Toute l'actualité des NFT
La princesse de la culture populaire a offert à tous les spectateurs de l’émission télévisée américaine The Tonight Show un token non fongible (NFT) de sa nouvelle collection à venir, créée en collaboration avec Superplastic. Paris Hilton lance sa première collection NFT L’influenceuse Paris Hilton se plonge plus profondément dans le métaverse, affirmant qu’elle le […]
L’article Paris Hilton : Le métaverse sera « l’avenir des fêtes » est apparu en premier sur Cointribune.
Malgré un début d’année bien morose pour la cryptosphère, la blockchain Tezos affiche un beau dynamisme. Elle attire en effet de plus en plus de projets de gaming et de NFT. Parmi ceux-ci, le Play-To-Earn Dogami va sans doute s’imposer comme tête d’affiche de cet écosystème. Sa médiatisation est tel qu’il sort du cadre des média sur les cryptomonnaies. Télé, radio, presse écrite plus généraliste l’annonce comme un phénomène à ne pas rater. La blockchain Tezos Présentation de Dogami La roadmap Les prochains projets sur Tezos Retour sur la blockchain Tezos Le projet Tezos remonte à 2014. Mais il […]
L’article Avec Dogami, le dogaverse arrive sur Tezos est apparu en premier sur Cryptonaute.
Les secrets non révélés sont les mieux cachés – La blockchain Secret Network a récemment fait parler d’elle à son insu. En effet, c’est en raison d’un conflit entre Miramax et le réalisateur Quentin Tarantino au sujet des NFT et des droits d’auteurs du film « Pulp Fiction » que le public a pu prendre connaissance de ce projet.
Secret Network est un réseau décentralisé qui propose un token de confidentialité, lequel permet également de créer des smart contracts. De plus, il possède son propre token, le Secret (SCRT), dont le prix a connu une belle envolée durant les 20 premiers jours du mois de janvier. En effet, dans cet intervalle, le prix du SCRT a doublé avant de retourner au niveau de prix qu’il avait en début d’année.
Dans la foulée, le 19 janvier, la société a annoncé la création de 2 fonds d’investissement auxquels seront alloués 400 millions de dollars. Sur ce montant 225 millions seront dédiés au premier appelé « fonds pour l’écosystème », destiné à soutenir les développeurs d’applications sur Secret Network et d’améliorer les technologies de confidentialité. En outre, les 175 millions de dollars restant sont destinés à une sorte d’incubateur de projets. Ce dernier fonds est déjà soutenu par 25 investisseurs et d’anciens partenaires de Secret Network, comme Arrington Capital, Outlier ou encore BlackTower Capital.
Le fondateur de Secret, Tor Bair, a insisté sur l’importance des questions de confidentialité qui doivent trouver des réponses respectueuses de la vie privée des utilisateurs. Selon lui, cela est un préalable inévitable pour parvenir à une adoption massive du Web 3.0 par les utilisateurs.
« Les technologies de confidentialité sont essentielles pour garantir que le Web 3.0 sera responsabilisant et ouvert, plutôt qu’une simple extension des échecs du Web 2.0. »
Tor Bair
>>Jusqu’à 100 euros offerts en cryptomonnaies pour bien préparer le prochain bull run, ça vous tente ?(lien affilié) <<
D’abord, il convient de rappeler que Secret Network a été choisi par Quentin Tarantino pour l’émission des NFT représentant 7 scènes inédites du film « Pulp Fiction », sorti en 1994.
La vente aux enchères du premier de ces NFT a été ouverte le 17 janvier 2022 et s’est clôturée le 20 janvier. Les enchères ont été nombreuses, ce qui a eu pour conséquences de rapidement faire s’envoler les prix. C’est ainsi que le premier NFT de la série a trouvé preneur à plus d’1 million de dollars.
Par ailleurs, Secret a révélé que de nombreuses sociétés d’investissement de renom, telles qu’Alameda Research et CoinFund, sont devenues parties prenantes au capital de Secret Network.
Enfin, il faut souligner que l’idée de Secret Network de créer une pool dédiée au soutien des projets de jeux blockchains, NFT et métavers, ou de finance décentralisée, tombe à point nommé. En effet, ces secteurs de la crypto qui ont explosé en 2021 semblent bénéficier de plus de conciliation de la part des différents États. Pour s’en convaincre, il suffit de prendre l’exemple de la Chine qui, après avoir interdit à plusieurs reprises les cryptomonnaies, n’est en revanche pas aussi réfractaire aux NFT.
Dans 2 jours ? dans 2 semaines ? dans 2 mois ? personne ne sait quand le bull run crypto reprendra. Ce qui est certain, c’est qu’il ne sera plus temps d’avoir des regrets. Préparez au mieux cette prochaine phase de croissance en profitant dès aujourd’hui d’une offre exceptionnelle : jusqu’à 100€ en cryptomonnaies offerts lors de votre inscription sur la plateforme Swissborg (lien affilié, pour un dépôt minimum de 50€)
L’article 400 millions de $ pour un anonymat total – Secret Network (SCRT) veut la jouer discret est apparu en premier sur Journal du Coin.
