Category: NFTs

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Crypto Exchange Education NFTs Zipmex

Zipmex Partners NRL and A-League Teams to ‘Boost Crypto Literacy’

Singapore-based crypto exchange Zipmex has partnered with Australian National Rugby League (NRL) premiership club Penrith Panthers and A-League football club Central Coast Mariners to elevate sports fans’ crypto literacy and expand the exchange’s customer base.

The partnership also includes some smaller community sports clubs – Wyong Rugby League Football Club, also based on the NSW Central Coast, along with Penrith Brothers RLFC and soccer club Penrith Rovers, both based in western Sydney.

Focus on Crypto Education and Giveaways

The partnership will focus on educating the clubs’ fans and members about cryptocurrency by running a series of workshops aimed at crypto newbies.

Zipmex plans to have a regular presence at home games for both the Penrith Panthers and Central Coast Mariners, manning information booths, running giveaways of up to A$500 in BTC, and creating NFTs of high-profile players.

The community-based clubs will see similar types of engagement and education, presumably on a smaller scale.

Zipmex Pushing to Grow its Share of Australian Market

These partnerships form part of Zipmex’s recent push to raise its profile and grow its share of the Australian crypto exchange market. 

The exchange has launched several new products into the Australian market recently, including ZipUp, its high-yield, no lock-in staking program, introduced earlier this month. In March the exchange also partnered with New Venture Wealth to offer Australians the opportunity to hold crypto in their self-managed super funds.

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Crypto News NFTs

World’s First Crypto Dating Show Raises $6 Million With the Help of Paris Hilton

The potential Web3 version of Netflix, Mad Realities, has launched the world’s first crypto dating show and subsequently raised US$6 million. The seed round was aided by 11:11 Media, socialite heiress Paris Hilton’s media company:

Persistence Pays Off in Crypto Dating Show Success

Mad Realities has moved a step closer to becoming an established Web3 streaming service. The round was led by venture capital firm Paradigm and attracted some other surprisingly big names: 

According to Devin Lewtan, co-founder and CEO of Mad Realities, the company was determined that Hilton join the fundraising round and evidently its persistence paid off. “We were really, really bullish on getting Paris Hilton,” Lewtan said.

The company began on YouTube, fundraising US$500,000 for its first project – a Bachelorette-style series called Proof of Love – through NFT sales. However, with its newly raised funds, Mad Realities is set on producing more content as it works towards creating a decentralised media company that can compete with mainstream services like Netflix.

If you would like a glimpse of what Mad Realities is offering, Proof of Love is available to watch on the company’s YouTube channel.  

Other Celebs Acting Up in Crypto Projects

In July last year, pandemic-based movie Zero Contact, starring Anthony Hopkins, was offered for sale as an NFT and later released to Vuele, a direct-to-consumer NFT viewing platform.

In the same month of 2021, the NFT series Stoner Cats launched. Created and produced by actor Mila Kunis, the animated series featured an A-list cast including Ashton Kutcher, Seth MacFarlane, Chris Rock and Jane Fonda voice acting as a group of sentient cartoon cats, with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a cameo role. The series required viewers to mint their access to the first five-minute episode.

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Crypto News NFTs

Moonbirds NFT Sells for $1 Million Within a Week of Launch

A single Moonbirds NFT has changed hands for just over US$1 million less than a week after the collection racked up more than US$200 million in sales in its first three days.

Moonbird #2642, one of the rarest NFTs in the collection of avian avatars, sold for a record 350 ETH (US$1.05 million) on NFT marketplace OpenSea on April 23.

Moonbird #2642. Source: OpenSea

The buyer was listed as The Sandbox, a blockchain-based gaming firm and subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands. The seller, who goes by “oscuranft” on OpenSea, pocketed a profit of about US$600,000 after buying the NFT a week ago for 100 ETH.

New ‘Nesting’ Feature for Moonbirds

Moonbirds was launched on April 16 by PROOF, a media startup founded by venture capitalist Kevin Rose. In a recent video, Rose explained how Moonbirds is building on its rapid success by launching a new feature called “nesting”, where holders can stake their NFTs in a non-custodial way and earn additional benefits:

In a separate Twitter Spaces post this week, Rose addressed the controversial exit of Ryan Carson, the project’s chief operating officer, who has left to start his own NFT venture fund.

