Author: Jana Serfontein

Jana has keen interest in what cryptocurrencies have to offer in regards to NGO’s, governments and the financial system. And is also intrigued with the psychological effect that cryptocurrencies have on society.

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Crypto News Football NFTs Sports

Football NFTs Set to Grow German Bundesliga’s Revenue by 280%

NFT deals on behalf of German football league Bundesliga, combined with sticker and trading card licensing, will generate US$179 million in the 2023-2024 season, almost four times the current season’s value:

Three Partnerships to Power Revenue Growth

Bundesliga has partnered up with three different projects. Topps, which has officially licensed Bundesliga’s physical trading cards since 2008, is extending the NFT rights it acquired for the 2020/21 season. Sorare will extend the partnership it undertook in 2021 to create NFTs of Bundesliga players for fantasy football until 2025. And OneFootball has acquired the licensing rights for digital trading cards collections and video-based NFTs of Bundesliga highlights. In total, these NFT partnerships are set to grow revenue by 280 percent:

As a consequence of the pandemic, Bundesliga’s total revenues dropped by almost 400 million euros (US$423 million) across the 2020 and 2021 seasons. The new sources of revenue from the NFTs and collectibles deal is important for all the league’s teams, particularly lower-ranked teams that depend on ticket revenue.

According to Lucas von Cranach, founder and chief executive of OneFootball, “We couldn’t have imagined when we first started working with the Bundesliga that we would build the partnership and achieve official partner status.” He added:

Now as official partner of one of the most innovative leagues in the world, we have the chance to build an even longer-term relationship that gives us the chance to take tens of millions of football supporters from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0.

Lucas von Cranach, founder and CEO, OneFootball

The partnerships undertaken by the league mark an evolution in the Bundesliga’s nascent NFT strategy and will provide much-needed additional revenue. Bundesliga’s international chief executive, Robert Klein, said the short-term deals reflect what is a rapidly evolving market.

Categories
Crypto News Metaverse NFTs

Morgan Stanley Says NFTs Could Be Next After UST Collapse

Morgan Stanley has warned that NFTs could be next to collapse after seeing what went down with the collapse of UST.

The US multinational finance giant, which has admitted crypto isn’t just a fad and also recently proclaimed that the metaverse is the next big investment theme, issued its warning to holders of digital assets as the great crypto crash of 2022 continues:

Non-Fungible Tokens Next to Fall?

In a Fortune report issued last week, it was noted that steep declines in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other tokens were not associated with the decline in equity markets. Instead, prices were subject to investor “speculation, with limited real user demand”, according to crypto analyst Sheena Shah.

However, such speculation is not limited to cryptocurrencies, with both NFTs and digital real estate in the metaverse affected. Shah noted that most holders bought NFTs with the expectation that they would appreciate, but at the moment that is simply not happening.

Overall, this year has not been kind to the NFT market. Total NFT transaction activity declined from US$3.9 billion to US$964 million from mid-February to mid-March. That’s not to say all NFTs are suffering equally – recent high-profile NFT collections such as Moonbirds, and the metaverse land sale for Otherdeeds, have done major business.

According to Modesta Masiot, finance director at NFT raking platform DappRadar, most NFT trading was centred on “blue-chip” NFT collections such as CryptoPunks. She added: “NFTs look to be entering perhaps one of many maturity stages. We expected this and believe it’s a normal development in such technology.”

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Crypto News Cryptocurrency Law NFTs OpenSea

UK Court Rules NFTs as ‘Private Property’ Favouring NFT Holders

The High Court of Justice in the UK has ruled to recognise NFTs as private property. The ruling has been hailed as a “landmark” but in reality will not actually change much, apart from helping to combat fraud. NFTs are already treated as private property in the US:

The catch in the ruling is that this conferred private property status does not extend to the underlying content an NFT represents.

OpenSea Caught Up in Case

The court case came about when Lavinia Osbourne, founder of Women in Blockchain Talks, claimed that two Boss Beauties NFTs had been stolen from her MetaMask wallet earlier this year. The NFTs ended up in two anonymous accounts on OpenSea and in an effort to reclaim the stolen property, Osbourne filed an injunction against the NFT marketplace.

A judge overseeing the case ruled that the NFTs were technically property and thereby enabled the court to issue an order requiring OpenSea to freeze the accounts so the NFTs could not be traded or sold.

Since no one knew the identities of the wallet holders, the injunction was granted against “persons unknown”. In a comment regarding the decision, Stevenson Law firm described the ruling as “a draconian remedy”.

