Mois : février 2022

In a metaverse often criticized for being devoid of things to do, the poker tables in Decentraland’s ICE Poker virtual casino have never been busier.

The play-to-earn poker platform from Decentral Games is host to around 6,000 unique players each day, which makes up more than 30% of Decentraland’s daily users. In the past three months, the game has generated more than $7.5 million in revenue through its various income streams, according to Decentral Games founder Miles Anthony.

“At any given time, we have over 1,000 players playing poker,” Anthony told CoinDesk in an interview. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of users, but when it comes to the open metaverse, it’s pretty substantial considering the main issue right now with metaverses is that they’re empty.”

For as much press as “Web 3” is garnering, it’s important to remember the numbers are still small. The number of wallets (the pseudonymous, but not exactly precise, measure of actual humans interacting with Ethereum-based smart contracts) touching OpenSea on a daily basis is just 50,000, according to DappRadar. The non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace was recently valued at $13.3 billion in a recent funding round.

Read more: This Casino in Decentraland Is Hiring (for Real)

Decentral Games bet big on the metaverse a year and a half ago when it started acquiring virtual land in Decentraland. The DAO says it’s accumulated more than 1,000 of the game’s parcels to date. That effort was backed in part by an investment from Decentraland itself back in September of last year.

The success of Decentral Games’ ICE Poker should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with online gambling platforms, which have been a hit among virtual communities for decades.

Anthony says the platform sees itself as the genre’s Web 3 iteration, requiring users to purchase one of its NFT wearables before being able to play with house chips, as well as issuing two separate tokens – ICE and DG – to support its ecosystem.

The wearables, sold in drops on the platform in limited supply, already fetch high prices on secondary marketplaces like OpenSea, holding onto a floor price of 2.46 ETH (around $6,500) at the time of writing.

With a high-priced point of entry, guilds have become a core aspect of the game’s ecosystem, Anthony said. He says the game has intentionally avoided relying on mega guilds like YGG for accessibility. Gaming guilds typically rent out key crypto assets for a share of future profits from retail users.

“To be 100% honest, I actually think large guilds are really detrimental to game economies,” Anthony told CoinDesk. “Obviously the valuations for [guilds] have been pretty wild. And it can be great for even the short term, but I think a lot of these deals kind of overlook long-term effects.”

Read more: Crypto VCs Are Making a Big Bet on Gaming Guilds. Why?

Anthony says the platform solves this problem with a built-in delegation system, where players can loan an NFT wearable to another user in exchange for a 60-40 share of any revenue earned with it. Users who delegate just a single NFT make up the majority of the platform’s lenders.

Wen users?

Despite the enormous hype around the future of the metaverse in recent months, few poker platforms have been able to successfully enter the space, in part due to regulation.

Virtue Gaming became the first play-to-earn poker platform with a Malta Gaming Authority license in December, though its platform differs from ICE Poker’s in that it makes money off traditional casino mechanics rather than tokenization.

Anthony said Decentral Games is also preparing to launch a mobile iteration of ICE Poker in the coming months.

Earlier this week, the American rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West implored people to stop asking him to do a “f***ing NFT.” There was something cathartic about reading his words, written by hand in black marker on a physical sheet of paper. “My focus is on building real products in the real world,” he said.

Both the note and the caption of the photo were written in all caps, as if to convey an outburst of exasperation. The post suggested that he has been inundated with requests from agents, hucksters, companies, shills and fans to create or promote non-fungible token projects. With more and more celebrities sharing hollow endorsements for NFTs that appear to be thinly veiled paid advertisements or money-grabs, it seems likely West has been dealing with a deluge of petitions to get involved in this nascent market. His statement is particularly refreshing to read because of this context: it stands in contrast to all of the public figures promoting crypto products they seem to otherwise know or care little about.

Jill Gunter, a CoinDesk columnist, is a venture partner with Slow Ventures, where she invests in early-stage crypto and Web 3 projects. She is also a co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a non-profit research organization working to guarantee the right to a free and open financial system.

Even those stars who are educated and coherent about crypto and do seem genuinely passionate about the promise of Web 3 – Paris Hilton, for example – still struggle to tie NFTs back to the “real world.” Her recent appearance on the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” alongside her Bored Ape NFT, has gone viral over the last couple of weeks for the awkwardness and disingenuousness with which she and Jimmy fawn over how “cool” their Apes are. It was her previous appearance on the show that stood out to me, however. She provided Jimmy and the audience with a very reasonable, high-level explanation of NFTs: “It’s a non-fungible token, which is a digital contract that’s on the blockchain. So you can sell anything from art to music to experiences, physical objects.”