Allegations of Insider Trading

News of Carson’s departure drew immediate fire from the broader NFT community, with many questioning how Carson was able to purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Moonbirds before his exit, possibly using insider knowledge to poach undervalued editions:

Carson’s cache of Moonbirds is worth US$1.2 million based on floor prices alone, as most were bought before prices ballooned following the initial mint.

Azukies Still Holds Record Price

With a 34 ETH (roughly US$100,000) current floor price, Moonbirds have racked up over US$330 million in sales since the April 16 mint. But there’s an even hotter collection out there in the NFT ecosystem. Azukies, an Ethereum-based set of hand-drawn, anime-style profile picture NFTs, reached a milestone earlier this month with the sale of a single Azuki for a record US$1.4 million.

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Bored Ape Yacht Club Hackers Illegal NFTs Scams

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Instagram Compromised in $2.8 Million NFT Phishing Scam

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s (BAYC) Instagram account has been hacked in a phishing scam resulting in an exploit of US$2.8 million worth of NFTs:

Yuga Labs, the creator of BAYC, is investigating the attack, tweeting followers not to click on links or mint new tokens. The attacker stole 133 NFTs after using BAYC’s Instagram account to promote a fake “airdrop”. The scam promised people free tokens if they connected their MetaMask wallets to the site linked through the post.

No Compensation As Yet

It is not yet known how the hacker accessed the Instagram account, and Yuga Labs has yet to announce whether it will compensate those affected by the scam:

According to Yuga Labs, “At the time of the hack, two-factor authentication was enabled and security surrounding the Instagram (IG) account followed best practices.” It added: “We’ve regained control of the account, and are investigating how the hacker gained access with IG’s team.”

According to blockchain data, the hacker’s wallet, which has been identified in connection with the attack, holds 91 NFTs and is said to be worth US$2.8 million based on the floor prices of the respective collections. The attack has seen 24 Bored Apes and 30 Mutant Apes stolen.

Yet Another Attack on BAYC

The news of this latest attack comes only weeks after the BAYC Discord servers suffered a phishing scam which led its governance token to plunge by 20 percent. Another possible hack was witnessed a couple of weeks ago when a BAYC NFT worth US$350,000 was sold for just US$115. Many question whether it was an exploit or just a massive error.

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Crypto News Ethereum Metaverse NFTs

Nike Launches ‘CryptoKicks’ NFT Virtual Sneaker Collection

After flagging its move into the metaverse in December with the acquisition of digital art house RTFKT Studios, sports apparel giant Nike has debuted its Ethereum NFT sneakers, CryptoKicks.

In its teaser video released on Twitter (see above), RTFKT demonstrated how its Nike digital sneakers can be modified via collectible “Skin Vials”, which can be mixed and matched to enable a range of styles.

Nike/RTFKT CryptoKicks (physical version). Source: brainstation.io

CryptoKicks can be opened through RTFKT’s MNLTH Ethereum NFTs, which were airdropped for free to holders of RTFKT’s CloneX profile picture NFTs and other earlier RTFKT NFTs in February.

That same month, Nike sued online sneaker reseller StockX for selling unlicensed images of its NFT sneakers, claiming the US$3.8 billion company had sold around 500 Nike-branded NFTs at “inflated prices and [under] murky terms of purchase and ownership”.

Social Media Goes Mad For CryptoKicks

The launch of CryptoKicks follows a series of quests, or puzzles, collectors had to solve before RTFKT launched the website that allows holders to open the mysterious NFT vaults. As some holders have shared via social media, the MNLTH vaults contain a pair of CryptoKicks, a single Skin Vial, and a second MNLTH vault.

RTFKT will launch a quest series to unlock the MNLTH 2 vaults later this year. Each pair of CryptoKicks will also feature an “evolution path” enabling them to be progressed in various ways.

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Crypto News Cryptocurrency Law Illegal NFTs Regulation Scams

US Senator Proposes Laws to Make Rug Pulls a Crime

Under new legislation filed in the US state of New York, lawmakers intend to confirm fraudulent rug pulls as a crime along with other crypto-specific forms of duplicity.

Companion Bill Filed in Lower Chamber

According to public records, Senate Bill S8839 “establishes the offences of virtual token fraud, illegal rug pulls, private key fraud and fraudulent failure to disclose an interest in virtual tokens”. A companion bill, Assembly Bill A8820, was also filed in the New York State Legislature’s lower chamber. The bills were introduced by State Senator Kevin Thomas and Assembly member Clyde Vanel, respectively.

