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Telegram founder suggests ‘NFT-like smart contracts’ to auction usernames
“Imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved usernames, group and channel links for auction,” the Telegram founder wrote.
Pavel Durov, the founder of encrypted messaging application Telegram, has floated the idea of a marketplace that could utilize “NFT-like smart contracts” to auction highly-sought after usernames.
Durov made the suggestion after the “success” of domain name auctions by The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain originally designed by the Telegram team. The blockchain project launched the TON DNS service, enabling users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts and websites in mid-July.
In a message to his personal Telegram group named Durov’s Channel on Tuesday, he noted that he was “really impressed by the success of the auction TON recently conducted for their domain/wallet names.”
“Imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel links for auction,” he said.
Durov suggested that Telegram could tap into similar technology to roll out a new marketplace that could be used to buy and sell “catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal, and all four-letter user names:”
“This would create a new platform where username holders could transfer them to interested parties in protected deals — with ownership secured on the blockchain via NFT-like smart contracts.”
“Other elements of the Telegram ecosystem, including channels, stickers or emoji, could later also become part of this marketplace,” he added. Read More
This platform makes transfers cheaper, opens access to digital assets, and protects consumers
Millions of people could benefit from digital assets — but high fees put them off. This digital money transfer service is aiming to tackle this problem.
Across the globe, citizens in many countries still face high costs of money transfers both domestically and internationally. That's why digital assets have become the logical solution to answer this challenge — as a decentralized store of value that could enable everyday transactions, regardless of borders. Unfortunately, despite its positioning to level the playing field, many users face high fees when they're trying to use digital assets.
Addressing these concerns head-on is ZEN.COM, a digital money transfer service licensed to operate in the European Union by the Bank of Lithuania.
The platform has made it its aim to provide users with an improved customer experience through a simple interface while simultaneously delivering accelerated conversions, with market exchange rates starting at 0.5%.
At present, the transfer service gives users the ability to convert more than 30 fiat currencies, including EUR, GBP and USD, to digital assets. This can later be spent on a physical Mastercard card. Read More
How Ethereum NFT Lending Service BendDAO Aims to Solve Its Liquidity Crisis
The declining NFT market is forcing a lending protocol that leverages them to propose big changes.
BendDAO, which uses NFTs as collateral to loan Ethereum to borrowers, is in hot water.
The project's DAO—a community centred around a shared initiative that uses blockchain-based tokens for collective voting—must now decide whether to adopt a new policy on its liquidation thresholds after seeing its treasury all but drained.
“They’ve run out of ETH,” Proof's head of research, "punk9059," wrote Sunday in a Twitter thread examining the issue. “People who lent money to others via BendDAO to buy NFTs on leverage can't pull their money out.”
According to Etherscan data, the DAO’s wallet has since received a small influx of funds and now holds roughly 425 ETH, but things aren’t exactly stable yet. One BendDAO co-founder, a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT holder who goes by CodeInCoffee.eth, put the new proposal to community vote Monday in an effort to stabilize the DAO’s finances and restore confidence in the lending protocol.
The way BendDAO currently works is by enabling users to deposit high-value NFTs into the service and receive up to 40% of the asset's "floor price" as a loan in ETH. On the other side, users who deposit and lend out their ETH earn interest on those deposits. But the incentivizes were evidently misaligned, and an imbalance of borrowers and lenders has caused a lot of bad debt to go unpaid. Read More
How Diamonds Can Make It Impossible To Copy And Paste NFTs
Diamonds continue to shimmer in the digital world. Already one of nature's most beautiful creations, diamonds continue to gain popularity as one of the most-desired NFT assets.
Crypto and diamonds already have a storied history. A mystery buyer paid $12.3 million in virtual currency for a diamond from a Sotheby's auction in 2021. Now, these precious gems continue to gain notoriety as famous figures bring jewelry to the blockchain such as GemSet.
Tokenizing Jewelry And Diamonds Proves Popular:
Last year, well-known rapper Lil Pump released a range of NFT chains on the Sweet marketplace. Each piece of jewelry featured three shades of intertwined gold adorned with thousands of diamonds.
As the digital merchandise sold, Lil Pump noted in a press release how NFTs “are the future.”
Many argue diamonds and NFTs are a proverbial ‘match made in heaven’ due to the unique nature of each asset and the ease of selling high-value, investment-grade diamonds on metaverse marketplaces. A growing number of diamond-focused NFT entities offer a wide range of natural and rare colored gems and unique jewelry - with an array of colors, clarity, and carat.
Some projects, like NFT Diamonds and Co., market ‘Digital Diamonds’ that exist as a limited series, ensuring these digital assets remain scarce and valuable.
Despite enthusiastic marketing campaigns by jewelers, physical diamonds are not as scarce as many believe. They often resell at just 25-50% of the original purchase value. Retail markups alone can exceed 100-200% of the actual market value for a diamond.
The ease of buying and selling NFT diamonds keeps these assets liquid and tradable, especially as auction houses and other online platforms notice a marked increase in the number of tech-savvy millennial bidders on jewelry and watches. Read More
What Does The Wallet Do? What Does It Mean For You?