I cannot fault her explanation. It’s not very specific, but then again she is speaking to an audience that is as mainstream as it gets. I have provided many skeptical friends with similar descriptions over my years of working in crypto. The retort they always level at me in different variations is a fair one: “What does any of that mean in the real world?” Unfortunately, Paris, there is little utility today in anyone minting digital versions of physical objects as NFTs.

Even those of us who are not skeptics, who have hitched our livelihoods to this experimental industry, regularly speak about crypto and Web 3 in contrast to the “real world” as if to express self-awareness that we are inhabiting another planet. We talk about tokens and NFTs versus “real world assets;” we talk about DeFi applications juxtaposed against “real world finance.” We all know that we have not yet delivered real products in the real world. Kanye West is right.

One common critique of crypto applications is that they are self-referential. DeFi in particular largely functions this way: Stake your magic beans to earn yield in internet money that you can trade on margin for derivatives of yet more digital tokens. In a way, this is an incredible achievement. As an industry, we have created a separate, mostly functional financial system almost wholly unlinked from the real world.

On the other hand, that crypto is in a universe unto itself lends the whole space a fragile quality – as if it is all a collective illusion and, once the first person awakes, it could all evaporate.

Crypto has built castles in the air. They are very complex, compelling, sophisticated castles but they are, as of yet, without foundations connecting them to terra firma.

Read more: Jill Gunter – The Right (and Wrong Way) to Get Web 3 Adoption

In a postscript to his NFT note, Kanye West scrawls, “Ask me later.” It is as if he is leaving the door open for us to build the foundations for those castles and to make NFTs and the rest of Web 3 matter to the real world. Maybe someday NFTs will be of interest to him and to the rest of the inhabitants of planet Earth.

How do we as an industry answer West’s implied call to action? What does it mean to make crypto matter to the real world? I believe the answer lies in building the right infrastructure to get us to mass adoption.

There are still so many flaws with the layer 1 and layer 2 technologies that support all of the early Web 3 applications that render the apps unusable for many would-be consumers and participants. Transaction fees on Ethereum frequently stretch into the hundreds of dollars. Layer 2 scaling systems face challenges around delayed withdrawals. More expandable layer 1 protocols struggle with maintaining uptime. There are limited privacy guarantees made by existing smart contract platforms. Even the most user-friendly wallets present challenges to users who are largely unfamiliar with concepts of private key custody.

There is so much work to be done just to get the platforms we are building on into a state where they can support the full range of users and use cases, including those that extend to the real world.

Part of why the use cases of crypto are limited today is because the infrastructure on which they are built continues to have limitations. Okiki Famutimi, a product builder who has contributed to companies including Circle and Aave, wrote a few years ago about the notion of “post-threshold companies”: companies that are building products for the point in time after mainstream adoption has been achieved. There are a lot of post-threshold companies in crypto, he pointed out, building products that assume eventual mainstream adoption when it is not yet even clear we will ever actually get there. These premature post-threshold companies can create a lot of hype and noise and distraction and cause skeptics to question what value these products, built on as-of-yet unfit foundations, will ever offer the real world.

For those who are less concerned about immediate mainstream utility, the nascent products of these post-threshold companies like NFTs, decentralized exchanges and decentralized autonomous organizations can offer a glimpse of the future. If the infrastructure supported better user experiences and onboarding, cheaper transactions and created reasonable privacy guarantees, we could squint and see the future of art, music, finance, governance and collective action.

Our explanations of exactly how this will all pan out may yet be a little hand-wavey, as Paris Hilton’s was on « The Tonight Show. » Her description reminded me of another celebrity speaking in grand generalizations about a nascent technology. In a BBC interview from 1999, David Bowie spoke of the internet as “ an alien life form,” while his interviewer squinted skeptically. “The context and the state of content is going to be so different from anything we can imagine at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.” Of course, at that point it was hard for most of us to see exactly how the alien life form of the internet would ever impact our world in the ways it was promising.

Indeed, in the intervening two decades since Bowie offered this vision, the internet for many of us has become the real world that we inhabit mentally and emotionally. It is worth remembering that Kanye West, in order to spread his message about focusing on real-world products, took to Instagram to post a photo of the paper on which he wrote. I would be surprised if someone has not already screen-shotted the post and minted it as an NFT. Who is to say that someday very soon we won’t consider that just as real as the Instagram post itself?