Professionals in the luxury goods market have been thinking hard about how to transfer their largely physical business into the new digital era. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have proven their worth in guaranteeing the provenance of one-of-a-kind digital assets, but can they also be used to bridge the gap between physical and digital luxury items?
NFTs are a large market: By August of last year, daily sales approached $1.8 billion. It has settled down since then, but it’s no longer unusual for half a billion dollars’ worth of NFTs to trade on a given day. These range from easy-to-mint consumer NFTs such as basketball cards and in-game skins to high-end auctions such as Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” or Pak’s “Merge.”
Creating a luxury NFT is about much more than only creating buzz. Just as in the physical world, it involves vision, craftsmanship, artistry and timing. A recent NFT project created in Malta called “ETH in Mellieha” perfectly exemplifies the level of detail needed to create a luxury NFT. Much more than a digital image, it’s also a physical memento of a real-world experience.
And, unlike many other NFTs, it also incorporates uncontestable legal rights to the physical asset for the owner of the NFT, regardless of the citizenship or current domicile of the holder.
At the core of “ETH in Mellieha” is a prestige license plate issued by Transport Malta. It simply reads “ETH.” The project team hired local artist Debbie Bonello to paint the plate in an invented street scene: a car parked on a narrow street in Mellieha, a small town in the northwest corner of Malta’s main island, with an iconic parish church towering on the horizon. The painting took two months to complete.
Upon completion, the painting was photographed and digitized by the renowned Maltese photographer Matthew Mirabelli and minted as an NFT. A bonfire ceremony was held, where the original painting, its sketches and the flash storage of the JPEG file were burnt and destroyed permanently. Bonello herself placed the painting into the fire. The NFT is now the sole version of the artwork.
The project has created a new user experience for purchasing a digital asset. While winning an auction is its own unique kind of event, it’s amplified by a documentary as well as social media support via an Instagram page and the @EthMlh Twitter handle. This multimedia approach offers a new way to do visual merchandising in the digital era, analogous to the pop-up showrooms that luxury brands are hosting in the brick-and-mortar space. While the pop-up shop itself is a work of art, the physical goods on sale within were the actual merchandise.
In this way, the art is only one, albeit important, element in the value of the NFT. While Bonello’s work was a one-of-a-kind painting, it’s not what’s being auctioned off. “ETH in Mellieha” is more than a digital art NFT, and it demonstrates how art can be integrated to create a wider, unique experience for the buyer around asset transfers – it’s that experience itself that’s under the gavel.
Ownership of “ETH in Mellieha” conveys not only ownership of Bonello’s image and the only ETH plate on the road in the nation that calls itself “Blockchain Island,” it’s also the story behind it, a story that includes a hilltop bonfire party with artists and dignitaries as the sun sets over the Mediterranean. It’s the first-of-its-kind opportunity for artists to collaborate with the blockchain industry in a way that allows them to create experiences that bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds.
The auction of the resulting NFT will begin Feb. 2 at 4 p.m. UTC on OpenSea.
Crypto has undergone an impressive spate of growth recently. We’ve gone from a few hundred users of non-fungible tokens (NFT), a couple of thousand Ethereum node operators and maybe a multitude more of bitcoin holders to several million investors and users across the industry. It’s wonderful there’s an open online world where anyone can create, build and explore without permission. That value is being created, and freedom preserved. But there’s something being lost in the mix: privacy.
Web 3, the buzzy corner of crypto that spans everything from play-to-earn gaming to collectibles to decentralized finance (DeFi), seems to be repeating the same missteps of Web 2. Although touted as a solution to the perils of internet centralization by letting people own their own data and earn rewards for the value they create, Web 3 is failing on these big promises. And with some of the biggest Web 2 builders entering the Web 3 space, the problems may only get worse.
Tor Bair is the founder of the Secret Foundation, an organization dedicated to building, researching and scaling adoption of open-source, privacy-first technologies . This article is part of CoinDesk’s Privacy Week series.
The Web 2 economy was built on a simple idea: collect a cheap resource at scale, user data, then repackage and monetize access to it as an expensive product. It gave users near unlimited ability to create content and connect globally while giving advertisers a captive audience. Companies including Facebook and Google built trillion-dollar businesses and “walled gardens” around this arbitrage, then changed their names (Meta, Alphabet) to distance themselves from the extractive platforms that allowed for their obscene growth.
Along the way, user privacy was not merely ignored – it was abandoned. It was only after the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blowers came forward that we truly became aware of how our data was being misused and resold, occasionally at the expense of democracy itself. Almost every Web 2 company has dealt with massive privacy failings and data breaches, from Uber to Equifax to LinkedIn to Alibaba.
