Category: Blockchain

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Blockchain Crypto News Gaming NFTs

Blockchain Gaming Has Soared 2000% in a Year According to Latest Report

Among the findings of a joint report by DappRadar and the Blockchain Game Alliance (BGA) is that blockchain gaming has boomed by a massive 2000 percent in a year. This figure directly relates to 52 percent of all blockchain activity.

DappRadar x BGA Games Report – February 2022 - Animefreaktv https://animefreaktv.org/dappradar-x-bga-games-report-february-2022/
DappRadar x BGA report.

This Could Be a $10 Billion Year

The first quarter of this year has seen significant statistics out of the crypto gaming industry. With US$2.5 billion in investments poured into the industry already, 2022 is shaping up to be a big year for the advancement of blockchain gaming. Developers are anticipating this number could grow to US$10 billion by the end of the year.

The popularity of play-to-earn (P2E) NFT games on the Ethereum sidechain has played a large role in this growth. According to the report:

The ownership entitled by NFTs, and the underlying financial ecosystem enabled by cryptocurrencies and play-to-earn games, will shift the paradigm from the traditional metaverse that is limited to a virtual, augmented reality.

DappRadar x BGA games report

Animoca Brands and Yuga Labs hold some of the largest deals for the year so far, as blockchain games drew in 1.22 million unique active wallets.

Success Stories in Crypto Gaming Industry

In 2021, blockchain crypto gaming coins soared, with just one week in August witnessing nearly 700 percent growth. This seemed to mark the start of the acceleration in the blockchain gaming industry. Mobile gaming benefits immensely from NFTs, as the notion of adding real-world value to in-game assets became wildly popular.

Later in 2021, Galaxy Interactive – a venture capital firm specialising in gaming start-ups – raised US$325 million with the intention of investing in blue-chip NFTs. At the time it was reported that US$150 million had been allocated to a range of new companies.

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Australia Binance Blockchain BNB Crypto News Play to Earn Solana Tokens

Move-To-Earn Token STEPN Has Soared 217x in 2022  

Active types can now get paid to exercise and breathe in the fresh outdoor air with new Australian fitness app STEPN – an NFT-based play-to-move Web3 crypto “game” powered by the Solana blockchain.

Following in the footsteps of Genopets – the first move-to-earn NFT crypto game developed on Solana – STEPN is basically a mash-up of Apple’s step-counting Health app with Axie Infinity-style play-to-earn (P2E) tokenomics.

With over half a million downloads so far on Android alone, STEPN has taken off and so has its governance token, $GMT.

STEPN’s Green Metaverse Token (GMT) has sprinted upwards, increasing five-fold in value over the past month, from US$0.65 to an all-time high of US$3.79. $GMT is the token required for making upgrades to the App’s in-game NFT virtual sneakers. GMT’s market cap is now over US$2 billion and the token is currently ranked #60.


STEPN price chart (GMT). Source: CoinGecko.com

The most recent 26 percent spike came after STEPN announced a partnership with Japanese sports apparel giant Asics on April 18 via Twitter, launching a sneaker sale on the Binance NFT marketplace. Selected subscribers will be able to purchase the first STEPN sneakers on the BNB Chain version of the game:

Earn Crypto Exercising Outside

Users can earn crypto by walking or running with the STEPN App. The app tracks movement via your phone’s GPS and rewards are paid in STEPN’s game token: Green Satoshi Token (GST), which can be traded for USD Coin (USDC) or Solana (SOL).

Players begin by choosing a fitness level that suits their goals, which also determines how many tokens can be earned using the app. The four tiers are divided by different types of virtual sneakers: walker, jogger, runner or trainer. STEPN sneaker NFTs can be found and purchased from the in-app marketplace. Check the stepn.com website for full instructions on how to play.

Since the game has taken off, the price to get started playing has elevated accordingly. Currently the floor price for a pair of sneakers is 13.67 SOL (US$1,400+). Participants in the upcoming STEPN Shoebox sale on Binance will be offered mystery boxes containing a pair of NFT Sneakers of random quality and type, for 0.5 BNB (US$210).