Quelle est donc cette startup française qui veut améliorer le secteur de la mobilité en le connectant aux technologies crypto ? Comment la « tokenisation » du secteur conduirait-elle à une amélioration des ventes d’occasion et à un meilleur suivi des véhicules ? Les NFT ne se cantonnent absolument pas qu’à l’art ! Ils représentent des opportunités inédites pour bon […]

L’article Automobile : les NFT bien partis pour transformer l’industrie avec CodeNekt ? est apparu en premier sur Cointribune.

Loopring, an Ethereum-based project that helps developers build decentralized exchanges (DEX), named Chief Technology Officer Steve Guo as its CEO, replacing founder Daniel Wang.

Wang will continue to work as an adviser and will spend time developing the project’s layer 2 strategy, the firm said in a blog post Thursday.Guo previously worked at Intel as a software engineer and a tech lead. He was admitted to the University of Science and Technology of China when he was 15 years old and graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science in 2005.“This year, we will focus on our new NFT [non-fungible token] support, improving documentation, polishing wallet and DEX user experience, and enhancing service availability. I believe the best of Loopring is yet to be seen,” said Guo.The loopring token (LRC) has lost about 60% of its value in the past month and was recently trading near $0.80, CoinDesk data shows. It touched a record high of $3.86 on Nov. 10, 2021.

Read more: Loopring Price Up 7-Fold This Month on GameStop Speculation, Metaverse Bets

GameStop officialise le lancement de sa plateforme de tokens non fongibles (NFTs) en partenariat avec Immutable X. En plus de cette concrétisation, les deux entités vont mettre en place un fonds de subvention de 100 millions de dollars pour soutenir les développeurs qui lanceront des projets sur la plateforme.

L’article GameStop révèle sa plateforme de NFTs en partenariat avec Immutable X est apparu en premier sur Cryptoast.

Le lanceur d’alerte et journaliste australien Julian Assange va collaborer avec l’artiste numérique Pak, qui est à l’origine du token non fongible (NFT) « The Merge ». Le projet sortira le 7 février, jour de la demande d’extradition de Julien Assange vers la Suède. Un millier de NFTs en open edition devraient être disponibles à la vente ainsi qu’un NFT unique dynamique.

L’article Julian Assange et l’artiste numérique Pak vont collaborer pour un projet de NFTs est apparu en premier sur Cryptoast.

Socialite and hotel heiress Paris Hilton has launched a series of autobiographical non-fungible tokens (NFTs) dubbed “Paris: Past Lives, New Beginnings” on the Origin Story marketplace.

The NFT collection is being done in collaboration with the cult toy brand Superplastic, which is also working with the designer luxury brand Gucci on a separate NFT drop.

Hilton’s digital collectibles are being released on Origin Protocol, where Hilton is both an investor and advisor. The NFTs feature Paris Hilton and Superplastic’s synthetic superstar, Dayzee.

Hilton first discussed this NFT drop during an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s « The Tonight Show » in January. Last November, Hilton married venture capitalist Carter Reum and the NFT drop represents her “symbolic closing of one chapter of her life and moving onto the next.”

In an interview with CoinDesk last April, Hilton said she has been into crypto “forever,” adding that “NFTs have literally taken over my entire mind and soul. I’m obsessed. It’s all I think about. I’ve never been so excited about something in my life because I really see this as the future.”

Many celebrities and luxury fashion brands have been launching NFTs recently. For some stars, the launches are strictly an investment, while others may believe they’re participating in a movement, but it’s a trend which continues to gain momentum in 2022.

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Ready for something new? Meet $GFOF, the first ETF from Grayscale Investments. https://t.co/2c0Ot0Rne7 pic.twitter.com/ZLHf23xkWj

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Lire la suite: Les brèves cryptos du 3 février 2022

Last September, after perhaps the most “2021” of all possible 2021 insider-trading scandals, NFT marketplace OpenSea’s head of product, Nate Chastain, stepped down from his role.

The reason? Chastain purchased non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that he knew were set to display on the front page before they appeared there publicly. It was a seemingly innocent act, similar to a Foot Locker employee purchasing a pair of Air Jordans with his employee discount before the sneakers hit the shelves – right?

Wrong. NFTs aren’t shoes; they’re digital assets minted on a blockchain, and in some cases, they can even be considered securities. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) counts NFTs when you do your taxes – even receiving an NFT as a gift triggers a taxable event. And U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has a reputation for being crypto-friendly, told CoinDesk last October that consumers should be “very careful” when trying to determine if the crypto assets are securities.

