Author: Caitlin Carey

Caitlin is a crypto evangelist with a deep curiosity and passion for learning and writing about everything to do with cryptocurrency. She has a background as a performing artist and songwriter and is a digital media enthusiast, with a bachelor degree in Multimedia.

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Blockchain Privacy Tokens

Internet of Things Privacy Token $IOTX Soars 71% Overnight Amid New Partnerships

IOTX is a smart contract, layer one blockchain and IoT (Internet of Things) platform that aims to fuel the future of Web 3 through connecting the physical and digital worlds.

IOTX allows us to secure data from billions of smart devices and extract value from it with next-gen dApps. IOTX’s mission is to democratise access to the new machine economy and return power to the people.

Join the Revolution

The Internet of Things is a multi-trillion-dollar industry owned by centralised corporations that control our devices, mine our data and make huge profits, with no value being returned to the users who generate it. IOTX is here to change the status quo and build a future that empowers users, not corporations.

We envision a world where everyday people own and control their devices as well as the data and value they generate. A vision we call the Internet of Trusted Things.

The IoTeX Vision

IoTeX Announces Big Partnership Deals and $IOTX Price Pumps

Travala.com and IOTX announced their partnership via Travala’s official Twitter:

The other partnership deal with NOWPayments was also announced this week on NOWPayments’ official Twitter:

This huge news of real-world partnerships helped boost the price of IOTX, as well as a presentation given to investors by Larry Pang, IOTX head of business development, and Xinxin Fan, head of cryptography, on Trusted Vehicle Tracking with IoTeX and Pebble Tracker. See the full presentation below, uploaded on November 4.

IoTeX ($IOTX) Price Analysis

Source: CoinGecko

Just two months ago, IOTX surged 215 percent in a single day after listing on Coinbase Pro, as reported by Crypto News Australia.

Categories
DeFi Scams Tokens

Rug Pull: ‘Monkey Jizz’ DeFi Token Founders’ Alleged Exit with $300,000 of BNB

What could possibly go wrong with a new DeFi Token launch named Monkey Jizz, released on PancakeSwap (running on the Binance Smart Chain) by a team of unknown developers and a cartoon monkey with a peeled banana as the face of its branding? Answer: everything.

Warnings Came Too Late For Some Investors

Warnings about the MJIZZ scam were tweeted about but it was too late for some, as the “dickheads” behind the project pulled the rug, stealing 500 BNB in total of Monkey Jizz investors’ money, worth US$300,000.

Like most refined scams, the Monkey Jizz project went to added lengths to reassure the community that it was a real project and would not rug. The website (which is now unsurprisingly down) FAQ read: “We understand everyone’s concerns and have been victims of scams ourselves in the past; we get it“. A doxxed “monkey master” was even posted with a photo of a guy named Cal, purported to be a real person to reassure buyers the project was legitimate.

As it turns out, ‘Cal’ is some otherwise pseudonymous bald guy sitting on a beach in Thailand, his photo watermarked with the logo of a local nightclub. According to Reddit, some users had done some online detective work and matched the photo to a Facebook account.

Presale Listed on PinkSale

The Monkey Jizz Life crew had also invested a lot of time and energy on the marketing side. They had all the basics: Twitter address, Telegram page, website (all now inactive), as well as doing a live AMA on YouTube with crypto influencer Travladd Crypto. The crew also had a presale listed on token launch platform PinkSale:

Rug pulls are becoming increasingly commonplace in DeFi, especially on PancakeSwap because it runs on BSC (Binance Smart Chain), where the transaction fees are insanely low compared to UniSwap, which runs on ETH. Buyers beware. Just because a project seems legit, does AMAs with influencers, and even goes to the trouble to highlight that it has an “anti-rug” mechanism built into its tokenomics, do not fall for it.

A similarly sad outcome occurred earlier this month with the SQUID token, which rugged on investors who said they weren’t able to sell their tokens on PancakeSwap.

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Blockchain Crypto News Facebook Gaming Tokens

Metaverse Tokens Soar Amid Facebook Announcement, SAND Up 158% in a Week

It’s no secret that the gaming sector is the hot focus of crypto right now, with social media giant Facebook announcing its re-branding to “Meta”. The ripple effect has seen The Sandbox token SAND surge 158 percent since the announcement. And it’s not the only one.

I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet. And it’s the next chapter for our company too.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook/Meta CEO

Zuckerberg added: “We’re a company that focuses on connecting people.” He says that “while most other tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we focus on building technology so people can interact with each other”.