STEPN plans to implement a sneaker-rental feature, coming soon to combat the high cost to entry.

How to Start STEPN

  1. Download the app from the App store (available for Android and Apple) and log in with your email address and verification code.
  2. Get verified. Join the official Discord and Telegram channels and get your activation code to enter the app on your phone. Note: due to popular demand, the development team is only releasing 1000 activation codes per day via Discord and 1000 per day via Telegram. You have to be quick, as codes refresh at midnight AEDT. You can also follow @Stepnofficial on Twitter for more activation code releases.
  3. Link your Solana wallet in the STEPN app and purchase your first pair of virtual sneakers from the STEPN marketplace. Sneakers can be customised and enhanced to increase token rewards.

STEPN buzz continues to gain traction amid rumours of further upcoming partnership announcements with other big shoe brands, including Nike and Adidas. Since the STEPN token sale in March, the app is off to a flying start, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Whether the move-to-earn model can prove sustainable over time will be the real test, but for now STEPN is showing no signs of slowing down.

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Australia Blockchain Crypto News The Sandbox

Sandbox Creator Buys a Major Stake in Australian Digital Agency ‘Be Media’

Australian digital marketing agency ‘Be Media’ has sold a significant stake in the company to Animoca Brands, the crypto investment giant behind the Sandbox. Be Media is said to be already filling positions for blockchain-based development:

Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands now has a particularly large stake in the Perth-based digital marketing agency. This comes as the company pivots towards crypto after prioritising the provision of Web2 companies for its digital strategies.

Be Media Stake Part of Animoca Expansion Plan

Animoca appears to have purchased its stake as part of its incursion into Australia with aspirations of inducting more companies into Web3. Although Be Media is not strictly crypto-related, the agency makes a good starting point for Animoca’s expansion plan. Be Media has already begun “aggressive hiring” for project management and blockchain-based development positions.

Be Media founder and CEO Jordan Fogarty will retain his current role and a minor stake in the company. Fogarty is reportedly enthusiastic about the pairing and “honoured” to be a part of the introduction of Web3 to local companies.

High Performing Sales

The Sandbox’s token SAND has performed well since its release, hitting an all-time high in November 2021. Animoca announced its intention to release Metaverse Alpha the following month, which had a knock-on effect on token sales. The play-to-earn game hosted the event for just a month.

More recently, NFT gaming platform Balthazar raised US$3 million through an Animoca Brands token sale. The sale valued the DAO at US$30 million and elevated Balthazar to its status as one of the leading platforms in the metaverse.

Animoca has also partnered with the Australian Football League to mint its new NFT collection.

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Australia Blockchain DAO Economics

RMIT Proposes ‘Docklands DAO’ to Help Melbourne Precinct Recover From Pandemic

A report released by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Blockchain Innovation Hub has proposed the creation of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) to help revitalise the Docklands district of Melbourne, following Covid-related lockdowns and restrictions that affected the city more than most others in Australia.

The April 7 report is the second of five commissioned by the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund (VHESIF) to explore opportunity areas for the creation of a digital CBD in Melbourne.

Docklands Ideal Location for DAO Pilot

The report’s author, Dr Max Parasol, believes the Docklands precinct would be the ideal location for the pilot DAO project because it faces a number of challenges due both to its location and the economic consequences of the Covid pandemic:

  • It’s geographically disconnected from Melbourne’s CBD.
  • It faces inconsistent and reduced foot traffic due to work-from-home and hybrid work models.
  • Local businesses have unpredictable inventory requirements. 
  • There are negative impacts from tenant rent discounts and vacancies.

Dr Parasol said the creation of a Docklands DAO would empower businesses to overcome these challenges and reinvigorate the local economy:

A Docklands DAO would encourage community buy-in and engagement as a way to regenerate the precinct … the beauty of a DAO is that it provides greater levels of transparency, openness and democratic governance so every member of the DAO [the community] has a voice and voting power.