Despite all the lofty promises of Web 3, it has not solved this core issue. While the blockchain world is indeed far more open than Web 2, it is actually far less private. Blockchains leak all user data by default, and not just to Cambridge Analytica but to anyone who glances at the blockchain. The dominant public-by-default model means users must give up control of their data by default as well.
This failure means Web 3 is not becoming user-centric after all. Public-by-default systems and blockchains recentralize and converge to winner-take-all structures. Whoever has the resources to make best use of all the publicly available data will capture the majority of value. In other words, the rich get richer, and users lose their control.
Web 3 companies like Chainalysis have achieved multi-billion- dollar valuations on this play. Miners, the computers that secure and order blockchains, routinely frontrun users based on their privileged view into publicly available data.
Meanwhile, Web 2 companies like Meta (the former Facebook) are clearly seizing the next multi-trillion dollar opportunity by concentrating their entire focus on the emerging metaverse. The same companies that shattered online privacy in the age of social media are now angling to control our open metaverse, wielding war chests of billions of dollars in hopes of capturing trillions.
These are two bad choices: an open metaverse that leaks all data by design and a metaverse owned and operated by the same companies that routinely exploit user data. We need to actively reject both.
See also: The Metaverse Needs a Constitution | Opinion
As we watch the metaverse emerge and build its foundation, we must be aware of and actively work towards a better model. Web 3 and the open metaverse must embrace privacy by design, protect users by default and allow them to consent to and benefit from the use of their data.
It’s not just a dream: Tens of thousands of users in our community around the world are already building and using private-by-default, decentralized, and self-sustainable applications that are truly empowering. We’ve been working towards this vision since 2015, and with the stakes higher than ever, this is the perfect moment to join our fight.
A metaverse that protects our privacy is the only one worth creating, and the only one worth living in.
YouTube is considering offering non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a way “to help creators capitalize on emerging technologies including things like NFTs, » CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote in an open letter about the video streaming platform’s 2022 priorities.
Wojcicki said her team is looking ahead to the future and has been following everything happening in Web 3 “as a source of inspiration to continue innovating on YouTube.”“The past year in the world of crypto, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and even decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) has highlighted a previously unimaginable opportunity to grow the connection between creators and their fans,” Wojcicki wrote.On Thursday, social media platform Twitter released an official verification mechanism for NFT profile pictures. This involves users linking their Ethereum wallet to Twitter and using an NFT as a profile picture.CoinDesk contacted Google, which owns YouTube, for further comment but did not hear back at press time.
The Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN), China’s state-sanctioned blockchain infrastructure project, said it is releasing its platform for non-fungible tokens (NFT) in the country today.
The BSN-Distributed Digital Certificate (BSN-DDC) network is a structure for building NFTs that is compliant with Chinese regulations, the organization said in a press release. Authorities in China discourage public networks like Ethereum that are commonly used in the NFT ecosystem.Instead, as CoinDesk reported in October, BSN is making 10 Open Permissioned Blockchains available on the BSN-DDC. These are localized versions of their permissionless counterparts that set restrictions on who can participate in network governance and use fiat currency for payment. DDCs are the same as NFTs, but renamed to emphasize their uses for certification.Five of the 10 chains were named: Ethereum-based Wuhan Chain, Wenchang Chain powered by Cosmos-based IRISnet, Corda-based Zunyi Chain, EOS-based Zhongyi Chain, and FISCO BCOS-based Tai’an Chain.Some platform partners were also announced: The state-owned museum and auction house Rong Bao Zhai Auction, state-backed Hainan International Culture and Artworks Exchange Center – which has acquired the first license for an NFT marketplace in China, consulting firm EY’s blockchain division, video technology provider Sumavison, electronic invoice provider Baiwang and Digital Art Fair Asia, an NFT-focused company from Hong Kong.Another 26 founding partners, as well as the roadmap and governance structure will be announced in a launch ceremony in the city of Nanjing in March.The BSN-DDC is based on the Blockchain Services Network, a platform where developers can build and deploy decentralized applications at a low cost.
Read more: BSN Architect Red Date to Launch NFT Infrastructure in China
Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:
Market moves: Bitcoin retakes $36,000 as the crypto market stabilized after last week’s correction.
Technician’s take: Extreme oversold readings preceded an uptick in BTC.
Catch the latest episodes of CoinDesk TV for insightful interviews with crypto industry leaders and analysis.
Bitcoin (BTC): $36,547 +0.1%
Ether (ETH): $2,426 -4.6%
Top gainers
Asset
Ticker
Returns
Sector
Cosmos
ATOM
+5.4%
Smart Contract Platform
Bitcoin
BTC
+0.7%
Currency
Top losers
Asset
Ticker
Returns
Sector
Solana
SOL
−8.5%
Smart Contract Platform
Algorand
ALGO
−7.3%
Smart Contract Platform
Filecoin
FIL
−6.4%
Computing
Sector classifications are provided via the Digital Asset Classification Standard (DACS), developed by CoinDesk Indices to provide a reliable, comprehensive, and standardized classification system for digital assets. The CoinDesk 20 is a ranking of the largest digital assets by volume on trusted exchanges.