The Facebook name only represents one product, Zuckerberg says. Facebook is rebranding to Meta in order to “encompass everything that we do. Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company.”

As an example of Meta’s ambitions, a partnership with sunglasses manufacturer RayBan aims to produce augmented reality glasses to interact with the real world for immersive experiences that include: displays, audio, input, haptics, hand tracking, eye tracking, mixed reality, sensors, graphics, computer vision, avatars, perceptual science, AI and more.

Metaverse Tokens Soar Upon News

Although Facebook is building its own metaverse, the news has been bullish for other blockchain-based metaverse projects besides The Sandbox (SAND). Decentraland (MANA) and Axie Infinity (AXS) are among others to have seen big spikes in price since the Facebook/Meta announcement.

SAND token performance. Source: coinmarketcap.com

Celebrities are also starting to enter the metaverse, with rapper Snoop Dogg announcing in September that he will build his own house – or a virtual reconstruction of his mansion, at least – in the Sandbox Metaverse and offer his exclusive NFT collection to fans, perform live concerts and interact with players.

Categories
Binance Australia Crypto Exchange Crypto News Superannuation

New Binance Australia CEO Sets Out His Vision for the Company

With a background of seven years in the Australian cryptocurrency market so far, newly appointed Binance Australia CEO Leigh Travers has vowed to dedicate his life to the development and growth of the industry, and he has big plans for the future of blockchain down under.

As early as high school, Travers was already investing. “I didn’t really see a lot of point in putting money into the bank and earning some interest,” he says, seeing more opportunity and excitement investing his first $500 into stocks and smaller innovative companies, which he saw as having huge upside potential.

Travers was a publicly listed wealth manager for small to mid-cap growth companies in more traditional sharemarket and investment banking before following his passion for investing into more volatile terrain: the attraction to crypto was inevitable as the next natural step in Travers’ career.

Watch the full live AMA below:

Current State of the Australian Crypto Market 

Australian projects are positioned “at the top tier” in the crypto space worldwide, with some amazing DeFi and NFT products coming out of the country. Roughly there are 600,000 actual users on Binance Australia, with potential for a million customers and an equity market of 10 million.

Binance Australia’s team has doubled over the past few months to tackle its number one priority: to grow the market overall into a much larger user base. Travers says that the market is in a high-growth phase, with Binance user numbers expanding at a rate of 10 percent per month.

Corporate Onboarding to be Expedited 

Over the next 15 years, Travers sees equities moving towards crypto-based economic models. The SMSF (Self-Managed Super Fund) marketplace in Australia has massive potential – in a country with 800,000 self-managed super funds and an A$800 billion market, Binance Australia wants to gain maximum exposure into the “most liquid, lowest-cost, digital asset exchange in Australia”.

According to Travers, Binance Australia will focus on leading the way in the areas of:

  • integrating risk-managed crypto portfolios into wealth management platforms;
  • offering support with tax reporting;
  • extending education resources; and
  • vastly improving the platform’s onboarding processing time, from a few weeks to only a few days.

Priority to Binance Crypto Debit Card

Travers says the number one product customers from the community want is a crypto debit card. “You’ve got to give the people what they want,” he says, “and it’s quite clear.” As he explains, people want to be able to have more utility for their crypto, to spend it in everyday life, to pay bills, paying merchants, etcetera.

The Binance crypto debit card is a top priority and is in development now, aiming to hit the Australian market as soon as possible – possibly by the end of the current quarter. If its second-quarter results are any indication, the immediate future for Binance Australia looks bright.

Categories
Crypto Art Crypto News NFTs

CryptoPunk Owner Turns Down $9.5 Million Offer, Could Have Made 11,500% Return

CryptoPunks have gone way beyond cult status with multimillion-dollar price tags and diehard collectors who refuse to part with these exuberant pieces of digital art, no matter what the cost or inducement.

CryptoPunk #6046

Canadian Punk collector Richerd bought CryptoPunk #6046 for 45 ETH (US$83,209) on Mar 31, 2021. Just over six months later he refused an offer for the same Punk, turning down a record-breaking on-chain bid of almost US$10 million, with a potential 11,500 percent return.

Richerd owns three other Crypto Punks: male punk #3936, which is basically the same as #6046 but without the cigarette, as well as two female Punks – #1032 and #1042 – and a variety of other, equally expensive NFTs, including Bored Apes.

