Author: Forbes
Canadian blockchain infrastructure and services provider Figment raised $110 million in Series C funding at a $1.4 billion valuation. The announcement closely follows the firm’s $50 million Series B, closed in August, which valued the company at $500 million. Revealed exclusively to Forbes, the current round was led by software investment firm Thoma Bravo, with participation from Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), Binance Labs, ParaFi Capital, Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC (the parent company of Fidelity Investments), CMS Holdings, Franklin Templeton, and StarkWare, among others. The investment brings Figment’s total capital raised to date to approximately $165…
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, after proliferating during the last decade, have swollen to a massive $2 trillion market in recent years. The bitcoin price, having begun surging late last year from under $20,000 per bitcoin, reached a peak of almost $70,000 last month and helping the combined crypto market briefly touch $3 trillion. The price of ethereum and similar rivals have risen even faster than the bitcoin price as investors pile into the nascent market. Now, as bitcoin and crypto prices come under significant pressure in the face of a hawkish Federal Reserve, one academic has warned cryptocurrency “lit a fire”…
How fast is the NFT conversation moving in gaming? Well, the video above I shot literally yesterday is already out of date. As if to prove my point, the studio behind STALKER 2 responded to mass backlash about its use of an NFT-based NPC as a promotional item by first posting an explanation of why they did it, then quickly deleting that, and posting a new statement that said they were cancelling the NFT concept and would not be doing anything with NFTs in the future. What on earth is happening? Well, this is a prime example of how core gamers are rejecting the…
A stealthy botnet that has infected computers in nearly 100 different countries is silently stealing cryptocurrency from its victims. From November 2020 to November 2021 it hijacked nearly $500,000. The Phorpiex botnet has been operating since 2016 and is made up of hundreds of thousands of compromised devices. Back in 2019 it was grabbing headlines for an alarmingly successful sextortion email campaign that was raking in $20,000 a month for its criminal controllers. Phorpiex also has the ability to steal cryptocurrency, which it does by “crypto-clipping.” In these attacks, malware on an infected devices waits for cryptocurrency transactions to be take place.…
It’s becoming more and more evident that the social media model is broken. Successive scandals continue to underline that social media platforms put shareholder profits and advertiser interests above consumer protection and security. You do this in banking you’re threatened with a jail sentence, or at minimum a whopping fine and censure from the regulator. Decentralized social media is in the limelight, but what needs to happen for it to gain the necessary momentum to compete with the size and scale of the centralized social behemoths? In the shadows of DeFi’s meteoric rise, several stories with the common thread of…
The chief executive of Tether ran a company that faced a string of lawsuits in China over unpaid bills and fines for late tax payments before he helped launch the contentious stablecoin now at the heart of the crypto industry. As crypto has moved from finance’s fringes to its mainstream, investors have increasingly relied on stablecoins, digital tokens backed by real-world assets, as a means to buy and sell volatile currencies such as bitcoin. But as Tether’s role in the crypto universe has mushroomed since it was founded in 2014, with $78bn of its stablecoins now in circulation, so has…
Each year, Gartner ranks emerging technologies and places them along a Hype Cycle curve. The curve starts with an innovation trigger, followed by a peak of Inflated Expectations brought about by success and failure stories from early adopters. Naturally, this leads to a steep decline into the Trough of Disillusionment, the make-or-break point for producers of the technology — when iterations either catch on successfully or fail to deliver. Fret not, there is a gradual upswing through the Slope of Enlightenment, where the innovation becomes more understood and accepted in terms of realistic functionality, finally landing at the Plateau of Productivity. This…
The explosive growth of cryptocurrency in recent years has posed various questions for philanthropists, governments, NGOs, businesses and investors alike, requiring a robust, tech-savvy response that caters to the ebb and flow of financial innovation. By 2023, the world is predicted to spend up to $15.9 billion in blockchain-related tech, demonstrating the increasing integration of cryptocurrency in daily life. As for philanthropists and occasional donors, cryptocurrency donations are tax-deductible and not subject to capital gains tax, making it a simple, attractive option for many rising millennial millionaires or long-standing wealthy benefactors. The question then becomes how the financial world evolves alongside the preferred…
Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that distributes identical copies of transactions across an entire network. These transactions are encoded and stored in “blocks” that are then “chained” together. This system is very difficult to hack or cheat, and it’s also “very difficult to alter transactions logged in a public blockchain as no single authority controls the nodes,” according to Forbes. Many people have heard about blockchain technology in the context of cryptocurrencies, but it can be used in a number of other ways as well. As the managing broker of a commercial real estate firm, I’m dedicated to studying blockchain and…
A consistent thread about bitcoin has been that if it succeeds, it will inevitably invite government legislation and regulation to shut it down. This has been a backhanded critique of sorts advanced by investors like Ray Dalio who are “on bitcoin’s side”, but worry about its success attracting the attention of the state powers that be. This isn’t an altogether surprising or irrational fear. We live centuries after the establishment of the nation-state as all-powerful welfare state, military, and taxation hub. It’s clear that state powers are often only reined in by “political” constraints (rather than physical or technical ones). Could governments…