S&P 500: 4,410 +0.2%
DJIA: 34,364 +0.2%
Nasdaq: 13,855 +0.6%
Gold: $1,843 +0.4%
Bitcoin’s price rose by as much as $1,834 on a four-hour basis during U.S. trading hours on Monday, after it briefly touched the $34,000 level during Asia’s late afternoon. The overall crypto market stabilized after the broad market correction downward in the past week.
Bitcoin is currently changing hands at around $36,400 and is up slightly in the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk data. At the time of publication, ether was down slightly, trading at about $2,400. Most of the major alternative coins (altcoins) were in the red.
The U.S. equity market also rebounded in the late afternoon on Monday. Major stock indices tumbled earlier in the day as investors closely watch the Federal Reserve’s first meeting this year, which will take place this week.
While bitcoin and the crypto market appeared to be following the performance of the stock market recently, as CoinDesk reported, the relationship between bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 stock index, the favored proxy for the tech sector, remains weak – a reminder there are other more important factors that could affect bitcoin and the crypto market.
“For the time being at least, one could say bitcoin’s prices are a combination of some global risk appetite and a lot of the market dynamics in China (and the aftermath of restrictions there),” CoinDesk’s Lawrence Lewitinn wrote. “Those factors’ influences aren’t static, but they explain a lot more than watching the Fed’s every move.”
According to crypto trading data analytic firm Kaiko, despite a sharp sell-off last week, bitcoin’s daily spot trading volume last week was still lower than it was during December’s price plunge.
The average daily spot trading volume of bitcoin on major cryptocurrency exchanges has mostly remained below $5 billion in the past month, down significantly since early fall, Kaiko wrote in its weekly newsletter on Monday. This is partly because Chinese exchanges OKEx and Huobi have suffered volume loss due to the crypto trading ban in China last year.
Bitcoin Short-Term Bounce Faces Resistance at $40K
Bitcoin (BTC) returned above $35,000 after multiple oversold signals appeared on the charts. The cryptocurrency faces initial resistance at $40,000, which could limit upside over the short term.
Bitcoin is up 3% over the past 24 hours after rising from an intraday low near $33,000, while the broader crypto market has stabilized.
The relative strength index (RSI) on the daily chart registered the most extreme oversold reading since the March 2020 crash. The previous extreme low was on Nov. 20, 2018, which preceded a few months of rangebound price action before a rally took place.
For now, a downtrend of lower price highs since November remains intact, which means sellers could remain active at resistance levels.
8:30 a.m. HKT/SGT (12:30 a.m. UTC): Australia consumer price index (Q4, MoM/YoY)
8:30 a.m. HKT/SGT (12:30 a.m. UTC): National Australia Bank’s business conditions (Dec)
8: 30 a.m. HKT/SGT (12:30 UTC): National Australia Bank’s business confidence (Dec)
Happy Australia Day!
11 p.m. HKT/SGT (3 p.m. UTC): U.S. Consumer Confidence (Jan.)
In case you missed it, here is the most recent episode of « First Mover » on CoinDesk TV:
« First Mover » hosts were joined by Marc Lopresti, managing director at The Strategic Funds, for an in-depth analysis on the crypto markets as cryptocurrencies suffer yet another sell-off. Since November, about $1.3 trillion has been wiped out in the total market cap. Plus, what could we expect from the Biden administration’s digital asset strategy that’s reportedly set to release next month? Nyca Partners Executive-in-Residence Matt Homer and CoinDesk Managing Editor for Global Policy & Regulation Nikhilesh De provided their insights. Then CoinDesk Executive Editor Marc Hochstein explained Privacy Week at CoinDesk.
Singapore VC Blockchain Founders Raises $75M for New Fund: The company has been an early investor in blockchain, crypto, Web 3 and metaverse startups.
Chinese Government Rejects Metaverse Trademark Applications: Report: Those rejected include applications by NetEase, iQiyi and Xiaohongshu.
Investors Put $14M Into Crypto Funds Last Week as Bitcoin Market Cratered: Inflows into digital-asset funds last week – after five straight weeks of outflows – suggest investors were taking advantage of the price dip.
Bank of America Says US CBDC Would Preserve Dollar’s Status as World’s Reserve Currency: CBDC’s are an inevitable evolution of today’s electronic currencies, the bank’s analysts said.
Biden Administration to Release Executive Order on Crypto as Early as February: Report: The directive will ask federal agencies to determine the risks and opportunities posed by digital assets.
Who Writes the Story of the Metaverse?: How narratives and memes shape our online future.
