Portuguese professional soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo has become the first player to be rewarded for his career achievements in the form of cryptocurrency, receiving 770 JUV tokens for his goal milestone.
He received the Fan Tokens ahead of Juventus’s Series A clash against Benevento last Sunday. The figure 770 marks the record-breaking number of career goals the 36-year-old has scored to date.
The connection between sports and cryptocurrency is continuing to grow, with players being bought and sold using cryptocurrency.
What Is $JUV?
JUV was launched in 2019 by the Italian Football Club as the official Juventus fan token on the Chiliz (CHZ) blockchain using the Socios.com platform.
These fan tokens enable supporters the chance to vote on club decisions, while also receiving perks, competitions and prizes, as well as augmented reality-enabled features.
There’s currently 24 clubs that are using crypto tokens in professional soccer, including Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and more. Manchester City is one of the latest clubs to join Socios with $CITY token.
Popular digital currency exchange and trading platform, Crypto.com is venturing into the non-fungible token (NFT) market.
The exchange announced on Tuesday that it’s launching a NFT marketplace, which will exclusively feature content from celebrities in different industries, including sports and music. Noteworthily, this follows the growing interest and boom in the NFT market.
Crypto.com Collaborates with Snoop Dogg, Aston Martin, and Others
The Crypto.com NFT marketplace is launching this Friday as an invite-only platform, per the announcement. It’s basically aimed at delivering unique and compelling content. Hence, the exchange partnered with celebrities in sports, athletics, music, and art for the inaugural contents on the soon-to-launch NFT marketplace.
The partners include Snoop Dogg, Aston Martin Cognizant Formula OneTM, Klarens Malluta with Lionel Richie, Axel Mansoor, Bag Raiders, BossLogic, and many others. The crypto exchange intends to collaborate with more mainstream artists in the coming weeks.
First F1 Team to Join the NFT Market
The partnership with Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team comes as they are planning to return to F1 racing after 60 years.
We’re excited to be the first Formula 1 team to offer a new way for our fans to own a piece of our history. The collection of NFTs we’re making available capture the very first moments of our return to F1 after more than six decades
Jefferson Slack, Managing Director at Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team.
Meanwhile, Crypto.com noted in the announcement that the NFT platform would be open to both users and non-users of the exchange. Among other things, the platform will allow collectors or the celebrities’ supporters to purchase or sell their NFTs using over 20 cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Dogecoin (DOGE).
The long-awaited next iteration of the leading decentralized exchange, Uniswap, will be deployed in the next two months, as the team disclosed in a blog post on Tuesday.
The upcoming Uniswap V3 is essentially aimed at enabling a more capital-efficient decentralized trading platform. Interestingly, the improvements with V3 will allow cheaper gas fees for transactions on the exchange compared to the current Uniswap iteration.
Uniswap V3 to Launch on Ethereum and Optimism Network
According to the Uniswap team, the next iteration will be deployed on the Ethereum blockchain precisely on May 5 and later on the Optimism network. With Uniswap V3, liquidity can be provided on the exchange with about 4000x capital efficiency, compared to the current Uniswap V2.
This will liquidity providers earn higher returns on their capital while also paving the way for low-slippage trade execution.
Additionally, Uniswap V3 will allow efficient and cheaper integration of oracles, which are “capable of providing time-weighted average prices (TWAPs) on demand for any period within the last ~ nine days.” With the launch of Optimism, the gas cost of V3 swaps will likely be significantly cheaper.
These features make Uniswap v3 the most flexible and efficient AMM ever designed.
Uniswap
Uniswap TVL
The exchange has become a critical infrastructure for decentralized finance. The current iteration was deployed in May 2020 and facilitated more than $135 billion in trading volume within a period of one year.
Uniswap was once the largest protocol in DeFi. However, its asset began plummeting following the end of its liquidity incentives last year. One can easily predict that the DEX will eventually outrank some protocols, following the features of V3. At the time of writing, there are US$4.04 billion worth of assets locked in the exchange, according to DeFi Pulse.
Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and MIT are conjuring what might be a major disruption to the financial services industry by creating a digital dollar.
