy.
Without an economy that’s based on culture, Siu said there wouldn’t be streaming services like Netflix and HBO or gaming consoles made by Sony or Microsoft, because culture is the fundamental reason that people engage with those technologies—whether via television shows, movies, or video games.
Siu said that reducing royalties for creators in the NFT space will erode the space’s existing culture and do more damage to the digital assets industry than good. He compared the pivot away from creators by NFT marketplaces to companies biting the hand that feeds them.
“If you kill the royalties, you kill the very industry that fed you, so it has to be protected,” he said.
Image: DimzQuitz/Wikimedia Commons
This Week on Crypto Twitter: NFT Community Wants Creator Royalties Back
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt There were ubiquitous losses among the leading cryptocurrencies this week as the latest inflation readings prompted fears among investors that the ...
News
Coins
4 min read
Tim Hakki
Feb 27, 2023
Prioritizing profits over creators’ fair share is part of a mentality rooted in traditional finance that influences some actors in the Web3 space, according to Siu.
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“There's a small percentage of people, as we have in the finance world, that are basically from crypto Wall Street, and what they do is just look at profit maximization,” he said. “Unfortunately, for people in the finance world, that's their lens.”
While NFTs are assets—digital tokens that signify the ownership of an item, often digital art—Siu pointed out that people don’t often trade cultural items with the same frequency that they do with financial ones like stocks. He said that many of the items people purchase in the physical world have some meaning attached to them that contributes to one’s self-perceived identity.
Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands. Image: Web Summit
Animoca Brands CEO: 'There Is No Metaverse Without Web3'
The metaverse means many things to many people, whether that be Meta's virtual reality "office," Fortnite's combination of gameplay and social space, or Decentraland's NFT-powered virtual worl...
News
Business
2 min read
Stephen Graves
Nov 6, 2022
“Think about all the things that you buy in the physical world; they form who you are,” Siu said. “You choose to buy a certain shoe, not because you think you can flip it—you choose to buy it because it says something about you.”
And ultimately, Siu believes that these types of purchases, where people buy a particular digital asset because it says something about them, will be a key driver of the adoption of Web3.
“Whether it's a district in Sandbox, or just [living] within L.A., it's saying something about who you are, or who you want to be,” Siu said, saying that even the location in which someone chooses to spend their time has cultural elements. “These are all the points of sort of culture that really is relevant and important.”
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- Banning Crypto 'Should Not Be Taken Off The Table': IMF
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Banning Crypto 'Should Not Be Taken Off The Table': IMF
The IMF wants to see more regulation of digital assets, but still says there could even be an outright ban on cryptocurrencies.
Andrew Asmakov
By Andrew Asmakov
Feb 27, 2023
2 min read
Banning crypto shouldn't be completely ruled out if they begin to pose higher risks to financial stability, according to the IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva.
“We are very much in favor of regulating the world of digital money,” said Georgieva in an interview with Bloomberg, adding that this is a top priority for the Financial Stability Board (FSB), the IMF, and the Bank for International Settlements.
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However, “if the regulation is slow to come and crypto assets become a higher risk for consumers and potentially for financial stability,” the option of banning cryptocurrencies “should not be taken off the table,” said Georgieva, citing countries like India that explored such a possibility in the past.
- GETH, the native asset powering the Ethereum testnet Goerli, is soaring. And that’s a problem.
The testnet token peaked at null.60 on Saturday and is now trading, according to CoinGecko, at about $0.31—and the fact that a testnet currency is even listed on price-tracking sites is indicative that something has gone wrong.
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More importantly, though, developers are now turning away from testing their apps on it due to the new costs.
Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden told Decrypt that the problem isn't new, saying that after almost a year of discussions on how to fix the GETH supply, the easiest solution is to let Goerli "slowly die."
"That's the intention with all testnets, they should live for a few years," van der Wijden said. "Afterwards it becomes increasingly hard to sync them, so it's not of much use."
According to him, the plan is to slowly phase out Goerli while moving users to the Sepolia testnet—which is already running but as a permissioned chain and not yet open for anyone to run a validator node.
Launched in 2019, Goerli is one of several Ethereum testnets that lets developers safely test their code before deploying them on the Ethereum mainnet. To make the testnet environment as real as possible, it also needed a native gas token. That gas token was freely trickled out via so-called faucets and from validators keeping the testnet alive.
- The Playboy MetaMansion is coming.
Playboy’s Web3 lead Liz Suman told Decrypt at NFT Paris last week that the virtual world is slated for launch this year, and that there will be ways to get in even for users who aren’t part of the magazine brand’s Rabbitar community.
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“It’s been the plan all along for the Rabbitars to be the VIPs of the MetaMansion experience,” Suman, who is VP for art, editorial, and Web3 at the 70-year-old media brand, said in an interview.
