He talked about MyPrize emerging from stealth and already onboarding nearly 100,000 users.

Bruch also discussed why online casinos are a perfect vehicle for bringing more people into the crypto space.

Moreover, the CEO explained how the MyPrize team enables content creators to become small businesses, properly monetize their content, and gamble with their audience.

Onboarding Thousands of Users

Bruch entered the crypto space in 2010.

He worked in the startup world before moving to crypto-related companies, holding positions in Kraken, Cumberland Labs, and JST Capital.

This was a “really exciting time”, the CEO said, because it allowed him to observe the entire 2017 bull run, “which was wild to participate in.”

Bruch also co-founded the NFT platform Recur, which shut down last August, a month before the start of MyPrize.

MyPrize emerged from stealth in late March.

The first two weeks were “really exciting,” he said. “We’re onboarding tens of thousands of users. We’re about to cross 50,000 users.”

As of April 25, it has surpassed the 70,000 mark.

SEVENTY THOUSAND USERS ON MYPRIZE

Good thing there's no max capacity in this casino, bring ALL your friends with you.

Can't wait to let everybody in! pic.twitter.com/b0DGQVLqbW

— MyPrize (@myprizecom) April 25, 2024

The actual casino product hasn’t launched yet, but there is an early access product available for users to start earning points.

The product will come to market “in the coming weeks.”

Notably, MyPrize had the highest-ever pre-launch valuation for an online casino of $140 million.

The project raised $13 million in funding over two rounds ($5 million in October 2023 and $8 million in March 2024) from major players, including Dragonfly, Boxcars Ventures, a16z Scout, Mechanism Capital, Arrington Capital, Breed VC, JST Capital, 2 Punks Capital, and angel investors, among others.

Bruch met with all the teams that wanted to invest in the company to ensure that they were the right partners for this “long journey.”

He said the broader gambling space will experience a lot of growth, and MyPrize is likely to be a decades-long business.

“I really wanted to make sure that whoever we brought onto the cap table was super aligned with our long-term vision – not only for the gaming and gambling space but also for the crypto space.”

Bringing Users Into Crypto Through Gambling

Bruch was “obsessed” with Bitcoin in 2010, and that obsession shifted to “pretty much all crypto and the ethos behind it.”

One of his personal goals has been to onboard as many people as possible into crypto, “period.”

To understand how he’s accomplishing this goal, we first need to understand the online casino space more broadly, Bruch argued.

Less than 10% of the trillion-dollar global casino and gambling market is online. Therefore, “gambling has not had its internet moment yet at all.”

However, most online casinos today actually accept crypto as an on-ramp. MyPrize, too, started with crypto and will eventually add fiat.

Meanwhile, the Web3 world is filled with great products – but not many are interesting to a wide range of people.

At the same time, “everybody enjoys gambling.” It’s exciting, engaging, and entertaining.

Don't get us wrong, we love a good casino trip.

That's why we're taking the best parts— the social aspect and feeling of winning with your friends— and combining them with the comfort and convenience of playing online. pic.twitter.com/uxqRXhNLGB

— MyPrize (@myprizecom) April 25, 2024

Additionally, gambling has the most product market fit in history, Bruch remarked. “From day one of civilization, people wanted to speculate.”

Therefore, the combination of these two points – a massive industry and user interest – represents a huge opportunity.

And it can go further, the founder argued. This type of application presents an opportunity to onboard many new users to the crypto ecosystem.

“Our view is if we can build a killer application that onboards millions of users and then from there expose them to crypto, and also build a big decentralized GambliFi ecosystem over time, then we’re doing something very special.”

Therefore, MyPrize is starting as a centralized business and will build a much larger, fully decentralized GambliFi ecosystem.

This will enable regular people to get into the crypto space for the first time, but “it all starts with having a killer application that people can go and engage on.”

Turning Creators Into Small Businesses

Bruch also discussed MyPrize’s plan for the creator economy.

He argued that creators are not monetizing their content in a meaningful way.

So the team has been searching for a way to “effectively turn every single creator into their own small business.”

They would have no need for a large workforce but would still be able to monetize their content through engagement with their audience.

For example, a creator can stream their gambling content while interacting and betting with the audience, enjoying and participating in the event together.

As a creator you set up a dedicated room for your community to watch, interact, and play alongside you.

If you're hosting your own room in the casino, we feel that you should be part of the house.

— MyPrize (@myprizecom) April 15, 2024

This completely changes the interaction between creators and the community.

This is why the team is building the Bet Together feature. Ultimately, betting is a social experience, Bruch said.

____

There is more!

In this interview, Bruch also discussed:

• his background and career before entering the crypto space;
• being one of the largest individual creditors to FTX, selected by the US DOJ to serve on the creditors’ committee;
• story behind the ‘MyPrize’ name;
• bringing new social capabilities to online casinos that capture the feeling of playing with friends;
• new streaming tools and monetization structures that better reward streamers;
• the evident development of the crypto.

Head on to the podcast episode to hear the rest of this fascinating interview.

__________

About Zach Bruch

Zach Bruch is the Founder and CEO of MyPrize, an online crypto casino.

Bruch previously held positions at Kraken and Cumberland Labs, where he ran their sales trading desk.

He later created his own trading operation and became one of the most profitable individual traders of all time.

Prior to founding MyPrize, Bruch served as an advisor at JST Capital, a financial services firm specializing in digital asset markets.

The post Zach Bruch, Founder and CEO of MyPrize, on the Evolution of Crypto Casinos, Trading, and Creating Multiplayer Experiences in Web3 | Ep. 329 appeared first on Cryptonews.

He discussed his move from the world of giants Apple and Yahoo to crypto and Ledger.

Rogers also talked about the incoming Ledger Stax, adding that more secrets will be shared soon.

The CXO gave a wide-ranging interview, which you can watch or read below.

Jumping from Beats and Apple to Crypto

Rogers worked for and with a number of giants across industries. These include LVMH, Beats Music, Apple, and Yahoo!.

He told Cryptonews Podcast that these helped him understand the value and profound change the Internet has brought to the business world.

Yet, he felt his work in music was done.

One of the reasons he joined Ledger in 2021 is the “freedom of choice” the Internet and the wallet maker bring.

This crypto wallet is a major step up from the credit cards we have: one protects banks’ secrets, but the other works only for its users.

“You as a user have ownership, and that’s driving a little bit more at the Internet that I always dreamed of,” the CXO said.

Ever stumbled upon those funky strings of characters in the crypto world? Meet the 'public address' It's like your personal crypto mailbox, where you can receive payments hassle-free.

And if you're scratching your head about public addresses, wallets, and private keys, hop over… pic.twitter.com/hzxIhiSzCc

— Ledger (@Ledger) April 5, 2024

Security vs. Performance

Upon meeting Ledger’s CEO Pascal Gautier years ago, he began understanding the massive difference between having just a smartphone for transactions and owning a special device for one’s funds.

Phones, he said, are designed for performance, not security.

And that has never been more true than today, he argued, as we witness major security incidents all around us.

After meeting the Ledger team, Rogers realized that this company would succeed.

The reason was simple, he said. There was only one bet there: there will be more digital ownership in the future.

Will we have more digital ownership in the future? The answer is yes. Digital ownership is the key to freedom and privacy. If not self custody, why crypto?

Thanks for the great side chat @moshaikhs #PBW2024 pic.twitter.com/cq42YRWS4r

— Pascal Gauthier @Ledger (@_pgauthier) April 9, 2024

“What I actually love so much about this space is this inevitability. We as human beings will have digital ownership,” Rogers remarked.

And because of that, we’ll need security.

Moreover, it is rare in crypto to see a company stand for one message for more than a decade.

For Ledger that is security and self-custody, Rogers said.

It’s always heartbreaking to hear about someone getting scammed – especially when the person who scammed them was someone they had grown to trust.

Unfortunately that’s exactly what happened to Niki, who lost $390k worth of crypto after meeting someone online who spent a lot of… pic.twitter.com/0gjftCQCSr

— Ledger (@Ledger) April 16, 2024

Ledger Stax: Readying for Shipment, More Secrets to be Revealed

The much-anticipated Ledger Stax, which will come with the E-Ink touchscreen, Bluetooth, and roomy user interface, was announced in December 2022.

“We struggled through last year to get to the yield,” Rogers commented. “We’re finally there.”

The team was in Asia at the time of the recording, moving toward mass production.

The company will be sending a message out to people who preordered “very soon” to double-check the information.

“And then we’ll follow up with the shipping schedule. So it’s coming very shortly.”

After that, Ledger will put the device back on sale.

(1/2) Thanks for the excitement for Ledger Stax!

We have received all the pre-orders we can deliver through Summer 2023.

We’re incredibly grateful for your support and are working hard to get current pre-orders ready to ship!https://t.co/ZhZYpxANAV

— Ledger (@Ledger) February 10, 2023

However, “there’s actually some more secrets around that that I don’t want to share just yet. So I would say look out this summer, and we’ll have more coming.”

All in all, users will get an improved interference and experience, a secure screen, more features built in, and more interactorability.

Additionally, Ledger is adding new partners daily, so “you’ve got a full array of services in there.”

Lastly, the company has another “big mission this year”: to eradicate blind signing, both with Ledger and with partners.

There’s plenty more to come.

____

But that’s not all!

In this interview, Rogers also discussed:

• being a huge music fan since an early age, studying computer science, and walking the path to the Apple Music launch;
• Tony Fadell – the former senior vice president of the iPod division at Apple – coming up with the idea for Ledger Stax;
• the notion of Ledger as a status symbol with a culture built around it: quality and security of the product must be priorities because only this will result in long-term, successful business;
• Ledger’s work on increasing ease of use for its users in 2024;
• Ledger’s transactional business and enabling people to buy, sell, and swap directly into self-custody;
• speaking to US Representatives and Congress people in Washington DC about self-custody: why it is challenging and how Rogers overcomes those challenges.

Check out the full interview here.

__________

About Ian Rogers

Ian Rogers is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at Ledger, a major crypto and NFT hardware wallet manufacturer.

Rogers has spent his career exploring and innovating at the intersection of music, artists, and technology.

Prior to joining Ledger, he spent five years as Chief Digital Officer at LVMH, where he was responsible for building group-level digital excellence and accelerating digital transformation for LVMH Maisons.

Rogers is also renowned for his work in the music industry, where he was the CEO of Beats Music and GM of Music at both Apple and Yahoo.

Also, he built some of the earliest music-related websites in the early ’90s, including Winamp.com, and has been working with Beastie Boys since 1993.

The post Ian Rogers, CXO at Ledger, on Self-Custody, The Future of Hardware Wallets, and The Launch of Ledger Stax | Ep. 328 appeared first on Cryptonews.

Talking with host Matt Zahab, Brekken recalled how difficult it was for people to buy BTC in 2011, noting that the ease of purchase today contributes to its adoption.

He remarked that meme coins are actually great for the crypto space because they are fun, cheap to get, and generally harmless. Importantly, they are stress-testing the biggest chains in the sector.

The crypto veteran talked about multiple markets happening simultaneously and the potential significance of the Ethereum Dencun upgrade.

Brekken also touched upon the necessity to re-examine our interaction with centralized exchanges and the need for services like SideShift.

In this interview, Brekken discussed:

• Buying BTC in 2011 vs. today;
• Multiple markets currently happening at the same time;
• Rethinking how we interact with crypto exchanges — particularly as the bull run ushers in a new wave of mainstream adoption;
• How products like SideShift encourage mass adoption;
• The Ethereum Dencun upgrade;
• If meme coins are generally good or bad for the crypto space;
• How increased meme coin trading will show us the limits of current protocols, forcing chains to compete with each other to show who can handle the most traffic.

Brekken gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see above or read below.

How the Bitcoin Times Have Changed!

Brekken discovered Bitcoin in 2011.

At that time, he said, there were very few routes for people to get BTC. One option was dark web markets, including the infamous Silk Road.

“But in my case, I’m just too much of a nerd,” Brekken remarked. He didn’t know about this avenue at the time.

But he had an advantage over an average Joe: he was a programmer.

Therefore, Brekken discovered information on BTC online and started learning about the novel technology.

Notably, at the time, anyone interested in BTC needed to install a program on their PC to get it. This program would create addresses and allow users to find a place to buy the coin, receive it, and send it.

This was obviously a much more difficult system than what we have today.

But Brekken said another advantage a programmer or engineer would have at the time is the way they view and think of technology.

They seek to understand how it’s made and how they can build upon it. They’ll to to find a way to improve it, create something similar, find another use case, etc.

Not every shiny coin on social media will lead to generational wealth.

AI recommends DYOR and safe trading.

Good job! pic.twitter.com/q4O0SXuMFO

— SideShift.ai – Direct to Wallet Trading (@sideshiftai) March 24, 2024

Direct-to-Wallet Trading: Recipe for Mass Adoption

And this is how SideShift.ai was created. There was a way to make a piece of tech that would help fulfill a demand, and Brekken went for it.

The team developed an efficient, easy-to-use, newcomer-friendly platform that offers direct-to-wallet trading.

When one uses a centralized crypto exchange, there are many steps to complete before finally getting the coins.

This includes all the necessary log-ins, 2FA, KYC, choosing the deposit, finding the network, waiting for confirmations, and so on, says Brekken.

However, it can get more complicated in certain cases, such as buying a specific meme coin. For example, the user needs to trade BTC for UDTS first before getting WIF.

SideShift.ai performs the trade immediately and delivers the coins to the wallet, the founder said.

// USD WEEKLY SHIFT VOLUME – APR 9 TO 15 //

SideShift recorded a gross weekly volume of $22.9m alongside a SHIFT count of 11,669 shifts. These figures combined to produce healthy daily averages of $3.3m on 1,667 shifts. pic.twitter.com/8urons5elK

— SideShift Research (@XAIResearch) April 19, 2024

“That’s why we call it direct-to-wallet trading because it’s the only way I know to explain that you don’t have to click 700 buttons in order to do something as simple as just going from what you have to what you want.”

There was lots of demand for this service, he added.

But speaking of exchanges, Brekken gave a warning: take your funds out.

The more long-term view for this industry is that people need to stop leaving their money on exchanges. It’s a huge problem, he said.

Simply said, the incentives are not aligned between the user and the exchange.

The exchanges have full control over users’ funds and make money off of it.

Also, they may use the funds without telling users, be attacked, do a rug pull, etc. There are too many red flags.

Oui oui! SideShift about to be available directly in the Ledger wallet https://t.co/ytGDcUxwHN

— Andreas (@abrkn) April 16, 2024

AI In Name Only

Brekken briefly touched on the ‘AI’ part in ‘SideShift.ai.’

“I’m going to be completely honest with you,” he said, “I just thought it sounded really awesome.”

The closest the company will get to an actual AI is the amount of automation they’ve done.

The company has a small team of people who deal with “quite a lot of volume.”

Yet, they keep everything smooth and stable thanks to “excessive automation internally,” Brekken said.

There’s very little human intervention, he added. “It’s like a giant machine” running nearly everything.

AI advises HUMANS to do their own research to be confident in their financial journey.

ATTACHING: Meme for motivation

Good job! pic.twitter.com/eRli2v5Iw1

— SideShift.ai – Direct to Wallet Trading (@sideshiftai) April 13, 2024

However, when talking to customer support, the team “makes it a bit confusing” for people to know if they’re talking to a human, a machine, or a machine pretending to be human.

“More likely, you might be talking to a human pretending to be a machine,” Brekken said.

And speaking of the team, the founder noted that SideShift.ai is currently hiring for a number of roles, especially engineers.

Meme Coins Are Stress-Testing Major Chains

Commenting on the ongoing meme coin craze, Brekken said that he himself was “really into” Dogecoin when it launched in 2013.

Looking at the craze now, “It was the exact same thing back when there was only Dogecoin, but obviously, this is on steroids.”

There are many more of these coins now, many more communities, and more people involved – even those outside the crypto space. It’s difficult to visit a café without overhearing a conversation about WIF or BONK, Brekken remarked.

But, generally speaking, meme coins are beneficial for the space, Brekken remarked. “I think it’s good in many ways that people are trading meme coins,” he said.

He argued that these coins create fun for friends and communities, that they are harmless, and also an excellent way for people to enter crypto.

Bitcoin’s $60,000-$70,000 price tag can be intimidating for newcomers. Once bought, there’s also a lot to lose.

But with meme coins, it’s a lot easier to afford and trade them.

Degens need something to gamble on, and the shiny new things are memecoins.

Catch all of the PvP action, hot takes and more in this week's spicy newsletter!

Read it now: https://t.co/dmEDPBMuyr pic.twitter.com/289DdZ9819

— Shitcoin.com (@ShitcoinDotCom) March 23, 2024

And this space is growing as well. Now, users have more advanced tools at their disposal trading BONK than they do trading Apple shares, Brekken argued.

Additionally, trading meme coins is potentially becoming a competitor to another giant: sports betting.

“It’s quality fun with your friends,” Brekken said.

Lastly, but importantly, all this activity is stress-testing the technology, specifically the chains these tokens reside and move on.

Solana and Ethereum, in particular, are being stress-tested. Different chains are competing. They must work hard not to fall behind and lose users.

“I will bet you, [the developers] are all working day and night on all these platforms and chains […] to just keep this running and to try to find ways to deal with this record-level high demand for throughput and capacity,” Brekken said.

Multiple Parallel Markets At Work

Another exciting point Brekken made is that we currently seem to be witnessing multiple markets happening simultaneously.

Previously, we’d see one sector at a time significantly rising above others, each with its own cycle.

For example, in the last cycle, there was a decentralized finance (DeFi) summer that turned into a Solana summer. This gradually shifted into a “mania” centered around FTX, and so on.

Today, however, we’re seeing the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) taking off, the meme coin market continuation, and a new DeFi wave.

It also seems like these three have separate risks and somewhat separate users, Brekken opined.

Don't be a piggy in the fight between bulls and the bears.

Plan your trades wisely. Good job! pic.twitter.com/WSm848Yp9V

— SideShift.ai – Direct to Wallet Trading (@sideshiftai) April 13, 2024

That said, he hopes that the meme coin cycle will continue to attract more newcomers to the space and encourage users within other cycles to explore other crypto-related markets.

The bull market has been “creeping up on us since the desperation we all felt” when Bitcoin was $20,000-$25,000.