Dr Max Parasol, RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub

A DAO is an open-source, blockchain-based organisation defined by rules encoded in a smart contract and governed by members who vote on proposals using governance tokens.

Docklands DAO Would Launch in Two-Stage Process

The report suggests a two-stage process for the creation of Docklands DAO. The first stage would involve the collection of anonymised local people traffic data and other key metrics such as rental costs, with the goal of assisting local businesses to more accurately predict customer numbers and business expenses.

In stage two, Docklands DAO assumes control of the collected data. Local business owners and community members, as part of the DAO, would vote on how to use the data to optimise resource allocations and improve the local economy to benefit all DAO participants.

Jason Potts, co-director of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, suggests DAOs such as the proposed Docklands DAO will help communities manage new digital resources and overcome the challenges of a post-Covid world:

The technology is just a vehicle for a new approach to community-led and community-owned discovery of new resources and opportunities with which we can continuously reinvent the local economies that make up our cities, and that has never been more important than right now. 

Jason Potts, co-director, RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub

RMIT has been a prominent player in the Australian crypto space, having last year urged the federal government to reform crypto tax settings and being ranked second in CoinDesk’s global Top Universities for Blockchain list.

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Blockchain Fantasy Sports Gaming NFTs Sports

Blockchain Soccer Game GOALS Nets $15 Million Seed Funding for Multiplayer Venture

Young Swedish start-up GOALS has announced that its seed funding round netted a profit of US$15 million. The round was led by venture capital firm Northzone alongside the CEO of Sorare and its strategic adviser, a very well-known football player.

The e-sports game features a play-to-own mechanism with players, clubs and skins available in the form of digital assets. This means that once you own one of these NFTs, it’s yours for as long as you wish to keep it – unlike soccer game giant FIFA, which only lets a player hold a skin for a limited time.

Barcelona Defender Gerard Pique Among the Donors

Despite being barely a year old – GOALS was founded in May 2021 – the venture is receiving a lot of support. Northzone, Cherry and Moonfire venture capital firms were just some of the notable names contributing to the seed funding round.

Nicolas Julia, CEO of Sorare (another prominent blockchain football game), and strategic adviser Gerard Pique, the famous Barcelona FC defender, were also among the donors.

Barcelona FC star defender Gerard Pique, who is also Sorare’s strategic adviser. Source: everythingbarca.com

GOALS is free to play, with the game taking a small cut of each marketplace transaction. You can check out the GOALS project trailer below:

Football Follows in Sorare’s Bootsteps

Sorare Crypto Fantasy Football paved the way for GOALS in the field of blockchain-based football games. The game enables fans to collect and trade player cards to compete for prizes. Since Sorare’s development in 2018, the game has gone from strength to strength, notably raising US$680 million in its September 2021 fundraising round.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sorare and how it works, Crypto News Australia has put together an independent review of the game. You can find it here.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi Hackers

Ola Finance Suffers $3.6 Million ‘Re-Entrancy’ Attack  

DeFi protocol Ola Finance has called on users to resist pointing fingers of blame and asked the community instead to focus on the growth of the project, as it addressed a US$3.6 million hack via Twitter on April 1.

The attack took place on Fuse Lending, Ola’s implementation on the Fuse blockchain:

Re-Entrancy Bug Responsible for Theft

The incident involved a “re-entrancy bug”, which is a commonly known culprit at the heart of DeFi attacks. The smart contract vulnerability enables hackers to make repeated calls to a protocol in order to steal assets, without having to pay back borrowed funds. 

The attack began by mixing funds through Tornado Cash, making the crypto hard to trace. The funds were then withdrawn over the Fuse Bridge and transferred to the Fuse network (Ola’s decentralised lending platform). The hacker used the assets as collateral to take out loans, and by exploiting the re-entrancy bug was able to then remove the starting funds without having to repay the loans.

This process was repeated several times across different Ola pools. The hacker then transferred the drained assets to wallets on Ethereum and BNB Chain. In total, the hacker holds US$3 million on Ethereum and another US$637,000 on BNB Chain.