This article originally appeared in Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter defining crypto, digital assets and the future of finance. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Emerging crypto regulation

While it wasn’t the SEC that investigated Chastain collectors tracked his wallet activity on the blockchain, which instigated an internal investigation by OpenSea – the story raises questions about whether federal regulators are tracking blockchain activity, too.

Legal measures against crypto insider trading are still fuzzy, particularly at this time when the industry produces new utility tokens, NFTs and altcoins every day. Innovation is constant in the crypto world, happening organically to meet new needs and build solutions, and often through significant venture capital funding.

The crypto scene is tight-knit. Despite the wide-scale appeal and booming popularity of crypto, its decentralized nature means a lot of information gets shared through community-generated means such as Twitter, Discord channels and in-person fireside chats and social events. Professionals, for the most part, use discernment (except for instances s like Chastain’s NFT opportunism), but overall, the general vibe is that crypto folks are pretty open book. Furthermore, like the OpenSea incident proves, there’s a certain amount of self-regulation built into the ecosystem through the public nature of blockchains (sort of like a pickup basketball game).

Do regulators consider cryptocurrencies to be securities?

In all the euphoria, however, it’s easy to want to open up your MetaMask or Coinbase wallet like you would your Robinhood or E-Trade app and add a few extra coins or tokens to your portfolio once you learn about exciting new projects and developments. But when traders – even hobby traders – get information from insiders about any new cryptocurrency or product, they should ask themselves whether those details are privileged, says Chicago-based Lisa Bragança, a former SEC branch chief.

“The best way to approach it is to presume that every time somebody makes a recommendation about a token, that it is just like a stock,” she told CoinDesk.

The SEC considers just about all cryptocurrencies to be securities, according to Bragança. The only ones that are safe (i.e., just assets) are bitcoin – it truly is decentralized, says Bragança – and ether.

But even these guidelines are still debated among insiders. The SEC’s allegations against crypto exchange Ripple, for instance, demonstrate that the issue of what defines a crypto security is still being determined.

“We should get a ruling in that trial some time here in the next couple of months maybe,” Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner who’s now CEO of consulting firm Patomak Global Partners, said during a CoinDesk “First Mover” interview last month. “That may be an indication of where things are going to go, » he said.

But while we wait to see how these lawsuits play out in court, the central question of what is a security will be the elephant in the room around which the nearly $2 trillion crypto industry is built.

“The SEC does not have jurisdiction over a trading platform if it’s not trading a security. So we come back to that essential question,” Atkins said.

Blockchain compliance and enforcement

Given the current back and forth, plus the novelty of blockchain technology, the likelihood of consumers getting nabbed for insider crypto trading with the same regularity and enforcement as they would with traditional securities is low – for now.

“The SEC doesn’t have a practice of going and checking the blockchain to see what transactions are being reported,” Bragança says. “And even if they could, they would have to figure out who was engaged in that trading because it’s often anonymous.”

Then comes the issue of enforcement. The ability to enforce insider-trading laws for crypto, according to Bragança, is “really impaired” and not something that’s happening regularly.

Regulators, however, do have the ability to cherry-pick when suspicious activity is flagged.

“Let’s say somebody is getting divorced,” Bragança says. If a spouse finds out or knew that their ex was engaging in insider trading on a decentralized exchange, that disgruntled spouse could report that to the SEC. “And then the SEC could investigate,” Bragança says.

The same considerations to determine if someone is guilty of insider trading apply to crypto as traditional assets: The information must be material – i.e., important enough that share prices could potentially be affected – and not public.

While crypto exchanges aren’t regularly sending consumer data to regulators, Bragança argues that centralized exchanges in particular are more than likely going to seek compliance with federal regulators over time.

“As these exchanges are seeking to get more authority, they are seeking legitimacy and status in the markets,” Bragança says. “So that’s when you will probably see, even without a law, [an exchange] decide to crack down and report suspicious trading.”

Beyond the popularity of investing in digital assets, futurists envision blockchain technology as a disrupter poised to reshape the entire finance and investment industry from top to bottom – and this future might not be as far off as we once thought.

“If you want to know what’s coming down the pike, it’s a tremendous amount of institutional and high-net-worth capital,” said Alex Lemberg, CEO of the Nimbus Platform, a decentralized finance (DeFi) investment service offering a series of income-generating strategies. “That’s not necessarily innovation, but that’s saying the market is growing from a liquidity perspective.”

This article originally appeared in Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter defining crypto, digital assets and the future of finance. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Yet the growing market is itself pushing innovation, said Lemberg, who named the non-fungible token (NFT) space as one area that he’s watching closely.