Therefore, Brekken hopes the three different cycles will affect each other positively and prolong this bull run.

“If you’re still alive with a good-looking meme coin portfolio [by the end of summer], I think you are a genius,” he added.

Ethereum Dencun Upgrade and Path to Sharding

Lastly, Brekken briefly discussed certain developments in the space, including the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, which went live in March.

The upgrade aimed to significantly boost the Ethereum ecosystem, reduce Ethereum layer-2 blockchain transaction fees, and pave the way for sharding in the future, which will finally lower Ethereum’s high layer-1 fees.

What surprised Brekken about these Ethereum upgrades is that everybody connected to the Ethereum ecosystem, including other chains, was fully ready at the moment the update went live.

This is a positive development.

There is no longer a need to develop separate software for several years to support an upgrade. These are instantaneous now.

Another notable thing is the ongoing talk about sharding.

Deep dive on Ethereum's sharding roadmap from @Delphi_Digital. It's very good! https://t.co/oiTEqLFXGx

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 27, 2022

Sharding is a solution that optimizes the process of verifying transactions and smart contracts by splitting the blockchain network into partitions called shards.

This way, every node does not need to review the entire transaction history on the network.

Instead, specific nodes are assigned to specific shards, optimizing the process of nodes verifying transactions.

This, said Brekken, has the potential to send ETH to $5,000.

Therefore, the upgrades we’re seeing now are the developers gradually building a path towards sharding. Brekken said it’s a large project that will likely take a few years to complete.

__________

About Andreas Brekken

Andreas Brekken is the founder of SideShift.ai, a platform offering direct-to-wallet trading. To date, the exchange has processed over $1.25 billion in volume.

Brekken first discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and has a deep technical understanding of the cryptocurrency space.

In addition to being a long-term crypto supporter, he has substantial hands-on industry experience.

In 2013, he founded Justcoin.com, a Norway-based cryptocurrency exchange (later acquired by ANX INTL), and then worked as a software engineer at Kraken in 2015 and 2016.

Brekken is also the founder of Shitcoin.com, a wide-reaching crypto content platform.

The post Andreas Brekken, Founder of SideShift.ai, on Bull Run, Meme Coins, and Ethereum Sharding | Ep. 327 appeared first on Cryptonews.

Vijay discussed key themes, including democratizing data, the convergence of cryptocurrency and AI, and their collective potential to eliminate malicious entities from the blockchain ecosystem.

Vijay also expanded on the resilience of certain NFTs, labeled as ‘survivors,’ emphasizing the critical need for integrity and transparency within the Web3 domain to foster broader acceptance. He also shared his insights on future trends in the gaming industry.

In this interview, Pravin discussed:

• the role of AI/ML in blockchain analytics;
• data integrity and transparency in NFT markets;
• navigating the regulatory landscape;
• the ins and outs of staking mechanisms;
• sustainable economies, network security, and anti-fraud.

Blockchain Police

bitsCrunch is a data analytics company specializing in multi-chain insights for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital assets.

It’s an AI-powered, decentralized data platform that enables developers to build NFT applications (dapps).

“We crunch each and every bit of data. That is bitsCrunch for you,” Pravin told the listeners.

Over the past three years, the team has developed a significant blockchain platform with support from industry giants such as Coinbase, Animoca Brands, Chainlink, and Polygon.

Describing themselves as “the blockchain police,” they aim to enhance blockchain transparency.

Their efforts notably support individuals like ZachXBT, a well-known on-chain researcher, by transforming complex blockchain data into formats that are easily understandable. Pravin highlighted their mission: “We help people make their own shots,” Pravin said.

“We help facilitate people like ZachXBTs in the world. And we would like to produce several ZachXBTs in the future.”

Additionally, they actively investigate and address on-chain malicious activities like wash trading and money laundering.

Wash Trading in Digital Assets has dire consequences!

– Artificial price inflation
– Misleading market metrics 
– Market manipulation
– Reduced trust 

Solution: bitsCrunch Wash Trading Detection!

Check out our use case on how bitsCrunch addresses security measures

… pic.twitter.com/3NuzsCKuXM

— bitsCrunch (@bitsCrunch) April 16, 2024

Pravin provided a couple of examples. One is image-level forensics.

If person A takes an image of person B and puts it on-chain as an NFT, earning thousands of dollars, that’s an infringement of what A owns as a brand.

The same goes for companies: B can’t sell company A’s logo as an NFT because it’s an infringement of company A’s intellectual property (IP).

Therefore, bitsCrunch helps brands protect their IPs.

It already has customers on the brand IP protection side and many more customers on the data side, Pravin remarked.

The Beauty of Crypto and AI

Pravin noted that artificial intelligence (AI) is not new: It’s been “with us for more than a decade now.”

However, it has recently taken off like never before.

Notably, bitsCrunch has been one of the earliest proponents of AI in the crypto space. They’ve supported the use of AI “to clean up the blockchain space” for several years now.

“And then if you look at crypto and AI, the beauty is that it can be applied to any domain, any field,” Pravin said. “And when these two converge, then sky is the limit, I would say.”

The CEO explained that data is everywhere – and a lot of it.

The Fortune 500 companies – including Google, Meta, Twitter, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, and others – are all very different. But they all use data and produce a lot of it.

Data is invaluable, as it can be applied across platforms, domains, and verticals, Pravin remarked.

The same applies to AI and crypto, he added.

The bitsCrunch Network Journey is Beautiful. pic.twitter.com/DKDhfjqWXn

— bitsCrunch (@bitsCrunch) April 16, 2024

Putting data on-chain creates “a ton of value.” At the same time, AI will help find malicious patterns, “figuring out […] what is good and what is bad.”

Furthermore, with the spot Bitcoin ETF approval and potential Ethereum ETF at the door, “I would say AI + blockchain is going to be huge,” Pravin opined.

Importantly for bitsCrunch, he added, the company is well-positioned to capture that momentum.

The team has indexed five chains: Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance, and Solana.

However, AI will help it sift through the data while indexing other chains as well.

“Exciting times ahead,” Pravin said. “[I’m] looking forward to the next few years and seeing how this space is eventually going to blow up.”

Integrating Solana

And speaking of Solana, bitsCrunch just recently announced the indexing of all Solana blocks.

Pravin described this blockchain as “a beast.” It is “clearly way ahead of some of the other chains in the space,” he argued.

However, its integration didn’t happen overnight. The team had to index more than two terabytes of data.

Massive news, #bitsCrunch fam!

We're bringing comprehensive indexing & in-depth analytics to digital assets, gaming, marketplaces & brands across the entire blockchain landscape, with expanded support for the @solana Ecosystem.

Our AI estimates digital asset value & detects IP… pic.twitter.com/kAFzd78ZGp

— bitsCrunch (@bitsCrunch) March 20, 2024

Moreover, they contacted the Solana Foundation last year. Their foundation and developer teams helped bitsCrunch with the indexing process.

“We wanted to get some tech support because, so far, we have been indexing EVM chains in the past, and Solana is a different beast.”

And because bitsCrunch is a small but growing project, the team was grateful that Solana’s official account retweeted the integration news.

“That shows the trust and the collaboration that we have,” Pravin remarked.

Setting Footprints in NFTs

The team, as the blockchain police, began their work in the NFT space.

The CEO said that they set their footprints during the NFT boom of 2021.

That’s when the company started raising the funds, subsequently seeing major companies backing it.

It was a good time for NFTs, so everybody praised the sector. But bitsCrunch wanted to “look at the dark side of NFTs.”

Notably, very few out of thousands of projects have survived till this day. And some of them have gotten pretty big, establishing major partnerships within and outside the Web3 space.

These include Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, Yuga Labs’ projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, and a few others.

We will be providing IP protection services to Polarise, starting with PolarFighters, the first-ever ERC-1000 standard NFT collection.

To celebrate this we are giving away 2 guaranteed WL spots to 2 random winners. More details soon.

Participate here: https://t.co/G1nAS2EnZg

— bitsCrunch (@bitsCrunch) April 12, 2024

“We want to look into what is good, what is bad,” Pravin said. The team wants to “look into the wash trading aspect of the game” and “see who is flipping charts, who is just here to make a quick buck, and we are also here to check what is the impact of money laundering [the result of which is] money flowing into the NFT space.”

And it’s not only over 200 massive brands the company has indexed so far. Artists are using the platform, too.

They index their art pieces, and the platform can detect any malicious activity related to them, including theft.

Stake-and-Earn: Democratizing Data

One of the aspects to stress about bitsCrunch is that it is decentralized.

Major data protocols – such as Chainalysis, Elliptic, Dune Analytics, and Nansen – are immensely valuable, but they are centralized, Pravin said.

Getting data can be very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Then when you finally receive it, you may not even understand it.

BitsCrunch wanted to democratize this, Pravin remarked. They wanted to offer readable, quick, simple, and affordable service.

The company’s data package starts at $75 a user, Pravin said.

“We want to democratize the data in a few clicks,” he said. “We don’t care where you are from, what you do. All we need is a wallet, which you can connect to the system, and you get access to the API keys or dashboards in just a few clicks.”

But having all these protocols, centralized and otherwise, is necessary to ensure as much transparency and integrity as possible in the space. This will draw more people in and lead to greater adoption.

Contributors are one of the many roles that exist in the bitsCrunch network.

This role allows participants to stake BCUT token to participate in some simple content enrichment /annotation to more advanced contributions like contributing with code or AI model or tooling to the… pic.twitter.com/7sejyR0MFO

— bitsCrunch (@bitsCrunch) April 12, 2024

Additionally, the team felt that having a token is essential. They never ask people to buy BCUT, Pravin stressed. “It’s all about the protocol. It’s all about what we add as value to the ecosystem,” he said.

The coin currently trades on a number of exchanges, including Bybit, KuCoin, Gate, Crypto.com, CoinList, Uniswap, and others.

Furthermore, people can operate nodes for bitsCrunch.

There are nearly 50 node operators today, in addition to more than 700 people delegating tokens, and more than 7 million tokens staked on bitsCrunch.

The company accomplished this in less than two months since the mainnet launch at the end of February.

“We are glad and humbled to have such numbers,” Pravin said.

Eye on the Games

In the end, Pravin commented on Web3 gaming and its growing popularity.

He said that this has been “a long-waiting domain” for the company to explore. The team has been discussing it since 2019.

A lot of capital has been deployed in this sector over the years, and game developers receive “massive funding.”

Every great game has epic collaborations behind it, and our partnership with @bitsCrunch is set to be a classic! Imagine gaming worlds where every character and asset is as dynamic and detailed as the real world. Get ready to play in a universe where innovation knows no bounds.…

— DrAhmetYasinTekin | $MOJO (@MDYasinTekin) April 16, 2024

However, building games takes a lot of time and effort. “And I strongly believe that this cycle will have a lot more games,” Pravin opined.

That said, bitsCrunch will test a lot of gaming, in addition to the real-world assets (RWAs) and NFTs that will be part of the gaming ecosystem.

“I’m really excited and looking forward to [this],” Pravin said.

__________

About Vijay Pravin

Vijay Pravin is the Founder and CEO of bitsCrunch, a blockchain analytics and forensics company focusing on securing the NFT ecosystem.

Pravin, originally from India, has lived in Munich, Germany, for the last ten years.

The post Vijay Pravin, CEO of bitsCrunch, on AI Enhanced Decentralized Data Analytics, Blockchain Forensics, and Staking Mechanisms | Ep. 326 appeared first on Cryptonews.

He talked about his gradual and intentional switch from a professional sports player to a crypto entrepreneur, accepting Bitcoin as salary seven years ago, establishing a staking-as-a-service, and chains coming to Myrmidon soon.

Rosenthal told us why ETFs are useful but go against the basic crypto ethos, and how Myrmidon ensures true coin ownership.

Lastly, he discussed the pros and cons of the four staking types: which one is the most difficult but most beneficial earning-wise and which one is the least.

In this interview, Rosenthal discussed:

• being the first athlete to accept BTC as salary in 2017;
• Myrmidon, a non-custodial staking provider;
• what’s going on with Ethereum;
• the implications of Ethereum ETF;
• solo-home staking, staking-as-a-service, pooled staking, and centralized staking.

You can watch what Rosenthal told Matt in the video above or read it below.

From Hokey Player to Crypto Player

There’s a pattern in the world of sports, Rosenthal said. Players retire and then feel like they’ve lost their identity. They struggle to live outside the sports world.

Rosenthal didn’t want this happening to him, so he started spreading out career-wise early on.

Being a pro hockey player in the US or Canada pays very well. In Europe, too, a player can “make a pretty good living.” But making money post-retirement is difficult.

Rosenthal returned from the US to Europe, well aware that his career would come to its inevitable end.

Therefore, he went to study and earn his degrees from the Copenhagen Business School.

Also, in 2016, he fell “deep down the rabbit hole” of crypto through Danish Bitcoin entrepreneur Niklas Nikolajsen, who founded Bitcoin Suisse AG in 2013.

This path ultimately led to Rosenthal becoming the first athlete to accept Bitcoin as a salary in 2017.

Many would certainly think this a very strange and/or bad financial decision at the time. Bitcoin and the world of crypto were very different seven years ago, and they were perceived differently in the mainstream.

But it turned out to be an excellent decision, and there are multiple athletes today accepting their salary in crypto.

And “I definitely orange-pilled a couple of boys, that’s for sure,” Rosenthal said.

He noted how relative the term ‘early’ is. In 2016 he used to think of those who had gotten into the space in 2015 or 2013 as being early.

But now that he looks back, he was early too.

Anybody who gets in today will likely be ‘early’ for somebody entering the space in 2030, let’s say.

No Competitor for Ethereum Yet

Rosenthal eventually went on to co-found Myrmidon in 2022. It’s a non-custodial staking provider primarily focused on Ethereum.

The CEO commented that “today, Ethereum is still the biggest L1 chain out there.”

There are some layer-1 blockchains competing with it, including Solana, Avalanche, and Cardano.

But “the bottom line is that Ethereum is still the one to beat, in my view,” Rosenthal remarked.

Since the last time Rosenthal was a guest at Cryptonews Podcast back in 2021, Ethereum has undergone a number of major upgrades. And “everything went smoothly,” he said.

Congratulations to the entire #Ethereum community on a succesful Dencun upgrade on epoch 269,568.
Here are some of the most important things you need to know about the upgrade : pic.twitter.com/zQbYLS0ELg

— Myrmidon Staking (@Myrmidonstaking) March 14, 2024

An issue, Rosenthal argued, is that some people may not understand what an update is supposed to do, expecting it to do something else – for example, lower the fees, which are a major pain point for Ethereum.

A negative narrative is then created around the chain when an upgrade doesn’t do what it wasn’t supposed to do in the first place.

Though he doesn’t fully understand why there has been so much negativity recently directed at Ethereum, Rosenthal remarked that it does follow historical patterns of “ETH getting hammered, Bitcoin taking off.”

The latter is up primarily because of the exchange-traded fund (ETF) approval is the US. And Ethereum ETFs are expected to follow.

And while personally he doesn’t “really care about the ETF,” the entrepreneur finds it beneficial for adoption.

That said, “long-term, ETH ETF or not, it doesn’t really matter for the adoption of ETH because I can’t really see a competitor to ETH as it is right now,” Rosenthal opined.

Case Against ETF and For True Ownership

Going deeper into the ETF argument, Rosenthal argued that “it’s a great product for the average person out there.”

It’s an easy way to enter the space and get exposure to the asset class.

But there is a big ‘but’. It’s counter-crypto.

Crypto, Rosenthal says, was invented for people to custody their own assets and always maintain full control.

The Bitcoin ETF is, by default, not a product that allows this.

People make different choices when managing their assets. And it likely can’t be expected that everybody will self-custody.

However, “for me, the underlying asset and owning the underlying asset is really what matters,” Rosenthal said.

This is why the Myrmidon team made the non-custodial solution, Ethereum Staking Dashboard, enabling people to easily stake their ETH without losing control over it.

The stakers don’t give up their keys, and they also earn yield.

There is a saying in #crypto –
"Not your keys, not your coins"

That's why we're all about native non-custodial #Ethereum staking

So why pick us?
1⃣ You have 100% validator control
2⃣ 0% protocol rewards fee
3⃣ 100% native staking

Get started todayhttps://t.co/NaG7pWH6Og pic.twitter.com/JDHoHzUJm8

— Myrmidon Staking (@Myrmidonstaking) February 14, 2024

Notably, Rosenthal explained, Ethereum staking is a bit different. Most proof-of-stake blockchains use delegation: for example, you delegate ADA or SOL to the stake provider.

However, if you want to stake your ETH, you have to make a transaction to the Beacon chain, and if you want to get the ETH back, you have to send the correct data to unlock it, the entrepreneur said.

“It’s a very complicated process,” Rosenthal opined.

And because it’s difficult for many to understand, they turn to centralized exchanges. This choice comes with its own set of security risks.

Therefore, Myrmidon enabled people to stake their ETH, maintain ownership over it, and exit the staking position easily.

“We’re trying to make a friendly UI for ETH staking, which is not very UI-friendly,” Rosenthal said.

The downside of Myrmidon’s service is that it must support native ETH staking, which means that users must stake 32 ETH per validator.

That said, “as of yet, we haven’t found one single provider [besides Myrmidon] who can safely say that they are truly non-custodial staking providers.”

Hence, unlike Myrmidon, should something happen with the provider, the users’ ETH is gone forever.

The Four Staking Categories: Pros and Cons

Rosenthal went on to discuss the four categories of staking.

These are solo home staking, staking-as-a-service, pooled staking, and centralized staking.

He explained that we can observe these categories as listed from the most to the least decentralized, from the most difficult to the easiest, and from the most secure to the least secure.

Solo home staking is the hardest and requires the most knowledge and work, given the constant updates. But it’s also the most decentralized, the most secure, and the most rewarding.

Staking-as-a-service is what Myrmidon does. It’s a very decentralized way to stake ETH, and it’s also not easy. However, if you know how to operate a wallet, you can choose this option.

Did you know #MyrmidonStaking offers a user-friendly platform for staking #Ethereum kinda like the launchpad?