According to James Cunha, head of the digital dollar project at the Boston Fed, there are already at least two prototype platforms that allow users to store and make transactions using the currency.
Digital Dollar [source: Flickr]
It’s not clear whether the platform uses blockchain as its underlying technology. However, back in August 2020 when the Fed-MIT collaboration was discussed, Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard said that the code will be open-source, meaning others will be able to see and build on it after it’s completed.
Creating a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Could Disrupt The Financial Industry
Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, also recently stated that the COVID pandemic had made clear that there are shortcomings with the current “arrangements”. He also said that there is a need to investigate ways in which speed and security in monetary systems around the world can be increased.
Jerome Powel [source: Flickr]
The potential that the central bank could cut banks out of their middleman role in the lucrative U.S. payments system is causing angst among banks.
Senator Sherrod Brown, the new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is urging the Fed to move quickly to create digital-currency accounts for Americans who can’t easily access the financial system and have been forced to deal with payday lenders who charge higher fees and interest rates. Those without bank accounts sometimes must pay high fees to cash paychecks or transfer money to relatives. These new systems could benefit disenfranchised citizens in many ways.
Everyone is afraid that you could disrupt all the incumbent players with a whole new form of payment.
Michael Del Grosso, analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading
However, this virtual currency could still be years away since it has not yet been approved by U.S. Treasury Department, Federal bank, or lawmakers. It also has not been decided how it will be incorporated into the current system. Still, the U.S. and other countries seem committed to digitizing their currencies enough to make financial industry executives nervous.
The Move to Digital Currency
A few countries have seen the potential of digital currencies and have started creating pilot projects to determine the range of applications.
We think it’s important that we not wait for the policy debate because then we’ll be a year or so behind. This will take significant outreach to the industry and serious debate.
James Cunha, head of the digital dollar project at the Boston Federal Bank
The Race to a Digital Currency [source: Bloomberg]
It looks like some countries are aiming to make some serious strides towards the adoption of digital currencies or at least to pilot projects to determine the benefits it could hold.
Approximately $2.5 million in Binance Coin (BNB) was drained from trading pools in the Binance Smart Chain DeFi exchanges after the anticipated launch of TurtleDex.
TurtleDex advertised itself as a DeFi storage platform and claimed it could help “keep data and preserve files without needing to keep them on their computer”. With the pre-sale launch on 15 March, the team hit their target in two hours, raising approximately 9000 BNB.
After the fundraising round, the funds were drained from the TurtleDex liquidity pool, moved to PancakeSwap and ApeSwap exchanges. From there, the funds were converted to Ethereum (ETH) and sent to nine separate wallets on the Binance Exchange.
Attention – The Turtledex (#TTDX) team has exit scammed.
We are just as shocked as everyone to see this unfold.
This type of scam is called exit scam, also known as “rug pull”. Shortly after it occurred, the owners deleted TurtleDex’s Telegram, official website, Twitter profile, and other social pages.
TurtleDex Twitter page
Distressed investors looked toward Binance for assistance and have reached out to CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ). They will need to keep their fingers crossed that Binance will step in and freeze the funds that were sent to Binance wallets.
Although with no formal response as of yet, investors will need to hope that CZ makes good on his word to assist with recovering funds lost in rug pulls based on a comment made a few days prior to the incident.
The community is up in arms about the event and is questioning the effectiveness of contract-audits since this is not the first exit scam to hit Binance Smart Chain.
So now the question is; who should the accountability be left with. The anon team is obviously to blame but what about @Jetfuelfinance & @ape_swap who've been in contact with @turtle_dex to setup & offer liquidty staking options for $TTDX. What due diligence was done?#BSC$BNBhttps://t.co/ddeNT4Hd20
Popular digital artists, including Beeple, are auctioning carbon-neutral artworks as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This is part of a collaborative effort between the NFT artists and the Open Earth Foundation to create awareness of climate change and essentially raise funds to support its CarbonDrop initiative, which is aimed at improving the planetary condition.
A total of eight artworks have been issued under this initiative, all of which see over US$2 million bids.
