Business

Quidd, a marketplace for digital collectibles and a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, has raised a total of $5 million in private pre-sales and an initial DEX offering (IDO). The token sale took place on Polkadot project incubator Polkastarter on Nov. 18. The allotment of 2 million QUIDD tokens at a price of US$0.25 per token sold out in under an hour, raising $500,000. Earlier this month, the private sale of the Ethereum-based QUIDD tokens raised US$4 million from investors including Binance Smart Chain Growth Fund, Genesis Block Ventures, Kingsway, Mind Fund Group Ltd, Sanctor Capital, OneFootball, and other angel investors. During the Nov. 3 pre-sale on the Animoca Brands’ Launchpad, 1,001 vouchers sold out in 22 minutes. Each voucher cost around $500, bringing the total value of the pre-sa...

Polemos, a play-to-earn (P2E) gaming guild specialized in NFT games, has raised $2 million in a strategic funding round to focus on its open-world role-playing game. Soon-to-be-launched as an open beta in Q1 2022, Illuvium is an open-world RPG adventure game built on the Ethereum blockchain. Players collect creatures called Illuvials that are represented as tradeable NFTs. The digital characters can be used to battle against other players and complete quests, becoming more powerful with each battle won. On Nov. 19, Polemos announced the funding round that was led by investment firm Delphi Digital and Framework Ventures. Other participants in the round included DeFi founders from Sushi, Aave, 1inch Exchange, and a number of others. Aiming to create a multi-layered network of players before ...

The total value locked (TVL) on Ethereum layer two (L2) networks has surged to a new peak as gas fees continue to steadily rise driving further adoption.  Layer 2 analytics platform L2beat currently reports that the total amount of value locked across various L2 protocols and networks has reached an all-time high of $5.64 billion. L2 scaling solutions provide much higher transaction throughput and lower transaction fees, and they have surged in terms of adoption in November which has seen the highest average gas fees in Ethereum network history. Hitting new ATHs in $ETH locked in layer2 pic.twitter.com/0971sAdS16 — Evan Van Ness (@evan_van_ness) November 22, 2021 Arbitrum has the lion’s share of the L2 market with $2.67 billion locked up, or around 45% of the total. The dYdX decentral...

In her monthly Expert Take column, Selva Ozelli, an international tax attorney and CPA, covers the intersection between emerging technologies and sustainability, and provides the latest developments around taxes, AML/CFT regulations and legal issues affecting crypto and blockchain. The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), where I exhibited my art, took place in Glasgow, Scotland and ended with the adoption of the Glasgow Climate Pact, bringing nearly 200 countries closer to keeping global temperature rise by 2100 under 1.5 degrees Celsius. The conference remained more focused on emission reductions than on developed countries’ provisions of support to developing countries, as outlined in UN-Energy’s summary of the Ministerial Thematic Forums, which highlighted key recomme...

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and we throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes! This week, our 6 Questions go to Han Kao, founder of thesis-driven investment fund Sanctor Capital and co-founder of crypto research company Crypto Briefing. Han grew up in New York City and studied economics at Columbia University. He started as a software developer but soon realized he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Over the years, Han has founded several companies: a web development firm (ISI Studios) during the dot-com boom, events marketing (BDBG Marketing) and online ticketing (theDreamVine) companies from 2005 to 2015, and a mobile app studio (J Tech) in 2015. In 2017, Han began publishing research on early-stage blockcha...

Look at your feet. A lot of you (raises hand) are wearing Nikes right now. For the fiscal year ending May 31, 2021, Nike reported its revenue was up 19% to $44.5 billion for the year. But that’s here. What about in the Metaverse? Why Nike is interested in the Metaverse For those as of yet unfamiliar with the concept, the easiest — yet very incomplete — way of imagining the Metaverse is imagining yourself existing in a real-life video game. Nike enters and provides very cool meta-stuff. This is no joke. Nike is very serious about the Metaverse. Patent filings dating way back to the pre-Metaverse universe in 2018 reveal that Nike has seriously been stockpiling the tools with which it can do business in the Metaverse. These digital tools will include sneakers but also avatars and other f...

Bitcoin (BTC) is witnessing a tough tussle near the $58,000 mark but that has not stopped select altcoins from hitting a new all-time high. This shows that traders are watching the fundamental developments on individual coins. One of the recent top performing major altcoins has been Avalanche (AVAX), which has soared more than 120% in November. The coin caught traders’ attention leading up to the announcement by accounting firm Deloitte which plans to build its disaster relief platforms on the Avalanche blockchain. Crypto market data daily view. Source: Coin360 In another step that shows growing crypto adoption, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced the launch of Bitcoin city, which will be powered by geothermal energy and initially funded by $1 billion worth of Bitcoin bond...

Avalanche (AVAX) is now the tenth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after more than doubling in price since the start of November. AVAX entered the top-10 crypto index after pushing out Dogecoin (DOGE). In doing so, its circulating market valuation reached $30.60 billion for the first time compared to Dogecoin’s $30.30 billion. AVAX circulating market cap. Source: CoinMarketCap AVAX price hits another record high AVAX price climbed while ignoring price corrections elsewhere in the crypto market after Nov. 10. Notably, Bitcoin (BTC) plunged by nearly 20% from its record high of $69,000, and Ether (ETH) — the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and Avalanche’s top competitor — slipped by 19% from its all-time high at around $4,867. Nonetheless, their downsid...

A crowd loan is a Polkadot (DOT) crowdsourcing event in Polkadot that allows the community to support project bids in upcoming parachain slot auctions. Users contribute DOT, receive rewards in project tokens and get their DOT back in two years (a standard slot lease duration). This mechanic helps projects raise substantial capital in DOT tokens that may even exceed a few hundred million in dollar notion value. The obvious downside for users is the need to lock their DOT for two years where they don’t have access to their liquidity during this lockup period. In mainstream finance, there are private companies and initial public offering (IPO) lockup agreements. The lockup agreements prohibit company insiders — including employees, their friends, family and venture capitalists — from selling ...

Bitcoin (BTC) hovered near $59,000 as Nov. 21 came to a close after avoiding a retest of its recent lows. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView BTC challenges $60,000 Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD almost hitting $60,000 before consolidating in a new higher range after sudden gains Saturday evening. The pair had hit lows of $55,650 during the week, these marking its lowest point in over a month, but further retests failed to materialize as sentiment improved. Adopting a calmer perspective into the weekly close, analysts thus looked to the long term to understand the overall health of the market. “Since breaking its black 200-day EMA, BTC rallied to new All Time Highs. Still over +50% above the 200 EMA, despite the recent ...

What is Mimblewimble?  Mimblewimble is a privacy-oriented decentralized protocol that uses a novel way of structuring and storing transactions on the blockchain. It was designed and introduced by an anonymous developer who went by the name Tom Elvis Jedusor, who was a French counterpart for “Voldemort” in mid-2016. How does Mimblewimble work? Taking its name from the Harry Potter books series’ well-known tongue tying spell that ties the victim’s tongue to prevent it from revealing specific information, Mimblewimble protocol literally works like a spell. It provides a framework for a blockchain that offers a new realm of potential in terms of scalability, fungibility, privacy and crypto anonymity, as the protocol allows cryptocurrency information to remain completely anonymous. Mimblew...