It's actually more like a dashboard and launchpad in one built right into our staking solution, which is 100% non-custodial

No messing around with extra smart… pic.twitter.com/RvkXnncsyx

— Myrmidon Staking (@Myrmidonstaking) April 9, 2024

Pool staking is a very popular solution. For one, it doesn’t require 32 ETH, but only 0.1 ETH. It’s easy and convenient. But the big issues are smart contract risk and centralization.

The final option is the easiest and the riskiest one: centralized staking. Here, the centralized exchanges do the work for you. They don’t require 32 ETH either. At the same time, stakers give up control over their assets.

Furthermore, the yield gets significantly lower as you go further down the list.

For example, those who use staking-as-a-service, get all base rewards, hence they earn more.

More Chains Incoming

The Myrmidon team has so far primarily been focused on Ethereum.

However, that’s not to say they haven’t worked with other chains or started planning support for additional chains.

“You should definitely check our website because we’re going to pop up new networks over course of 2024,” Rosenthal said.

Just recently, the team launched Cardano, which is “off to a great start.”

Users can now delegate their ADA coins via Myrmidon.

Hey #CardanoCommunity

We are live with our cardano stake pool

Name: Myrmidon
Ticker: MYR
Fixed cost: 170₳
Margin: 5%

Some facts about #MyrmidonStaking (us)
1⃣ We host our nodes in house
2⃣ We are a non-custodial staking service provider
3⃣ We are a team of 5 people… pic.twitter.com/5myTN1ag2D

— Myrmidon Staking (@Myrmidonstaking) April 3, 2024

They are also live with the Danish-founded blockchain Concordium.

“We run the largest pool as a third-party provider for that ecosystem,” said Rosenthal.

Therefore, the company supports three networks currently, while the fourth – Fleek – is expected to go live this summer, in Q3.

Myrmidon will not launch any chains before it has customers on them, Rosenthal stressed.

Running various networks without customers is wasting time and effort that can be put elsewhere.

This is especially true for Myrmidon, which hosts everything in-house and does not rely on third parties like Amazon or Google Cloud.

Additionally, they focused on setting up a second server on a different energy grid as another security layer, which can take over should anything happen to the first one.

Therefore, there is plenty to do at all times.

And with their dashboard launched and doing well, these are “great times, exciting times, exciting markets,” Rosenthal concluded.

_________

About Nikolaj Rosenthal

Nikolaj Rosenthal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Myrmidon, a non-custodial staking provider.

He played professional hockey for more than 10 years and was the first athlete to accept Bitcoin as a salary in 2017.

Rosenthal has been involved with crypto since late 2016. This investor and entrepreneur was also the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Evonax.com.

He attended Copenhagen Business School, where he earned a BSc in Business Administration and Service Management and an MSc in Organizational Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The post Nikolaj Rosenthal, CEO of Myrmidon, on ETH, Staking-as-a-Service, Non-Custodial Staking, and the Ethereum ETF | Ep. 325 appeared first on Cryptonews.

Among the top 25 most popular AI coins, Bittensor, Render, and Fetch.ai led the pack in the same period.

Also, a significant number of smaller AI-related coins garnered enough attention to enter this competitive list.

Meanwhile, fifteen countries globally accounted for more than 74% market share of global interest in the AI crypto coins narrative.

The US and the UK took the 1st and 2nd spots, respectively, while Southeast Asia showed a particularly outsized interest in these coins.

Interestingly, the UK, the US, India, Australia, Canada, and the Philippines led global rankings for meme coins in 2023 as well – suggesting a particular reactive nature to crypto market narratives.

What Are AI Coins?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) coins or tokens are cryptocurrencies developed specifically to power particular AI-based projects, applications, and services.

This includes decentralized AI marketplaces, AI-powered trading algorithms, AI-driven decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and more, Crypto.com explains. Furthermore, these coins leverage artificial intelligence to improve user experiences, scalability, and security within blockchain networks, says zebpay. 

AI cryptos serve as a means of payment for transactions on an AI platform. Otherwise, they can be used as governance tokens, granting governance rights to their holders.

Moreover, AI can be trained to analyze market trends, identify investment opportunities, detect illicit activities, and many other tasks, with more potential applications emerging daily.

The surge in interest in AI crypto is unsurprising given the massive attention AI, in general, has received over the past couple of years. This is particularly the case following the launch of ChatGPT.

“Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI interest and related efforts have gained momentum in the tech industry. This interest has spilled over into the crypto space, bringing attention to AI-related cryptocurrencies,” said a report by crypto data aggregator CoinGecko.

Also, the announcement of OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video model saw an average price increase of 151% amongst AI crypto coins. For now, the AI crypto current is likely to get stronger.

AI Crypto Surge 257%

By March 2024, the top AI crypto coin by market capitalization was Bittensor (TAO), at $3.85 billion. It remained the largest AI crypto coin throughout January and February 2024. It was followed by Render (RNDR), with a market cap of $3.03 billion, and Fetch.ai (FET) in third place, with $1.41 billion. Per CoinGecko,

“Across the board, AI crypto coins rose an average of 257.2% between January 1 and February 29, 2024.”

As of April 4, TAO’s market cap is $3.836 billion, RNDR’s is $3.654 billion, and FET’s is $2.788 billion. Therefore, only TAO’s numbers have dropped slightly since March.

Another change is that FET is in fourth place by market capitalization now, while The Graph (GRT) sits in third with $3.229 billion. Meanwhile, a December 2023 report by CoinGecko found that the most popular crypto narratives last year were AI, GameFi, and meme coins.

These captured one-third of investor interest.AI, it said, was “by far” the most popular crypto narrative over the course of 2023, accounting for 11.3% of crypto narratives interest. Gaming came second with 10.5%.

Among AI tokens, the biggest gainer of the year was Akash Network (AKT), “reaching an all-year high that was 13 times its January 1 price.” Meanwhile, RNDR, as the biggest AI token by market capitalization, “followed closely,” seeing its price surge by up to 12 times at its yearly high, the report said.

In Q1 2024, the crypto narratives with the highest returns were meme coins (returns of 1,313% on average across its top tokens), real-world asset (RWA) (286%), and AI as the only other narrative that recorded 3-digit returns (222%).

In March 2024, CoinGecko conducted another study. It examined non-botted web traffic by country based on the top 25 most popular AI coins on its platform from January 1 to March 10 of this year. It excluded coins with botted web traffic. According to this study,  

“Bittensor (TAO), Render (RNDR), and Fetch.ai (FET) are unsurprisingly the most popular AI crypto coins so far in 2024, on the back of their large market capitalization and strong price performance.”

TAO leads with nearly 12% in interest, RNDR with 10%, and FET with 8.9%. AKT reappeared as well. It is one of the seven popular AI coins that rank among the top 200 crypto by market capitalization. It’s fourth on CoinGecko’s list with 5.8% in interest.

Others include PAAL AI (PAAL), SingularityNET (AGIX), Ocean Protocol (OCEAN), AIOZ Network (AIOZ), Nosana (NOS), and Arkham (ARKM).

Notably, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol have reportedly been discussing a potential merger of their crypto tokens to establish a decentralized AI platform and foster collaboration among the three companies.vThe companies are exploring the creation of an ASI token, which would possess a fully diluted value of approximately $7.5 billion.

The 25 most popular AI coins, per the CoinGecko study, are:

Meanwhile, there are some smaller coins that nonetheless made it to the most popular list. These have managed to capture attention and significant interest within and outside the Web3 sector. The study gives two examples:

• PaLM AI (PALM), with nearly 5%, gained interest thanks to its association with Google’s AI technology;
• Smart contract auditor 0x0.ai (0X0), RWA platform TokenFi (TOKEN), Web3 gaming infrastructure GameSwift (GSWIFT), and social trading platform Zignaly (ZIG) gained significant interest from incorporating AI technology. 

Meanwhile, the study argued that seven smaller coins “have benefited” from “eye-catching tickers.”It named Solidus AI Tech (AITECH), DeepFakeAI (FAKEAI), ChainGPT (CGPT), AIT Protocol (AIT), LayerAI (LAI), Sleepless AI (AI), and Delysium (AGI). 10 of the popular AI crypto coins have “AI” or associated abbreviations in their tickers – and many projects use it in an attempt to benefit from it.

“This interest is at least partly driven by the speculative tendency to favor any coin that seems AI-related, amid the narrative mania.” 

However, “AI-related tickers have not guaranteed popularity, as there are just as many such coins that have received less attention,” the report warns. The remaining popular AI coins on CoinGecko’s list are Autonolas (OLAS), Oraichain (ORAI), and Clore.ai (CLORE), each with less than 4% interest.

US Consumers Drive Interest in AI Crypto Coins, 15 Nations Taking the Lead

According to a March 2024 CoinGecko study, 15 countries globally account for a 74.4% market share of global interest in AI crypto coins. The study looked at the global traffic share for the 25 most popular AI coins as of March this year.

At the very top is the United States. Its share alone is nearly 19%.

Next is the UK, which accounted for a 9.1% share of global interest in the narrative. This is a significant difference percentage-wise between the first two places.

Türkiye, with 6.5%, follows as the third top AI crypto country in 2024.  

Which countries are most interested in AI crypto coins?

The top 15 countries account for 74.4% of global interest in the AI crypto narrative in 2024, with US, UK and Türkiye leading.

Tap to find out if your country made the list. https://t.co/YnXPs4taok

— CoinGecko (@coingecko) March 13, 2024

Per the study, “the US and UK also led the meme coin craze last year, pointing to their importance in the crypto market.”

And speaking of the meme coin narrative, the report found that five other countries led global rankings for both meme coins in 2023 and AI coins in 2024.

These are India (with a 5.7% share of global interest in AI coins in 2024), Australia (5.3%), Canada (4.5%), and the Philippines (2.8%). 

“This suggests that these countries are particularly reactive to crypto market narratives,” the report argues.

Meanwhile, when it comes to Europe, the study found that the AI crypto narrative was the most popular in the Netherlands (5.6% of global interest share), sitting in the 5th spot. 

It is followed by Poland (3.2%) and Germany (3.2%) in the 8th and 9th place, respectively, as well as France (2.1%), standing as the 13th on the list.

Notably, among all these regions, Southeast Asia “has shown particularly outsized interest in AI crypto coins,” the report remarked. 

On the top 15 list, four countries are from this specific region. The Philippines came in 10th with a 2.8% share of global interest in the AI crypto narrative.

At the same time, Singapore and Indonesia accounted for 2.2% each and Vietnam 1.2%. Singapore and Indonesia took the 11th and 12th places, respectively, while Vietnam took the 15th. 

Interestingly, according to Statista data as of February 2024, Türkiye led the ranking of the top five countries per share of crypto owners. Nearly half of Turkish survey respondents said they owned crypto.

Vietnam and the Philippines also rank high.

At the same time, the US, the UK, Australia, and many European countries sat quite low on the list.

Countries like the US and Germany remain very cautious when it comes to all things crypto, with concerns about market volatility and scams. They create strict – and in the case of the US, notoriously unclear – regulations based upon those fears.

However, nations that rank higher in crypto adoption studies, such as Türkiye, see cryptocurrencies as a financial opportunity and an important safeguard.

Conclusion

Fifteen countries worldwide account for more than 74% of the global interest in AI crypto.

Among these, the US takes the lead with an 18.9% share of global interest in the narrative, followed by the UK with 9.1%.

Notably, these two countries, along with India, Australia, Canada, and the Philippines, led global rankings for both meme coins last year and AI coins this year.

This implies that these countries are exceptionally reactive to crypto market narratives. When it comes to the AI cryptocurrency market, in the first three months of 2024, AI crypto coins increased by some 257%.

Among the 25 best performers, Bittensor, Render, and Fetch.ai stood at the top. Their rise is attributable to significant price performances and market capitalizations, as well as the increasing interest in AI generally.

Even smaller AI-related coins managed to garner enough attention to make it into the top 25 list.

Interestingly, it seems that incorporating “AI” or related abbreviations in ticker symbols – presenting the coins as even remotely associated with AI – attracts attention.

It is not a guaranteed recipe for success, though.

The post AI Crypto Tokens Surge 257%: 15 Nations Taking the Lead, US Consumers Drive Interest in AI Crypto Coins appeared first on Cryptonews.

He told us how the relationship between AI and crypto is mutually beneficial, the lack of AI-enabled dapps and what Revolut is doing about it, the GPU problem and how crypto solves it, why some DeFi aspects are inefficient and how ML can change that, and more!

In this interview, Pant discussed:

• building autonomous worlds and games;
• building decentralized AI infrastructure
• applying ML to DeFi;
• Smart Agents;
• Story Protocol working with Ritual to train and track models on-chain.

Niraj Pant gave a wide-ranging interview, which you can see above or read below.

Creating the Foundation for AI On-chain

It is notable that AI crypto is emerging now and not, let’s say, during the last cycle, Pant told Cryptonews Podcast host Matt Zahab.

There has been an idea of decentralized AI for a long time. But it faced a number of challenges. It couldn’t reach the level of what is today a growing sub-industry within the crypto space.

A key challenge is that there simple wasn’t the developed transformer (deep learning) architecture as we see it now.

Yet today, we find machine learning (ML) architecture behind numerous large language models used in massive products, such as ChatGPT.

Additionally, there were not even many consumer AI applications to speak of before.

Following the rise of transformer architecture, as well as the creation of ChatGPT and GPT-3 in 2020, “a new renaissance in AI development” has begun.

“We finally saw a big AI consumer use case,” Pant said.

Now, numerous companies and startups are using AI, developing it, and/or raising money for it.

Before all this had happened, bringing AI to blockchains was pretty much impossible. Blockchains could not efficiently support actions such as training, inference, and tuning.

Blockchain is just now reaching the required level of efficiency. We’re seeing improved speed, better cryptography, Layer-2 blockchains, zero-knowledge proofs, and more.

AI may still be a “pie in the sky,” but these developments are “bringing us to a space where we can actually do AI on blockchains.”

mf, if you want to be a part of the crypto x ai revolution, then ask yourself why you aren’t running an infernet node. pic.twitter.com/QcGyWmM67Q

— Ritual (@ritualnet) January 19, 2024

Crypto and AI: Bi-directional Benefits

Crypto and AI can help each other, Pant said. There is a “confluence of the two spaces.”

Therefore, the two gain “bi-directional benefits.”

AI is highly centralized. And this is where crypto can help.

AI is basically just a few major products that people use globally (ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Runway, for example), and only a few companies making the models (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook).

The crypto world, however, is very resistant to the idea of a centralized authority. They realize that hands with too much power in them are bound to abuse it.

It is notable to remember that AI is not going anywhere: nearly all products use it in some way, and “billions of people” will use it daily in a matter of years.

Therefore, having a “decentralized, transparent alternative where you can get privacy, computational integrity, governance rights, ownership amongst the users and the people that contribute to it is really important.”

The worlds of artificial intelligence and crypto are becoming increasingly interconnected, as new protocols are emerging to unlock new user behavior around ownership and markets by utilizing AI models onchain.

— Ritual (@ritualnet) February 23, 2024

Meanwhile, AI can also help crypto. There are many interesting use cases, from non-fungible token (NFT) generation, over building customized games, to creating customized movies, and much more.

“We’re really entering this new era where we can combine the infinite abundance of AI with the ownership and self-sovereignty properties you get with crypto,” Pant said.

They are at the opposite ends of the technology spectrum: one is centralizing, and one is decentralizing. Merging them is key.

Missing: AI-enabled Dapps

Before he started working on Ritual, Pant spent six years as a General Partner at Polychain.

He got increasingly interested in AI, while also staying “very close to the crypto infrastructure side of things.” That led him to research the crypto-AI intersection.

While many of the teams he worked with at the time had great ideas, he started noticing that no one was building AI-enabled decentralized applications (dapps).

“That feels like a massive opportunity,” Pant commented. “That’s going to grow in size a lot.”

Therefore, their company, while it started small, is now growing “quite rapidly.” The amount of attention the Ritual team has seen in the space “has skyrocketed.”

The team behind it focused on enabling developers to easily use AI in their smart contracts and on enabling the above-mentioned use cases.

To accomplish this, they built out Ritual in two phases.

The first phase is a system called Infernet.

This is a lightweight library to bridge off-chain compute on-chain. It’s a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contract developers to request computation to be done off-chain from Infernet Nodes and delivered to their consuming on-chain smart contracts via the Infernet SDK.

For example, if a developer wants to create a new NFT mint based on user input, they could build a smart contract that relays the information to the Infernet off-chain compute system, which does the work inside a container, and then returns the result, optionally with proofs or privacy.

The focus today is on EVM-compatible blockchains, but in the future, it will be “really anything.”

The second phase is called the Ritual Chain.

This sovereign, Layer-1 chain extends the ideas around Infernet onto an execution layer where users get more direct proofs, privacy, and on-chain semantics that make it easier to build the applications they want.

It will be an execution layer custom-built to support AI-native operations and enable a new class of applications at the intersection of crypto and AI.

AI x Crypto represents one of the most exciting new areas for crypto technologists, with a near infinite design space for AI-enabled protocols to be built on top.

Through Infernet and Ritual Chain, smart contract developers can now access a rich set of AI workflows and tooling…

— Ritual (@ritualnet) April 8, 2024

“That’s kind of our roadmap for the next year,” Pant said. “We are looking to do devnet in the summer.”

However, developers can build applications on Infernet and move them to the chain if and when they choose.

The GPU Conundrum and How Crypto Solves It

Niraj Pant told Matt that when it comes to the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a service, “there’s a ton of different vectors that you can innovate on.”

This could be on the geographical side, new market side, incentives with tokens, different types of hardware, being able to coordinate those machines, and more.

Therefore, GPU as a service is “one of the most interesting use cases of crypto AI.”

GPUs can be used for “a whole bunch of tasks.” But buying one – unless you’re a massive company – is extremely time-consuming and expensive.  By the time you get one, the tech has advanced, so “you’re constantly behind.”

Another option is using cloud services. However, these are limited in availability and/or “they just charge an insane premium” on top of the actual raw cost.

These scenarios have resulted in GPUs becoming prohibitive for many startups building AI.

There is a third option: Web2 providers that offer a basic service for more technically savvy users.

While these are great, they don’t have “a full market” like, for example, the crypto market does: buyers and sellers on two sides. Instead, the provider is always on the other side.