CarbonDrop NFTs Attracts Over $2M Bids
The artists involved in the CarbonDrop initiative include Beeple, Refik Anadol, Sara Ludy, Mieke Marple, GMUNK, Kyle Gordon, Andres Reisinger, and FVCKRENDER. The carbon-neutral NFTs are being auctioned on Nifty Gateway, one of the leading NFTs marketplace. So far, the eight artworks combined have amassed US$2,218,951 in bids at the time of writing.
Beeple’s ‘OCEAN FRONT’ NFT has the highest bids in terms of value. It attracted a US$2 million bid during press time. Interestingly, Justin Sun, the CEO and founder of the Tron blockchain, is one of the highest bidders. Meanwhile, other artworks are yet to reach a six-figure bid.
Beeple’s OCEAN FRONT NFT
NFTs Artists Help to Fight Climate Change
All the proceeds from the digital art collection will be donated to Open Earth Foundation, as noted on the auction page. The 501c3 non-profit organisation is on a mission to increase planetary resilience. It harnesses emerging digital technology, such as blockchain and radical collaborations, to deploy and scale concrete systemic solutions at a planetary level.
The NFT auction is also committed to balance its own carbon footprint as detailed on their website.
Each unique carbon offset is pegged to the unique artwork in order to compensate the underlying emissions from the NFT minting. Artists will further commit to offset their historical NFT footprint to create a net positive climate impact.
January 22, 2021, Brazil. In this photo illustration the Brave Browser logo seen in the background of a silhouette hand holding a mobile phone
Privacy-focused Brave Browser has extended its Ethereum-based digital currency, Basic Attention Token (BAT), to Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystem. The development today means that BAT holders can now access several projects on BSC, including its decentralized finance (DeFi) services.
BAT Debuts on BSC as Wrapped Token
The Brave token was launched as an ERC-20 standard token. However, it can now be used on the BSC ecosystem as a wrapped token, which will make it possible for BAT holders to access BSC projects like PancakeSwap, BakerySwap, Beefy Finance, etc., through “numerous bridges that connect Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.”
Also, Brave intends to preconfigure support for BSC on its browser wallet later this year to enable users to directly access the BSC services without having to download additional applications. In addition to that, Brave also plans to leverage the low transaction fee on the BSC network to enable scalable P2P tipping within its browser.
Our hope is that BAT and Brave will take crypto mainstream and to make DeFi user-friendly for the mass market. […] With wrapped BAT now available on BSC, we believe this is achievable.
Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave
Brave now adds to the list of popular Ethereum platforms that have migrated to the BSC network for some reasons that include cheaper transaction fees.
BAT Monthly Users Surpass $3 Million
BAT is one cryptocurrency with fast-growing demand. It’s the utility token of Brave Browser, which sees over 25 million monthly active users (MAU). More than 3.8 million users transact with the cryptocurrency on a monthly basis.
BAT was trading at US$1.20 on Coingecko during press time. It soared by over 7% on the 24-hour count, following the announcement on Monday. Its market capital currently sits around US$1.7 billion.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) are providing artists and musicians independency by selling their tokenized artworks or albums in DeFi marketplaces, instead of relying on major record labels.
According to Business Insider, more artists are joining the NFT movement by selling their tokenized work for large sums. A new wave of artists is now considering directly offering their music in the form of tokenized products sold on DeFi marketplaces, rather than having it handled by traditional third parties.
Crypto Art Changing the Music Industry
The implications of this new approach appear to be quite significant, for example from a royalties perspective. Many musicians have complained how the current revenue from streaming platforms like Spotify tends to be quite small after the cut taken by labels and distributors. Experts in the music industry have stated that crypto art could indeed shift the power structure of many companies. Researcher Cherie Hu said that NFTs can potentially change the scenario for record labels and their relationship with musicians.
They could provide more incentive for labels to better serve artists. Artists will likely be asking themselves ‘Is my label doing the best job at maximizing the value of my relationship with fans? Do they deserve a cut of these NFTs?’
Cherie Hu [Business Insider]
Millions of Dollars in NFTs
Some of the first and most popular NFT sales were Kings of Leon and 3LAU. Both artists sold their NFT albums for millions of dollars.
