On Monday the Associated Press announced an NFT marketplace it will launch on January 31 in collaboration with Xooa.
Blockchain
Blockchain: Explaining the Negative Backlash Over Mozilla's Crypto Donation Option
After swift backlash, Mozilla pulled back on its decision to include cryptocurrency as a way of donation. But why the controversy?
Polygon Fixes Bug That Endangered $24 Billion Worth of MATIC Token
Polygon, a Layer 2 scaling network for Ethereum, fixed a bug that put its MATIC token at risk. However, a hacker was able to steal tokens.
These NFT 'Meta Watches' Aim to Transform the Luxury Watch Market
Meta Watches is a set of unique watches automatically generated and represented as NFTs, living on the Ethereum blockchain. Every watch will have a unique name and feature set. A Meta Watch is fully functional and will show you the current time on your device. Currently there are three ways to obtain a metawatch: schachter-welker collection: 10 unique nft watches that can be acquired for 10 eth each by the nagel draxler gallery. Gm collection: 17 handcrafted watches that already sold for an average of 0.55 eth each. Analog summer 2021 collection: 1234 generative art watches we are soon releasing for minting (0.08 eth each)
What is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)?
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is out with another explainer article, this time about DAOs.
Simply put, DAOs are software enabled organizations. They allow people to pool resources toward a common goal and share in value creation when those goals are achieved. DAOs run on top of open blockchain networks like Ethereum, organized by tokens with their rules encoded in smart contracts. DAOs aren’t tied to a physical location, which allows them to mobilize quickly and attract talent from all over the world
Here's What Coinbase and Intel Think About the 'Metaverse'
“The Metaverse” has been hyped in the news recently by companies such as Facebook/Meta. Brian Armstrong, CEO and cofounder of crypto exchange Coinbase, as well as Raja Koduri, Senior vice president and General manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group at Intel, both recently shared their thoughts.
From Mr. Koduri: “Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time, will require even more: a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art.”
From Mr. Armstrong: “The Metaverse is the distant evolution of Web3. In its most complete form, it will be a series of decentralized, interconnected virtual worlds with a fully functioning economy where people can do just about anything they can do in the physical world.”
Unstoppable Domains and Alchemy Launch API for Enterprise NFT Domains
On Thursday, Unstoppable Domains announced a partnership with Alchemy. The companies have launched an API for NFT domain name integrations.
New VPN Called 'Exidio dVPN' Runs on Sentinel's Node Network
Exidio is a new decentralized VPN application that uses the Sentinel blockchain, which itself is part of the Cosmos ecosystem. “Exidio dVPN is rewriting the true definition of what it means to be a VPN. This is made possible by the Sentinel blockchain where all the global, distributed nodes are sharing their available and unused bandwidth. So as long as the Sentinel blockchain stays active, the network of nodes that offer bandwidth to the network remain active.” Exidio claims that traffic is end-to-end encrypted with proven no data logging.
Ledger Wallet Adds Support for Internet Computer (ICP), Staking Included
Ledger on Friday announced that its crypto hardware wallet now supports Internet Computer Protocol token (ICP) to hold and stake.
Cool Stuff Found
Ledger Announces Plan to Launch Crypto Debit Card to Work With Hardware Wallet
At the Ledger Op3n conference, the company announced its intention to release a crypto debit card called Crypto Life.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Joins Chainlink Labs as Strategic Advisor
Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google, has joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor.
Hackers Steal $119 Million From Web3 Project 'BadgerDAO'
BadgerDAO reported on Wednesday that it lost about 2,100 bitcoin and 151 ether in a hacking attack.
Kryptobi, who said he is on the BadgerDAO support team and has been looking into the hack, told Motherboard that it appears someone injected a malicious script into BadgerDAO’s frontend after compromising an API key for BadgerDAO’s Cloudflare account. Cloudflare is a web infrastructure, content delivery network, and website security company, which is used by millions of sites on the internet.
Square's New Name 'Block' Highlights Company Focus on Blockchain
When pondering what Jack Dorsey would do after his departure from Twitter, my first thought was focusing on Square and cryptocurrency. Now, a few days later, the company has changed its name to Block.
We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs. Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy.
Here are the Top 10 Blockchain Predictions for 2022
Blockchain Coinvestors has released its predictions for 2022. Every year the team publishes their predictions for the year ahead.
Cool Stuff Found
Vitalik Buterin Introduces EIP-4488 to Help Reduce Ethereum Gas Fees
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, is proposing EIP-4488 as a way to help reduce gas fees.
After highlighting concerns regarding the transaction fees on the Ethereum network, Buterin suggested the new EIP-4488, saying that it would “decrease transaction calldata gas cost, and add a limit of how much total transaction calldata can be in a block.”
In other words, EIP-4488 would limit the total transaction calldata, where data from external calls to functions are stored, before reducing the calldata gas cost to remove the possibility of breaking the network.
Loopring's New Smart Wallet Can Help Recover Stolen or Lost Crypto
Loopring Wallet is a first-ever Ethereum smart contract wallet with zkRollup-based transfers. Gas-free, secure, and simple. It allows you to avoid gas fees and network congestion. It integrates Loopring’s zkRollup, a layer-2 scaling protocol to increase speeds and lower fees by 1000x relative to Ethereum mainnet. Completely self-custodial; only you control your assets. Say goodbye to seed phrases and paper backups, say hello to social recovery. Choose a combination of friends, your other wallets (hardware or software), or institutions as guardians of your wallet. If you ever lose access to your mobile, they help you recover your assets. As long as more than half of your guardians are trustworthy, your assets are secure.
Twitter Creates Crypto Team Reporting to Chief Technology Officer
As part of the platform’s push toward decentralization, Twitter created a crypto team that will report to the company’s CTO.
What is the World Economic Forum Doing About Blockchain?
The World Economic Article advises companies to integrate blockchain technology, writing about “middleware” such as Chainlink (LINK).
While there remains a general assumption that blockchain technology is still in its early stages, in reality, it is already entering the early phase of majority adoption, especially by the finance industry. Recalling the massive digital transformation propelled by the internet, many forward-thinking enterprises in the finance sector and beyond are already taking important steps to become blockchain-ready.
I think it’s interesting that WEF is talking about blockchain stuff. It’s also good news for companies such as Chainlink, because they make it easy for stuff on a blockchain to interact with stuff off the chain. Disclaimer – LINK is one of the cryptocurrencies I invest in.
Blockchains Aren't as Private as You Think, But They Could Be
Cybersecurity expert Mashael Al Sabah was recently featured on MIT’s Business Lab podcast. She talks about privacy issues with blockchain technology and how they can be fixed. You can listen to the podcast with the link below (direct link on Apple Podcasts), and.or read the podcast transcript.
A lot of people think that they are completely anonymous when they use Bitcoin, and this gives them a false sense of security. In our research, what we did is that we crawled social media, like there’s popular forum for Bitcoin users called Bitcointalk.org, and we crawled Twitter as well for Bitcoin addresses that users attributed to themselves. In some forums, people share their Bitcoin addressees along with their profile information. So, now you have the public profile information, which includes usernames, emails, age, gender, city.
Cool Stuff Found
Polygon Blockchain Fixes Double Spend Bug Reported From Bug Bounty
Security researcher Gerhard Wagner found a double-spend bug in Polygon’s Plasma bridge. The company awarded Mr. Wagner a record US$2 million for reporting this critical vulnerability.
In total, it is possible to create 14×16 = 224 different encodings for the same raw path. A malicious user can leverage the issue to create alternative exits for the same burn transaction and perform double spends on the Polygon network.