Therefore, these companies are “running their own supply.” They have limited hardware, and they get to dictate the deals and with whom they make them.

However, the crypto market could expand the range of hardware suppliers. Perhaps certain groups in Europe or Asia can now open up the supply and satiate the demand.

Another key thing is being able to bridge into more types of hardware through novel, unique architectures. Crypto can do this.

“And one of the great things is that crypto uses a ton of GPUs,” Niraj Pant said.

Meanwhile, Ritual has partnered with an external GPU-as-a-service company called Ionet. They have “a massive cluster of GPUs all around the world” that run Ritual nodes and are able to take down Ritual demand requests.

Nodes on the Ritual network typically require access to compute to service AI model operations such as inference, finetuning, and more. Our client already makes it easy to hook up nodes to external compute sources. Partnering with @ionet_official helps accelerate the process for…

— Ritual (@ritualnet) February 26, 2024

Using ML to Make DeFi More Efficient

Ritual has recently released a toolkit called Infernet ML.

This is a series of ML workflows that the team has pre-built – a “bunch of examples that allow you to do things like that NFT mint, or use an LLM in a smart contract, or really anything else, across a bunch of different ML frameworks.”

Today we’re open-sourcing infernet-ml—a toolkit for building ML workflows on Infernet.

From classic ML algorithms to LLMs, infernet-ml is the easiest way to deploy ML-enabled dApps onchain.https://t.co/1tmZJu3gls pic.twitter.com/3UWz2rCoV9

— Ritual (@ritualnet) March 21, 2024

That said, ML helping decentralized finance (DeFi), Niraj Pant remarked, is one of the most interesting applications for crypto AI.

Today, when you launch a DeFi protocol, you’re trying to accomplish a task. Some DeFi protocols are very narrow in what they offer, while others are full-featured systems with many different products.

However, building a protocol is not the end of the job. Now, the team has to manage everything related to it, such as the system itself, the treasury, the protocol security, risk, and much more.

Additionally, a big issue in DeFi today is governance, Pant argued. Decentralized organization (DAO) governance is difficult and “laborious in time and in people.”

It takes days to read through proposals, deliberate, do “politics” to get the required votes, and finally vote.

“And this is very inefficient for many tasks,” Pant said.

However, while human governance will likely remain necessary for treasury management for a long time, said Pant, AI and ML may benefit other aspects.

“This might be things like what’s the interest rate parameter, or what’s the liquidation factor or the collateral factor. You can stream in data from different protocols and stream in price feeds from different exchanges and use that to drive the decision-making around those different factors,” the co-founder explained.

So if the price of an asset that’s on a lending market drops significantly within some bound, this would indicate that a project should tighten up the required collateral and make people shore up so that the protocol doesn’t have additional risk.

Ever wondered what’s possible with an LLM onchain? How about making a generative NFT? Or even having a bot buy/sell coins on your behalf through natural language?

Announcing Ritual Learn—your guide to building AI-enabled dApps on Ritual.https://t.co/E9mTfLLpaq pic.twitter.com/nXK4ZydYk3

— Ritual (@ritualnet) March 29, 2024

Therefore, DeFi can be used with AI in many different ways, Niraj Pant noted, from governance proposals to treasury management to risk parameter management and in many different use cases, such as lending, yield generation, portfolio optimization, and others.

Meanwhile, one of Ritual’s advisors is Tarun Chitra, Founder and CEO of Gauntlet. In the future, Gauntlet could create the models and earn a royalty—a more direct form of revenue than the current one. “So it’s a very exciting future. It’s one that we talk about internally quite a lot,” Pant said.

Also, there’s a lot coming down the pipeline for Revolut. They’ll be pushing “tons” of use cases around AIs and PCs, new types of ways to interact with NFTs, making games more personalized, and much more, Pant concluded.

__________

About Niraj Pant

Niraj Pant is co-founder of Ritual, the decentralized execution layer for artificial intelligence (AI).

Prior to founding Ritual, Pant spent six years as a General Partner at Polychain, leading investment rounds in startups like Offchain Labs, EigenLayer, and Compound.

He began his career as a cryptography researcher in the Decentralized Systems Lab at UIUC.

The post Niraj Pant, Co-founder of Ritual, on The Future of Crypto and AI, Decentralized AI, and Applying ML to DeFi | Ep. 324 appeared first on Cryptonews.

This fourth halving, anticipated to occur around April 19, will cut the block reward from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. This programmed adjustment occurs every four years and follows the pattern set since the first halving in 2012. It is designed to control inflation and mimic the scarcity of traditional resources.

In an interview with Cryptonews.com, Adam Sullivan, President and CEO of Core Scientific, discusses the challenges and opportunities this halving presents. Core Scientific is one of the largest Bitcoin miners in the U.S. with seven facilities across five states.

How Bitcoin Halving Will Impact Miners

Sullivan first established the peculiar environment and the transformative nature of this upcoming event coinciding with the approval of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the same year.

“This halving is interesting, it’s a bit different than 2020. I would say we’re more decentralized than we were in 2020 in terms of where miners are located,” he explained.

“We’re at a point now where majority of the hash rate that’s online today actually can stay online post-halving,” said Sullivan. “I think that’s going to elongate the cycle.”

Due to the potential infrastructure constraint, Sullivan believed that there would be limited new generation machines that may go online. In addition, the miners are going to see a considerable margin compression over the course of the first few months after the halving.

“I would say a number of marginal operators are actually going to be able to survive, but only for so long,” said Sullivan.

As he anticipated a hard time for miners, Sullivan also argued that many players in the industry would sell their assets and even companies for cash by the end of 2024.

“You can only survive on getting cash, making some money some amount of money for three to four months before a lot of these companies have to say ‘I need a big cash infusion. Let me go sell some of my assets,’” he elaborated.

“I think no one will be surprised by a significant amount of M&A (mergers and acquisitions) that occurred,” noted Sullivan.

Future of Mining in a Changing World

In addition to the halving event, the future of the U.S. mining industry faces major changes driven by external economic factors and the ongoing search for cost-effective mining locations.

As the power prices trend higher in regulated markets, Sullivan predicts a restructured and redefined mining business in North America, especially when miners struggle to find opportunities to operate sizable facilities across the United States.

“I would say it’s amazing how people can find low-cost power in other countries,” he said. “The China shutdown in 2021 accelerated the exploration throughout the world. And I would say we’re kind of going through that again.”

Looking into the next cycle till 2028, Sullivan pointed out the emerging opportunities in Africa and South America, and highlighted the Middle East as a burgeoning hub for low-cost power.

“A number of locations that have access power and want to find a way to bring jobs to those communities, some of that’s being advertised right now by some countries,” said Sullivan. “But we might find Northern Canada ending up being the Holy Grail of Bitcoin mining four years from now.”

$CORZ Full Fiscal Year 2023 Highlights

– 19,274 bitcoin mined in our data centers; 13,762 by self-mining, more than any other publicly listed miner in North America, and an estimated 5,512 for our hosting clients
– Total revenue of $502.4 million
– Operated total hash rate of… pic.twitter.com/ylVHPyJRW5

— Core Scientific (@Core_Scientific) March 13, 2024

Even if Bitcoin mining operations were to emerge in uncharted territories, Sullivan stated that the existing leaders will probably pilot the projects with the assistance of local parties.

“There’s a lot of nuances to running the game,” he said. “You learn how to design these buildings much more efficiently from experience.”

“The local parties give us the conditions like the temperature, the humidity, the wind speeds, what direction is the parcel facing, and we can design a facility that is optimized for all those weather conditions,” claimed Sullivan. “That’s something you can’t just learn in your first build.”

Bitcoin Halving and Market Volatility

Adam Sullivan also discussed the potential impact of the Bitcoin halving on its price, noting, “We are definitely going to see more volatility post-halving.” He mentioned the role of ETFs in providing broader access to Bitcoin, which could eventually help stabilize fluctuations over time.

Addressing external factors, Sullivan said, “Policies from the Fed (Federal Reserve) during an election year could boost Bitcoin prices if inflation rises…But I think there’s a real possibility here where we just stay flat post halving.”

Concluding his insights, he suggested that the long-term prospects for Bitcoin are likely positive, saying, “Easier access to Bitcoin through ETFs could lead to greater price increases as more financial institutions engage.”

“And for Core Scientific, we believe we’re very well prepared for this upcoming halving. We have a plan over the next four years that we’re executing on to remain a very competitive Bitcoin miner in 2028,” said the CEO.

The post Core Scientific CEO Discusses Bitcoin Halving’s Impact on Mining appeared first on Cryptonews.

The reward for mining a block of transactions started at 50 Bitcoins in 2009, dropping to 25 in 2012 and 12.5 in 2016. As a result, the ‘halving’ event creates practical difficulties for miners when half their income suddenly vanishes.

With the imminent Bitcoin halving setting up the grand chess game in the markets, “sentiments are bullish in the long term,” says Henry Robinson, Co-Founder and Head of Crypto of Decimal Digital Currency. However, he adds that the psychology around such a significant event can create major volatility.

Robinson started in the cryptocurrency industry by constructing a GPU mining ‘facility’ and has accumulated deep knowledge in the critical aspects of the mining business including heat management in data centers, energy infrastructure optimization, crypto-specific cybersecurity, among others.

Speaking with Cryptonews, Robinson noted that the price action of Bitcoin takes time as there would be exuberant bullish action, dramatic sell offs, or both, before and after the halving.

That said, once the dust settles, “we expect a continuation to new all-time highs and for Bitcoin to cross major milestones over the next two years on its path to greater integration with global finance,” he added.

The crypto executive answers to some of the key aspects of the pre and post Bitcoin halving trends.

Cryptonews: After each halving, Bitcoin has seen massive surges in the past, indicating the start of bull markets. What is your prediction on this year’s Bitcoin halving outcome?

Robinson: Bitcoin is now an important institutional asset unlike ever before. Bitcoin ETFs are booking 9-10 figure weekly net inflows and are approaching $60 billion of volume in less than two months making BTC ETFs among the most successful ETF launches ever. We’re seeing this accumulation begin to affect price already, and the post halving effect at current prices means about $700 million less of monthly new BTC supply soon. We expect new all-time highs in 2024.

Cryptonews: If we notice previous halvings, there has been a recurring trend analysis of Bitcoin. A notable price dips precedes each halving, for instance, in 2016 and 2020, pre-having corrections of 40.37% and a drop of 63.09% were noted respectively. Following this, there was a significant recovery in the crypto price post-halving.

Taking that into consideration, will there be a robust dip in the price in the coming days just before the halving? And would it be a wise decision to ‘buy the dip’ at that time?

Robinson: Leveraged traders tend to get wiped out when everyone believes profits are a sure thing, and sentiments are very bullish right now.

We wouldn’t be surprised to see a correction ahead of the halving that liquidates the more extreme bullish bets before an upward continuation, and would definitely call something like that a ‘buy the dip’ opportunity. We may also just see a continued uptrend, as buyers show no signs of stopping.

Cryptonews: Also, as the trend shows subsequent increases in Bitcoin prices following previous halvings, will there be a decrease in the magnitude of these increases moving forward?

Robinson: Mathematically, that is what we should expect. The supply constraining impact of the halving lessens each time from a BTC denominated perspective. However, the other half of the equation is the overall demand for BTC, which is currently at unprecedented levels. With Bitcoin inching closer towards acting as a global reserve asset, we are seeing a massive macroeconomic rebalancing into BTC coinciding with the imminent halving.

Cryptonews: The recent spot Bitcoin ETFs approval needs to be taken into account. The market is getting a lot smarter about pricing in the impact of each new Bitcoin event such as the ETFs’ approval.

Would this event have an impact on the upcoming Bitcoin halving?

Robinson: The BTC market is getting smarter, and deeper pocketed. All this new liquidity from ETFs is making BTC pricing more rational and thwarts market manipulation. More importantly, the Bitcoin ETFs have created a foot in the door to educate traditional asset managers about Bitcoin. They may have ignored it out of caution or due to regulatory constraints before, but now many are taking a closer look and will realize the incredible risk to reward ratio. Adoption is only getting started.

Robinson’s Bitcoin price predictions align with that of major industry players including recent anticipation from Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse. He predicted that recent conflux of events like Bitcoin halving and spot Bitcoin ETFs approval would drive the overall crypto market capitalization exceeding $5 trillion by the end of 2024.

Whatever the case, the market may need to brace for volatile short-term Bitcoin trading post the halving event, adds Robinson.

The post A Week Before Bitcoin Halving 2024: What is in For The World’s Largest Crypto This Year? appeared first on Cryptonews.

What You’ll Find in This March Ethereum Analysis:

1. 1. What is Ethereum?
   2. Ethereum Price Performance and On-chain Data Analysis
   3. When will the ETH ETF be approved?
   4. Ethereum Ecosystem Updates 
   5. Ethereum-Based Protocols and DEXs
   6. Ethereum NFTs and Gaming Updates
   7. Looking Ahead – Can The Ethereum Price Go Even Higher?

What is Ethereum?

Founded in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum serves as a distributed blockchain computing platform designed for the execution of smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). The network enables users to create and innovate extensively with smart contracts, catalyzing the emergence of various assets and industries such as decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), Web3, and beyond. At its core, Ethereum features an execution engine tailored for smart contract processing, known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). In addition, Ethereum employs a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which enhances its scalability and sustainability.

ETH Price Performance and Ethereum On-Chain Data Analysis 

On March 11, the Ethereum price hit $4,000 for the first time since 2021. However, after rallying to $4,094 leading up to the Dencun upgrade, ETH underperformed compared to Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader crypto market over the past month. The Ethereum price fell to its low for the month of $3,367 on March 20 and closed the month at $3,636.

The potential approval of a spot Ether exchange-traded fund (ETF) remains an important catalyst for ETH to rise above the $4,000 mark. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently evaluating the matter, with a final decision expected by May 23. 

Furthermore, recent updates to the Ethereum protocol should not be underestimated. The Dencun hard fork, which took place on March 13, was designed to increase network scalability and improve Layer 2 (L2) data processing capabilities and has attracted strong interest from rollup solutions. As a result, transaction fees for most applications on Ethereum L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, Startnet, and Zora Network have been significantly reduced. 

On Ethereum, reductions in fees were observed as well. Total fees on Ethereum dropped from $38.7 million on March 5 to $9.4 million on March 31. 

Total revenues on Ethereum decreased by 48% in the 10 days following EIP-4844 was implemented. The proposal introduces a novel transaction type capable of accepting data blobs. 

With a total value locked (TVL) of between $47.2 billion and $57.9 billion (peaking on March 13), Ethereum had the largest market share of any blockchain last month.

However, there has been some volatility in Ethereum network activity over the past month. The number of daily active addresses across the Ethereum ecosystem increased from 413k on March 1 to 534k on March 20, and then dropped to 467k on March 31.

Ethereum’s daily transaction volume also fluctuated during the month, rising from 1.2 million on March 1 to 1.4 million on March 19, and falling back to 1.2 million by the end of the month. 

When will the ETH ETF be approved?

The potential approval of a spot Ether ETF is one of the most eagerly anticipated events that could significantly impact the short-to-medium-term Ethereum price. Compared to the previous approval of Bitcoin ETFs, the approval of an ETH ETF is less certain, as it is expected to face increased regulatory scrutiny from the SEC. 

In March, the SEC postponed its decision on VanEck’s ETF application until May 23, and similarly delayed decisions on the Hashdex and ARK 21Shares Spot ETH ETFs until late May.

Recent filings with the SEC by big asset management firms, including Fidelity (on March 27) and Bitwise (on March 28) to create spot ETH ETFs underscore the growing interest in Ether-based financial products. Fidelity’s filing, in particular, indicates its intention to put some of the ETH it holds to work, demonstrating confidence in Ether’s long-term prospects. 

Additionally, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) announced it would accept applications for Ether and Bitcoin crypto exchange-traded notes (ETNs) in the second quarter of 2024, further underscoring the growing mainstream acceptance and integration of cryptocurrencies into traditional financial systems.

However, despite such strong interest in ETH ETFs, this back-and-forth dialogue between industry players and regulators underscores the complexities and nuances of integrating Ether-based financial instruments into traditional financial systems. Unsurprisingly, the Grayscale Ethereum Trust discount has fallen to its lowest level since November 2023 amid fading hopes for a spot ETF in May. 

Ethereum Ecosystem Updates 

According to data from Coin98 Analytics, the Ethereum ecosystem experienced significant growth in the first quarter of 2024. Ethereum tripled its earnings on a quarter-over-quarter basis in Q1 2024, reaching $369 million. The amount represented a 210% year-over-year increase from $119 million in Q1 2023.

Ethereum’s Q1 2024 fees and revenues increased 79% and 85% quarter-over-quarter, respectively. According to the data, Ethereum generated $1.2 billion in transaction fee revenue in Q1 2024, which is 155% more than in the first quarter of last year. Total Ethereum revenue reached $1 billion in Q1 2024, up 186% from $385 million last year. 

In March 2024, the Ethereum ecosystem witnessed several significant updates and developments that promise to shape its future trajectory.

BlackRock Launches BUIDL

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced an initiative to launch a tokenized asset fund on Ethereum, solidifying the network’s importance. The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) will be fully collateralized by cash, U.S. Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements, offering qualified investors the opportunity to earn U.S. dollar income. In a strong symbolic gesture, BlackRock deposited $100 million in USDC on the Ethereum network.

Google Enables Crypto Wallet Searches

Google expanded its Ethereum search features to include human-readable Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains, allowing users to view wallet balances associated with ENS names directly in search results. This integration further bridges the gap between traditional search functionality and blockchain data, improving accessibility and usability for users.

Nansen Now Supports SportFi

Nansen, a blockchain analytics platform, integrated blockchain data from SportFi chain Chiliz and Ethereum rollup zkSync on March 28. This integration provides a comprehensive overview of both ecosystems, allowing cryptocurrency teams to run queries and gain insights from raw data, thereby enhancing their decision-making capabilities.

Pectra Upgrade To Raise Ethereum Validator Stakes

Additionally, Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade is set to raise the maximum validator stake to 2,048 ETH, a significant increase from the current 32 ETH. This move, expected by the end of the year, aims to enhance the security and decentralization of the Ethereum network.