Are you ready to visit the Playboy Mansion... in the metaverse? @elizabethsuman of @Playboy told us it's the "north star" of the 70-year-old brand's Web3 strategy. pic.twitter.com/dWenF9PkGr
— Decrypt (@decryptmedia) February 27, 2023
“That is still very much the case, while also opening it up in this way that’s integrating The Sandbox’s community, maybe onboarding other people who are interested in web3 [...] and making a space that is a place for everyone.”
[Decrypt on Twitter](https://twitter.com/decryptmedia/status/1630220878540570629)
“Are you ready to visit the Playboy Mansion... in the metaverse? @elizabethsuman of @Playboy told us it's the "north star" of the 70-year-old brand's Web3 strategy.”
- SuperRare is an NFT marketplace that launched in 2018. Image: Decrypt.
NFT Royalties Are 'Not Going Away on SuperRare': Co-Founder Jon Perkins
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NFTs
NFT Royalties Are 'Not Going Away on SuperRare': Co-Founder Jon Perkins
The NFT space is a much bigger picture than just the recent Blur versus OpenSea controversy, according to SuperRare founder Jonathan Perkins.
Andrew Asmakov
By Andrew Asmakov
Feb 27, 2023
3 min read
SuperRare is an NFT marketplace that launched in 2018. Image: Decrypt.
SuperRare is an NFT marketplace that launched in 2018. Image: Decrypt.
Creator royalties, or a lack thereof, on NFT marketplaces have been the niche's biggest talking point of late.
For SuperRare though, the decision to pay creators was already made five years ago.
According to the project's co-founder and CTO Jonathan Perkins, when SuperRare launched in 2018, the royalty aspect was going to be a "standard."
"What I think we’re seeing pan out now is just the kind of chaos of a new market taking shape," @SuperRare cofounder @rareperkins told us at @nft_paris about the creator royalties debate. "Royalties are not going away on SuperRare." pic.twitter.com/WoFq3CJKn4
— Decrypt (@decryptmedia) February 27, 2023
“We took a fairly controversial move at the time to include artist royalties. What we said is that if we can help artists make any money through royalties, why not try at least? So we played some part in establishing some kind of a standard, at least for the art side,” told Decrypt during the NFT Paris conference. "Royalties are not going away on SuperRare.”
Creator royalties are fees ranging up to 10% of an NFT sale that's paid to creators. For projects that generate significant trading volume, these fees can be a substantial source of revenue.
OpenSea’s controversial move to change its creator royalty and fee structure earlier this month has raised serious questions about what the value proposition of NFT marketplaces will be if artists and the original creators are cut off revenue streams. Now, buyers on the marketplace are free to decide whether or not they want to honor creators’ royalty preferences on the world’s leading NFT marketplace.
[Decrypt on Twitter](https://twitter.com/decryptmedia/status/1630239894722453504)
“"What I think we’re seeing pan out now is just the kind of chaos of a new market taking shape," @SuperRare cofounder @rareperkins told us at @nft_paris about the creator royalties debate. "Royalties are not going away on SuperRare."”
- Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block beat Wall Street expectations on the top line but missed on earnings.
In its latest earnings report for last quarter, Block reported null.83 billion in Bitcoin revenue from its Cash App business unit in the previous quarter, down 7% from the same time in 2021.
- Getting crypto into the hands of the masses may come one NFT at a time.
This is exactly what NFT Factory, an NFT-dedicated hub in the heart of Paris, is trying to offer within its 400 square meters physical building dedicated to NFT education.
- News
Gaming
Electronic Arts Founder Trip Hawkins Is Now Making NFT Games
Hawkins has joined startup Games for a Living to help create NFT and token-fueled video games, starting with Elemental Raiders.
Andrew Hayward
By Andrew Hayward
Feb 24, 2023
3 min read
Artwork from the NFT-based game Elemental Raiders. Image: Games for a Living
Artwork from the NFT-based game Elemental Raiders. Image: Games for a Living
The crypto world has attracted a number of video game industry legends, including famed developers like Will Wright and Peter Molyneux that are now developing NFT-based games, and now there’s another big name on that list: Trip Hawkins, the original founder and CEO of video game giant Electronic Arts (EA).
Hawkins was announced today as a co-founder and chief strategy officer of Games for a Living, a startup that is developing games based around NFTs and blockchain-based tokens.
- Bitcoin dropped sharply on Friday—dragging the rest of the digital asset market with it—after key inflation data came in and seemingly rattled investors.
The biggest cryptocurrency is currently down 3% in 24 hours, trading for $23,070, CoinGecko data shows. Just last week, it broke above $25,000 per coin for the first time in eight months.
- A group of NFT enthusiasts are trying to buy the winning key from Yuga Labs’ endless runner game Dookey Dash and have placed an eye-watering null.1 million bid on the asset.