@Richerd took to Twitter with his priceless punk #6046 featured as his profile picture, declaring that he will never sell his Punk.

He further explained that his CryptoPunks are deeply tied to the identity of his business’s branding, therefore selling ownership of the image would not be something he would consider.

My identity along with identity of other iconic Punks and apes have value beyond the NFT itself. We have our own brands similar to any other brand and that has value. Because I value my personal brand and identity, this was an easy rejection for me.

Richerd Chen, co-founder, Manifold

Richerd is otherwise known as Richerd Chen, the co-founder of NFT smart contract developer Manifold, a studio behind some of the most inventive NFT projects yet seen. Manifold Creator includes a powerful extension framework that allows creators to install blockchain “apps” into their creator contract, allowing them to create products beyond just visual and audio NFTs and support features beyond simply minting.

Chen added via Twitter: “I have huge conviction in the NFT space and in Punks. When it comes to [the] NFTs space, I think very long-term … To me, my brand, identity, and what I’m building in the NFT space will be way more valuable in the long run.”

See the below CryptoPunk image branding a truck wrapped with Spottie the CryptoPunk Rapper:

Categories
Blockchain Crypto News

Polkadot Soars 18% Overnight Amid Hotly Anticipated Parachain Auctions

Polkadot’s price has enjoyed an 18 percent pump in the lead-up to the project’s announcement that parachains are officially ready to launch on the mainnet. This is a massive milestone for the multichain network, led by creator Gavin James Wood (and also Ethereum co-founder), since the release of Polkadot’s whitepaper five years ago.

Auction Dates Proposed for Polkadot Parachains Launch

Polkadot has released its Proposal for First Parachain Auctions. Motion 118 will be a schedule of the first set of parachain auctions on Polkadot and Council buy-in to a recommended strategy for auction rounds on a three-to-six-month basis. Once passed, there will be two batches of auctions: the first will consist of five auctions starting on November 11, with the second lot of six auctions to begin on December 23.

Parachains have already been successfully deployed running on Kusama – Polkadot’s Canary Network – since June this year. In 2019 Polkadot launched Kusama, built with the same code as Polkadot, to attract blockchain contributors and allow developers to build their own custom blockchains, or parachains, offering new projects low barriers to entry – ideal for startups looking to move fast and develop their own dApps at low cost.

What Are the Polkadot Parachains and What Does It Mean?

Parachains are individual layer-1 blockchains that run in parallel on Polkadot, connected to the Polkadot Relay Chain and secured by its validator set. A parachain slot is a scarce resource on Polkadot and only a limited number will be available. To become a parachain on Polkadot a project has to win a Slot Auction, with two years the maximum duration for lease. A full slot is divided into eight lease periods, making the minimum duration that a project can lease three months. A Reddit user has posted an in-depth explanation.

The announcement of parachains on Polkdot has been hotly anticipated by those in the crypto space and breeds bullish sentiment for DOT:

Six months ago, Crypto News Australia reported that Facebook was working on an ecosystem for creators on the Polkadot blockchain to connect the regulated and the unregulated. It will be exciting to see what other projects Polkadot’s new parachains will attract in the coming months.

Categories
Binance Binance Australia Binance Coin Crypto Exchange Crypto News Cryptocurrencies

Binance Launches $1 Billion BSC Growth Fund to ‘Bring Next 1 Billion Users to Crypto’

Binance, one of the world’s leading crypto exchanges, has announced the biggest funding program of its kind for the cryptocurrency industry. The US$1 billion Binance fund will help expand the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystem and advance the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology by the financial industry overall.

With collaborations from industry-leading organisations, the investment fund will target scaling blockchain technology for real-life use cases and will bridge the gap between crypto-blockchain and the current technical-financial sectors.

Binance.org

Binance stated its mission was to disrupt financial infrastructures by allocating half the new fund to its Investment Program, which will focus on growing decentralised computing, gaming, metaverse, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and financial services.