Osbourne commented following the ruling:  

Women in Blockchain Talks was founded to open up the opportunities blockchain offers to anyone, regardless of age, gender, nationality or background. This case will hopefully be instrumental in making the blockchain space a safer one, encouraging more people to interact with exciting and meaningful assets like NFTs.

Lavinia Osbourne, founder, Women in Blockchain Talks

UK authorities have been cracking down on the fraudulent use of NFTs, with the country’s first NFT seizure worth US$1.9 million earlier this year having been part of an investigation into an elaborate tax evasion scheme.

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DeFi Hackers Scams

GoDaddy Website Hack Leaves DeFi Protocol ‘SpiritSwap’ Compromised

Multiple DeFi protocols have been compromised after an attack on the world’s biggest domain registrar, GoDaddy. Unconfirmed reports suggest the hacker(s) may have used GoDaddy’s account recovery method to target crypto domains.

SpiritSwap, one of Fantom’s biggest DeFi exchanges, has been left vulnerable as a result:

SpiritSwap Manages to Mitigate Disaster

SpiritSwap managed to quickly take action as the attacker(s) manipulated the swap parameters and were able to take away an amount not exceeding US$18,000. SpiritSwap provided updates stating it had disabled swapping in order to prevent the hackers from stealing further funds and assured users that their contracts and funds were safe, but the domain spiritswap.finance has been compromised. Since the attack, SpiritSwap has suspended all transactions:

Swapped Funds Redirected Across DeFi Protocols

Several crypto projects use GoDaddy to host their domains, and at the time of writing the full extent of the damage was not yet clear. That said, this attack differs from the recent ‘Coinzilla Ad’ hack in which an ad caused a pop-up on sites such as CoinGecko that, when clicked, could drain a user’s wallet. In the case of GoDaddy, the attacker used the hosting platform to redirect swapped funds on DEXes such as QuickSwap and SpiritSwap:

DeFi Scams on the Rise in 2022

DeFi scams are nothing new but are becoming ever more brazen. Here is a recent list of the scams that happened in DeFi this year:

Categories
Crypto News Ethereum Terra

Lido Finance Warns Leveraged Traders as Staked ETH Loses Peg

Lido Finance has warned leveraged traders they are at risk of liquidations as a surge in ‘Staked Ethereum’ (stETH) redemptions has caused it to lose its 1:1 peg with Ethereum:

Discount Hits 5% Before Dropping Back to 3%

When Lido sent out its warnings, the discount was 4.2 percent and rose as high as 5 percent before dropping again. As it stands, 1 ETH can be exchanged for 1.0248 stETH through the Curve protocol, which means it is currently trading at a 3 percent discount relative to Ethereum.

stETH/ETH Chart, Source: Coinmarketcap.com

Surge Follows Terra’s Lost Peg

The StETH price surged as people who have staked it in the Anchor lending protocol, which runs on the Terra blockchain, rushed to retrieve it on May 13 after the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) lost its peg to the US dollar.

Terra had also been paused twice, signifying an attempt by the team to save the network’s native assets as UST lost its peg. The fall of Terra has had widespread effects on the entire crypto industry – in this case, while the network was halted it would have been impossible for Lido users to recover their stETH.

Until stETH is trading at a discount, holders can redeem their stETH for more ETH compared to their initial deposits, meaning there would not be enough ETH in the pool to back all holders’ stETH.

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Crypto News NFTs OpenSea

OpenSea Rolling Out Features to Block ‘Copymint’ Bandits

As the NFT garden continues to blossom, issues such as fraud and plagiarism are inevitably hindering trust in the space. To address this, OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, is putting measures in place to reduce fraud while improving authenticity:

The marketplace announced in a series of blog posts that it would be introducing two changes to the platform:

  1. An updated verification and collection badging system will broaden the number of creators eligible for verification.
  2. An automated system to aid in identifying, removing and preventing instances of “copymints” – copies of authentic NFT content – will also be put in place.

OpenSea says it will be implementing a new two-part detection system as copies make it more difficult to find authentic content on the platform. It will also use image recognition technology to scan NFTs on the platform and compare them with authentic collections, looking for flips, rotations and other variants.

According to one of its blog posts, OpenSea is “committed to threading the needle between removing copymints and giving space for those substantively additive remixes to prosper”. The marketplace has already started removing offending content and will scale up the removal process in coming weeks.