Today’s crypto explainer: Crypto Flash Crashes: What You Need to Know
Other voices: Blockchain beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value?
« Surveillance economies power our biggest tech companies. Facebook and Google track our every step to deliver surgical ad strikes that make us hungry to buy more stuff we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t even know. They track where we go, what we like, who we know and love, and with whom we’re sleeping. » (Author and speaker Daniel Jeffries writing for CoinDesk) … « Well, here’s another take – it’s a bad time to be a day trader, but it’s also a bad time for NFT flippers, whose gains and losses are typically priced in ETH. Even as the price has fallen, the average amount of ETH exchanged for non-fungible tokens in top collections has stayed relatively consistent. » (CoinDesk media and culture reporter Will Gottsegen) … « That is the promise of a virtual world: that you get to be anybody you want, unhampered by flesh, gravity, environment, expectations and economics — or maybe just the record you have created. » (Vanessa Friedman/The New York Times) …
I’m no Emily Dickinson, but the latest developments in internet culture – excuse me, Web 3 culture – has me thinking I can shill my grad school poems for 1 ETH ($3,000) a pop.
And on January 20, 2022, I did. After all, imposter syndrome doesn’t have a place in a burgeoning industry where even founders admit to being in the midst of a learning curve. If I were a creator during Gutenberg’s era, I like to think I wouldn’t have passed up the chance to play around with the printing press. Why should NFTs be different?
When I first heard about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in April 2021, I was immediately thrilled by the high-level concept of them: Artists, seemingly overnight, now had a way to own their own work and determine their own royalties. I needed to hear more.
Being a journalist, I was fortunate that my first conversation about NFTs was with Whale Shark, a prominent collector and founder of the WHALE token who once spent 22 ETH on a one-of-a-kind pair of sneakers.
Ahead, I share what I’ve learned since that first NFT conversation and my chats with dozens of creators and founders in the blockchain world. As they say in crypto, time moves so fast. One month is basically a year, and it took me about seven months – essentially one whole dog year – to finally work up the nerve to put one of my poems on a blockchain. I’d like to make it easier for you.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to mint your first NFT using OpenSea, a popular NFT platform among first-time creators. (Great alternative platforms also exist, which we’ll touch on below.)
Outside of my financial journalistic work, I have a growing affinity for all things astrology-based. Looking at my recent astrology chart with astrologer Noah Frere, I noticed that Juno was very active. In light of this, I decided to base my first NFT collection on the tumultuous relationship between Juno and Jupiter – two gods from Roman mythology. And after a great conversation with my business coach, Lisa Fabrega, I knew I wanted to explore the tension between love and duty through the lens of devotion.
I therefore decided to name my poetry alter ego – every creator needs one, right? – “Juno Muse.”
With my concept nailed down, I had my marching orders: Resurrect my old poems and write several new ones. Then, learn how to mint them on a blockchain.
The tech skills required to mint NFTs on OpenSea are comparable to the ones I used to sign up for Myspace in 2006.
“There’s a big misconception that you have to be technical in order to participate in crypto,” said Denise Schaefer, co-founder of the blockchain education platform Surge. “But I look at NFTs as a fun entryway into the space that doesn’t require coding skills when minting in marketplaces like OpenSea or Rarible.”
Here are some beginner-friendly NFT platforms where first-time creators can mint:
Blockchains used: Ethereum and Polygon
OpenSea is popular and easy to use for all types of NFTs. While the Ethereum blockchain is notorious for charging high service fees, or “gas”, OpenSea now has a lazy mint option. The creator can upload their artwork, “mint” it to their profile and list it for sale without paying gas fees. When the collector buys it, they will pay the gas fees.
An ETH wallet (e.g. MetaMask, Coinbase or dozens of others)
2.5% of your sale
Visit the OpenSea resource page.
Blockchains used: Ethereum, Flow and Tezos
Creators can use Rarible to mint NFT creations, whether they are books, music albums, digital art or movies. There are some fun features, such as the ability to show a “sneak peek” of your creation to everybody who comes to Rarible but limit the full project to purchasers only.
Rarible considers itself a community-owned NFT marketplace. Using Rarible’s unique token (ERC-20 RARI) makes you an owner of the Rarible project. This is a cool feature, but it was a little over my head for my first mint. I hope to learn more about this.
A wallet compatible with your choice of blockchain.
Vary depending on the blockchain you use, but the option for free minting exists.
Read the Rarible FAQs
Blockchain used: Solana
While Solana has mixed reviews from Ethereum loyalists, artists and creators report that the Solana blockchain is super fast, has high performance and is cost-effective with negligible fees. Solana’s speed and efficiency also cuts down on energy usage, therefore giving it a reputation as a new, less environmentally damaging, alternative to Ethereum.
Phantom wallet and Arconnect Wallet
Reportedly 0.000005 SOL ($0.00025) per transaction. Fees can fluctuate, but they are almost zero.