Coinbase Tackles Centralization on Ethereum

Furthermore, on March 26, Ethereum client diversity improved as the market share of Geth, a major Ethereum execution client, dropped from 84% to 63%. Coinbase’s decision to switch around half of its validators to Nethermind contributed to this diversification, addressing long-standing concerns about centralization risks within the Ethereum network.

Developers Launch “Pump The Gas” Initiative

Lastly, on March 21, Ethereum developers launched the “Pump The Gas” initiative to increase the blockchain network’s gas limit from 30 million to 40 million. This initiative aims to reduce transaction fees on layer 1, potentially improving Ethereum’s scalability and usability.

Ethereum-Based Protocols and DEXs

Ethereum Layer 2 protocols experienced a significant drop in transaction fees in March after the Dencun upgrade, as reported above. This led to increased translation on some L2 networks. 

Base Hits New Daily Users High

For example, Coinbase’s Ethereum-based Layer 2 network Base saw a new high in daily transactions, which jumped from approximately. 440,000 before the upgrade to over 2 million on March 16, accompanied by a massive 3,200% increase in daily new users on Base –  (666,866 on March 16).

Starknet Introduces Fee-Saving Measures

On March 12, Layer-2 scaling protocol Starknet announced the rollout of additional fee-saving measures to coincide with the Dencun upgrade. This hard fork aims to transform the storage of data on the Ethereum mainnet, introducing “blob space” as a cost-effective alternative to the traditional call data method. 

The protocol’s transition to a proto-danksharding, inspired by the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-4844), is expected to result in immediate fee reductions. In addition, the Foundation is preparing to release version 0.13.1, which will move from the costly call data method to the more economical blobs transaction type, with the goal of significantly reducing fees. This move is expected to have a significant impact on Starknet’s gas expenses, as call data accounts for nearly 90% of fees. In addition, a new hash system will be deployed to increase the protocol’s transaction capacity. 

Uniswap Still Leads the DEX Space

In March, Uniswap continued to maintain its position as the leading DEX on the Ethereum blockchain. In particular, Uniswap’s governance token, UNI, surged 46%, topping $16 on March 6 and reaching a peak not seen since January 2022. This surge was complemented by a 54% increase in trading volume ($36,5 billion in February vs. $79,5 billion in March).

This follows a proposal by the Uniswap Foundation to upgrade the protocol’s fee redistribution governance with the goal of increasing community participation. In particular, the upgrade will focus on the distribution of the protocol fee to the holders of the UNI token.

MakerDAO Introduced “Endgame”

Decentralized finance protocol MakerDAO’s ambitious “Endgame” transformation aims to grow the DeFi stablecoin market capitalization from $4.5 billion to over $100 billion, positioning it as a formidable competitor to Tether (USTD). 

Launch Season is upon us!

Endgame focuses MakerDAO towards scalable resilience and sustainable user growth: The goal is 100 billion Dai and beyond

Launch Season will bring the most important yield farming and UX features rapidly to market

More: https://t.co/gWLWBWpEq8

(1/9) pic.twitter.com/Xujg04uYX2

— Rune (@RuneKek) March 12, 2024

Ethena Topped Earnings Charts

Ethena, a synthetic dollar protocol built on Ethereum, became the highest-earning DApp after surpassing $6.8 million in daily cumulative revenue in the first week of March. The only blockchains to surpass Ethena’s revenue were Tron, with $38.6 million, and Ethereum, with $182.5 million in daily cumulative revenue over the seven days.

Ethena nr 3 in terms of revenue pic.twitter.com/c14c3HL2Td

— Seraphim (@MacroMate8) March 8, 2024

Eclipse Secured Series A Funding

Layer 2 developer Eclipse Labs secured $50 million in Series A funding, led by Placeholder and Hack VC. This funding aims to bolster Ethereum scalability using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). By integrating SVM’s high performance with the Ethereum ecosystem liquidity, Eclipse Labs aims to offer a differentiated Layer 2 solution. With collaborations with Rarible, Pyth Network, and Solend, Eclipse Labs targets a mainnet launch in Q2, promising a scalable and composable Layer 2 network.

Optimism Foundation Sold 19.5 Million OP Tokens 

The Optimism Foundation, the entity behind the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Optimism, revealed a private sale of approximately 19.5 million of its governance tokens on March 8. With each Optimism (OP) token valued at around $4.62, the total worth of the tokens sold stands at approximately $90 million at the current market value. Notably, the foundation has stipulated a two-year vesting period for the sold tokens, preventing buyers from trading them before this period lapses. 

Morph Raised $20 Million in Seed Funding

Morph, a developer of Ethereum’s Layer 2 network, successfully raised $20 million in combined seed and angel funding rounds. The $19 million seed round was spearheaded by Dragonfly, with contributions from Pantera Capital, Foresight Ventures, the Spartan Group, Symbolic Capital, and other esteemed investors. Additionally, the angel round, amounting to $1 million, enlisted the support of prominent figures, including Sandeep Nailwal from Polygon and Alex Svanevik from Nansen.

Polygon Experienced Downtime Issues

On March 24, Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Polygon reported downtime for its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) due to a problem with its blockchain sequencer. Polygon has addressed its two million followers, emphasizing that the issue is isolated to zkEVM and does not affect any other chain deployed using the Polygon chain development kit (CDK).

Ethereum NFTs and Gaming Updates

The NFT market and NFT sales, in general, saw a slight dip in March, but Ethereum managed to remain the first most popular blockchain network for trading in the NFT ecosystem. 

According to CryptoSlam data, the sales volume of Ethereum-based NFTs reached $489.5 million in March, 11% less than in February ($553.4 million). The data further revealed that the Ethereum network attracted around 98k buyers and 84k sellers of NFTs in March. The number of NFT transactions on Ethereum reached more than 648k in March, 22% less than the previous month. 

Despite the Ethereum price reaching two-year highs, the prices of top NFTs witnessed a significant decline in March. The ETH-denominated floor prices for several of the top traded collections on NFT marketplace Blur plummeted. Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape and Mutant Ape Yacht Club saw drops of 44% and 35%, respectively. Additionally, collections such as DeGods experienced a decline of over 55%. 

However, in the midst of the downturn, NFT’s blue-chip CryptoPunks collection on the Ethereum blockchain continued to make headlines with record-breaking sales. In March, a rare Alien-like Punk fetched approximately $16 million in ETH, marking another milestone for the highly sought-after collection. Only nine Alien CryptoPunks have ever been minted, adding to the scarcity and desirability of these digital assets.

The gaming sector continues to be a major focus for Layer 2 projects on the Ethereum blockchain. Layer 2 networks Starknet and Arbitrum doubled down on promoting gaming development. The Starknet Foundation allocated $125.5 million worth of tokens to advance gaming initiatives on the network, while Arbitrum launched the Gaming Catalyst Program (GCP) to spur the growth of Web3 gaming, demonstrating the increasing focus on blockchain-based gaming within the Ethereum ecosystem. 

Notable Ethereum NFT Launches in March:

• The Legacy Cowls (March 29 – April 5). This NFT collection was created by DC Comics, Warner Brothers Discovery Group, and Candy Digital to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the superhero Batman. This collection revolves around Batman-themed NFTs and is based on the inaugural DC comic series on the blockchain, titled The Legacy Cowl, which originated in 2022. The collection consists of a remarkable 11,544 digital collectibles, each representing a piece of Batman’s legacy.
• African Beauty (March 8 – March 15): The African Beauty features 10,000 NFTs and aims to celebrate the diversity and beauty of Africa while empowering African women. By purchasing an African Beauty NFT, collectors were able to help empower and educate women and girls across Africa. 
• Lumi Punks (March 17 – March 24): Lumi Punks features 900 NFT fashion items tailored for the metaverse, a virtual reality space for interaction, creation, and exploration. These items can be explored, bought, sold, and traded, and are compatible with various games and VR platforms.
• RoboMetaMorphs (February 29 – March 7): This collection is part of Kraut 9, an AI-powered NFT launchpad and Web3 marketing agency, and showcases skillful artwork depicting a robotic civilization emerging from the remains of Earth. Designed by German artist Hagen Pietsch in collaboration with Midjourney, an AI art generator, and enhanced with Photoshop, the collection features 8,888 NFTs.

Looking ahead – Can the Ethereum Price Go Even Higher?

In conclusion, despite ETH reaching $4,000 in March for the first time since 2021, its performance has been subdued compared to BTC and the broader crypto market over the past month. 

The Ethereum ecosystem witnessed various updates and developments, including initiatives by major asset management firms such as Fidelity and Bitwise to create spot Ether ETFs, highlighting the growing interest in Ether-based financial products. In addition, the London Stock Exchange’s announcement to accept applications for Ether and Bitcoin ETNs in Q2 2024 further underscores the mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrencies.

Furthermore, recent updates to the Ethereum protocol, in particular the Dencun hard fork, aimed to improve scalability and reduce transaction fees on L2 solutions such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Starknet, and Zora Network. This also led to a notable decrease in fees on Ethereum in March, from $38.7 million to $9.4 million by the end of the month.

In the DeFi sector, MakerDAO’s ambitious “Endgame” transformation aims to grow the DeFi stablecoin market cap from $4.5 billion to over $100 billion, positioning it as a competitor to Tether. 

Additionally, Ethereum’s NFT market saw a slight dip in March, although it remained the most traded blockchain network in the NFT ecosystem, with turnover reaching $489.5 million. Despite price declines for top NFT collections, the Ethereum-based CryptoPunks NFT collection continued to make headlines with record-breaking sales, demonstrating the enduring appeal of digital collectibles.

Looking ahead, Ethereum’s focus on scalability, regulatory developments regarding ETH ETFs, and continued innovation in the DeFi and NFT sectors are likely to shape its future trajectory and adoption.

The post March 2024: ETH Hit $4000, What Else Happened In The Ethereum Ecosystem? appeared first on Cryptonews.

Duea talked about the natural connection blockchain and crypto have with the gaming and betting worlds, and how he came to co-found Roobet.

He explained the difference between Web2 and Web3 gambling, touched upon the partnerships with Snoop Dogg and UFC, and told us why influencer gambling streams are so entertaining.

In this interview, Duea discussed:

• difference between Web3 and Web2 gambling;
• advancing everyday application of cryptocurrencies;
• official social casino of the UFC, roobet.fun;
• future of crypto gambling regulations: how regulations might evolve and impact the industry;
• blockchain and crypto integration: blockchain’s role in Roobet’s operations and supported cryptocurrencies.

You can read what the two Matts talked about below or watch their discussion above.

Ethereum Predictions (Don’t) Come True

Before Roobet became one of the behemoths in the space, Matt Duea was working a job that would prove indispensable to the creation of this betting brand.

He worked on a marketing team, a position that allowed him to meet and collaborate with various people.

“And when they had a new project kind of rolling up, that is how I got on board,” he said.

The position allowed him to educate himself about blockchain “full time,” and about its convergence with video games.

Speaking of which, Duea himslef was a gamer, so the concept of digital currencies was very familiar to him.

So in 2017, Duea became increasingly interested in blockchain, crypto, tokenization, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and he started “poking around that whole crazy world of people exchanging and trading these virtual items.”

From then on, he went “full steam” ahead, exploring this industry and its community.

Ultimately, the marketing company he worked for joined with a blockchain company. “And we were doing all kinds of cool stuff as a marketing team, introducing these concepts to the world. And I was just enamored by it,” Duea said.

Interestingly, in 2018, “nobody cared,” he said. Even their company was convinced that NFTs on Ethereum would never work because it’s too expensive and too slow.

They were both right and wrong.

Ethereum did end up being very expensive.

“But I guess the thing that was wrong was people were willing to pay the gas,” said Duea.

Not Your Typical Casino

Asked to describe Roobet, Matt Duea said that it was founded by an online community with its online community in mind.

Before he joined the project, it housed a few house games and “a small, quiet, sleepy community.”

But the team worked hard to make it an active space for all involved. They often say that Roobet’s more than a casino – it’s a club.

It may not be the biggest, said Duea, but Roobet aims to be the best and the most fun.

And crypto made sense as part of this business. One of its benefits is that it provides a provably fair mechanism that helps everybody feel confident that outcomes can’t be manipulated.

Furthermore, per Duea,

“We don’t look like your typical casino because we didn’t come from that space. We came from the gaming space.”

The team merged the ideas of crypto, blockchain, entertainment, and betting when they were locked inside during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At that point, “I think nerds really stood out because we were the ones that knew how to play around and have a good time and engage with people socially online.”

At the same time, everybody else was “really paying attention to their digital selves.”

“It was like betting had a golden moment,” Duea said.

Roobet 2.0 Is Now Live!

Welcome to the faster, sleeker, and slightly purple-r Roobet pic.twitter.com/HdNGVuzi0c

— Roobet (@Roobet) April 1, 2024

Notably, their game Crash became a massive success. The world loved it, Duea remarked, and it became a huge part of how people got to know Roobet. “Many people associate Roobet with ‘the rocket game’.”

There is still a house version of Crash to this day.

The team continued adding house games, as well as “the biggest global providers.”

Moreover, Roobet provides a unique rewards system, trying to “stay true to our gamer, crypto-first type of mentality when it comes to product.”

The platform also accepts fiat in order to include as many users as possible.

Web3 Gambling vs Web2 Gambling

The major difference between a Web2 and a Web3 gambling platform is that the latter offers crypto support.

Roobet has “a fascination and a love” for all things crypto, blockchain, gaming, and internet culture. Odds are that many other operators will not share the sentiment.

Also, from a licensing standpoint, most can’t “really touch” crypto. Very few licenses today are willing to support a brand trying to innovate using this type of technology.

However, this is likely to change over the next few years as adoption increases, Duea opined.

Moreover, crypto is often being villainized and met with resistance to acknowledge its legitimacy.

It is not easy to set up all the licensing, and there needs to be constant communication with different regulatory bodies and constant monitoring of all business aspects and potential risks.

Furthermore, Duea remarked that it is difficult for Web2 brands – especially large ones – to adopt a new payment type overnight.

Even for Roobet, there were bumps on the road. For example, when they integrated Dogecoin (DOGE), there were commenters who laughed at the decision, asking whom it was for.

“Well, who it’s for is the Doge community. Who it’s for is the crypto community,” Duea said.

And while everybody can speculate about Doge’s intrinsic value, “once you’re done arguing over that, if you want to gamble it, come on over to Roobet.”

That said, Duea hopes that more platforms will adopt crypto as it becomes better understood and more popular.

This is relevant, he argues, because crypto would become substantially more accessible – not everybody has access to platforms like Roobet, but they do to many other platforms globally.

This isn't an April Fools Joke, our $1,000,000 Raffle is LIVE https://t.co/7XsRShL1Qo

— Roobet (@Roobet) April 1, 2024

It is also important to Duea himself. He wants to see crypto technology more celebrated and less demonized. He also wants to see people make money, he added.

Besides, when people start using crypto for betting, they certainly pay more attention to it, because now they’ve got “skin in the game.”

Streaming Dopamine

Online betting is not going anywhere.

One of the noticeable examples is the emergence of massive streamers gambling millions in front of a captivated audience glued to their screens.

It’s gotten popular during the lockdowns, and it’s still going strong.

Duea opined that gambling content has become a form of entertainment. “Casino content is very entertaining to watch and similar to watching maybe your favorite steamer playing a video game on that last level trying not to die.”

It’s a form of a parasocial relationship, he added, providing a dopamine hit.

And it is unlikely to go away. Gambling and sports betting are actually becoming more familiar to many people.

Also, content creators can monetize it better than advertising or merchandise.

Locking Up Big Partnerships

Partnerships are “cool opportunities” for Roobet to be a part of “these very long-standing legacies” and the innovation they’re pushing for, Matt Duea remarked.

In April 2023, Roobet announced a $420,000 giveaway in partnership with their “Chief Ganjaroo Officer, Snoop Dogg.”

Snoop Dogg has a “classic approach” to business, Duea said, “old school” in many ways. He conducts business very straightforwardly.

And the collaboration with him is deeper than just a betting sponsorship.

“I think when it comes to crypto, entertainment, supporting creators, […] when it comes to helping people own their work and build platforms under themselves that allow artists and creators to feed themselves, long term, and build businesses – those are the things that we realized very early Snoop connects with.”

In July 2023, Roobet.fun became the official social casino of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in a multi-year deal.

The platform finds the combination of the sport’s brutality and its origin stories interesting to be a part of.

The fighters are like real-life action figures, Duea said.

There are both betting and gaming elements there, he suggested. Fighters “go in, and they just don’t know what’s going to happen. […] And it really gets your adrenaline going just being around it.”

Making partnerships continues. Endorsements from big names, of course, help, said Duea, but it’s not enough to bring in customers.

“It is more of a trust-building thing,” he added. In the end, you must let the product speak for itself.

__________

About Matt Duea

Matt Duea is an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Roobet, a betting brand for the next generation of gamers, and part of the group behind Roobet.fun and Roobet.com.

The post Matt Duea, Co-Founder of Roobet, on Web3 Casinos and Sports Betting, Crypto Gambling, and The Future of Crypto Gambling Regulations | Ep. 323 appeared first on Cryptonews.

This phenomenon isn’t just a quirk of Bitcoin’s design. It’s a fundamental shift in the blockchain’s architecture, cleverly engineered to slow down the creation of new Bitcoins.

The enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto masterminded the halving to have a finite supply cap of 21m tokens.

Halvings are spaced roughly every four years, or after every 210,000 blocks. They can be seen as milestones leading towards the final goal — when all 21m bitcoins have been mined, a moment expected around the year 2140. As of now, the Bitcoin network has churned out about 19m tokens, inching ever closer to that final count.

Halving Pump Likely to Be Followed by Downturn

The upcoming Bitcoin halving is widely considered to be one of the most positive indicators within the cyclical nature of the market.

Brian Dixon, CEO of Off the Chain Capital, highlighted a key distinction between past and present halvings. Historically, retail investors primarily drove demand for the asset. However, the current landscape encompasses a broader range of participants. These include institutional investors, public corporations, and even sovereign governments, he pointed out.

“This dramatic increase in the types of interested parties may create strong buying pressure compared to past halvings,” Dixon told Cryptonews.

Based on Dixon’s analysis, the optimal allocation window for Bitcoin falls within the six months preceding a halving. It also typically extends for 12-18 months following the event. During this post-halving period, Bitcoin has demonstrably achieved new all-time highs throughout past cycles. Dixon anticipates this trend to potentially continue within the forthcoming 12-18 months after the upcoming halving.

