News Headlines (December 23, 2021)
- Decrypt’s Coin of the Year: Solana
Decrypt is not suggesting anyone buy SOL—after all, in the crypto market, things can go south very quickly. SOL could tank in 2022. We’re simply saying that no crypto project had a year like Solana had. The surging popularity of NFTs, the maturing DeFi landscape, and new all-time highs for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies dominated headlines and captured a great deal of attention in 2021. SOL began the year at a modest price of $1.52 and has since surged by a stunning 11,150%. One year ago, in fact, even astute crypto observers could have been forgiven for not knowing what Solana was at all.
https://decrypt.co/88814/coin-of-the-year-solana-sol
- K-pop Fans Have a New Nemesis
BTS is the best-known K-pop group, but it is just one group among dozens of artists and groups each with its own sound and look, including emo rock, city pop, and tracks that mix hip-hop with traditional Korean elements. So it’s no surprise that pretty much all of the major music labels in South Korea have announced plans to sell “non-fungible tokens,” or NFTs, in recent months. When K-pop labels made their NFT launches public earlier this year, the response from many fans was brutal. NFTs already have a market among crypto true believers, and labels might not be able to convince fans that these creations are for them too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/12/nft-kpop-environmental-problems/621091/
- Uniswap Deploys on Polygon
Uniswap, one of the largest decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, has launched on Polygon. Polygon founder Mihailo Bjelic noted today that Polygon has the “second strongest DeFi ecosystem” after Ethereum itself. Bjelic also said that Uniswap may incentivize adoption and will commit up to $20 million toward that end. That amount includes $15 million specifically for liquidity mining rewards. In his original Uniswap proposal, Bjelic also said that Polygon is “aligned with Ethereum and its values” and “battle-tested.” He noted benefits including possible e savings for users and said that Polygon can help “return to the original DeFi vision.”
- What Is Loopring and What’s Driving Its Rise?
Loopring is a program designed to work on top of Ethereum’s blockchain (a layer 1, or base, blockchain). This means that Loopring seeks to make the experience of using Ethereum faster by processing elements of Ethereum transactions on its own network. You can think of it as creating a side road off the main highway to help ease congestion. You may have heard of other blockchains, such as Avalanche and Solana that also claim to be faster and cheaper than Ethereum. However, unlike Loopring, these are known as layer 1 blockchains. Loopring’s developers claim this helps the protocol reach throughput approximately 1,000 times greater than Ethereum, with peaks of 2,025 transactions a second.
https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-loopring-and-whats-driving-its-rise/
- Bitcoin Worth $15 Quintillion Is Just Another Day in Crypto
Crypto believers argue that snags are to be expected in an industry that’s still in its early days. It will find its footing, they say. Whatever the future holds, there sure were a ton of major screw-ups in 2021. Back when digital tokens fetched a pittance, this could be dismissed as a silly sideshow. Now, cryptocurrencies are worth real money — more than $2 trillion, assuming the tally isn’t garbled by a data error — and their backers want to overtake traditional finance and revolutionize much more. Just this month, CoinMarketCap, a go-to source for crypto prices, spewed out incredibly wrong data for the entire market.
- Tokens.com Announces Additional Investment in Metaverse Group and the Purchase of Additional ETH
Tokens.com Corp. a publicly-traded company that invests in revenue-generating crypto assets linked to the Metaverse, Decentralized Finance, and Non-Fungible Tokens is pleased to announce the completion of additional strategic investment in Metaverse Group’s $6 million financing. Tokens.com was the lead investor in this strategic round of financing and retains its 67% majority ownership. In addition, Tokens.com has increased its ownership of Ethereum with a subsequent purchase of 230 ETH tokens, bringing its total ETH holdings to 3,000. In addition to ETH tokens, Tokens.com also owns Solana, Polkadot, Terra, Shiba Inu, Oasis Rose and Ankr.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tokens-com-announces-additional-investment-123000110.html
- Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Prices Catch Up With CryptoPunks
Both CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs quickly sold out on launch, which means acquiring one today requires bidding on the secondary market. Major brand partnerships, lucrative airdrops, an engaged community, and celebrity endorsements have all contributed to Bored Ape Yacht Club’s success this year. While CryptoPunks’ creator Larva Labs has its own marketplace that launched when the collection was minted in 2017, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are typically traded on OpenSea. CryptoPunks has long been regarded as one of Ethereum’s most prized NFT collections.
- Hong Kong NFT project Monkey Kingdom loses $1.3M in phishing hack, launches compensation fund
According to its developers, the hack first occurred with the breach of Grape, a popular solution for verifying users on Solana. Hackers then used the exploit to take over an administrative account, which posted a phishing link in the Monkey Kingdom Discord’s announcement channel. On Tuesday, Solana nonfungible token (NFT) project Monkey Kingdom, which has received notable backing from American DJ Steve Aoki, announced via Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) that hackers made off with $1.3 million of the community’s crypto funds through a security breach on Discord.
- Terabethia cross-chain protocol bridges Internet Computer and Ethereum
Psychedelic, a Web 3.0 development studio building solutions for the Internet Computer, launched Terabethia, a cross-chain contract communication and asset mirroring protocol. The protocol attempts to tackle the problem of Ethereum network congestion and high gas fees. The Internet Computer, meanwhile, uses a “reverse gas model” where developers supply the funds needed to run the applications or contracts that use their gas, known as “cycles.” Beginning with the Internet Computer and Ethereum, users will have the ability to mirror and use any Ethereum tokens, fungible and nonfungible, on the Internet Computer blockchain and vice versa, effectively turning the Internet Computer into a layer-two scaling solution for Ethereum.
- Secretum: The Ideal Trading & Messaging Solution for Asia and Africa
Africa and Asia are the highest unbanked continents with nearly 70% of adults in countries such as Vietnam and Morocco not having a bank account. Not only that, just 42% and 44% of the Asia-Pacific region and Africa have access to mobiles. An innovative startup is capitalizing on the influx of crypto adoption and mobile utility boom by exploiting the power of Blockchain to offer an unparalleled secure and user-friendly messaging app — Secretum. Secretum is a fully decentralized, encrypted, and secure messaging DApp (Decentralised App), built on the Solana Blockchain. It allows users to exchange messages and trade crypto assets as easily as sending an SMS.