Check out this Artist’s Guide to Solana and Holaplex and visit the Holaplex.
For Solana tl;dr it’s basically:
1. Establish an account with a crypto exchange like @coinbase, convert small amount of usd to sol ($5 would do)
2. Establish @phantom wallet in @brave or Chrome
3. Move funds from exchange to browser wallet
4. Initialize store @holaplex!
— Jackie◎ (@hackingbutlegal) January 16, 2022
Blockchain used: Tezos
Originally created as a secondary marketplace, objkt now allows artists and creators to mint directly on its platform. It’s also popular among literary NFT creators and used by theVerseVerse co-founders Sasha Stiles and Ana Maria Caballero.
Minting is now live on https://t.co/wErtxZVJLY. Artists can create collections and directly mint into them.
Creating a collection will deploy your own smart contract on the @Tezos blockchain. ⛓️🖥️
Take a look at @pointline_‘s new collection: https://t.co/rowggJ0y4E pic.twitter.com/2qxIrTytBV
— objkt.com (@objktcom) November 11, 2021
Choose from these compatible wallets:
SpireTemple WalletGalleonKukai WalletUmamiAirGap Wallet
2.5% for all successful sales
Visit the objkt website and/or discord server.
Get ready to tweet and DM. If you want to start making NFTs, you’ll need to dust off your Twitter account. You’ll also need to join Discord, a Slack-like chat platform for gamers and crypto lovers. Expect to get most of your information and build authentic relationships through these types of communication channels.
Read more: Crypto Discord: Where to Go, What to Know
When you’re ready to sell your NFTs, expect your community to be your number-one marketing resource. It sounds a little cliche, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money on sophisticated marketing tactics to create a successful project.
“Regardless of how low or high the market is, the community is so enthusiastic and constantly tagging our project in different things constantly talking about it,” said Maliha Abidi, whose Women Rise NFT collection launched in November 2021 and sold out in 50 days, generating 2,000 ETH of trading volume in the process.
“We have not put in even $1 in marketing so far, but we were literally just featured in Vanity Fair yesterday and today in Rolling Stone,” Abidi told CoinDesk on Jan. 19.
Biggest week at Women Rise! ☀️
We sold out, reached 5400 unique holders, achieved 1900 ETH in trading volume,reached 24k on Twitter, reached 12k on discord, are trending on #32 on @rarible and @opensea, featured on Rarible homepage, & it is all thanks to our amazing community 🥰 pic.twitter.com/BvcAWNvP1I
— Women Rise NFT (@WomenriseNFT) January 19, 2022
Even 1-of-1 creators – artists who mint unique, single pieces of art, compared to algorithmically generated avatars that people use as Twitter profile pictures – seemingly trust that making friendships can go a long way.
“We interact with each other every day. You’re going to see your collectors in a Twitter space or if there’s good alpha information, we share it with each other,” said Thao Nguyen, an artist who pivoted from making Etsy creations to NFT artwork on OpenSea in 2021. “It’s a very giving relationship, and I absolutely love it.”
To start turning my poems into art, I asked my mom to mail me an old iPad she wasn’t using and signed up for an online illustration class at the Baltimore Academy of Illustration. I bought an Apple Pencil, downloaded Photoshop for iPads, and plugged in my Yeti microphone (which I already had) to practice recording audio clips in iMovie and GarageBand. I dug out my old poems from grad school, walked around Manhattan thinking of ideas and bought a notebook to start scribbling.
Every creator has their own process, but no matter what, you need to think about how your art will translate digitally. Follow these guidelines to make your first NFT:
Use materials and tools you already have.Invest in new technology or knowledge as needed.Find other creators and learn from each other.Consider the audience you think will like your work and keep them in mind as you create.Choose whether you want your NFTs to have visual, audio or written components – or all three.Pick a file type. OpenSea accepts JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG, MP4, WEBM, MP3, WAV, OGG, GLB and GLTF.Think about the file size. OpenSea’s limit is 100 MB.Factor in accessibility – I chose to have subtitles along with my spoken-word poems so that they could be enjoyed by as many people as possible, including people with visual and/or hearing impairments.
After some experimenting, I ended up scrapping the graphics I created in Photoshop and instead used Canva to make a simple title image and subtitles for my poem. I then recorded myself reading the poem along with the slides.
I’m not the most talented visual artist. But I gave myself permission to play around – and I don’t intend to stop experimenting. The advice I’ve gotten is this: Don’t pigeonhole yourself too soon or limit your notions of what’s possible. Unless you have a clear aesthetic like Abidi, an experienced painter, consider NFTs your opportunity to try new things. NFTs are a new art form, so let your message translate to the new medium.
In OpenSea, the minting process is so easy I kept waiting for a clown to jump out and tell me I’d been tricked.
It’s as simple as uploading your files, inputting your collection’s description and making your profile, determining your royalties (for later, when your art is sold in a secondary marketplace) and completing your listing.