However, Anthony Georgiades, general partner at Innovating Capital, had a more circumspect perspective. He observed a historical pattern in which each halving was preceded by a price increase. This was followed by a period of roughly 90 to 180 days of sustained price appreciation after the halving itself. This upward trend, however, was then invariably followed by a significant price correction.

He suggests that this pattern becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Suppose market participants overwhelmingly anticipate a pre-halving price surge followed by a crash. In that case, their buying behavior will be driven by the expectation of a pump. And their selling will be similarly motivated by the anticipation of a subsequent downturn.

MicroStrategy to Have Waning Bitcoin Proxy Role

Aki Balogh, CEO of DLC.Link, downplayed the direct impact of the halving on Bitcoin’s demand.

However, he acknowledged that marketing efforts by major corporations such as MicroStrategy and BlackRock will likely raise public awareness among both institutional and retail investors.

Balogh also suggested that MicroStrategy’s role as a proxy for Bitcoin investment might diminish somewhat moving forward. He reasoned that for some investors, directly purchasing Bitcoin through an ETF is a more transparent option. Investors would prefer this method compared to acquiring shares in a company like MicroStrategy, whose board may have undisclosed objectives.

Miner Centralization

Every four years, the number of Bitcoin awarded to miners is halved. Since miners are the primary source of new Bitcoins entering circulation, this effectively reduces the future supply by 50% over the subsequent four-year period.

According to Jesper Johansen, CEO of Northstake, the halving will also induce volatility in the network’s hash rate. This is because miners using older equipment or facing higher operating costs may be forced offline due to reduced profitability.

He expressesed concern that this could exacerbate centralization trends, with large-scale mining pools benefiting from economies of scale and further concentrating hashing power.

The potential for mining centralization raises two key concerns, he said. Firstly, entities with significant control over the mining process could possess the ability to censor transactions by selectively refusing to confirm them. This directly contradicts Bitcoin’s core principles of decentralization and censorship resistance. Secondly, centralized mining pools might exert undue influence over decisions about protocol updates or modifications.

Further Maturation as an Asset Class

The 2024 Bitcoin halving replicated prior reductions in mining rewards by 50%. Still, it will unfold in a demonstrably different context compared to previous halving events.

Unlike the earlier halvings in 2012 and 2016, which coincided with Bitcoin being a relatively obscure phenomenon, or the 2020 halving that occurred amidst pandemic-induced economic disruptions, the current event takes place within a landscape characterized by burgeoning mainstream adoption and evolving regulatory frameworks.

Leo Smigel, a personal finance expert at Analyzing Alpha, vividly recalled the anticipation surrounding the first Bitcoin halving in 2012.

“When the halving happened and the block reward dropped from 50 to 25 BTC, I had no idea what was coming,” he said. “The price back then was around $12 – cheap pizzas and all that. But over the next year, we saw the first real Bitcoin bull run take off. By December 2013, 1 BTC hit over $1,100!”

With institutional investors finally entering the crypto market, demand appears poised for an upswing.

Therefore, while short-term price fluctuations are inherently unpredictable, Smigel said the halving bolsters his confidence in Bitcoin’s long-term viability as a digital equivalent to gold.

Bitcoin to Draw Developers from Across Ecosystems

Bill Laboon, director of education and governance Initiatives at the Web3 Foundation, anticipates a period of consolidation within the Bitcoin mining landscape. This is because the halving will render mining unprofitable for the least efficient miners.

While a sudden 50% reduction in production would be detrimental to businesses in many industries, Laboon acknowledges that the halving is a planned event, and miners have likely had time to prepare for its impact.

He characterized it as a social event as well. He suggests that the halving fosters a sense of community by uniting not only Bitcoin developers but also those from other blockchain ecosystems. This not only fosters excitement and boosts the morale of existing developers, but the heightened attention also attracts new developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The post Bitcoin’s Next Phase: 5 Key Changes To Expect Post-2024 Halving appeared first on Cryptonews.

What You’ll Find in This March Solana Analysis:

1. 1. What is Solana?
   2. Solana On-chain Data Analysis and SOL Price Performance
   3. Solana Ecosystem Updates and Acquisitions
   4. Solana Meme Coins
   5. Solana Airdrops and DEXs
   6. Solana NFTs and Games
   7. Looking Ahead – Will SOL’s Price Continue to Ascend?

What is Solana?

Solana is an open-source blockchain platform founded in 2017 that emphasizes scalability and speed. With its unique Layer 1 network architecture, it processes over 710,000 transactions per second, enabling the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps) for various use cases, such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) marketplaces. Unlike Ethereum, Solana does not require additional scaling solutions, relying on powerful computers for network maintenance and data storage. Its native cryptocurrency, SOL, is essential for transactions and network security through staking.

Solana On-Chain Data Analysis and SOL Price Performance

On March 18, the market capitalization of Solana cryptocurrency surged to an all-time high of $92.5 billion, surpassing its previous peak of around $77.9 billion recorded in November 2021. On March 21, the Solana network also updated its record for the daily number of new addresses on the blockchain. The number of daily new addresses reached 1.61 million.

Solana’s daily active addresses reached 2.4 million, outperforming all other chains — a new high for Solana since June 2021.

Solana’s daily transaction volume fluctuated during the month, rising slightly from 27.9 million on March 1 to 29.1 million on March 28. During the last two days of the month, this number dropped to 23.3 million.

Solana’s total value locked (TVL) reached $4.9 billion in March, representing a 96% increase compared to February 2024.

While the crypto markets experienced a bit of a pullback, the SOL price continued to rise throughout March. Starting at $135 on March 1, SOL’s price quickly approached $205 on March 28 — for the first time since December 2021 — and closed the month at nearly $200.

Solana’s meme coin mania also pushed on-chain volumes and fees to new highs. Volume on Solana exceeded $3.79 billion on March 15. On March 16, Solana’s total trading volume soared past Ethereum, reaching $3.52 billion and beating out the daily volume on the Ethereum network by more than $1.1 billion, per DefiLlama.

Total fees on Solana were also at new all-time highs. The total transaction fees paid on Solana on March 18 amounted to $4.9 million — the vast majority of which was non-vote priority fees.

Moreover, since March 9, Solana has overtaken Ethereum to become the number one blockchain for stablecoin transfer volume. Data from blockchain analytics platform Artemis showed that Solana’s stablecoin transfer volume reached a new high of $112.9 billion on March 28, surpassing the Ethereum network, which reported only $17.6 billion. 

Not surprisingly, Solana was searched for more globally than ever before, according to Google data. Google Trends’ weekly tracker of a keyword’s popularity shows that global interest in Solana hit a five-year high of 100 on March 10 and 16, surpassing the previous peak in the last week of December 2023.

According to CoinGecko Research, Solana has also been declared the most popular blockchain so far in 2024, accounting for 49.3% of global crypto investor interest in chain-specific narratives.

Solana Ecosystem Updates and Collaborations

FTX Sells SOL at a Discount

The estate of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX will sell its remaining 41 million Solana, worth $7.7 billion at the time of publication, to institutional investors for around $60, while the current SOL market price is around $188. Neptune Digital announced the acquisition of 26,964 SOL at $64 per token, with 20% to be unlocked in March 2025 and the remainder on a monthly basis until 2028.

Among other institutional investors is also Pantera Capital, a major crypto hedge fund with $5.2 billion in assets under management, which is seeking to raise funds for the potential acquisition of SOL from FTX, according to a March 7 Bloomberg report. Bloomberg reports that FTX holds around 41.1 million SOL tokens, accounting for 10% of the total Solana circulating supply and valued at approximately $5.4 billion. The potential sale of these tokens could provide vital funds for compensating investors affected by the exchange’s bankruptcy.

Coca-Cola Partners With ALL.ART

Coca-Cola HBC, a key partner of the Coca-Cola Company, partnered with Solana-based platform ALL.ART to implement blockchain-based employee certification. Students or trainees will be required to digitally sign the certificate themselves, creating a permanent aspect of the NFT’s metadata and enhancing security and authenticity.

SOL ETFs On The Horizon?

Institutional staking services provider Figment Europe and Apex Group are preparing to launch Solana (SOL) staking exchange-traded products (ETPs) on the SIX Swiss Exchange via Issuance.Swiss AG. This product, Figment Solana Plus Staking Rewards (SOLF), will be tailored to provide institutions with easy access to staking rewards through traditional brokers or banks within a familiar ETP framework.

Aphone Virtual Phones Launch on Solana

A new virtual smartphone app, Aphone, was launched on Solana’s blockchain and Aethir’s decentralized cloud infrastructure, targeting people with older hardware and those in developing countries. Aphone allows users to interact with resource-intensive apps and games, regardless of their device’s capabilities, and aims to provide access to Web3 concepts and applications to a wider audience. 

APhone’s Features

Ready to ditch the data giants? Experience the first decentralized cloud smartphone!

With APhone, enjoy:

Decentralized Cloud by @AethirCloud
Web3 DApp Store
Multiple Accounts
Super VPN
Airdrop Farming Portal
State-of-the-art Specs pic.twitter.com/CRV8lZl76k

— APhone (@aphonelabs) March 30, 2024

Killbears Switches from Ethereum to Solana

The Ethereum-based gaming project Killabears revealed its plan to transition to the Solana blockchain on March 20. This event is important for Solana, as it signifies Killabears as the first major gaming project to commence a migration from Ethereum.

Solana Ecosystem Coins

Solana’s meme coins have been in a frenzy as part of the recent crypto bull run.

Slerf (SLERF), the meme coin of the Solana-based NFT community Bozo Collective, saw a surge despite a major pre-launch glitch on March 18. After a $10.8 million SOL pre-sale, a glitch resulted in the liquidity pool (LP) and 50% of the token supply being burned.

This sparked controversy, but the reduced supply fueled a buying frenzy that pushed SLERF to $1.28 and a market cap of $500 million within three hours. MEXC, CoinEx, and Bitget quickly listed SLERF. The developer admitted the LP burn was a mistake and went on X to address 10,000 listeners. Despite the debate, SLERF’s early performance broke records and boosted Solana’s DEX volume.

Dogwifhat (WIF), a dog-themed meme coin, became the third-largest meme coin by market capitalization on March 29, surpassing Pepe (PEPE). The WIF price skyrocketed to an all-time high of $4,8 on March 31 as meme coin fans raised over $700,000 to advertise the token’s logo on the Las Vegas sphere. Major exchanges such as Binance and Robinhood Europe listed WIF, which also pushed up its price.

Jeo Boden (BODEN), a Solana meme coin parody of U.S. President Joe Biden launched on March 9, also hit its new record, surpassing $325 million in market cap on March 28.

On March 18, the Milady NFT collection joined the meme coin craze as well and released the Solana-based meme coin, Milady Wif Hat (LADYF), named after the popular Solana meme coin Dogwifhat (WIF). The meme coin attracted 91,486 SOL ($18.6 million) within two hours of its pre-sale announcement.

Similarly, a pseudonymous art producer (@darkfarms on X) launched a new Solana meme coin, Book of Memes (BOME), on March 14 through a rapid 24-hour presale that garnered over 10,000 SOL. This event created an immediate buzz, prompting centralized exchanges such as Bingx, MEXC, Poloniex, and HTX to quickly list BOME, soon followed by Kucoin, Binance, and Bybit. Within just 36 hours, the market capitalization of this meme coin skyrocketed to $1.4 billion.

Another meme coin SMOG has also been making waves and is positioned to soar onto centralized exchanges (CEX) in the near future. Despite its recent retracement to $0.20 on March 31st from fleeting highs of $0.36 on March 8th, SMOG experienced a remarkable uptrend, reflecting a 233% increase over the last month. 

Solana DEXs

The meme coin frenzy helped Solana-based decentralized exchanges (DEX) top the charts in trading volume.

Jupiter (JUP)

On March 27, Solana’s decentralized exchange (DEX) Jupiter allocated $10 million in USDC and $100 million in its native JUP token to launch its Jupiter DAO. The allocation is intended to provide the DAO with the resources to support ideas using USDC and to adjust the JUP allocation for long-term incentive alignment with JUP contributors. 

Jupiter DAO also introduced a new voting system that changes the dynamics of community engagement and decision-making within the ecosystem. By locking JUP tokens, users gain voting power and can actively participate in the governance process. This system is designed to provide equal treatment to all participants, regardless of the amount of JUP tokens they lock.

Catdets, It’s TIME TO VOTE!

We have a fun genesis vote for you to get familiar with the platform. Head over to https://t.co/j63st12ogA, lock some JUP, and try it out!

All votes (including the genesis vote) will receive incentives, which includes launchpad fees from the JUP and… pic.twitter.com/1sj3QIeu5G

— Jupiter (@JupiterExchange) March 5, 2024

The price of Jupiter’s native token, JUP, has skyrocketed with the formation of the JUP DAO and the introduction of ASR. The token has reached an all-time high of $1.6 and is up 220% since. The market cap of JUP has also surpassed $1.6 billion.

Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP)

In March, Solana’s DeFi ecosystem was also enhanced with the introduction of Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), which is now operational on Solana’s main net. This means that Solana developers can now natively exchange USDC tokens from Ethereum and other EVM-compatible ecosystems, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Optimism, and Polygon. It will also be compatible with non-EVM blockchains. Solana ecosystem players such as Jupiter Exchange, Allbridge, Drift Protocol, Solend, Wormhole, and others have already integrated support for CCTP. 

1/ @Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol is now live on Solana!

Fast, frictionless flows of USDC to Solana from 8 blockchain networks across 56 unique routes are now possible

All you need to know about #CCTP https://t.co/3InoRf83H8

— Solana (@solana) March 26, 2024

Io.net And IO Research Get Funding

IO Research, creator of the Solana-based decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) Io.net, raised $30 million at a $1 billion valuation. Since the launch of the platform and the Ignition program, Io.net has experienced massive growth, with the total number of workers providing graphics processing unit (GPU) power exceeding 120K. 

BREAKING: https://t.co/WLXlHkvE4z has raised $30M to build the largest decentralized GPU network in the world and solve the AI compute shortage.

The Series A round was led by Hack VC with participation from Multicoin Capital, 6th Man Ventures, M13, Delphi Digital, Solana Labs,…

— io.net (@ionet) March 5, 2024

Z Airdrop

Zeta Markets, the derivatives DEX on Solana, officially confirmed the Z Airdrop and eligibility details. The event will take place in April and will reward early adopters and dedicated users of the platform. 

KMNO

Kamino Finance, a dominant player in the Solana DeFi space with over $674 million in TVL across multiple products, announced the launch of its governance token, KMNO. The airdrop, dubbed the “Genesis Distribution,” will also take place in April, with eligibility determined at a snapshot on March 31.

Solana NFTs 

Solana was the third most traded blockchain network in the NFT ecosystem in February. Data from CryptoSlam indicated that the sales volume for Solana-based NFTs in March reached $234,9 million. The data further revealed that the Solana network attracted around 24,000 buyers and 18,000 NFT sellers in March. The number of NFT transactions on Solana in February reached more than 2,2 million. 

A notable update came from the Solana NFT marketplace Tensor, which announced its intention to issue a governance token, TNSR. In its post on X, the Tensor Foundation revealed its plan to launch the TNSR token, hinting at the issuance of a governance token without going into specifics. 

Introducing $TNSR – the future of NFT trading.$TNSR will govern Tensor protocols that have already traded over $2bn worth of NFTs on the fastest, most scalable blockchain – Solana. pic.twitter.com/eff2IxGOwr

— Tensor Foundation (@TensorFdn) March 12, 2024

The month also saw a fascinating event when a relatively unknown NFT artist, pseudonymously known as Kero, managed to raise over $10 million in SOL in less than a day. This feat was accomplished through the pre-sale of a meme coin that was originally started as a joke. 

Im not on Sol yet, to start it right should we make a SOL Shitcoin for fun ?

— Kero (@KeroNFTs) March 14, 2024

The Solana NFT market has also seen significant sales activity. The purported owner of Achi, the dog behind the Solana-based meme coin Dogwifhat, sold the iconic photo of the dog wearing a hat as an NFT for $4.3 million.

SOLD

On November 17, 2018, Achi's owners captured him in an endearing hat on camera. It went viral, ultimately becoming a meme and mascot for the meme coin $wif.

Today, that image was collected by Gigantic Rebirth Ventures on FND for 1,210.759 ETH (4.3 Mil)! pic.twitter.com/8jV4szdPg1

— Rob | Foundation (@RDToTheMoon) March 18, 2024

Notable NFT launches in March:

Looking ahead – Solana Analysis for April

In March, Solana’s on-chain data analysis showed that the blockchain and the SOL price performance both reached significant milestones. Market capitalization reached an all-time high of $92.5 billion, accompanied by a record number of daily new and active addresses. Despite fluctuations, daily transaction volume increased slightly, and TVL jumped to $4.9 billion, a 96% increase from February 2024.

According to Google Trends and CoinGecko Research, interest in Solana has skyrocketed worldwide, reflected in the price of SOL, which rose from $135 to nearly $205 by March 28, a new high since December 2021. 

The ecosystem witnessed new collaborations and advancements, including institutional investments, DeFi enhancements such as Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, and the launch of innovative projects such as Aphone and Io.net.

The meme coin scene thrived, with Slerf and Dogwifhat experiencing surges in market capitalization and trading volumes. New meme coins like Jeo Boden, Milady Wif Hat, and Book of Memes also emerged, driving excitement and market activity. 

Solana’s NFT market saw robust sales, highlighted by Tensor’s announcement of a governance token, TNSR, and a successful $10 million SOL raise by NFT artist Kero. In addition, notable NFT sales included the iconic Dogwifhat photo, which sold for $4.3 million. 

These developments underscored Solana’s growing prominence in the blockchain space, as evidenced by its market performance, ecosystem expansion as well as vibrant meme coin and NFT markets.

The post Solana March 2024 Recap: SOL Price Analysis and Ecosystem Review appeared first on Cryptonews.

He talked about Pixels’ development and successes, what it takes to launch a Web3 game, and why projects should wait before launching a token.

The founder also touched upon Pixels move from Polygon to Ronin, as well as their work with Binance.