Yuga Labs is the $4 billion company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club and also owns the Crypto Punks NFT collection. UpDAO is the collective behind the winning key bid, which has not yet been accepted by the current owner, 18-year-old Fortnite streamer Kyle “Mongraal” Jackson.
- Hong Kong looks ready to invite retail traders back to the crypto casino.
In a new consultation paper, the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong (SFC) proposed "to allow all types of investors, including retail investors, to access trading services provided by licensed VA [virtual asset] trading platform operators."
- Inventor of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee has lashed out at the nascent crypto sector, saying that the speculative nature of digital currencies makes them a form of gambling.
“It’s only speculative," Berners-Lee told CNBC’s Beyond The Valley podcast. "Obviously, that’s really dangerous.”
- The number of Bitcoin (BTC) whales, or wallet addresses holding 1,000 or more BTC, hit its lowest level since August 2019 on Sunday.
There were 2,027 whales on Sunday, February 19, according to crypto analytics service Glassnode; the last time their number dropped this low was August 5, 2019, when they numbered 2,023.
- Customers of FTX Japan will be able to withdraw deposits of crypto and fiat currency tomorrow, the Japanese subsidiary of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX said Monday.
The withdrawal process will be facilitated through Liquid Japan, a crypto trading platform purchased by FTX last spring. The company’s announcement comes after FTX Japan paused withdrawals last November as founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fred’s crypto empire came crumbling down.
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has come down on former NBA star Paul Pierce for unlawfully shilling a little-known cryptocurrency.
Ex-Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce agreed to pay over null.4 million in penalties to settle the charges, the SEC announced today.
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- SEC Chair Gary Gensler Blames Kraken for 'Choosing' Not to Follow the Law
- Paxos Halts BUSD Minting as SEC Prepares Lawsuit
- Bored Ape Owner Burns $169K NFT to Move It From Ethereum to Bitcoin
- StarkWare to Open Source Its Zero Knowledge Tech for Scaling Ethereum
- News
NFTs
Def Jam Creates NFT Band With Solana’s Catalina Whale Mixer
The Whales will be based on avatars from the Solana NFT project, with tunes coming through both traditional and Web3 channels.
Andrew Hayward
By Andrew Hayward
Feb 8, 2023
3 min read
Artwork from The Whales, a Catalina Whale Mixer band from Def Jam. Image: Def Jam
Artwork from The Whales, a Catalina Whale Mixer band from Def Jam. Image: Def Jam
Legendary hip-hop music label Def Jam Recordings is the latest to try its hand at creating a musical act built around NFT avatars, today announcing a collaboration with Solana-based project Catalina Whale Mixer to create a virtual band.
Called The Whales, the virtual band will pair colorful whale avatars from the Solana profile picture (PFP) collection with music from what the companies claim will be “an all-star cast” of musicians and producers. Those collaborators have yet to be announced
- Computer scientist Craig Wright has lost a claim in a UK court to protect the Bitcoin blockchain by copyright.
Wright, who has long asserted that he is Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, claimed that Bitcoin forks—spin-offs derived from the cryptocurrency—breach his intellectual property rights because he created the original digital asset.
- A judge granted FTX’s legal team permission to subpoena FTX co-founders Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang, ex-Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s parents, and his brother Gabriel, according to a court order filed on Wednesday.
FTX’s legal team asked for permission to send subpoenas to the group, which it calls the “Insiders,” on January 25, saying that some within Bankman-Fried’s inner-circle have been cooperating with the restructuring team’s efforts to recover assets.
“Key questions remain, however, concerning numerous aspects of the Debtors’ finances and transactions,” attorney Kimberly Brown wrote in the January 25 motion. It also names Nishad Singh, ex-chief technology officer at FTX, and Constance Wang, who was formerly a co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets with Ryan Salame, saying they have not been cooperating with efforts to recover customer funds.
- The Brave mobile browser has added support for Solana dApps, its developers announced on Tuesday, after adding support for the popular proof-of-stake blockchain to its desktop browsers last year.
Brave announced the mobile integration on Twitter, saying users can now connect with Solana NFT marketplaces Magic Eden and cryptocurrency exchanges Orca and Jupiter Exchange
- The SEC is investigating San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken for violating securities laws, according to reports.
Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the investigation was at an "advanced stage" and "could lead to a settlement in coming days," citing an unnamed person familiar with the matter.
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- This Week on Crypto Twitter: Sam Bankman-Fried Emailed Witnesses and Bought Cumrocket Tokens
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- FTX Wants Politicians, PACs to Return Donations—And May Sue to Recover Funds
- Institutional Traders Shifting Attention from Blockchain to AI: JP Morgan
- NFL Reveals First Super Bowl 'Metaverse' Concert in Roblox
- FTX Bankruptcy: Texas, California, and New Jersey Join Call for Independent Examiner
- Is Anyone Using Helium? Nova Labs’ New IoT Push May Provide Answer