Official Report Forthcoming

Ola tweeted that it would soon publish an “official report detailing the exploit”. For now it has responsibly paused the use of the Fuse network lending protocol while looking into rectifying the bad code.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, re-entrancy attack in DeFi. Only two weeks ago, Agave and Hundred Finance, two lending DeFi protocols, were exploited for approximately US$11 million. Three months ago, Grim Finance DeFi protocol was hacked for US$30 million in Fantom tokens as attackers exploited a flaw in the vault contract.

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Australia Blockchain Crypto News

TAFE QLD Creates First Accredited Blockchain Technology Course

In early March, Australian state Senator Andrew Bragg urged the Australian blockchain industry to pick up the pace or risk falling behind other developed nations. Almost exactly a month later, TAFE (Technical and Further Education) Queensland has answered the call by announcing the world’s first accredited course in blockchain technology.

Applications in Arts, Banking and Business

The new course, which will equip graduates with a Diploma of Applied Blockchain, will enable real-world applications in the arts, banking and business sectors.

According to its TAFE overview, the course is designed for experienced professionals with basic experience in business planning, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies wanting to formalise or further their skills in this area.

Recent workforce data from LinkedIn identified blockchain as the most in-demand hard skill of 2020, with qualified professionals in the field in high demand.

Among other specifics, the TAFE course will cover how to:

  • develop a blockchain business model implementation plan;
  • apply big data and blockchain technologies to the Internet of Things (IoT);
  • develop a team business model that aligns team operations with a blockchain business model;
  • identify and apply big data to enable marketing strategies within a blockchain ecosystem; and
  • develop, monitor and maintain a governance policy within a blockchain network.

Successful completion of the course will allow graduates to seek work in a range of management or operational roles applying blockchain technologies within new and existing organisations.

How to Apply

To apply and learn more about study options for the TAFE Queensland Diploma of Applied Blockchain, visit TAFE’s website.

According to Austin Lewinsmith, co-founder of Blockchain Collective, a partner of TAFE Queensland, “Blockchain technology will underpin the development of the Web 3.0 revolution because it provides highly effective, efficient and secure ways of managing data.’’

As also reported by Crypto News Australia this week, the Australian Web3 ecosystem is growing exponentially. The availability of this new course, therefore, could not have come at a better time.

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Bitcoin Blockchain Crypto News

MIT Review Says Quantum Computing Not a Threat to Bitcoin

Quantum phenomena are strange things to wrap your head around, with the applications thereof even more so. Some believe that quantum computers will become advanced enough to break current cryptography, endangering trillions of dollars and the blockchains that secure it.

Quantum computing is said to be the next iteration of advanced computation that will completely blow conventional computers out of the water. Due to the nature of the technology, problems can be solved orders of magnitude faster than on a regular computer.

A Looming Quantum Threat?

Theoretically, a quantum computer can ‘easily’ solve the problem of finding the prime factors of large numbers exponentially faster than any classical scheme. This would make these computers exceptionally good at prime factorisation, which is at the heart of breaking the commonly used RSA-based cryptography.

However, building a quantum computer that could crack RSA codes would require many millions, if not billions, of qubits. This means that cracking cryptography is currently way beyond the scope of current computing power.

Quantum Computers Still a Long Way Off

In an article written for Technology Review, Sankar Das Sarma – a condensed matter theory physicist and quantum information expert – states that some of the hype and speculation around this revolutionary technology has “disturbed ” him.

When fully realised, quantum computers stand to change the world in ways we can barely even imagine, but at this stage we are “no closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about. It is akin to trying to make today’s best smartphones using vacuum tubes from the early 1900s,” Das Sarma writes.

Currently, the most advanced quantum computers have dozens of decohering qubits, nothing remotely close to the possible billions required to crack RSA cryptography:

I am all for hope and am a big believer in quantum computing as a potentially disruptive technology, but to claim that it would start producing millions of dollars of profit for real companies selling services or products in the near future is very perplexing to me.