The launch of the Markethive wallet is approaching, so it’s time to start beating the proverbial drum. It is the start of an exciting time with the advent of many integrations to follow the release of the wallet that will bring Markethive into prominence as an unprecedented platform. The combination of inbound marketing, social media, digital broadcasting, video, conference rooms, e-commerce, gamification, etc.
Markethive is a blockchain-driven crypto economy, all-inclusive, with a distributed database system required for this decentralized, monolithic global project. We’re almost there with the release of the wallet that will initiate entrepreneurial sovereignty and open the floodgates of this divine enterprise with its plethora of systems and services, including the new interface and dashboard.
We now have a complete working wallet with the Solana Network, and we also have a fully functional crypto merchant account. The Markethive wallet is being polished with the finishing touches, keeping mindful that it’s not just a simple wallet but a comprehensive, dynamic engine centralized for you that powers your platform and business.
Markethive is fundamentally a sophisticated inbound marketing and storefront platform, integrated with a social network, and not just another social media platform you see popping up to counter the media tech giants we’ve come to know as oppressive, censoring you and using your personal data for their own gain. Read More
Where today’s DEXs are falling short, explained
What are the benefits a decentralized exchange has over a centralized one?
Decentralization means that a user remains in full control of their funds at all times.
On a centralized exchange (CEX), transactions are facilitated by an intermediary, the platform itself.
By contrast, a decentralized exchange (DEX) enables users to transact directly. As a result, the platform doesn’t hold any funds, meaning they can be less susceptible to hacks.
In addition to security, DEXs have also proven to grant users access to a greater cross-section of cryptocurrencies.
Given how Bitcoin was founded to promote decentralization and disintermediate banks, some enthusiasts argue DEXs stay true to the core values of cryptocurrencies. Read More
Decentralizing the Internet: How Wayru is Bringing People Together with Blockchain
Wayru is a startup that believes that people’s internet infrastructure should be in their own hands. The Florida-based company is a strong advocate for the internet as a human right and is striving to make this a reality with a pioneering new decentralized network of Hotspots and Genesis hardware devices, that will not only provide internet to millions in undeveloped regions but also reward those who chose to support the network.
Wayru’s mission is to decentralize internet access for a global market and it aims to achieve this by expanding its decentralized network of Hotspots and stimulating the adoption of its Genesis hardware devices on a global scale. Wayru’s goal is to achieve 1,000 fixed broadband clients and 10,000 WiFi users by the end of 2022 but has far more lofty targets in the long term.
“Only a few large Telcos manage most of the sector worldwide. It is time to give the power of connectivity and access to information back to the people. We believe that the ownership of Internet infrastructures should be in the hands of as many people as possible.”
Having already received the backing of Industry leaders Borderless and Algorand, Wayru has now developed a unique sharing economy model that has the potential to disrupt the telecommunications industry in underdeveloped nations, and beyond. Creating a viable internet infrastructure is only half the battle though. For Wayru to complete, or even surpass its centralized counterparts, it must offer advancements from both a technological standpoint and an economical one. Read More
Ethereum community splits over solutions for transaction censorship
Social slashing and even a user-activated soft fork have been suggested as possible responses to the threat of transaction censorship on Ethereum.
The Ethereum community has been divided over how to best respond to the threat of protocol-level transaction censorship in the wake of the United States government sanctions on Tornado Cash-linked addresses.
Over the last week, Ethereum community members have proposed social slashing or even a user-activated soft fork (UASF) as possible responses to transaction-level censorship on Ethereum, with some calling it a “trap” that will do more harm than good and others stating its necessary to provide “credible neutrality and censorship resistance properties” on Ethereum.
The heated debate comes after Ethereum miner Ethermine elected not to process transactions from the now U.S. sanctioned Ethereum-based privacy tool Tornado Cash, which has prompted members of the Ethereum community to worry about what would happen if other centralized validators did the same.
The Ethereum community is also debating the effectiveness of social slashing to combat censorship on the Ethereum network, as the strategy could lead to a chain split with some validators processing transactions on the censorship-less chain and the others validating only the OFAC-compliant chain.
Social slashing is the process whereby validators have a percentage of their stake slashed if they don’t correctly validate the incoming transactions or otherwise act dishonestly. Read More
Decentralized Science DAOs Empower Scientists and Scientific Research
Decentralized science (DeSci) is an ongoing global movement to rethink the scientific research ecosystem using blockchain technology. It adopts the Web 3.0 model of decentralized ownership, enabling fair and equitable scientific research funding.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are critical to DeSci’s framework for introducing funding opportunities for scientists and researchers. They leverage automated, tamper-proof ‘smart contracts’ to offer a cutting-edge alternative to traditional funding agencies. Their end goal is to incentivize innovative research.
DeSci’s DAO-based model engages distributed communities to decide on idea selection and funding. A few high-ranking officials no longer control the entire process. DAOs significantly lower entry barriers instead, eliminating gatekeeping and bureaucratic hurdles that hinder free scientific research. 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.