In this interview, Barwikowski discussed:

• current state of Web3 gaming and its future;
• how Pixels differs from other Web3 games;
• Ronin migration – move from Polygon to Ronin;
• achieving 500,000 daily active users and 4.5 million in token revenue in the last 30 days;
• Pixels building the biggest Web3 casual games company — aiming for a similar impact to Zynga’s influence on Web2 gaming.

You can read what Luke and Matt talked about below, or you can watch the full podcast episode above.

Game Maker, K’NEX Winner, and Bitcoin Miner

Barwikowski started young. At just 11 or 12, he began using a program called GameMaker and its scripting language. He made mini-games for his friends.

He taught himself scripting languages, thinking about how it allows him to build “without any limits.”

Interestingly, more than a decade ago, he won a nationwide contest for building with the construction toy system K’NEX, and:

“I thought coding was really cool because I basically got unlimited K’NEX. I can just build whatever I want.”

From then, Barwikowski moved into Web development and other areas.

At one point, he even mined Bitcoin (BTC). At the time, one could still use a home computer. Barwikowski could “just leave my parents’ computer on and make money.”

However, he was wiping his hard drives all the time, as he was in his hacking phase, “so I lost all that Bitcoin, but it’s fine.”

After he moved from coding to entrepreneurship, he sold his first app at just 18.

Creating Pixels

Pixels, founded by Barwikowski, is a social casual Web3 game powered by the Ronin Network.

Unlike many games, even similar ones, Pixels has seen significant traction. It has surpassed a whopping 700,000 daily active addresses and 500,000 daily active users.

Pixels now at 720 K DAU and 1.5 M MAU.$RON $PIXEL pic.twitter.com/mSLb6X3PoT

— Jihoz.ron (@Jihoz_Axie) April 1, 2024

Before working on Pixels, Barwikowski was working on a different product. It was an “8-bit pixel art product” where people could host mixers, holiday parties, and other events.

At that time, there were just three people on the team, briefly competing with a product called Gather Town: “a combination of Zoom and an online game where you walk around and if you get close to people, it opens up video chats. It was spatial video,” he said.

This is the technology he started selling quickly to large companies, including Apple, Uber, Rippling, and Twitter.

However, while still working on that first app, its creator realized that it “wasn’t the best business.” The best use-case scenario for these virtual spaces is people gathering about once a week for an hour. And larger companies used it once a quarter with no other need for it.

In 2021, however, Barwikowski noticed the massive popularity of Axie Infinity.

Furthermore, as he studied economics, “the idea of building an economy ground up inside of the context of cryptocurrency made total sense to me.”

And having a piece of tech in their hands they did not know what to do with, they started forming ideas of an avenue to move into.

“We kind of turned that tech into Pixels,” Barwikowski said.

Bottoms-up Growth Approach

Barwikowski noted that Pixels may look simpler than it is. But there’s “a lot of depth” to it, he said.

It’s 40% games and 60% everything else, said the founder, “and I think a lot of people in the space underestimate how much of the rest you need to build in addition to a game to make a successful Web3 game.”

All these people are trying to make crazy complex web3 games with insane production when Monopoly Go is over there in web2 with $2b in revenue.

Controversial take, but gameplay is only small portion of what you actually need to build to make a web3 game work.

— Luke Barwikowski (@whatslukedoing) April 2, 2024

Therefore, the team is very focused on what Barwikowski calls the Growth Engine, in line with their long-term plans and Pixels’ roadmap.

Much of what they do is centered around the incentive design and “basically a new form of user acquisition.”

Per the founder, Web3, if used properly, is an extremely powerful tool. It unlocks new types of ways for games to grow that don’t exist inside of Web2.

“And what we’ve been experimenting with is basically what we call a bottoms-up growth approach,” he said.

In Web2, games grow from performance marketing. They target a specific audience, spend money per user, and “then it just becomes a game of math for them.”

They’ll decide if this game is successful or not right there. If it is, they’ll pour millions into advertising. And they need to raise millions to do that.

In Web3, the team takes the complete opposite approach to the growth strategy, Barwikowski said. They aim to create the best incentive structures to “help our users help us grow.”

That way, very little money is spent on user acquisition, for example, a few thousand dollars for giveaways.

“But we haven’t done any paid advertising, no performance marketing, anything like that,” Luke Barwikowski said.

Congratulations to @pixels_online for Hitting the milestone of 2,000,854 wallets on @Ronin_Network !

In just 5 months on Ronin, Pixels has achieved:
• Leading game in terms of DAA
• Launch on Binance Launchpool
• 2M wallets on Ronin

Next is 1M DAA and 5M wallets pic.twitter.com/mWERXCEylG

— Nathann.eth (@0xxNathan) March 30, 2024

And this is how they can grow games in a new way that makes their growth strategies hyper-competitive against Web2 games.

Furthermore, they can take this growth engine built for Pixels and eventually apply it to other games in the ecosystem.

Major Moves: Ronin and Binance

Pixels was established in April 2020 on Polygon. However, the team announced its migration to Ronin in September 2023.

The Pixels team has a lot of respect for the Polygon team and the tech they built, Barwikowski said.

But the hardest part of Web3 is user acquisition and distribution, he added. It’s difficult and costly.

Ronin “had a level of distribution that doesn’t exist anywhere else inside of Web3 right now.” They’ve already done the hard work of onboarding millions of users onto their chain through Axie Infinity. “That is extremely valuable.”

Per Luke Barwikowski,

“I kind of viewed Ronin as almost like a new type of publisher in a way where they have access to a great dedicated user base.”

People loved Axie, and even though Axie’s DAU was slightly down, there were still many users in that ecosystem “that could be resurrected.”

This was “very true,” Barwikowski said, and many Pixels users now are from the Ronin ecosystem – the majority are (former) Axie Infinity players.

Therefore, the growth began with the core Axie Infinity user base that Ronin had built out.

Now, the game is getting very strong traction inside Southeast Asia and other markets.

One more benefit of moving to Ronin, he said, is knowledge.

There were many who tried giving the Pixel team advice about Web3 Gaming – but they themselves never launched a Web3 Game. They didn’t understand what actually comes with it.

The Ronin Sky Mavis team knows what they are talking about, said Barwikowski, so their knowledge, mentorship, and guidance have been invaluable.

Meanwhile, the team revealed that Binance rolled out the PIXELS token.

Our token, $PIXEL, is officially live on @Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange

We’ve been working towards this moment for over 2 years, and we couldn’t be more excited to share this massive milestone with you all.

This is just the beginning and the best is yet to… pic.twitter.com/G3MCCf0yMU

— Pixels (@pixels_online) February 19, 2024

Binance “probably understands Web3 and tokenomics better than anybody” whom Barwikowski talked with over the last two to three years.

Their due diligence process is extensive, long, and intense, he added, but ultimately worthwhile for both parties.

Binance wanted to “make sure that we had something that was sustainable, of real value […] They have a lot of concern for the things they launch.”

Putting Tokens Before the Game is Easier, But….

There has been a trend in Web3: many teams launch tokens first, while the games come out years later.

The token may start strong but goes to cents because there’s no ecosystem.

Pixels took the opposite approach.

Barwikowski argued that teams launch tokens sooner than they should simply because it’s the easier thing to do.

“Actually having something that’s ready to use a token is quite difficult,” he stated. Launching a token is “a very large commitment” and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

It took Pixels much thought, preparation, and experimentation to get to this point.

Moreover, they had a soft currency as a Web3 currency, BERRY. This helped the team understand better how to manage a live Web3 currency before actually launching the Pixel token.

And yeah, we’re really glad that we got the lessons that we learned through this first go because otherwise, this second go maybe wouldn’t have been successful, right?

The founder advised that a project – be it a token, a game, or something else – should always keep asking itself why it exists, what it aims to accomplish, and what value it adds.

These may seem like simple questions, “but the answers and the things that you learn are not so clear at first,” Barwikowski said.

One needs to be in this space to understand and build an idea around how all these Web3 components should actually interact inside of a game.

So there’s some truth to this.

We built the core gameplay mechanics in Pixels in ~4 months.

On an engine that took us 1.5 years to build.

Over 2 years ago.

& almost all of our initial thoughts / hypotheses around web3 were wrong, it takes a long time to hone in web3 gameplay https://t.co/gNbw14qXX3

— Luke Barwikowski (@whatslukedoing) March 30, 2024

Meanwhile, this is still a very experimental company, the founder said, and the community knows that. They’re all testing the game together.

Unlike many other projects, he said,

“We build in public, and we build with community.”

What doesn’t work in the first iteration is fixed for future use.

Per Luke Barwikowski, the team still has “probably one to two years of really fine-tuning what this looks like inside of this first game that we’re building out, Pixels, the game everybody’s playing and enjoying right now. The ambition is much more in the future.”

Additionally, the next chapter of gaming is going to be play-to-earn, and Barwikowski is “all in.” It’s possible to make it sustainable, he argued, and the company “that cracks that has a huge opportunity in front of them.”

__________

About Luke Barwikowski

Luke Barwikowski is the founder and CEO of Pixels, the largest web3 game by DAU.

With over 2.5 million total players, Pixels is a social, casual Web3 game powered by the Ronin Network, focusing on farming, exploration, and creation in an open world.  As CEO, Barwikowski says, his mission is to build the biggest Web3 casual games company.

His background in software engineering started at 12, and he built and sold his first app at 18.

Luke Barwikowski holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Economics from the University of Michigan.

The post Luke Barwikowski, CEO of Web3 Game Pixels, on The Current State of Web3 Gaming, Growing to 500K Daily Active Users, and Building on Ronin Blockchain | Ep. 322 appeared first on Cryptonews.

The strategic partnership with validators reinforces blockchains’ security and decentralization, Core Foundation told Cryptonews via mail.

Core Foundation that aims to create a secure and decentralized ecosystem for dApps, has become one of the first projects to leverage ZAN’s enterprise node service.

Ant Digital Technology revealed its blockchain development brand ZAN in September last year, with a focus on serving institutional and individual clients in overseas markets, particularly Hong Kong and Singapore.

According to Core Initial contributor Brendon Sedo, the collaboration aims to fortify security and champion decentralization across the Asia-Pacific region.

“This collaboration marks a significant milestone for both Core and ZAN as validator partners,” Sedo noted. “This partnership is just the beginning – we look forward to fostering more collaborations in the region with ZAN and demonstrating our commitment and enthusiasm for Asia’s dynamic BTCfi landscape.”

Further, Core claims to be the first BTC DeFi project to integrate ZEN’s technology, with the recent rise of layer 2 BTC projects.

Collab Aims to Foster Decentralization Across APAC Region

Core also emphasized that leveraging ZAN’s technology would help enhance Core Chain’s scalability and reaffirm its dedication to decentralization.

Additionally, the partnership would strengthen Core Chain’s ties with the Asian tech community, pushing wider community engagement, the company added.

Ethan Duo, CTO at ZAN highlighted the shared goals and commitment to advance the blockchain ecosystem through the partnership.

“We believe our concerted efforts will empower users across the Asia-Pacific region and significantly advance the influence of blockchain technology,” Duo told Cryptonews.

Core Foundation recently launched an NFT marketplace – Wizard Gallery – aiming to provide users with seamless NFT minting and trading, operating on Core Chain. The marketplace boasts hosting more than 20,000 NFTs created by over 50 artists.

The post Exclusive: Ant Digital Technology’s ZAN Becomes Core Chain’s Validator to Fortify Blockchains’ Security in Asia-Pacific appeared first on Cryptonews.

Williams discussed the future of AI, its ‘perfect partnership’ with smart contracts and blockchain, and how AI can help average Joe and Jane perform complex trades with verbal instructions.

He further explained what differentiates Internet Computer as a crypto cloud from other blockchains, and why it’s currently the only one in the “third lane.”

In this interview, Williams discussed:

• decentralized AI (DeAI);
• why AI projects should be decentralized;
• why dapps should get into AI;
• building out a world-class content studio;
• hosting AI models on the blockchain;
• multichain DeFi;
• decentralized cloud computing.

Dominic Williams gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can watch above or read below.

The Future of AI is Smart Contracts

Sitting in a new studio in the basement of Zurich HQ, Williams discussed the promising future of AI.

The Internet Computer (ICP) blockchain aims to function as a decentralized cloud. It would enable AI models to operate entirely on the blockchain without centralized cloud providers like Amazon Web Services.

Williams opined that “the long tail of AI, where people run their own models, is probably one where AI runs smart contracts on blockchains.”

And this is possible today on the Internet Computer blockchain.

Everyone in crypto is currently talking about AI: blockchains for AI, tokens for AI, ChatGPT integration that people can use to put chat into their Web3 service, and much more.

And all that is great, said Williams. However, DFINITY is more focused on the fundamentals.

The project’s mission is to reinvent computing on blockchain. This means that they see blockchain as it is today on the Internet Computer.

Smart contracts on the Internet Computer are a bundle of web assembly bytecode and persistent memory pages, and they run in parallel. They directly serve user experiences in end users’ browsers.

This blockchain specifically, said Williams, is capable of acting like a “crypto cloud where you can build anything with smart contracts.”

This allows it to process some 330,000-350,000 Ethereum-equivalent transactions a second.

Moreover, some of these smart contracts are now packing up to 400 gigabytes of persistent memory, said Williams, providing enough memory and compute power to run an AI.

Earlier this weekend the Internet Computer #ICP passed 3 billion blocks It's probably now processed substantially more blocks than all the other blockchains combined (?) It's a beast.

— dom.icp ∞ (@dominic_w) March 24, 2024

“And what we’ve done at DFINITY,” Williams added, “is worked on technology that’s made it possible for the Internet Computer blockchain to run computation at scale. Today, it hosts many orders of magnitude more data and computation than traditional blockchains. And that’s why it’s able to run AI smart contracts.”

AI and Blockchain are Perfect Partners

It’s old news that OpenAI took the world by storm. However, per Williams, it and similar projects are “centralization on steroids.”

However, he said, the good news is that, while these large language models with huge amounts of money do grab a lot of attention, “in the future we’re going to see millions of individual AI models running.” These will focus on specific tasks.

Actually, we’re already interacting with AIs on a daily basis. A common example are services like TikTok or Instagram. This kind of content recommendation neural networks, for example, will be very prevalent in the Web3 field, Williams remarked.

There are some key things to pay attention to, the founder warned.

There will be standalone large language models that coordinate organizations. An example is Delphi AI, which connects to all aspects of a technology company running it: the calendar, Slack, GitHub – any and all apps.

This means that the AI model will have access to all of this organization’s most sensitive data. And it’s going to become the number one target for hackers.

Furthermore, a malicious actor could infiltrate the company and feed the AI misinformation. The AI can’t tell the difference between fake and real, and it becomes corrupted.

Therefore, employers within the organization should interact with this type of AIs only with a strong blockchain-based authentication.

Also, the organization would be fully dependent on the AI. Should this AI run on traditional infrastructure and something mundane goes wrong – a piece of equipment breaks, for example – and the AI goes offline, it would be “incredibly disruptive.”

All this serves to show that AIs must be tamper-proof. Williams said this is achieved through smart contracts.

When AI is accessed via strong authentication through blockchain, “that the AI is unstoppable.”

Therefore, said Williams, “when you think about it, AI and blockchain fit together perfectly. And blockchain is the only way of creating a tamper-proof, unstoppable compute platform.”

All this said, if you want the absolute most efficient AI, you’d run it on a dedicated AI cloud, the founder added.

Power of AI-Based DeFi

Blockchain is complex. Crypto, decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized apps (dapps), and other sectors of the industry are difficult for the everyday user to understand on the tech level.

“Things start getting complex if you really have to enable people to create almost arbitrary instructions,” Williams argued.

However, this is where AI can come in. Users can just tell it what they want.

Should a project catch a user’s eye, they can get their phone out and verbally provide instructions to an AI crypto wallet that will then carry out a transaction.

Williams provided another example. A user can instruct the AI to sell 5 WBTC if WBTC on Ethereum reaches $100,000 and only if the slippage is less than X.

The AI will then display a concise pseudocode – a simple one that layman can understand – and, if the users likes it, “they press confirm and boom, it’s done.”

Therefore, there is also the convenience aspect:

“The system can make it possible for normal people to create much more complex actions.”

On the Internet Computer, smart contracts can be invoked in a heartbeat, Williams noted. They can be periodically woken up to, for example, check a price oracle and behave according to instructions that have been previously made.

It allows people to buy and sell crypto and make trades conveniently, as well as create complex default actions based on conditions.

Also, it’s very easy to create a simple swap interface.

Witness the groundbreaking fusion of AI and Blockchain that promises to redefine the future

AI running on blockchain as a smart contract pic.twitter.com/Y3pU7gxOEu

— DFINITY (@dfinity) March 26, 2024

While the product is not finalized yet, the first AI demo includes image classification. Users can upload a photograph, and AI will identify it.

DFINITY is also working with partners and AI experts, and “they’ve got various things they want to run on the Internet Computer.”

The project’s ideas include face recognition, which would enable fully autonomous KYC.

Hosting AI Models on Blockchain

Running AI as a smart contract involves a certain amount of replication.

The Internet Computer allows users to choose the level of replication. On a standard system subnet, it’s doing 13x replication, Williams said.

In the future, there may be lower trust AI subnets, which only have 4x replication, which still gives very impressive security and resilience, he argued.

And the higher the level of replication, the more queries you can do.

Currently, the Internet Computer’s limitation is the amount of main memory that a smart contract has: 4GB each. That’s because it’s still running 32-bit WebAssembly (wasm).

However, said Williams, “I’m really excited about this. I’m pleased to say that we’re moving to 64-bit wasm soon, which completely removes that restriction and will probably increase the maximum amount of main memory to 32GB or something like that.”

This will enable the blockchain to run large language models. (For explanation purposes, large language models include the GPT-3 and GPT-4 from OpenAI, LLaMA from Meta, and PaLM2 from Google.)

Meanwhile, DFINITY’s pipeline already includes Single Instruction/Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions. They will be put into the smart contract execution environment to “massively” speed up these AI smart contracts.

“And we’ve got a whole lot of other things in the works too,” Williams said. First, they plan to host many AI demos.

