Toute l'actualité des NFT
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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).
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.
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.”
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Lire la suite: Les brèves cryptos du 3 février 2022
Yuga Labs, the startup behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, is in talks with venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) over a funding round that would value it at as much as $5 billion, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
Yuga Labs is in talks about selling a multimillion-dollar stake with a16z among the firms it is courting, the FT said, citing people with knowledge of the discussions.Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 algorithmically generated images of cartoon apes minted and sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain, counts a score of celebrities as owners, including Paris Hilton and Steph Curry. Most recently rapper Eminem bought one on OpenSea for for 123.45 ETH ($319,000).Previously an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Stripe, a16z has invested extensively in the cryptocurrency industry, recently telling investors it is looking to raise $3.5 billion for a new crypto venture fund.
Read more: A16z Publishes Web 3 Policy Proposal for World Leaders
The president of Nintendo says the games company will hold off on expanding into the metaverse until it can be sure that the medium will provide the « surprise and fun » its players expect.
The comments by Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa were made during an earnings news conference Thursday, Reuters reported.This comes a week after another giant in the Japanese gaming industry, PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi, came out against the metaverse calling it “isolating” and VR headsets “annoying”.In contrast to this hesitation on the metaverse, in mid-January Microsoft acquired game developer Activision for $69 billion, the largest gaming deal in history, as it said the move would “provide building blocks for the metaverse”. This deal is currently being reviewed by the FTC.Historically, Nintendo has been extremely protective of its intellectual property (IP) and prefers to keep it in-house rather than licensing it to third parties. On expanding Nintendo’s empire through licensing, Furukawa said: « It wouldn’t be a plus to suddenly bring in people who don’t have Nintendo’s way of thinking. »This has been to the chagrin of Nintendo’s investors, who want the company to expand its IP licensing regime and embrace mobile gaming.The company has aggressively gone after NFTs and crypto projects that use the likenesses of its characters.Despite Nintendo’s non-committal stance on the metaverse, many metaverse indices hold it in their basket. Nintendo makes up approximately 5% of Solactive’s Metaverse index which is traded on markets in Germany. The stock has also been called an “overlooked” and “undervalued” metaverse play.
Adieu, petits milliards partis trop tôt ! – Les frais de transaction sur le réseau Ethereum (ETH), alimentés principalement par le minage de NFT, ont détruit plus d’1 milliard de dollars d’ethers (ETH) en janvier. Malgré cette somme record, le réseau créé par Vitalik Buterin est toujours inflationniste… jusqu’à son passage en preuve d’enjeu (proof of stake) prévu dans le courant de l’année 2022.
L’analyse des données issues de la blockchain par Nansen Analytics, publiée le mardi 1er février, indique que plus de 1,096 milliard de dollars d’ETH ont été brûlés au cours du mois de janvier dernier. Avec l’introduction de la mise à jour EIP 1559 en août dernier, une partie des frais est retirée de la circulation pour chaque transaction qui a lieu sur la blockchain Ethereum.
Pour rappel, l’envoi d’ethers coûte entre 10 et 50 dollars. En revanche, les tâches plus complexes, comme le minage de NFT (jetons non fongibles) ou l’interaction avec des smart contracts dans le cadre de la DeFi (finance décentralisée), coûtent beaucoup plus cher (parfois jusqu’à 400 dollars, suivant le taux d’utilisation du réseau), et brûlent donc énormément d’ethers.
En janvier, le volume total des transactions NFT sur OpenSea a atteint le chiffre record de 3,5 milliards de dollars. Elle occupe actuellement la première place du classement des transactions brûlées établi par Ultra Sound Money, avec 65 778 ETH (181,7 millions de dollars) brûlés au cours des 30 derniers jours. En deuxième et troisième position, on trouve les jetons brûlés par les transactions Ethereum et l’activité financière sur la plateforme d’échange décentralisée Uniswap (UNI), avec respectivement 35 696 ETH (98,6 millions de dollars) et 24 223 ETH (66,9 millions de dollars).