Note the accepted file types:
I chose to mint my first NFT on Polygon, which had no fees.
Once you mint your NFT, you will see it on your profile. Blockchain data is public and accessible by anyone. Your NFT’s buying and selling history will be available forever, helping you and prospective investors track its price.
“Etherscan is where you can see all the transactions that have happened in the Ethereum blockchain,” Schaefer told CoinDesk. “It is specific to all transactions that are occurring in the Ethereum network, and in and out of the network. Everybody having access to these public records is what allows for blockchains to operate without a central authority and without a bank.”
But you might not want the whole world to know how much money you have and how much money you’re transacting, said Schaefer. This is where pseudonyms and having multiple wallets – totally legal in the blockchain world – come in.
After minting, it’s time to list your NFT for sale. I opted to keep things simple and list mine for 1 ETH, or $2,922.42 at the time of minting.
My 1 ETH price will remain on my Juno Muse OpenSea profile until Feb. 20, or whenever someone takes my NFT off the market.
In the meantime, I plan to keep experimenting with how I price my NFTs. I plan on releasing my old grad school poems, and, to make Juno proud, I plan to keep writing poems on Thursdays, which is ruled by Juno’s love, Jupiter. Maybe, just maybe, this new routine will help me fall in love with NFTs and – most important – my own art again.
Keep Learning: How to Create, Buy and Sell NFTs
Cryptocurrency mixers and the illicit activity often associated with them regularly make headlines. To the casual observer, the frequency of these attention-grabbing stories can give the impression that crypto mixing is far more prevalent than it is. Data tells us mixer transactions make up a shockingly small fraction of overall crypto activity.
Since Bitcoin’s inception, blockchain technology has been closely associated with the dark web, money laundering, tax evasion and worse. Just last year millions in bitcoin were paid in ransom to the hackers of the Colonial Pipeline, further perpetuating the public’s belief about the underground world of blockchain-based currencies.
In reality, being a distributed, public ledger makes the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains overly transparent.
This article is part of CoinDesk’s Privacy Week series.
By just knowing a public wallet address, one can track all past and future transactions of the account. Any association between exchanges, entities or doxxed individuals – private individuals who have had publicly revealing identifying information about them published online, either intentionally or unintentionally – could give insight into who is doing what in each transaction.
In one respect, transparency is quite refreshing as societal and ecosystem norms are often imposed on venture capital firms, project founders and other members of the crypto community. However, the need for privacy exists if crypto is ever to take on a mainstream role in payments, finance and banking.
The Bitcoin and Ethereum communities understood the downside of transparency and have since built infrastructure to allow users to opt-in to further privacy through potential “unregulated or controversial” technology.
Read More: Bitcoin Mixers: How Do They Work and Why Are They Used?
Early on, Bitcoin privacy was achieved through centralized mixing services that required trust in third parties. A user would send bitcoin to a company that “mixed” or “tumbled” the funds with other depositors’ bitcoin and then sent back an equivalent amount of mixed bitcoin on the other end. Users who wanted privacy were, in effect, exchanging their bitcoins for other bitcoins that couldn’t be associated with their own.
There was a substantial risk in using these mixing services. Users had to entrust their coins to the third-party mixing platform and believe that they’d get their funds back. Bitcoiners especially took issue with that idea since the Bitcoin protocol counts trustlessness as one of its core tenets. Centralized services were also at risk of being shut down due to regulatory action, and many early mixers were shut down.
In 2013, Greg Maxwell proposed CoinJoin, a transaction privacy method that involved no changes to Bitcoin itself. A CoinJoin takes advantage of how Bitcoin transactions are structured with a bitcoin input from a user, a signature that allows that input to be sent, and an output location for that bitcoin to end up. The signatures are unique for each input. Although these inputs usually come from the same user, they are not required to be. This is how CoinJoin works: Many users can contribute multiple inputs to a transaction where they ultimately send bitcoin to themselves on the other side, but the details are obfuscated due to the unknown number of parties who contributed inputs.
CoinJoins have always worked on Bitcoin, but there wasn’t always an easy way for users to collaborate and carry out a CoinJoin to enable privacy. Now, there are bitcoin wallets like Wasabi Wallet and Samourai Wallet that allow users to implement PayJoins, an implementation of CoinJoin, within the wallet, making privacy available to all.
However, even though these privacy options have been around since 2018, the volume data suggests the penetration of CoinJoins has not increased much since the early days. Although more bitcoin has been CoinJoined each year, the highest volume month was just over 65,000 BTC in January 2021 (worth about $2.3 billion, on average), a scant 0.35% of the total bitcoin transacted in that month.
The same phenomenon shows itself when considering “Fresh Bitcoin” – a metric that describes new bitcoins that use a CoinJoin that have never been mixed before.
