x
Image Source: Pixabay
Build business: An outlook on the Web3 industry during the downtrend
With the crypto market’s downturn, it’s essential to focus on what the blockchain technology industry has always suggested: build.
By the end of May, Bitcoin’s (BTC) price had dropped 40%, Ether (ETH) had lost 50% of its value, and the entire crypto market dipped below its $1-trillion capitalization for the first time since January 2021. As we enter a clear bear market trend, it’s essential to focus on what the blockchain industry has always suggested: build.
Bitcoin, Ether, and the broader crypto market’s downturn correlate to macroeconomic uncertainty. The uncertainty is driven by rising interest rates coupled with quantitative tightening, resulting in asset price sell-offs across the stock exchange and the crypto market. It’s entirely possible that we can see the repeat of events like the Terra ecosystem’s unwinding, crypto lending service Celsius’ fallout, and the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital’s $400-million liquidation losses.
The 2018 crypto winter was brought about by negative market sentiment and loss of confidence; however, 2022’s crypto winter is a direct result of macroeconomics. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is down, equities are down and global markets are down. This bear market is not isolated to crypto alone, with leverage unwind simultaneously occurring across several markets.
Venture capitalists and private investors pumped no less than $30 billion into blockchain projects. A third of that amount went to gaming and virtual world projects to lay the foundations of the Web3 metaverse. Read More
Your crypto wallet is the key to your Web3 identity
Web2 identity has been all about linked email addresses and social media accounts. Now that Web3 is poised to move in, here’s why crypto wallets will be the new key to ID.
Digital identity has been a fraught subject since the earliest days of the internet. Web2 bridged the gap between people’s offline lives, online identities, and creative and consumer habits, which has given way to a thoroughly integrated internet experience designed to be as personalized and targeted as possible. As a new phase of virtual interaction and digital identity appears on the horizon — one even more interconnected than Web2 — we need to rethink personalization and ownership with an eye to what did and didn’t work in the world of Web2.
While there is no blueprint for the Web3 identity procedure, we can predict the trajectory that digital identity in the metaverse will follow. This trajectory is already taking shape. Read More
Crypto, like railways, Part 2: Blockchain as the new internet planner
Just like railways transformed everyday lives in towns in the early days, blockchain technology continues to shape the format of the internet and its users.
In my latest article “Crypto, like railways, is among the world’s top innovations of the millennium,” I compare the blockchain revolution to the railway boom. If we apply this analogy further, what’s going to happen next?
Stuart Hylton in his book What the Railways Did for Us: The Making of Modern Britain cites this quote: “The direct effects of railway building are, after all, considerable enough in themselves to require no exaggeration. They profoundly influenced the internal flows of traffic, the choices of the site and the patterns of land use, the residential densities and development prospects of the central and inner districts of the Victorian city.”
When one examines the development of blockchain technology, one can make a curious observation. First of all, nobody saw it coming: People neglected Bitcoin (BTC) and related applications; blockchain protocols were doomed as unnecessary, while Wall Street predicted the fall of crypto. Laugh or not, Bitcoin has “died” over 400 times. Secondly, the industry has captivated the minds of the public and professionals, governors, and creators; in a blink of an eye, the internet adopted the roadmap from Web2 to Web3. Read More
Layer-1 Blockchains That Are Expanding The Horizons Of The DeFi Ecosystem
The crypto market has already borne witness to the tremendous growth and subsequent slide of decentralized finance (DeFi) on second-generation blockchains, spearheaded by none other than Ethereum. To date, Ethereum dominates the DeFi landscape, thanks to its array of Solidity smart contracts.
However, as a layer-1 blockchain solution, Ethereum’s existing capabilities may have peaked. The Ethereum network is regularly criticized for its slow throughput and skyrocketing gas costs. To solve these problems, dozens of Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions have emerged in recent years. But each are accompanied by their own limitations.
Meanwhile, realizing Ethereum’s problems and the growing demand for alternative layer-1 solutions, several new smart contract blockchains like Solana, Binance Chain, and the most-recent KleverChain, among others, have entered the mainstream crypto market.
Developers of DeFi protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) are increasingly using these new blockchains to offer a diverse array of decentralized products and services, which, in turn, is helping expand the DeFi ecosystem across several different blockchains and their respective communities. Read More
A democratic society values a free-flowing media ecosystem. A healthy media ecosystem is one of the characteristics of a democratic society. Mass media outlets such as newspapers and cable TV networks were prominent in the past. Today, the internet and social media platforms allow for greater communication across society.
Journalism, investigative correspondents, and even freelance writers are essential to that ecosystem. High-quality reporting revealing brutal truths and users' scope and exposure on social media to either create or access information are forces that can drive genuine societal change. And even keep the power structures in check.
Despite the positive aspects mentioned above, harmful practices and negative external forces related to the media ecosystem often eclipse them. These issues are usually easy to recognize once they’re identified. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge them and spread awareness about their potential risks.