Malgré ce mécanisme, Ethereum reste un réseau blockchain inflationniste. L’émission actuelle de 5,4 millions d’ETH par an dépasse les 3,5 millions d’ETH brûlés. L’offre d’ETH ne se réduira qu’après le passage de la preuve de travail à la preuve d’enjeu. En effet, le coût énergétique de minage de nouveaux blocs baissera avec ce mécanisme de consensus, réduisant de fait le niveau de rémunération requis pour inciter les acteurs à participer à la validation de transactions. Pour rappel, la récompense actuelle pour la production d’un bloc est d’environ 2 ETH.
Une fois que la transition se produira, le montant total des nouvelles émissions sera inférieur à celui des jetons brûlés, avec pour conséquence un réseau déflationniste net. Le passage à la preuve d’enjeu, surnommée « The Merge », aura lieu au cours du deuxième ou du troisième trimestre de cette année. Avant cela, le taux de hachage total du réseau a encore réussi à atteindre un nouveau record historique.
La Fondation Ethereum a d’ailleurs récemment abandonné le nom « Ethereum 2.0 » (le nom du réseau après The Merge) dans son rebranding. Elle l’appelle désormais la couche de consensus (Ethereum consensus layer) pour éviter les confusions.
2022 sera-t-elle l’année où le prince des cryptos deviendra roi ? Tout est possible, même surpasser….Btcoin lui même ? En attendant, le réseau créé par Vitalik Buterin bat tous les records, porté notamment par l’avènement des NFT et de la finance décentralisée. Tous les regards se tournent désormais vers The Merge et sa promesse de réduire les frais d’utilisation du réseau.
Débrouillez vous comme vous voulez, mais il commence à devenir urgent d’accumuler quelques éthers ! Pour ce faire, une offre exceptionnelle vous attend sur la plateforme Swissborg qui vous offre jusqu’à 100 € en cryptomonnaies lors de votre inscription. (lien affilié, pour un dépôt minimum de 50 €)
L’article Sous les coups des NFT et de la DeFi, 1 milliard de $ en ethers (ETH) vient de disparaître à jamais est apparu en premier sur Journal du Coin.
After tipping off its plans for the metaverse in a Web 3 job posting last October, GameStop is partnering with Immutable X for the launch of its non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, the company announced Thursday.
The gaming retail giant said it tapped the Ethereum Layer 2 solution due to the network’s “zero gas fees for trading and minting NFTs in a carbon-neutral environment,” according to a press release.
GameStop plans for its marketplace to include “billions of low-cost, in-game assets that can easily be bought and sold,” specifically mentioning digital real estate and in-game skins to be included.
The marketplace is tapping Starkware for help with its backend, which is a zero-knowledge proof technology that can combine thousands of Ethereum transactions into one.
Read more: GameStop Enters the Metaverse With ‘Web3 Gaming’ Job Post
GameStop has also partnered with Trace and Cool Effect to “offset its remaining carbon footprint,” in what could be a bid to avoid the backlash that’s become commonplace with mainstream NFT involvement. (FTX similarly purchased carbon offsets before its Coachella NFT announcement.)
Along with the marketplace news, GameStop and Immutable announced the launch of a $100 million fund dedicated to supporting Web 3 game development in its ecosystem.
The fund aims at attracting game developers and studios to the marketplace, becoming just one of many $100 million plus gaming funds to launch in the past few months. (Mechanism Capital, Gala Games, Solana Ventures and Hashed being a few of the others.)
“The GameStop mission is literally power to the players, and that is exactly what we’re trying to do here,” Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable, told CoinDesk in an interview. “The $100 million is a minimum of what we’re doing.”
Immutable raised a $65 million Series B last September led by BITKRAFT Venture and King Rival Capital. Its IMX token was up sharply in early morning trading.