Sankar Das Sarma

Even though the problem lies in the distant future, some projects have already started preparing for the threat quantum computers might pose. In 2020, for example, Australia’s CSIRO and Monash University started working on a “quantum-proof” blockchain protocol.

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Blockchain Crypto News Crypto Wallets Gaming Metaverse Opera

Opera Browser Adds BTC, SOL and MATIC Wallets for its 350 Million Users

Popular web browser Opera has this week announced support for at least eight more base networks and various layer-2 protocols in what seems to be a push for a major Web3 browsing experience.

As per a blog post from the Oslo-based company, Opera plans to onboard millions of users to enjoy a “seamless Web3 experience” through built-in wallet support for leading blockchain ecosystems and layer-2s including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon (MATIC), Cosmos-based IXO, Ronin, Celo, and StarkEx:

Seamless Access to Web3

Opera users will be able to access dApps (decentralised applications) from popular ecosystems such as Polygon or Solana and benefit from lower gas fees and faster transactions.

By connecting several layer-1 and layer-2 ecosystems, Opera will remain “chain agnostic” – allowing its 300+ million users to seamlessly access Web3. Users from the popular P2E (Play-to-Earn) title Axie Infinity will also be able to interact with the recently hacked Ronin ecosystem.

The integration of multiple blockchains and notably Layer 2s is a key strategy in Opera’s mission to remain chain agnostic and seamlessly onboard millions of users to Web3 and do so in an environmentally-conscious way.

Opera blog post

Opera Sings Praises of its Browser

Opera has been working on crypto-related products since 2018 when it launched its first web browser with an integrated Ethereum wallet and Web3 support, even before most browsers started integrating different levels of support for blockchains.

It wasn’t until January of this year that Opera unveiled the beta version of its Crypto Browser Project, a fully dedicated Web3 browser with built-in integrations and support for seamless access to dApps, games, and metaverse platforms.

Ever since we started in the Web3 space in 2018, we’ve been sealing partnerships with the most popular and cutting-edge blockchains and Web3 domain name providers in order to accelerate crypto’s evolution from proof-of-concept towards mass adoption.

Jorgen Arnesen, EVP Mobile and Web3, Opera

On February 25, Opera integrated DeversiFi, a decentralised exchange powered by StarkWare, a scaling solution for Ethereum that uses ZK rollup technology.

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Blockchain Cardano Crypto News Institutions Investing

Institutional Demand for Cardano (ADA) Soars 50x in 2022

Since the beginning of the year, Cardano (ADA) has seen a massive 50-fold spike in large transaction volume (LTV) and, according to crypto intelligence firm IntoTheBlock, this represents a significant increase in institutional demand for the decentralised blockchain network.

IntoTheBlock stated in a tweet that such high volumes – last seen in 2018 – indicate “increasing institutional demand”.

The volume of on-chain transactions over US$100k has increased remarkably in 2022 alone. This week, a total of 69.09 billion ADA, worth US$81.4 billion, was moved in these large transactions, representing 99 percent of total on-chain volume, according to the firm.

Large transactions on Cardano: IntoTheBlock

ADA Making Waves on Many Fronts

Cardano’s Total Value Locked (TVL) has also seen a significant increase since the beginning of the year when it started off. The chain’s slow academic approach has seen its token off to a low start but as new functionality is added, the chain becomes more secure and decentralised for users.

ADA TVL. Source: DefiLama

Since smart contracts were enabled on the chain in September 2021, many developers have started building in the ecosystem. Within the first five days of the upgrade, 2,334 smart contracts were deployed on the network.

Since 2021, the average amount of active addresses has also been steadily increasing. As of January 2022, the total addresses with a balance have increased from 3.4 million to 5.05 million, pointing to an exponential increase in usage.

Total ADA addresses. Source: IntoTheBlock

Cardano’s Layer 2 – Hydra also recently started looking into implementing a burning mechanism for the token, but this has caused confusion among some members of the community. With all the progress the chain has made, many are wondering how its price has managed to stagnate: