Author: Forbes
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have dropped this week, wiping over $200 billion in value from the combined crypto market—despite some bold bitcoin price predictions. The bitcoin price has fallen around 6% since Monday, dropping from around $52,000 per bitcoin to under $46,000 before recovering slightly. Meanwhile, other major cryptocurrencies including ethereum, Binance’s BNB, solana, cardano and XRP have also moved lower, with XRP losing almost 20% of its value during the last week. Now, bitcoin traders are braced for option contracts worth more than $6 billion to expire on News Year’s Eve—one of the largest options expiries this year that could fuel…
Early on, 2021 was shaping up to be the year the pandemic faded and society bounced back. But instead of a great reopening, the year brought the “Great Resignation,” inflation and two new Covid-19 variants in the form of Delta and Omicron. Even as the virus continued to constrain living in 2021, it also paved the way for certain trends to gain traction within Black culture, according to Black entrepreneurs, Black business leaders and Black researchers. Among them: a crypto craze, a higher profile for Black content creators and a new level of clout for Black colleges. These trends were…
The sports card market was flipped on its axis when MLB awarded Fanatics both its MLBPA and MLB licenses in August 2021. The deal effectively ended Topps’ 70-year connection with baseball, as well as nixed Topps’ SPAC merger with Mudrick Capital. With Fanatics taking over the MLBPA license in 2023, there are many pressing questions about where the sports card industry is headed for 2022. How will NFTs merge into the fabric of sports card collectibles? When Topps announced its initial deal for a SPAC merger with Mudrick in April, chairman Michael Eisner saw how collectors have rapidly increased their…
Teamwide offers for name, image and likeness deals are picking up in women’s sports. Earlier this week, CrowdPush announced a deal offered to the Alabama’s women’s gymnastics team, and now cryptocurrency exchange FTX is announcing an NIL offer being made to FSU’s entire softball team after making an offer to UCLA women’s basketball earlier this month. “We like to partner with full teams because so much of crypto is about community development, and we hope that NIL partners learn and explore crypto and FTX with their friends and teammates in an authentic way,” said FTX vice president of business development Nate Clancy. “FSU softball…
2021 is bidding goodbye, and what a year it has been! Cryptocurrencies soared, Coinbase went public, venture capital investors rolled out a conveyor belt for blockchain unicorns, non-fungible tokens and dog-themed coins took over the world, Jack Dorsey left Twitter and took Square to 3D (figuratively), Facebook became Meta. Somehow along the way we’ve all got pulled on a train heading for the metaverse, once merely a dystopian fantasy of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science-fiction novel “Snow Crash”, referring to a virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people, and 30 years later—Big Tech’s latest obsession, spearheaded by the largest social…
A lot of people have made a lot of money in crypto in the last few years and a lot of people have lost a lot. On balance huge sums have been made and a lot of those profits are going back to money heaven as profits are shifted from losers to winners. Investing, and especially trading, are skill games. If you play where the competition is toughest, in trading you will be lucky in the long term to keep your profits or even your capital because in trading ‘winner takes all’ logic is in play. In crypto the general…
Slowly, the Chinese state has been building up the e-CNY or the digital yuan to where it has some real-world capacity now. During the Winter Olympics, the Chinese state aims to evangelize the digital yuan to a broader international audience, trying to get the government-controlled payment rail into the hands of international visitors for a soft pilot of what is a long-standing Party goal: to more broadly internationalize the Yuan. Visitors to the Winter Olympics will be allowed to access the digital yuan with their passports, even if they don’t have any domestic Chinese banking accounts. Yet concerns remain for the…
Terra has evolved into the second biggest blockchain network in crypto behind Ethereum in recent months. On it, there are unique applications, like Kujira, Mirror, and Anchor, that fill the missing gaps in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Blockchains by total value locked DEFILLAMA Money Legos of DeFi on Terra The Terra blockchain and its native stablecoin UST have seen massive demand from users, benefiting from the rise in the popularity of native DeFi applications. Anchor allows users to save their UST and earn stable yield of around 20%. Mirror enables users to earn yields of around 40~50% through staking synthetic assets and UST together. Anchor and…
As of yesterday, President Biden signed a $768 billion defense policy bill into law that signals to the Pentagon critical issues for national security and a whopping $740 billion to the Department of Defense. According to the new law, the U.S. National Strategy Against Terrorism and Illicit Finance will no longer include language explicitly describing cryptocurrency, ‘‘by striking…such as so-called cryptocurrencies, other methods that are computer, telecommunications, or Internet-based, cyber crime,’’. The new bill updates the wording in a section called ‘Trend Analysis of Emerging Illicit Finance Threats to now say, “A discussion of and data regarding trends in illicit finance, involving…
Remember in 2020 when everyone said on New Year’s Eve and Day — “Oh, thank God, it’s over. This year will be so much better!” And in 2021 we got, more Covid, more threats of losing jobs over Covid policies, more masking, and in parts of Europe — constant protests not seen in at least a generation. How was 2021 by comparison? We have rumors of Central Bank’s in the West planning their joint rollout of a Central Bank Digital Currency. We have record high inflation. What if the EU, US and Japan did roll out a central bank digital currency (CBDC)? What…