BSC will not be the only blockchain supported, consistent with previously voiced ambitions from the company. As Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who has frequently said in interviews “there is room for everyone”, tweeted yesterday:

$1 Billion Growth Across Four Sectors

The fund will be allocated across four different sectors:

  1. US$100 million for Talent Development: mentoring developer communities, educating new crypto investors, providing academic scholarships to universities, running boot camps and supporting R&D on cutting-edge blockchain innovations.
  2. US$100 million for Liquidity Incentive Program: multiple programs to encourage participation from traditional financial markets and crypto, targeted to developing compliant relationships between investors and emerging digital asset markets.
  3. US$300 million for Builder and Incubation Program: $100 million to conduct regional and global hackathons, run developer conferences, and support existing mainstream development programs; $200 million to incubate 100 innovative dApps.
  4. US$500 million for an Investment Program: to accelerate mainstream adoption and bring disruption to financial infrastructures.
Categories
Blockchain Crypto News Cryptocurrencies Stablecoins Tokens

LUNA Token Up 34% in a Week, Prints New All-Time High Following Terra Network Upgrade

Terra’s native token LUNA has been climbing in an aggressive ascent towards the US$50 mark, from around just US$10 at the end of July. The new ATH was recorded on October 4 with LUNA peaking at US$49.45 following Terra’s network upgrade.

$1 Billion Worth of LUNA Tokens Burned

The highly anticipated Columbus-5 upgrade went live on September 30, introducing changes to the Terra network that will add a deflationary mechanism to LUNA’s token economics by implementing token burns. LUNA is Terra’s utility token, used for maintaining equal value to the US dollar for Terra’s Stablecoin UST.

Since the upgrade, instead of LUNA tokens being transferred to a community pool, they are now burned whenever UST is minted. About 23.4 million LUNA tokens worth approximately US$1 billion were burned on the day of the upgrade, which resulted in LUNA’s price jump. The new deflationary model is very bullish for LUNA’s future price prediction; the more LUNA tokens that are burned and taken out of circulation, the more the asset increases in value as it becomes more scarce.

The supply burn places deflationary pressure on LUNA making it increasingly scarce … This was a key driver for recent price action.

Delphi Digital

What is the Upgrade About? 

The Columbus-5 upgrade is significant for Terra investors because it increases compatibility between Terra and other blockchain networks by enabling the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) standard. IBC will let users easily transfer LUNA, the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin, and other assets from Terra to alternate networks and vice versa. It will position Terra to become the de facto stablecoin of the Cosmos ecosystem (a project aiming to build a network of independent blockchains communicating through IBC).

Last week, Crypto News Australia placed LUNA among the top 3 coins to watch.

Categories
Australia Blockchain Crypto News Education RMIT University Online

RMIT Ranks Second for Blockchain in Global Uni Rankings

Out of a total of 230 tertiary institutions worldwide, Australia’s RMIT comes in second on the list of top universities for blockchain, according to CoinDesk.

The number one-ranked university for blockchain was the National University of Singapore, which offers multiple blockchain research centres, blockchain-themed conferences, blockchain clubs, and company partnerships, also offering a master’s program in digital financial technology. Coming in third was the University of California, Berkeley in the US.

Three Aussie Unis in the Top 20

Impressively, two other Australian institutions made the top 20 list: the University of New South Wales (UNSW) ranked 13th, and the University of Sydney came in at number 20.

Support for blockchain in Australia has been heavily championed by cryptocurrency enthusiast and NSW politician Senator Andrew Bragg, who has called for the government to attract fintech investors to Australia.

In February this year, Crypto News reported on how Blockchain Australia and RMIT had been calling for government support for blockchain. Accordingly, government grants have been a vital part in helping RMIT secure the No. 2 spot for Australia’s RMIT University as one of the best universities to study blockchain in the world.

Categories
Airdrop Crypto News Gaming Tokens

Axie Infinity’s AXS Token up 100% After Launching Staking Rewards Feature

Axie Infinity’s ASX token has reached all-time highs of above US$135 following a huge airdrop to early supporters and the launch of a new staking service, where holders saw returns of up to 385 percent APY for staking their tokens.

The team behind Axie Infinity’s monster-battler NFT game airdropped US$60 million to early users and sales of the NFTs for the game also saw 50 percent gains.

Axie Infinity (AXS) is a blockchain-based battle game that has become insanely popular this year as gamers embrace play-to-earn (P2E) gaming models. The Axie project’s monthly users peaked in weekly volume in August at US$220 million.

Axie Infinity is Also Planning to Launch a DEX

Axie Infinity is set to release its own decentralised exchange, bridging the gaming world with DeFi. The new DEX, to be built on Ronin, an Ethereum-linked sidechain purpose-built for Axie Infinity, will facilitate users to trade tokens within the Axie ecosystem without having to move their tokens off the platform.

Investors in Axie Infinity, which received US$7.6 million in its last funding round, include the likes of billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. In the three-month period since June, AXS gained a stellar 934.35 percent against the US dollar and 840.61 percent against bitcoin.