Author: Forbes

Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, a piece of digital artwork, finds itself alongside paintings made by the likes of Picasso, Rothko, van Gogh and Monet as one of the most expensive art pieces sold at an auction in 2021, a year when non-fungible tokens (NFTs) garnered mainstream attention and emerged as one of the hottest tech trends. This picture taken on April 7, 2021 shows blockchain entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, also known by his pseudonym MetaKovan, showing the digital artwork non-fungible token (NFT) “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” by artist Beeple in his home in Singapore. AFP via GETTY KEY FACTS Made…

Just like last year, my first prediction is that we will continue to see many big deals (at big valuations) in the video game industry. I still expect the most likely big IPOs to be Discord and Epic. Last year we saw numerous acquisitions of game companies over $1B and I expect we will see that again this year, as well as a growing amount of funding going to earlier stage venture-backed gaming companies. Father and daughter having fun with digital games. GETTY Again, repeating one of my predictions from 2021, I expect the “creator economy” – people and businesses…

Last year companies were forced to scramble and find workers. After years of taking people for granted,, the pandemic upended the job market. There were about 11-millions jobs available but a scarcity of people who were willing to take them. In an effort to attract and recruit talent, businesses had to make fundamental changes. They offered higher wages, sign-on bonuses, remote, hybrid and flexible workstyles, one-on-one mentoring, and free college tuition. Even with these accommodations, seats were left unfilled. There is another sweetener that some businesses are considering to attract people to join their firms—paying in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In 2021 we saw digital assets go…

For the second time this year, the Islamic Republic of Iran has banned the mining of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in an attempt to ease pressure on its crumbling energy infrastructure. Bitcoin miners deploy power-hungry computer hardware in a race to randomly discover – or mine – a specific string of numbers that the network needs in order to create new blocks of data. The prize for wading through trillions of wrong guesses is newly minted bitcoin; the cost is the electricity needed to keep the machines whirring away. Tehran is not ideologically opposed to the activity: the Ministry of Industries,…

It’s been a stunning year for the crypto market and an even more stunning one for crypto ETFs. Global assets of crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and exchange-traded products (ETPs) surged 549% to $20.23 billion as of Nov. 30, compared to just $3.12 billion at the end of 2020, according to a report from ETFGI, a London-based research house focused on the global ETF market. The top three funds in the world are XBT Provider’s Ether Tracker One, with $1.69 billion in total assets, XBT’s Bitcoin Tracker Euro, with $1.53 billon, and ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) with $1.42 billion. XBT…

There is a chance that the US will begin to regulate stablecoins sometime in 2022. Certainly, stablecoins have been a subject of focus by a series of US regulatory bodies as well as the Presidential Working Group on Financial Markets. In this post, I discuss what the works of two very fine twentieth century economists, Frank Hahn and Hyman Minsky, have taught us how to think about money and financial fragility when it comes to regulating stablecoins. I begin with some background on the crypto space. According to Carolyn Wilkins, who serves as an external member of the Financial Policy Committee,…

Ever since El Salvador became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender, there’s been no shortage of critics and naysayers predicting a disastrous end to the experiment. Yet for many elderly residents of El Zonte – the beachside town that first convinced president Nayib Bukele to go down the cryptocurrency rabbit hole – bitcoin has only brought smiles. Local dentist Enrique Berrios has been waiving fees at his practice and traveling to isolated, rural patients ever since he arrived in the town 17 years ago. After crossing paths with the bitcoin community that set up shop in El Zonte,…

In recent years, Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary has transitioned from a crypto skeptic to an enthusiast, investor and evangelist. He holds multiple positions in the industry and has also become a paid spokesperson and endorser for crypto exchange FTX. In this interview we discuss how his background as a venture capitalist and software investor informs his financial decisions, ways that the regulatory landscape has evolved over the years and where crypto fits into a diversified portfolio. He also has some very interesting thoughts related to NFTs how investors should weight bitcoin v. ether. Forbes: How do you approach your…

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, were the hottest thing in the cryptocurrency space in 2021. The NFT market generated more than $23 billion in trading volume during the year—rendering the $100 million from 2020 a drop in the ocean. With the continuous emergence of new use cases, 2022 is shaping up to be another exciting year for this growing class of crypto assets. One of such use cases is the incorporation of raffles with NFTs. Gaming and collectibles were the biggest benefactors of the NFT boom of 2021. The use of NFT in gaming introduced the possibility for gamers to become the undisputable…

After more than a decade of dismissing the revolutionary potential of blockchain technology, Washington finally woke up in 2021. As the total market cap of all blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies surpassed $3 trillion, the Beltway bandits realized the bigness of the crypto market: big taxation, big regulation, and big campaign donations. House and Senate: Parallel Universes on Capitol Hill A small but growing bipartisan cadre in Congress is starting to work with the US crypto industry on a regulatory framework to thread the needle between innovation in the American economy while guarding against fraud and crime. This effort took a step forward…