OpenSea in Troubled Waters

The changes OpenSea aims to implement come at a good time, as the marketplace has suffered various blows to its reputation in 2022. Earlier in the year, a former Bored Ape Yacht Club owner announced he would be suing OpenSea for US$1 million in damages after his Bored Ape was stolen from his crypto wallet. Mintable, another NFT marketplace, also recovered three NFTs stolen in a phishing attack on the OpenSea platform.

Categories
Crypto Art Crypto News NFTs

Madonna and Beeple Partner Up for Bizarre NFT Collection

Pop singer and cultural icon Madonna is well-known for her boundary-breaking love of all things risqué and has taken this to a new level. Partnering up with famous NFT artist Beeple, Madonna has released a series of NFTs that leave very little to the imagination when it comes to motherhood.

The series features three videos of Madonna-as-mother in virtual-reality simulations where she respectively “gives birth” to a tree, butterflies, and robotic centipedes:

Madonna Bares All for Women and Children

Madonna sparked confusion and some social media dismay this week with the release of her NFT collection, called ‘Mother of Creation’. The series of three single-edition NFTs features the singer naked and in the act of “mothering” various forms of life.

It’s been an amazing journey building this from an intellectual idea to an emotional story, giving birth to art. I wanted to investigate the concept of creation, not only the way a child enters the world through a woman’s vagina, but also the way an artist gives birth to creativity. Most importantly, we wanted to use this opportunity to benefit mothers and children who are most in need right now.

Madonna, pop singer and cultural icon

The first, titled ‘Mother of Nature’, sees Madonna lying on a laboratory bed and “giving birth” to a tree that starts to blossom as it exits her body. The second, ‘Mother of Evolution’, depicts her recumbent on an abandoned vehicle in an almost destroyed city where she is seen “giving birth” to butterflies. In the final instalment of the series, ‘Mother of Technology’, the singer is seen lying in a forest and “birthing” a series of biomechanical centipedes.

Madonna commented: “When Mike [Michael Joseph Winkelmann, aka Beeple] and I decided to collaborate on this project a year ago, I was excited to have the opportunity to share my vision of the world as a mother and an artist with Mike’s own unique point of view.”

Proceeds Go to Three Worthy NPOs

Proceeds from the NFT sales will benefit three non-profit organisations that support women and children. These are the Voices of Children Foundation, the City of Joy Foundation, and Black Mama’s Bail Out.

The collection has been slated as “soft-core porn” and has upset many who took to Twitter to express their dismay, but Madonna is not the first to bring the porn industry together with NFTs.

Racy online subscription service OnlyFans announced in February that its users could use ETH NFTs as their profile pictures. Also, the original and biggest player, Playboy entered the space last year when it combined its 68-year legacy of arts patronage and progressive conversations on sexuality with an exhibit that invited the digital art community to create original works to celebrate what it called “sexual liberation, gender equality and representation”.

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Australia Crypto News Investing

Australian Fund Manager Calls for Diversification in Crypto Portfolios 

Diversifying your risk is an old-school rule that helps keep an investment portfolio safe, and the same applies to a crypto portfolio. So says Richard Galvin, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset Capital Management (DACM), who has been at the helm of the world’s highest-ranked, long-only crypto fund for almost five years:

About 800,000 Australians own cryptocurrencies, a 63 percent increase from 2020, according to the commonwealth Treasury. Data from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) suggests that A$227 million worth of crypto assets are held by self-managed superannuation funds, or 0.03 percent of the net assets.

Given that Bitcoin makes up 42 percent of global crypto assets, it is likely that the largest and oldest of them all is best represented in the portfolios of Australian investors, and according to some professional crypto investors that is a problem.

Richard Galvin, DACM co-founder and CEO. Source: medium.com

According to Galvin, “Our view is that only holding bitcoin as your crypto exposure would be like buying BHP as your Australian equity exposure. We wouldn’t say it is a good or a bad idea in and of itself, but the opportunity set is far, far wider in our view.

“Our Global Digital Asset Fund usually holds eight to 12 key active positions in different coins or tokens, and we feel confident that this will outperform bitcoin and [second-largest coin] ethereum as single holdings over time.”

Crypto differs from traditional assets in many respects, including the decentralised legal structures underpinning tokens and highly controversial methods of valuation. A long list of critics believe the asset class should not be invested in because of the inherent volatility and prevalence of scams and cybercrimes. But, according to the Treasury data, many people are unfazed by the risks.