Now it seems that artists can connect directly to fans through NFTs by offering special items, maybe even reserved to NFT holders.
NFTs are built on decentralization, connecting fans directly with creators. The current systems in place are opaque and antiquated. NFTs cut out the middleman.
Matt Colon, Steve Aoki’s manager [Business Insider]
NFTs are currently the hottest trend in the fintech space. From books to a single tweet can be auctioned. Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet, which is also the first tweet ever on the social network. Justin Sun, CEO of Tron, offered two million dollars for it.
Users from Reddit are discussing the NFT craze with DeFi, arguing that record labels will have to adapt to new emerging technologies to stay in business.
As reported by CNBC, Morgan Stanley will be the first major U.S. bank to offer its clients access to bitcoin funds. With the maximum allowed being 2.5% of the clients total net worth.
Is bitcoin going mainstream? Morgan Stanley banks on the cryptocurrency as the first major U.S. bank to offer its clients access to bitcoin funds. #bitcoinpic.twitter.com/otAaGMftEJ
As explained by CNBC, they are looking to demographically gain exposure into a new generation of younger investors who care a lot more about cryptocurrencies. As clients gain interest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, if their current providers don’t offer them the services to invest, they will look elsewhere.
The move by Morgan Stanley might be the first by a big bank, but CNBC suggested that if it works, everyone else will surely follow suit.
It looks like Cardano will be used as the decentralized financial platform as announced by Charles Hoskinson – CEO of IOG at the Blockchain Africa Summit.
The introduction of Cardano to Africa, initially through Ethiopia, Hoskinson has predicted that the “miracle of Africa” will make the emergence of China as a world power look small in comparison, as millions of people are onboarded onto Cardano.
Cardano is an open platform that seeks to provide economic identity to the billions who lack it by providing decentralized applications to manage identity, value and governance
Cardano, The Blockchain That Can Run an Entire Country
IOG (Input Output Global) is building a decentralized finance system on Cardano (ADA) that aims to unite the world’s economies. IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson revealed the formation of a partnership with Ethiopia two years after Cardano protocol was constructed. And after building many local relationships, training staff, and overcoming obstacles, the platform is at a turning point on the continent where millions of users will join the Cardano ecosystem though public and private partnerships.
In the next 5 years, our staff in Africa will grow from dozens to hundreds, if not thousands. Instead of having one headquarters, we will probably have 4 or 5 across the continent.
IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson
Cardano has had a strong presence in Africa for years, and Hoskinson who wants to take the lead in DeFi (Decentralize Finance) wants to apply these use cases in Africa. These countries have a more relaxed regulatory environment and according to him is rife with opportunity. The idea is to make the wealth of Africa liquid, allowing individuals to play a much larger role as well as share in the riches of the economy.
The first countries to make national elections online will likely be African nations. The first to have an end-to-end digital identity and economy, there is a lot of potential for them to be African nations.
IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson
Decentralised Identities
Hoskinson also revealed that the Prism team, working on a Decentralised Identities (DID) solution will be expanded enabling them to bid on and seal flagship contracts allowing Cardano to do business with various private and public entities.
What I can say is that we are at the final stages of a large government contract that would have multimillion users being onboarded onto the platform for real-world blockchain implementation.
IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson
Since this project is so large in scope a few things have gone wrong and unforeseen setbacks have moved due dates of projects up by a month or two. Also, the difficulty of doing business in Africa is one of the more difficult hurdles to overcome since there are some extra barriers in Africa that one wouldn’t normally encounter in first world countries.
Boom In The Ecosystem
But the two projects in Ethiopia and Tanzania are just the beginning. As O’Connor also revealed, IOG has three other “focus countries”: South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. For South Africa, he said, it is an “interesting project” involving insurance. All projects are expected to reach several million people, so IOG will attract 100 million users in the first stage.
That should be just the beginning. After these five focus countries, we got plans for another 15 countries which we will be working on after we delivered on these first five.
John O’Connor, Director of African Operations at IOG
And after a recent statement by Hoskinson that 100 companies are in the process of moving over the Cardano from Ethereum the future of the ecosystem looks bright. But it seems ADA stakeholders are still waiting for the birds to land.