Furthermore, they’re working on two major projects: one is Utopia, and the other is Orbit – an open source project that will enable users to create a completely decentralized, institutional-grade, cross-chain crypto custody solution on the Internet Computer.

Creating Utopia

Speaking of future development, Williams noted two main areas the team is focusing on.

One is helping optimize the Internet Computer to run AI so it can run larger and larger models and do so more efficiently.

The other is Utopia, which will enable the enterprise sector, governments, NGOs, and others, to run like private Internet Computers that can integrate with the public Internet Computer and with each other.

People using Utopia to create these private clouds will “just be focused on the fact that online systems and services are tamper-proof and unstoppable.”

Another important aspect to note is that the team behind the Internet Computer is creating advances and milestones all the time – yet there is no “fanfare.”

On other blockchains, there are really trivial features “wrapped up in this big release with a fancy name, and then it’s marketed to hell.”

But Internet Computer “isn’t the best” at marketing itself. Williams noted that it tends to be too tech-focused.

This is also something they’re working to correct.

A great example of this is something called deterministic time slicing. It’s a huge achievement, Williams said. It essentially shows that the Internet Computer is a genuine, decentralized operating system.

And while operating systems like Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, OSX, Windows, or Linux run on a single computer, the ICP stack “works as a kind of operating system that runs across multiple compute units.”

These “things are so much more further in advance than what people are used to on blockchain,” Williams said.

The Three Lanes of Blockchain Technology

Lastly, in connection with the previous discussion, Williams noted that there are three lanes when it comes to blockchains.

The first comprises blockchains dedicated to hosting a ledger.

The second lane is for blockchains that host smart contracts.

The third lane houses “the world computer blockchain.” This is where Internet Computer is, and it’s difficult to communicate that, Williams says.

#ICP's tech is years ahead, and will stay ahead.

"A blockchain that supports full stack decentralization, where you can build social networks fully on-chain, and even run AI as smart contracts." – @dominic_whttps://t.co/G6JFBDGvKB

— DFINITY (@dfinity) March 28, 2024

People assume it resides in lane two, that it’s one of the traditional blockchains hosting smart contracts with “less compute capacity than a Raspberry Pi.”

However, this blockchain is already a serverless cloud where users create online systems and services using smart contract software.

This is not the same as what the leading blockchains have to offer, Williams said. The difference is relevant to communicate.

Blockchains tend to store “very tiny amounts of data and perform very tiny amounts of computing. […] The difference between where blockchain is today and where it has to go to become a crypto cloud is a long one,” Williams concluded.

__________

About Dominic Williams

Dominic Williams is the Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINTIY Foundation, a major contributor to the Internet Computer (ICP) blockchain.

He is a crypto theoretician and entrepreneur. He has been involved in the blockchain space since 2013. Prior to that, he was an engineering entrepreneur who created multiple internet technologies and products.

Williams specializes in distributed computing and crypto network theory, having proposed multiple innovations that are in use today.

The post Dominic Williams, Founder of DFINITY, on Decentralized AI, AI Dapps, Hosting AI Models on the Blockchain, and Multichain DeFi | Ep. 321 appeared first on Cryptonews.

However, challenges remain in ensuring standardization and broader integration.

Asset tokenization leverages blockchain technology to represent ownership of real-world assets (real estate, art, shares, etc.) as tradable digital tokens. These tokens function as digital ownership certificates, enabling fractional ownership. As a result, it broadens the investor base and increases trading activity, thereby enhancing liquidity in these markets.

A critical limitation of many current tokenization platforms is their narrow scope, according to Ralf Kubli, board member for the Casper Association. 

He explained that tokenization platforms prioritize the digitization of the underlying asset itself, neglecting to represent the associated liabilities and cash flows. Consequently, an asset-backed token is created and linked to a blockchain, with a separate PDF document containing the terms and conditions.

Overcoming Tokenization’s Transparency Gap with Smart Financial Contracts

However, the dependence on manual cash flow calculations negates the very efficiency and automation that tokenization promises. This lack of transparency and verifiability surrounding cash flows presents a substantial risk, echoing a critical vulnerability exposed during the 2008 financial crisis.

“The current projects do not define the cash flows of the underlying financial instrument in a machine-readable and machine-executable term sheet,” Kubli told Cryptonews on Thursday.

“Failing to do so means we still have the same risks that have already plagued the financial industry for years. Especially the brute force efforts required around reconciliation.”

The Role of Smart Contracts in Tokenization

Kubli proposes a clear solution: ensure all cash flows are algorithmically and deterministically defined within these assets.

This necessitates the development of “smart financial contracts.” These contracts wouldn’t just encode information about the tokenized asset, but would also explicitly define all payment obligations of the parties involved. By doing so, they would comprehensively define both the asset and liability aspects of the financial instrument.

“Fortunately, we do have such a standard available. Established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards (ACTUS) Research Foundation was formed to help clarify the cash-flow patterns of financial instruments based on collateralization,” he said.

“Now, they have created and deployed an open-source standard that any business could use.”

The adoption of standardized cash flow definitions within tokenized assets, as advocated by Kubli, would offer financial institutions real-time insight into their resources and obligations. This enhanced transparency could significantly mitigate the risk of a future crisis mirroring the events of 2008.

The post Securing the Future of Asset Tokenization Requires Industry-Wide Standards: Casper Exec appeared first on Cryptonews.

According to the figures, the number of crypto users in Russia could reach 38.5 million by 2027. That’s a 15% increase year-on-year (yoy) from the 19.3 million crypto users in 2022. This percentage is the highest average growth rate for any of the countries or regions surveyed in the report.

That means Russia’s total number of crypto users, which at present exceeds high numbers posted by UK, Japan, Canada and Germany, will go on being the second highest in the world for cryptocurrencies, ahead of every European and Asian rival and second only to the U.S..

Over the Pacific, the US recorded a staggering 52.8 million crypto users in 2022, a figure which exceeds Russia’s projected 2027 figure by a fraction over 37%, indicating the world-leading scale of adoption in both the former Cold War rivals.

However, adoption in the US will skyrocket too, with a near doubling over five years to a projected 102.2 million users by 2027. Altogether, the year-on-year growth rate for the US between 2022 and 2027 is 14%, which is in line with Japanese and European projections but lags 1% behind Russia.

The number of European crypto users in 2022 was 101.5 million; this looks set to blow up to 191.6 million by 2027.

The rest of the world will see exponential growth in crypto adoption. At present, the total number of users across all the countries that are not USA or continental Europe is 291.7 million. That figure will mushroom 20% year-on-year to peak at 729.3 million in 2027.

Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or DeFi?

One interesting point to observe is how the popularity of NFTs and Decentralized Finance protocol users varies by region. NFTs are undoubtedly more popular in the USA than any other region, with 0.9 million NFT users in 2022. That figure is expected to rise sharply to 1.6 million by 2027.

Hardly anywhere else takes NFTs nearly so seriously, though. The closest contender to the US, Russia, at present has a third of the NFT users of its rival. The projections for 2027 broadly reflect a proportionate increase as the number of Russian NFT holders doubles from 0.3 million to 0.6 million.

While people think of America as the land of supersized highways and Mcdonald’s meals, continental Europe far exceeds it in metrics for NFT and DeFi use, although this remains proportionate to the overall number of users in both regions, with Europe nearly doubling the States and projected to comfortably maintain the lead by 2027.

In general, the figures are positive for all aspects of crypto. The report highlights expectations that tokens (both fungible and non-fungible) and dapps will remain a thriving part of the broader cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem in the post-regulation landscape.

How Regulations Drive Russian Crypto Adoption

This brings us to one key area that affects countries’ attitudes towards crypto, and by extension, their adoption level, namely: regulation.

So, understanding Russia’s lead on crypto should be simple when we examine the context. Singapore research firm TrippleA estimated about 17.3 million Russians owned crypto in early 2021. The figure represented 12% of the population at the time. It grew by 2 million the following year.

The lofty numbers are hardly surprising in a country where 46% of its internet users pay for goods and services using e-money, $16.8 billion of which is on-chain, according to 2022 figures.

However, Russia’s crypto fans have hard a nervy ride. The Kremlin wasn’t always so accommodating. In January 2022, the Russian central bank published a public and industry consultation paper calling for tight oversight on crypto and an outright ban on a lot of crypto-related activities in the territory, including mining. This changed with the invasion of Ukraine.

Now, Russia is taking a flexible approach. This week, government ministers have been discussing a new draft bill submitted by miners that aims to recognise the activity as a form of entrepreneurship. The bill has support from a swathe of lawmakers but lacks a final seal of approval from the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

But on the whole, the Russian government has been reserved about cryptocurrencies. While cryptocurrencies present a potential avenue to help Russian citizens to evade US sanctions, the authorities have been focusing their energy instead on the digital ruble.

How Regulations Drive Crypto Adoption in US

The regulation narrative will also continue to drive adoption in the US, albeit for different political and geopolitical reasons.

The number one driver of adoption in the USA currently is the spot Bitcoin ETF narrative. ETFs are investment vehicles from funds that buy and hold Bitcoin to create and sell shares for their funds on exchanges.

The industry was looking to US approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs to be the number one driver of institutional and family office adoption of crypto, because they provide a regulated means for anyone with a brokerage account to buy and hold Bitcoin to exploit its potential gains.

Many regions legalised ETFs in recent years, including Canada and Europe. However, the prospect of a US ETF looked distant because the regulator responsible for approving one, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has pursued an openly anti-crypto agenda since Chairman Gary Gensler took office in 2021 and started a crackdown by suing multiple actors in the industry, aka regulation-by-enforcement.

Last year, things changed. A federal court overturned a ruling by the SEC that denied crypto-friendly asset manager Grayscale’s application to convert its Bitcoin trust into an ETF. The Judge ruled the SEC’s rejection “arbitrary and capricious”.

Fast forward to 2024 and the SEC conceded 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs to the industry. They have been some of the most successful ETF launches in history, netting to date over $11.7 billion in inflows.

Elsewhere in Washington, fierce debates have ignited around a proposed bill by anti-crypto lawmakers that the industry says puts far too stringent reporting requirements on crypto.

In general, the US may be far behind the EU and Canada in terms of regulatory clarity, but crypto’s Stateside believers are likely to hold their dominating grasp on the world market in the short term.

The post Rise of Crypto Titans: USA and Russia Set to Dominate Blockchain World by 2027 appeared first on Cryptonews.

Notably, said the team, almost $100 billion in capital has been locked across Web3 protocols as of March 2024, adding:

“That capital represents an unparalleled and attractive opportunity for blackhat hackers.”

It is also worth noting that $73,885,000 has been recovered from stolen Web3 capital in 7 specific situations.

More specifically, $62 million was from the Munchables exploit and $5.3 million from the Seneca exploit.

This makes up 22% of the total losses in the first quarter, the report remarked.

$336.3 Million Lost in 61 Web3 Incidents

The report looked at the volume of crypto funds the community has lost due to hacks and scams in the first three months of this year.

More precisely, the Immunefi team reviewed all instances in Web3 where:

• blackhat Web3 hackers exploited crypto protocols;
• protocols allegedly performed a rug pull.

They found 61 such incidents.  This includes successful and semi-successful hacks and alleged fraud.

In total, the team discovered that $336,311,217 was lost in Q1 2024.

Out of this number, hacks were responsible for $321,645,400 across 46 specific incidents.

Fraud was behind another $14,665,817 stolen across 15 specific incidents.

The total number represents a 23.1% decrease compared to Q1 2023, when hackers and fraudsters stole $437,483,543, the report noted.

Also, most of this loss occurred in January alone, when more than $133 million was stolen.

Mitchell Amador, Founder and CEO at Immunefi, commented that “while it’s positive that overall losses have decreased, it’s essential to note that DeFi faced significant challenges, accounting for 100% of total losses in Q1 2024.”

“Particularly,” he said, “the ecosystem witnessed a considerable volume of losses due to private key compromises, emphasizing the critical need to secure both code and protocol infrastructure.”

DeFi and Ethereum Are Main Targets

Speaking of decentralized finance (DeFi), it comes as no surprise that the sector remains the main target for exploits.

“DeFi represented 100% of the total losses, while CeFi has not witnessed a single attack,” the report said.

To put it in context, that $336.3 million in total losses in Q1 across 61 incidents mentioned above – it was all lost in DeFi.

That said, it’s still a 22.8% decrease compared to Q1 2023. DeFi losses at the time totaled $435,675,543.

Meanwhile, in Q1 last year, centralized finance (CeFi) lost $1,808,000.

Back to the first quarter of this year: Ethereum “once again surpassed” BNB Chain as the most targeted chain.

Ethereum witnessed the most individual attacks: 33 incidents, or 51% of the total losses across targeted chains.

In the second place, BNB Chain suffered 14 incidents, or 22% of total losses.

Together, these two chains accounted for over half of the chain losses in Q1 2024, totaling 73%.

Other affected chains include Arbitrum, Solana, Optimism, Bitcoin, Blast, Polygon, Conflux Network, and Base, respectively.

Meanwhile, most of the $336 million was lost by two projects.

In January, Orbit Bridge, the bridging service of the cross-chain protocol Orbit Chain, suffered a whopping $81.7 million exploit.

In March, Munchables, a non-fungible token (NFT) game on the Ethereum layer 2 Blast, suffered an exploit resulting in $62.8 million in losses.

These two projects lost $144,480,000 in total, representing 43% of Q1 losses, the report said.

Web3 Hackers Lead the Way

Compared to fraud, hacks are still the leading cause of fund loss in the scamming world.

Hacks accounted for 95.6% of losses in Q1 2024, while fraud accounted for only 4.4%.

In total, hackers stole $321,645,400 in Q1 2024 across 46 specific incidents. This is a 23.1% decrease compared to Q1 2023, when losses caused by hacks totaled $418,589,089.

On the other hand, $14,665,817 was lost to fraud in Q1 2024 across 15 incidents. It’s a 22.4% decrease compared to Q3 2022, when losses caused by frauds, scams, and rug pulls totaled $18,894,454, Immunefi said.

Meanwhile, Immunefi, which protects over $60 billion in Web3 user capital, offers over $155 million in available bounty rewards.

It has paid out over $95 million in total bounties, saving over $25 billion in user funds, the team said.

The post Web3 Losses Cut By 23% in Q1 2024, Hackers May Be Eyeing $100 Billion in Locked Funds – Immunefi appeared first on Cryptonews.

This scheduled occurrence, happening roughly every four years, is expected to take place this April and would directly impact Bitcoin’s supply by reducing the mining reward by half, a core aspect designed to preserve its value over time.

In a conversation with Cryptonews.com, William Quigley, a venture capitalist who co-founded the stablecoin issuer Tether and the NFT platform WAX.io, delved into the broader effects of Bitcoin halving.

Quigley elaborated on the intricacies of Bitcoin halving, its direct impact on the crypto market, and particularly, how it affects both miners and individual investors.

Bitcoin to Reach $300,000 by 2025 End

Quigley first touched on Bitcoin’s price forecast post-halving, elaborating how the market would adjust to the event based on previous records.

“There is a historically Bitcoin prices increased the months following the Bitcoin halving,” said Quigley. “For the first halving in November 2012, Bitcoin went up 100 times from its pre happening level, $12 to $1,200.”

“The second halving, it went up about 30 times, from $650 to $20,000. And the third halving, it went up eight times, from $8,500 to about $19,500,” he said.

Though Bitcoin price has always been surging following the halving events, Quigley pointed out that the multiple has kept dropping, from 100 times, to 30 times, and the most recent eight times.

“So, you know, maybe four times, three times this time,” he predicted. If Bitcoin price were to regain the $70,000 level by [presumably] April 20, four times of its value could exceed the $300,000 mark.

Tether co-founder on why Bitcoin could reach $300k at the peak of the next bull market https://t.co/iZhPjoVS7V

— William E. Quigley (@WilliamEQuigley) March 4, 2024

Quigley also incorporated historical statistics of the previous post-halving rally cycles, suggesting that it would take 500 days to 18 months for Bitcoin to hit the next all-time high, which would be October 2025 for this fourth event.

Bitcoin Halving’s Impact on Miners and Investors

The crypto veteran continued to analyze the chain of reactions from Bitcoin miners, individual investors, and financial institutions post-halving.

“In order for Bitcoin to continue to function the way it’s supposed to, we need to be reducing the number of daily Bitcoin mined,” said Quigley “So we’ll drop from 900 to 450 beginning [presumably] on April 20.”

The reduction of mining rewards would then pose significant challenges and opportunities for the miners. “Now, a few months ago when Bitcoin was like 40,000, most of the Bitcoin miners were profitable… At 67,000, what it is today, they’re very profitable,” said Quigley.

Even if Bitcoin price may skyrocket to boost the profit margin of mining operations, the competition will probably intensify proportionally as more industry players seek to benefit from the rally.

For individual investors, the halving event presents a nuanced landscape. Quigley’s advice leans towards a long-term investment horizon.

Unlike a traditional company which has makes its own profits and releases new products, Quigley emphasized that Bitcoin operates as an open-source platform maintained and utilized by a community of independent users.

Therefore, traditional financial metrics cannot determine Bitcoin’s value. “Bitcoin is valued purely by sentiment of the people who are buying and selling it,” said Quigley.

“If you’re trying to trade on sentiment on a daily basis, that sentiment is random. It goes up and down throughout the day. I wouldn’t trade it,” shared Quigley. “If you are going to buy Bitcoin first or any crypto, it should be a very, very small percentage of your net worth.”

“Also, never buy crypto unless you are able to hold it for five years,” he added. “Which doesn’t mean you do hold it for five years, but you have the ability to hold it for five years.”

More Crypto Quant Trading Firms Post Bitcoin Halving

Regarding institutional players in the industry, the Tether and WAX co-founder argued that more quant trading firms specialized in crypto investment will emerge post-having due to the soaring trading volume.

“In the first halving in 2012, the amount of trading volume on a daily basis was probably less than a million dollars,” said Quigley. “By the third happening in 2020, we were doing $15 billion to $30 billion a day, up to a hundred billion.”

“When you have that much trading and crypto trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are price disparities that people can exploit” he explained.

“The primary trading volume of Bitcoin is in Bitcoin futures, if you can use leverage to exploit those, you can make a lot and you can also lose a lot,” said Quigley. “But the futures markets will always attract people who think they can take advantage of some price difference and make a lot.”

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