Author: Forbes
In the past four weeks, these anime-like “skateboarder” characters notched $300 million in transactions, beating out even the Bored Ape Yacht Club. On January 12th, at 10:00 am Pacific, a group of four 30-something men living in Los Angeles released 8,700 nonfungible tokens. The anime-style characters known as Azukis were priced at $3,400 apiece. They sold out in three minutes, raking in over $29 million. Another $2 million worth were sold in a private offering a few days later. Then things really heated up. In the four weeks ended February 11, Azukis did nearly $300 million in transaction volume across…
Bitcoin is holding above $42,000 after a drop from Thursday highs of $45,785. Some analysts cited mounting fears of Russia’s possible invasion of Ukraine as factors behind the weekend selloff. As of 8:20 AM ET, the cryptocurrency is trading at $42,404. On Saturday, bitcoin’s hashrate, a measure of computational power on the network, surged to a new all-time high, jumping from 188.40 terahashes per second (TH/s) to 248.11 TH/s in just one day, per data from YCharts. Industry experts think the hashrates will continue to grow “at an aggressive pace” as miners are solidifying their foothold in the U.S. The United States now accounts for the…
Local governments have been interested in cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum for years, and some have begun accepting it as a form of payment for certain transactions. But come places are taking it a step further. Last month, Berkeley, Calif., announced it was moving forward on a long anticipated project to sell “microbonds” in the municipal market. City leaders initially had the idea in 2018, and are working with UC Berkeley’s blockchain accelerator lab, Blockchain at Berkeley. The project is the brainchild of Mayor Jesse Arreguín and Councilmember Ben Bartlett and would issue municipal bonds using the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrency. This would…
Hedge funds have started to dip their proverbial toes in the water of cryptocurrencies. In fact, the significant uptick in crypto hedge fund launches could be a defining factor of the market this year. However, there’s a debate in the market about whether crypto hedge funds can truly generate alpha in a market in which the numbers show that many traditional hedge funds provide only beta exposure. A bit of cryptocurrency in hedge funds Jason Meklinsky, head of Americas Business Development at financial services provider Apex Group, said they are definitely seeing a bit of cryptocurrency creeping into some of the…
While a decade ago, it would have sounded like something out of a sci-fi action movie, the metaverse has become a bonafide part of the modern world. 2021, in particular, saw meta-mania fully grip the business sector, with Facebook announcing metaverse-focused projects and a slew of content relating to the metaverse being released. Metaverse 2022: No longer the setting of a sci-fi epic, the metaverse is becoming as real as the material world. But what is the metaverse? In short, the metaverse refers to virtual worlds that are designed for humans to interact with— as easily as they do in…
South Korean online game developer Krafton, founded by billionaire Chang Byung-gyu, is investing 8 billion won (about $6.5 million) in two digital art companies to develop non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for the metaverse. The company behind the hit game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds announced on Monday that it paid $4 million for a 12% stake in NFT trading platform Xbyblue and $2.5 million for a 6% stake in online auction service provider Seoul Auction Blue. Both companies are subsidiaries of South Korea’s first auction house, Seoul Auction, which was founded in 1998. The three companies have also agreed to develop NFT-related projects, allowing Krafton to create and sell NFT avatars…
No, it’s not because they will agree Bitcoin is a new and better form of money. In fact, it won’t be altruism uniting bitterly divided left-wing and right-wing politicians in their advocacy for the technology. Rather, the reason Democrats and Republicans will embrace Bitcoin is because Bitcoin will create jobs – high-income jobs, particularly, in heartland and rural America. If you’re new to Bitcoin, it might not be clear why this is the case. Understanding what Bitcoin achieves, why it matters, and why it differs from other cryptocurrencies remains difficult, and for some like myself, it’s been a career-long pursuit. Simply put,…
The crypto market keeps expanding, and step by step, it’s being supported by legislation in different countries. Therefore, it may seem like now is a good time to develop your own cryptocurrency. Yet many startups doubt whether they should create another cryptocurrency, and they have reasons for their concern. According to Coinopsy, there are over 2,000 dead cryptocurrencies so far. Many projects were abandoned by their creators because of regulatory issues, exploited vulnerabilities and lack of community support. So if you decide to develop your own cryptocurrency, it’s vital to keep others’ experiences in mind to avoid the same pitfalls. Since blockchain…
Philippine Digital Asset Exchange (PDAX) has raised more than $50 million in a funding round led by U.S. investment firm Tiger Global Management as the cryptocurrency exchange looks to make virtual assets more accessible in the Southeast Asian country. UBX, the venture fund of UnionBank of the Philippines, which counts one of the country’s richest clans, the Aboitiz family, as its largest shareholder, has taken part in the financing round, PDAX said in a statement on Thursday. Other investors include Kingsway Capital, Jump Capital, U.S. blockchain payments firm Ripple and DG Daiwa Ventures, the investment company jointly established by Japan’s Daiwa Securities…
Acouple weeks ago, it would’ve been hard to identify a great deal of common threading between Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook billionaire, Daniel Ek, the Spotify billionaire, and Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase billionaire. More recently, a link between the three has become pretty apparent: none of them want an active role deciding what belongs on their sites. This won’t shock anyone familiar with the past five years for Zuckerberg, who has long insisted it shouldn’t be his company’s responsibility to referee what belongs on the web. But it’s not something we’ve thought a lot about in connection to Ek and Armstrong,…