Traditional Principles of Finance Still Apply

Galvin argues that despite the potential risks associated with crypto investing, the same old rules of traditional portfolio construction need to be applied, including diversification. This means that investors need exposure to “altcoins” – the thousands of digital coins other than bitcoin.

Cody Harmon, a financial adviser, says diversification matters and notes that it does not mean crypto investors need to go too far down the rabbithole deploying their money to strange altcoins, often referred to as “shitcoins” by critics.

Galvin acknowledges that the regulatory environment around certain crypto investments remains uncertain, and says that DACM’s holistic approach has helped it deliver superior returns: “[This is because] we avoided a lot of that kind of flash-in-the-pan hype stuff and bought more fundamental assets that’ve been able to weather the insane volatility better than others.”

Galvin concurs with Australian fund manager Hamish Douglass in his view that cryptocurrencies should have a broader role in investment portfolios, but they will “either be asset-backed or they will be central government-backed. So maybe there is some truth in gold coin after all.”

Categories
Crypto News Facebook NFTs

Meta to Start Testing Digital Collectibles on Instagram

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, will start testing digital collectibles on a small number of users on its Instagram platform, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

A small group of creators and collectors in the US on Instagram will be able to use NFTs as profile pictures in a move similar to what Twitter has done in recent months. The test group will be able to post NFTs at no cost by linking their third-party digital wallets in-app. Each NFT will get a special “shimmer” around the photo attributing the piece to both creator and owner.

Ethereum and Polygon Provide Initial Blockchain Support

Ethereum and Polygon are blockchains that will be supported, with Flow and Solana launching soon. Rainbow, MetaMask and Trust Wallet, along with Coinbase, Dapper and Phantom, will be compatible with the platform.

Zuckerberg commented: “Meta plans to bring NFTs to apps in our family. This week, we’re starting to test digital collectibles on Instagram so creators and collectors can display their NFTs on their profile. Similar functionality is coming to Facebook soon, along with augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories via Spark AR [a free studio that allows businesses and private users to create their own filters] so you can place digital art into physical spaces.”

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, tweeted in agreement:

The news comes after speculation that Meta will support NFTs from Ethereum, Solana and Polygon, and confirms the rumour raised last year that the social media giant would support NFTs via the Novi digital wallet.

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Australia Bored Ape Yacht Club Crypto News NFTs

Australian Bored Ape NFT Investor Turns $300 into $5 Million

An Australian investor in the NFT space has managed to turn US$300 into a whopping US$5 million. Steve Morlando is the proud owner of Bored Ape #2177 (above), a particularly rare ape in the series, which he bought last year for what amounts to 0.01 percent of its current value.

Morlando acquired the Ape before NFTs took off. He says he won’t be selling it anytime soon, unless somebody quadruples their offer, and he freely admits the project could yet crash and be worth nothing. The Aussie is a seasoned online gambler and blogger and is a huge proponent of the emerging NFT market, to the point of launching his own collection.

Morlando is also a long-term investor who seeks out projects to hold for a minimum of 10 years. “In 2020 I was on Twitter and all the crypto people I followed started talking about NFTs,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald. “I got very close to buying a few but didn’t and probably researched it for three or four months before, eventually, I bought a Beeple piece called Bull Run for $1000, and then the whole space just exploded.

I had offers of $300,000 to $400,000 on that piece just two or three months after I bought it. And then May came around, and I saw a project called the Bored Apes. I had a few ethereum left in my wallet and I thought they looked cool, so I minted 10 of them, and I was lucky enough to get one of the rarest ones, a gold ape … for which I now get offers of $5 million-plus, weekly.

Steve Morlando, NFT investor

NFTs are ‘Double-Sided’

For Morlando, NFTs have two different sides. On one side, some NFTs are just beautiful art and on the other side are projects like BAYC, which is “like gambling squared”. He explains that you are gambling when you pick a project that does well, “then you are gambling if you are to get a rare one in the set, and then you gamble again if the project team can do what they say they’re going to do”.

Regulatory Clarity Needed in Australia

The NFT space in Australia is heating up with projects garnering a high degree of popularity in the country. As a result, more clarity needs to be offered regarding regulation for digital assets and artists. It has been noted that the country needs to implement policy specifically related to NFTs to stave off a potential “brain drain” on the Australian economy, according to NSW Liberal Senator and crypto proponent Andrew Bragg.

Regulatory clarity will offer greater protection to artists from Australia, such as those of the Yolngu nation in the Northern Territory who have started to digitise their work as NFTs in an effort to create a new stream of income and share their art with the global market.