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The best is yet to come: What’s next for blockchain and the creator economy
The global pandemic changed everything for creators: The stay-at-home orders accelerated the shift toward blockchain and Web3 advancement.
Big Tech’s woes and pandemic-related restrictions have sped up fundamental changes already underway in how the world produces, consumes, and uses video content — changes likely to propel growth in the creator economy well into the future. And, given the increasing availability of low-cost decentralized blockchain infrastructure, these emerging players have a shot at mounting a serious challenge to the FAANG-run streaming providers.
There are five ways that blockchain will hasten growth in the creator economy, and help cement it as a central force in worldwide culture and entertainment: Read More
OpenSea phishing scandal reveals a security need across the NFT landscape
OpenSea’s latest vulnerability poses a larger and more deeper question relating to the global NFT ecosystem’s existing security infrastructure.
Despite the ongoing volatility plaguing the digital asset sector, one niche that has undoubtedly continued to flourish is the nonfungible token (NFT) market. This is made evident by the fact that a growing number of mainstream mover and shakers including the likes of Coca-Cola, Adidas, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and McDonald's, among many others, have made their way into the burgeoning Metaverse ecosystem in recent months.
Also, owing to the fact that over the course of 2021 alone, global NFT sales topped out at $40 billion, many analysts expect this trend to continue into the future. For example, American investment bank Jefferies recently raised its market-cap forecast for the NFT sector to over $35 billion for 2022 and to over $80 billion for 2025 — a projection that was also echoed by JP Morgan.
However, as with any market growing at such an exponential rate, issues related to security have to be expected as well. In this regard, prominent nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea recently fell victim to a phishing attack that took place just hours after the platform announced its week-long planned upgrade to delist all inactive NFTs. Read More
What is Solana, and how does it work?
Solana’s ambitious design aims to solve the blockchain trilemma, a concept proposed by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, in its unique way. This trilemma describes a set of three major challenges that developers face when building blockchains: decentralization, security, and scalability.
It is widely believed that blockchains are built in such a way that forces developers to sacrifice one of the aspects in favor of the other two, as they can only provide two of the three benefits at any given time.
The Solana blockchain platform has proposed a hybrid consensus mechanism that compromises on decentralization to maximize speed. The innovative combination of PoS and PoH makes Solana a unique project in the blockchain industry.
Generally, blockchains have greater scalability, depending on the number of transactions per second they can support, the more and better they scale. In decentralized blockchains, however, time discrepancies and higher throughput slow them down, meaning that more nodes verifying transactions and timestamps take more time.
In a nutshell, Solana’s design solves this problem by having one leader node chosen based on the PoS mechanism that sequences messages between nodes. Thus, the Solana network benefits, reducing workload that results in increased throughput even without a centralized and exact time source. Read More
Terra Is Now DeFi's Network of Choice After Ethereum
The latest rise in the price of LUNA, Terra's native token, has made Terra the second-largest home for all things DeFi.
Terra, the fast-growing DeFi tool kit built on Cosmos, is now officially the second-largest ecosystem in decentralized finance.
According to data pulled from DeFi Llama, Terra currently boasts a total value locked (TVL) of just over $23 billion, marking an all-time high in U.S. dollar terms.
This is roughly twice as much as runners-up BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain) and Fantom. The king chain, Ethereum, still dominates 54% of the entire DeFi market, commanding $111 billion. Read More
Wallet in final draft mode
Staking the Markethive Way
Staying One Step Ahead
Markethive started out as a sophisticated inbound marketing platform with a social media interface harvesting a robust collaborative culture. The entrepreneurs of the Markethive community have been using the free system and tools, promoting their businesses, and branding themselves across the internet with much success.
With the advent of Blockchain technologies, Markethive set its path on an unprecedented journey of combining marketing, social media, digital broadcasting, e-commerce, gamification, etc., with cryptocurrency and decentralized Blockchain, distributed ledger technology. An ongoing project of massive proportion to deliver sovereignty, financial and self, and freedom of self-expression for all equitably, without bias.
Markethive is a Vision from the Divine Source. Its mission is to fill the vacuum for the world's entrepreneurs - To empower and enrich the lives of every individual on every level across the globe. And the timing couldn’t be more perfect as we witness the soul-less destruction, tyranny, and surveillance of humanity gift wrapped and delivered to us as protection and for our own good.