“We can now fractionalize anything with an NFT, and that allows us to take any physical asset we’re very confident in the pricing trajectory for over the next 50-100 years and fractionalize the risk of ownership and make it liquid so people can trade it whenever they want to,” said Lemberg. “That’s a huge innovation because that is how the stock, bond and commodities markets work – now you’ll see cars, watches, art and physical assets creep in and gradually start to trade in the same way.”

Lemberg’s vision is another step closer to reality. Last week, traditional asset manager WisdomTree announced that it is launching WisdomTree Prime, a digital wallet that will be made available to investors via a mobile app.

What is WisdomTree’s wallet?

Like any digital wallet, WisdomTree Prime allows investors to buy, hold, save and spend digital assets, said Will Peck, head of digital assets for WisdomTree.

“For us, that could mean bitcoin, that’s certainly the case for many investors, but it will also mean other tokenized versions of mainstream assets, like blockchain-enabled funds that can invest in securities,” said Peck, who added that WisdomTree is in the process of launching a line of such products. The company is also pursuing tokenized gold, real property and cash. “We think about it as offering a neobank-like experience in a digitally native wallet.”

The result is an offering unlike any currently available to investors, said Peck, where they can see their cryptocurrency, other digital assets, stocks, bonds, real property and banking assets within the same architecture and the same user experience.

WisdomTree is perhaps best known as an exchange-traded fund (ETF) sponsor, said Peck.

“We were asking if we could do to the ETF what the ETF did to the mutual fund,” he said. “We asked ourselves if there was some sort of superior technology that could act as a wrapper for products and types of exposures, and we pretty quickly came to crypto and blockchains for that.”

Peck and WisdomTree came to the conclusion that issuing and owning assets on the blockchain would ultimately improve the user experience because they reduce costs and increase the options available to investors.

A unifying force

In the traditional world, for example, payments, banking and investment technology stacks are kept separate, but cryptocurrencies have shown that people like having all three concepts built into a unified architecture –tokens like bitcoin and ether are capable of serving all three purposes.

Similarly, when securities are traded, there are usually an “immense” number of counterparties and intermediaries involved, said Peck, but over time blockchain is going to remove or consolidate those entities and offer users more transparency on costs.

“We believe there are a lot of efficiencies and consumer benefits to be gained from the unified user experience,” he said. “In the future we will offer new services and types of assets that will help remove intermediaries and lower the cost for people.”

As opposed to the wallets offered by cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini and Crypto.com that give investors access to large lists of crypto assets, WisdomTree is going to offer a curated experience.

Peck believes that blockchain technology will continue the process started by investment technologists like Charles Schwab in making investing cheaper, easier and more widely available.

Eventually, WisdomTree will bring this technology to financial advisors.

“We’re starting at retail because that is the path we think makes the most sense to start our journey, but we’re not stopping there,” said Peck. “We will have an institutional user portal over time and serve institutional clients as well as advisory firms. We’re going to be expanding out in 2022 and 2023 to tailor this offering to financial advisors.”

WisdomTree is simultaneously continuing its pursuit of a spot bitcoin ETF, Peck said.

‘Tokenize the world’

But DeFi thinkers like Lemberg believe the greatest potential lies in tokenizing any investable asset.

“There isn’t a single instrument that has been invented in the past 100 years that can’t be tokenized,” he said.

Lemberg added that though tokenization can present a better way of doing things, it likely won’t replace the incumbent financial industry.

For one thing, much of the investment and innovation to come in blockchain will be from institutions like banks and traditional asset managers like WisdomTree, said Lemberg.

“Because they already have some of the best technological resources out there, they will still be the biggest players, even in blockchain,” he said. “There is absolutely no worry that blockchain will compete with every bank, asset manager and hedge fund on the planet, their ability to deploy technology and research is a heck of a lot more mature than anything we see in the DeFi space.”

Instead, the big disruption will come from blockchain enabling more participants in the financial system.

“As someone who has been through a few decentralization events in finance over the last 30-plus years, I will tell you that initially it will be tough,” said Lemberg. “When I started you couldn’t trade an equity or an option on your own, you had to call me first. If you wanted to know what a quote was, you had to call me. Most of your ability to see a quote came out every day in the Investor’s Business Daily or The Wall Street Journal.”

“When the ability to see markets trade in real time on your computer, when you got the ability to bypass brokerage services and trade on your own, both those things were mass decentralizations to the tune of trillions of dollars,” he continued.

“Now think about what we’re watching today. Did any of that really disrupt investment banking? No, it ended up being a huge positive for them. But for individual investors, there’s going to be a huge learning curve.”