Rising interest rates by the Federal Reserve has people concerned of a potential slow-down in the housing market (worse-case scenario, a recession, or even a depression). How would this affect crypto - and metaverse assets in particular? A closer and updated look at what's been going on in virtual vs. real-estate, especially in China (still down by 60%+).
Proof-of-Storage (sometimes called Proof-of-Space) coins like STORJ, Filecoin, Arweave, and Sia show a lot of promise in the Web 3 space due to the fact that NFT and metaverse projects are driving demand for storage spaces that are both secure and decentralized. (Web2 servers are centralized and often have a single point of failure.) STORJ has recently released a...
From the Wall Street Journal: "U.S. law enforcement linked the Lazarus Group, an online crime syndicate connected to the North Korean government, to the $540 million hack of the online game Axie Infinity last month. The theft, infiltrating the network upon which the game is run, was one of the largest in the 13-year history of cryptocurrencies. The perpetrators...
Decentraland recently released its beta version of the desktop client - how does it look in its current state? From egamers.io: "Players will now experience performance enhancement upgrades with cleaner graphics, faster processing speeds, and improved stability by adding the client’s option. The client is only available for Windows in beta, with the developers...
Many are bracing for "ugly" numbers for inflation in the United States in this week's Consumer Price Index report - as high as 8.4%. Inflation was, of course, the result of the US Treasury having printed record amounts of money in recent years - highly accelerated in the last few years due to COVID spending; further made worse by lockdown procedures that caused...
Tz1and, a metaverse project based on the Tezos ecosystem (XTZ) has been slowly gaining some traction lately. Is it an early stage project worth investing in? A look at how it stacks up against the other major metaverse platforms out there. Project - World Explorer? / Decentralized? / Selling Points tz1and - Yes / Yes / Support of artist communities and indie...
You may have heard that Elon Musk had just bought 9% of shares in Twitter and has become one of their newest board member. This prompted a rumor that the billionaire will be trying to push for Dogecoin to be integrated with the popular social media platform itself, prompting a rally. (No confirmation on how true this really is, however.) Though it's good...
This event largely went unnoticed by the media, but Tezos (XTZ) underwent a major upgrade to their protocol as of this week. The upgrade deals mostly with scalability issues - as the oldest Proof-of-Stake system in the market, XTZ arguably one of the most technically advanced blockchain platforms in the world right now. In the early days of the crypto industry...
Lately there has been an increase in hacking activities in crypto and Web3 related projects as whole, as hackers target smaller projects and platforms to siphon money out of vulnerable systems. To be clear, none of the major protocols or coins has EVER been breached - Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Tezos, etc. The protocol has always been safe, and decentralized....
While the hype in Web3 right now tend to focus on NFTs of image files, most Web2 platforms are still focused on video and livestreaming content since that's where the demand for content is at the moment. Why aren't people talking more about minting NFTs of videos in a decentralized way? The challenges, possible solution, and a brief history of attempts that came before.
Filecoin rallied this week in anticipation with its partnership with Monaverse, a new metaverse contender that focused on high-end, professionally built metaverse environments. A quick look at Monaverse and Decentraland - their pros and cons -- and why Proof-of-Storage projects are likely to do well regardless of who wins the race towards the most popular metaverse.
The US Census Bureau recently published population numbers for cities across the US, and the numbers don't look too good: most large urban centers in the country have taken significant population losses in 2020-2021. Politicians and media pundits typically blame COVID and supply chain woes, though these trends were already happening even before the pandemic - the...
The US Census Bureau recently published population numbers for cities across the US, and the numbers don't look too good: most large urban centers in the country have taken significant population losses in 2020-2021. Politicians and media pundits typically blame COVID and supply chain woes, though these trends were already happening even before the pandemic - the...
Marshall McLuhan's "Medium is the Message" has been the dominant ethos for Web2, the media, and the art world for quite some time now. The 3 camps often fight each other over status games, but they're all really part of the same coin if you look closely enough. People have been talking about 22' being the year of the Music NFT, but I do think there's a bigger...
An update to the drama with Ethereum Name Service (ENS), which has been going through some tough times. This week I swapped out my ryangtanaka.eth ENS domain for ryangtanaka.org - a more traditional DNS domain for all of my #Web3 related activities. (My web hosting account is canceled, still - I'm planning on hosting all of my web activities on IPFS from now...
A lot of public and private interests are pouring a lot of money into quantum computing right now, and there have been significant breakthroughs in the technology in the last few years that has made it possible for people to start thinking about practical applications. Quantum computers are attempting to crack encryption algorithms such as Elliptic Curve Digital...
What's been happening in the NFT space since the downturn in the crypto market? A lot, actually.
In today's inflationary economy where money printing reigns supreme, the idea of "burning" money to maintain a currency's worth stands out as counterintuitive and different. It's also highly illegal - creating your own money supply (counterfeit) or destroying them are usually both felony offenses in most fiat systems right now. In a way the ability to control a...