Doing so will help you make informed decisions about how you use media and how it can impact your life and the lives of others. The following are a few issues pervasive in many digital news sites, forums, and social media platforms. Read More
Markethive Media has embraced blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, building an ecosystem that belongs to “we the people,” eliminating many of the issues plagued by media outlets today. With its meritocratic culture, dynamic social media interface, and growing community, Markethive is enhancing and bringing the platform into the future internet with new technology and interfaces, but still in keeping with the human touch.
Terra projects band together in migration to Polygon ecosystem
Projects formerly running on the fallen Terra blockchain have collaborated to help each other migrate over to the Polygon layer-2 network.
More than 48 different crypto projects formerly based on the failed Terra ecosystem have found a resurgence by migrating over to Polygon.
Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt expressed delight at his network’s ability to onboard many projects to the ecosystem in a Saturday tweet. He hinted that Polygon’s multimillion-dollar Terra Developer Fund has been effective in attracting the talent that was unexpectedly flung into limbo when Terra collapsed in May.
Polygon is a network that serves as a layer-2 scaling solution for the Ethereum network.
Among the higher-profile projects to move to Polygon are the Lunaverse (LUV) metaverse platform, the OnePlanet nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace, and the Derby Stars play-to-earn (P2E) game.
OnePlanet has been instrumental in helping other NFT projects migrate to Polygon. It has become a platform dedicated to assisting NFT projects from Terra with its Ark*One initiative.
OnePlant’s Saturday blog post outlines how Ark*One has helped “A total of 48 NFT projects, encompassing 90 NFT collections” port over to Polygon:
“This represents a large proportion of Terra projects, including some that did not launch on One Planet before the cataclysmic de-peg event.” Read More
Chelsea Manning’s Reluctant Return to Crypto and Renewed Passion for Privacy
"There are pitfalls to not having this kind of technology," Manning told Decrypt about the importance of projects like Nym's mixnet.
It’s a sign of the times that government secrecy isn’t top of mind for American activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
“We’re actually so awash in information now that secrecy isn’t the issue anymore,” she said. “It’s verification.”
She spoke to Decrypt over a video call in June about her security work at Web3 privacy project Nym and what brought her—somewhat begrudgingly—back into the world of cryptography.
Manning became synonymous with government transparency when she gave classified documents—250,000 American diplomatic cables and 480,000 Army reports on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—to WikiLeaks in 2010. It was, and still is, the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history. Read More
The Next Big Thing in NFTs: Selling Them for Peanuts
The pitch to fans: Support music or art out of goodwill, in exchange for a sense of ownership or patronage.
Would you buy an NFT for $1,000? How about for $10?
With the recent staggering losses in the crypto market, speculators have fled the once-frothy NFT market, taking what was left of their money with them. Floor prices for top collections have crashed to earth. Now some people in the industry producing original digital art—as opposed to collectible PFP (profile picture) collections like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks—are attempting to create a grassroots, sustainable business model that has a low bar for entry and doesn’t rely on speculation.
One deceptively simple idea gaining steam: selling NFTs that are cheap.
“We’re producing value out of thin air. It’s alchemy.”
Take Mike Pollard, who in 2021 began work on a marketplace for reasonably priced music NFTs called Nina, now in beta, which he describes as a kind of “crypto Bandcamp.”
“The models being used for selling NFTs, like auctions and bonding curves, along with the high fees on platforms like Ethereum, made it necessary to sell NFTs at high prices,” he told me.
Nina, by contrast, allows musicians to sell tracks at prices they set, without input from rent-seeking intermediaries. The result, Pollard said, is that tracks go for around $10.
Of course, there are still sellers with an outsized sense of their contribution to the art world. “One artist tried to sell a track for $1 million,” he said. “It did not sell.”
By and large, Nina’s artisans are attempting to create a more rational marketplace for their one-of-a-kind digital creations. Read More
Wanchain Expands Decentralized Crosschain Infrastructure with OKC
Most blockchains in use today run independently, making them fenced gardens in that only the participants in one blockchain can see the activities that take place there. The characteristic of sovereign blockchains and the reality that each one maintains a separate consensus algorithm and ledger are the causes of this. And for this reason, they are delighted to confirm that Wanchain, a decentralized blockchain interoperability solution, now supports OKC. Wanchain’s goal is to promote blockchain adoption by trying to bridge the many siloed blockchain networks worldwide. To secure massive digital assets and Dapps, OKC is a quick, high-performance, open-source smart contract platform backed by OKX.
Wanchain’s distinctive, non-custodial cross-chain bridges will integrate OKC, adding new assets and liquidity to the active ecosystem of projects and applications there. The use cases for $OKT in other ecosystems will expand thanks to these bridges.
Initial direct bridges to OKC will connect the following blockchains: Avalanche, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Polygon, Wanchain, and XDC Network. By utilizing the power of cross-chain technology, projects within the OKC ecosystem will use the cross-chain blockchain infrastructure provided by Wanchain to provide new value and use cases for their users. Read More
Disclaimer: These articles are provided for informational purposes only. They are not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or any other advice.