We are building an ecosystem, and there’s an absolute need and use for our coin (HVC) for everything we do; therefore, the potential for the open market to accept and embrace HiveCoin is very promising. Read More
Cardano's Charles Hoskinson Criticizes ConsenSys, Claims JPMorgan Has No Stakes In Cardano
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has taken to Twitter to issue a public response on the matter of ConsenSys' disclosure of a 2020 deal which saw JPMorgan Chase acquire what has been called an "influential" stake on two of ConsenSys AG's (CAG) flagship products, MetaMask and Infura.
According to Hoskinson, JPMorgan has no stakes in the Cardano blockchain, and neither does it have any presence or control in any "critical" Cardano infrastructure.
According to the special audit filed by 35 shareholders from ConsenSys AG, there were " [...] fundamental intellectual property and subsidiaries illegally transferred from CAG into a new entity, ConsenSys Software Incorporated (CSI).”
These were specified further regarding the transfer's involvement of two flagship products served by ConsenSys, MetaMask, and Infura (crypto wallet and gateway, respectively). According to a press release issued by the shareholders, the transfer was effectively offset "in exchange for 10% ownership of CSI" with an offset a "$39 million loan" that was purportedly made by Joseph Lubin, ConsenSys's founder, and major shareholder. This transaction was recorded on August 14, 2020, and has since been the subject of criticism among ConsenSys' shareholders. Read More
Stablecoins will have to reflect and evolve to live up to their name
Stablecoins have the possibility to become a promising alternative system amid global inflation, but they must be auditable to remain stable.
In the case of stablecoins, unfortunately, the name is so far a misnomer. The fact that stablecoins are pegged to a “real” asset does not equate to stability. Traditional underlying assets are not exempt from market fluctuations, and with the majority of stablecoins pegged to fiat, they can be just as unstable.
With governments printing more and more fiat, we cannot afford to turn away from the potential of stablecoins backed by truly stable assets. In order for stablecoins to live up to the promise of “stability,” there must be a wider and more mainstream movement away from being backed by inflation-prone fiat currencies toward more reliable physical assets.
Gold is the most logical option. Throughout all the turbulence that 2021 brought, the price of gold sat steadily between $1,700 and $1,950 an ounce, proving both its stability and value.
But, tying a coin to a hypothetical store of gold doesn’t go far enough. The underlying asset must be fully allocated and redeemable — one gram of gold for one token. That prevents the coin from distancing itself from the reality of the asset it represents and stops the coin from contributing to debt growth. Read More
Non-crypto natives launch social tokens to engage with community and fans
Social tokens could be the next big trend in crypto this year, but regulatory concerns and specific use cases remain unclear.
While social tokens may be gaining traction, it’s also important to point out the regulatory concerns. The biggest issue to consider here would be a social token in the form of a security.
To ensure that social tokens are not viewed as securities, Ceesay explained that tokens created on Calaxy are stable coins that are collateralized one-to-one with USDC. “These are stable coins due to the regulatory gray area, but this also helps with onboarding,” he said. For instance, Ceesay pointed out that a Calaxy user could be an eight-year-old boy who is a fan of a specific sports player. “We don’t want these users to have a volatile asset,” explained Ceesay.
Berkowitz further remarked that Socialstack is an entirely closed ecosystem to ensure regulatory compliance. Berkowitz added that while there are still no clear regulations around social tokens, certain steps can be taken to ensure compliance:
“The best way to mitigate the risk of a security is to do things through an NFT and then have a Know Your Customer layer that identifies each person as an accredited investor. This is the best way to mitigate risk, but as of now we are making sure communities on our platform are not getting into risky situations.” Read More
Crypto industry seeks to educate, influence US lawmakers as it faces increasing regulation
Much like other activities in the digital asset space, crypto lobbying has been picking up during the past year.
Interaction between the cryptocurrency industry and Capitol Hill is becoming ever more intensive as efforts to regulate crypto grow in tandem with its popularity. The surge in crypto industry lobbying last year was given some concrete parameters in February by crypto analytics startup Crypto Head. It released a report showing that the crypto companies that spent the most money on lobbying in 2021 were Robinhood, Ripple Labs, Coinbase, and the Blockchain Association. These organizations were the lobbying leaders during the past five years as well, although with different rankings.
Here is what the United States crypto-lobbying landscape looks like today. 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.