We can see that these data sets look strikingly similar, but the Fresh Bitcoin metric likely provides a more realistic view for demand growth for CoinJoins, given some users opt to mix the same bitcoins multiple times in order to increase privacy and mathematically guarantee untraceability. The number of Fresh Bitcoins CoinJoined in January 2021 was closer to 45,000, or 0.25% of the total bitcoin transacted in that month.
Part of this overall lack of adoption can be due to exchanges blocking withdrawals to privacy-preserving bitcoin wallets, such as Wasabi, which would naturally suppress demand for CoinJoin as mixing would disrupt the fungibility of the owner’s bitcoin. That is, the bitcoin that went through a mixer would be « tainted » and treated differently by the exchange than other bitcoin.
Taproot was an important upgrade made to the Bitcoin protocol that was implemented late last year. Taproot enabled a handful of potential usability and privacy improvements, with the addition of Schnorr signatures an address type to Bitcoin that makes types of transactions look the same, making blockchain forensic analysis more difficult for multisignature transactions.
As it relates to mixer traffic, however, Taproot in its current state does not improve the privacy of CoinJoins because their inputs are single signature.
That said, Taproot’s activation sets the groundwork in order for cross-input aggregation (CISA) in the future, which would allow for improved privacy and efficiency of CoinJoin transactions. Digital signatures are the critical piece that allows CoinJoins to work. If CISA makes it into the Bitcoin protocol, the many signatures needed in a CoinJoin transaction could be combined and aggregated into one, which could boost scalability and make the process cheaper.
The most popular mixer on Ethereum takes a different approach than CoinJoin because it is built and deployed on the application layer. Tornado Cash allows ETH holders to deposit a sum of their token balance into a non-upgradable smart contract that gives them an encrypted note. Using the encrypted note, the user can withdraw the funds from another Ethereum address in a single or multiple transactions.
One step further, Tornado Cash allows third parties called “relayers” to send that encrypted note verifying the withdrawal transaction to application users. In return for passing the note, relayers receive a small fee. The relayer system allows users to have their funds trustlessly withdrawn into a new wallet, without needing ETH in the new wallet to pay for the claim transaction because the relayers also take care of covering that cost on their behalf.
It is important to note that relayers are not able to access any transaction data beyond paying the transaction fee, stopping them from altering the destination of the claimed funds.
At the end of the process, the user who deposited their assets into Tornado Cash now has them in a fresh wallet, leaving behind a very difficult trail to follow. In turn, the relayer takes a small fraction of the deposit to pay for the claim transaction and reward them for their service.
Tornado Cash version 1 has been live since the end of 2019 and has processed 2.4 million ETH and $5.1 billion U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins at the time of writing, according to data from Dune Analytics and Etherscan. Most often used was the fixed deposit of 10 ETH, with the contract seeing 13,819 transactions since December 2019.
November of last year was the largest month for Tornado in terms of volume, processing over $200 million ETH and stablecoin withdrawals in the last week of the month. However, during December the application released a new product dubbed Nova. The upgrade allows users to deposit arbitrary amounts of assets instead of the outdated, tiered and fixed deposit limits. Nova has seen some adoption with 673 wallets depositing 633 ETH in the new platform in less than a month.
While Ethereum’s most popular mixer is often publicized for its use after decentralized finance (DeFi) exploits or nefarious activities, the application appears to be growing in popularity among everyday users concerned with operational security (opsec) and privacy. Recent compliance integrations even allow the application to generate a report on whether an address’s use of Tornado Cash was in relation to any known exploits or laundering, so law-abiding users can access the technology without drawing unnecessary suspicion.
Read More: Crypto.com’s Stolen Ether Being Laundered via Tornado Cash
The adoption of DeFi, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and bitcoin have gone parabolic over the past year, making illicit activities a smaller percentage of overall crypto transactions than ever. A recent Chainalysis report revealed that even as the notional value of illegal activity hit $14 billion, illicit transactions only made up 0.15% of all cryptocurrency volume during 2021.
Mixers will continue to support those with ill intentions – but that is the double-edged sword of privacy and decentralization. Not only is anyone allowed to access and use blockchain wallets, developers are allowed to build and deploy any product they deem fit on top of smart contract platforms like Ethereum.
As it stands now, regular bank accounts provide us a high level of personal privacy from our friends and family. It is exceedingly difficult to find out how much money someone has in their bank account even if you know a lot of identifying information about that person.
With cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, if your wallet address becomes known, your balance and all your crypto activities can become known. Bitcoin and Ethereum should be able to provide that privacy at a minimum, and the use of privacy-focused technologies like mixers provides that option to everyday crypto users.
However promising mixers are for privacy, the data shows that users are still not taking advantage of what they have to offer. Meanwhile, the mainstream narrative points to mixers enabling illicit activity rather than the potential benefits they may provide to individuals.
More education on the topic, and less stigmatization of mixers themselves, could go a long way toward improving personal financial privacy.