The legislation places particular focus on rug pulls – a term referring to the sudden exit of a developer or founding team and the resultant defrauding of investors – given how prevalent the practice is in the crypto space. The framed New York legislation proposes limits on the ability of founding teams to sell significant percentages of their token holdings within a period of five years.

The specific text of the proposed legislation reads:

Illegal rug pulls:

1. A developer, whether natural or otherwise, is guilty of illegal rug pulls when such developer develops a class of virtual token and sells more than ten percent of such tokens within five years from the date of the last sale of such tokens.

2. This section shall not apply to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) where a developer has created less than 100 NFTs that are regarded as part of the same series or class of NFTs or where such NFTs regarded as part of the same series or class are valued at less than $20,000 at the time the rug pull occurs.

Proposed New York rug pull legislation

If the legislation is approved and signed, it will take effect 30 days after passage.

Need for Legislation Parallels the Rise of Rug Pulls

Legislation such as this is becoming all the more necessary given the rising incidence of rug pulls and crypto scams. Last year Crypto News Australia reported on a Solana NFT project that was accused of a rug pull of the coin Eternal Beings. And in December, Bent Finance confirmed that its pool had been exploited for US$1.6 million in a rug pull incident.

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Crypto News Ethereum Illegal NFTs Scams

$34 Million ‘AkuDreams’ NFT Project Locked Permanently by Smart Contract Error

An error in a smart contract has led to NFT project AkuDreams locking up US$34 million worth of Ethereum. The project was hit by an exploit through its refundable Dutch auction on April 22 in which the hacker did not profit but managed to lock up the funds:

Cryptocurrency developer Foobar tweeted coding (see above) showing that “$34 million, or 11,539 ETH, is permanently locked into the AkuDreams contract … It cannot be retrieved by individual users or by the dev team.”

‘No Malice Intended’

The AkuDreams Twitter account confirmed the exploit and said: “We are locked down and consulting with some of the best on the next steps. We will mint your NFTs, and reveal them as soon as humanly possible. We will also be working to issue funds for those passholders who bid with the intention of securing a price .5 ETH below the final price.”

Refunds and Withdrawals Blocked

The auction opened at 3.5 ETH on the premise that the lowest bid would set the final price, and anyone who placed a higher bid would receive a refund. AkuDreams passholders were also promised a 0.5 ETH discount on each NFT they minted. But due to a bug in the contract, an exploiter was able to halt refunds and withdrawals from the contract, which meant that auction participants who bid above the final NFT price could not receive the ETH they were owed. As a result, refunds and withdrawals from the contract could not be passed.

AkuDreams acknowledged the issue in saying that the exploit “was not done out of malice” and that it was looking into the incident. The announcement that followed contained the admission, “To be clear, this is our fault.”

The project has promised to return funds to the community and later confirmed that the NFTs would be airdropped to bidders, and that it would honour refunds for the passholders who are owed a 0.5 ETH discount.

Exploits, Exploits, and More Exploits

The crypto space has of late been rife with exploits taking place in every sector. In October 2021, a bug in the DeFi protocol Compound saw its users mistakenly rewarded with US$80 million in COMP tokens. Qubit Finance earlier this year lost US$80 million after its protocol was hacked, making it one of the biggest exploits so far this year.

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Coinbase Ethereum NFTs

Coinbase COIN Hits All-Time Low, Down 63% Since IPO

Coinbase stock has hit an all-time low just two days after it launched its Ethereum NFT marketplace. Since the launch, shares are down more than 15 percent and the price has dropped more than 47 percent since January.

Coinbase Plummets Despite New Developments

Coinbase shares on the Nasdaq slid down to US$131.14 hours after trading on April 22. The crypto exchange announced its plans to enter the NFT space in October last year, with over 1.5 million people signing up for the waitlist, and the beta version of the marketplace kicked off on April 20.

The launch, which had been hyped for over a year, failed to reverse Coinbase’s months-long slump, with the price almost halving since January.

Further Integration Planned Despite Lukewarm Reception

While everybody can access the website at the moment, with the beta launch only a select few clients can buy and sell Ethereum-based NFTs with payments in Ether. Coinbase plans to integrate other blockchains in the future along with unique features that would allow users to engage more. For now, though, it seems that Coinbase’s NFT marketplace has failed to generate much excitement despite entering a burgeoning space populated by other marketplaces such as OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare and LooksRare.

What differentiates Coinbase’s marketplace from those of its competitors is that it emphasises communal experience, encouraging NFT artists and buyers to interact and connect with social features, much like Instagram. The platform, which has aggregated any NFTs for sale on the Ethereum blockchain across marketplaces, is still limited in terms of access and is slowly opening to its millions-long waitlist.

The downturn in prices comes at a bad time for Coinbase. The launch of its marketplace was initially planned for late 2021 and it has entered the red-hot NFT space just as it seems to be cooling down. Along with the price slump, Coinbase is also being dragged into a class action lawsuit for selling 79 “unregistered securities”.

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0x Coinbase Crypto News NFTs

0x Token (ZRX) Soars 53% Amid Coinbase NFT Partnership

The native token for the Ox crypto exchange has recorded a massive spike following its partnership with Coinbase that allows Coinbase to use Ox Labs’ NFT standard for its new social NFT marketplace.

As recently reported, the Coinbase NFT social marketplace has gone into beta and will be tested by 3 million selected users on the waitlist. For Coinbase to get the market up and running, it partnered with Ox Labs which boasts that it has the “most robust feature set of any exchange protocol”.

Coinbase Partnerships Good for Price Action

According to data from CoinMarketCap, after news broke of Coinbase’s partnership the Ox token (ZRX) rallied 53 per cent. The token was at a five-month high of US$1.17 and also traded just over $1 billion volume on the day as well. The coin has since stabilised at around the $1 region.

We’re thrilled that Coinbase is using Ox to power [its] new social marketplace for NFTs and anticipate this launch will unlock a massive wave of new users into the blockchain space.

Will Warren, co-founder and co-CEO, 0x Labs
0x/USD price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

In the past, other projects such as Mina and Propy that partnered with Coinbase also saw considerable price movement when word got out they were collaborating with the US crypto heavyweight.

What 0x Labs Brings to the Table

The Ox open standard will be the engine of the Coinbase marketplace, aiming to deliver up to 54 per cent lower gas fees to users. Additionally, Ox Labs stated in a blog post that extra features include free non-custodial listing, instant royalties for creators, collection orders and more.

Building on Ox significantly reduces the effort required by Web3 developers and NFT marketplaces to deliver a seamless multi-chain experience to their users, giving them more time to focus on their products.

0x Labs blog post

One of the big things to come out of Ox Labs is the new V4 of its protocol that allows swaps between NFTs, so that users can exchange collectibles as easily as tokens.

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Coinbase Ethereum Markets NFTs OpenSea

Coinbase Launches NFT Marketplace to Battle OpenSea Dominance

Leading US crypto exchange Coinbase has announced the imminent launch of its new NFT marketplace, with a social spin to it – like Instagram – to help connect users and creators.

The NFT marketplace is now in beta after Coinbase unveiled its plans in October last year for a “Web3 social marketplace”. It is being built on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain and reportedly “any NFT that’s for sale on the Ethereum blockchain will be searchable” on its platform.

Users who are interested in the beta and want to have a look at their collections can do it here. At launch, the exchange will allow its 43 million users to easily access NFTs through the platform. The marketplace will also be adding support for other blockchains in the near future.

Coinbase NFT marketplace beta. Source: Coinbase

For a limited time, the platform will incur zero transaction costs, except for Ethereum gas fees to process a transaction on the blockchain. The platform will also require users to use a self-custody wallet such as Metamask or the Coinbase wallet.

Social Platform to Build Engagement

The platform’s beta testers who join through the waitlist are encouraged to make use of all functions, including new social features. Having received over 8 million applications, the platform may well be in a position to compete with market leader OpenSea. This could be done by not only being an NFT marketplace, but also a platform where creators can build and engage with their communities.

According to the Coinbase announcement:

We learned that people don’t just want better tools to buy and sell NFTs – they want better ways to discover them, better ways to find the right communities, and better spaces in which they can feel connected with each other.

Sanchan Saxena, VP of product, ecosystem products, Coinbase

To create more of a community feel, the platform will add social feeds to facilitate browsing of other creators’ portfolios. In an Instagram-like approach, users will have profiles tied to their wallets so users can interact with each other. The marketplace will also incorporate a recommender based on buying history, who the user follows, and other metrics.

We’d like to make Coinbase NFT a little bit more like Instagram, as opposed to, say, an auction like eBay or something like that […] I think having people that you can follow, your favourite artists or creators, and having a feed of content that gets populated from those people you follow, could be really powerful.

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO

NFT Marketplace to Become Decentralised in the Future

At this stage, the platform will operate on Coinbase’s centralised servers, but in time it will be moved to decentralised solutions. In that event, the platform will include functions such as airdrops, minting, and token-gated communities. The platform will also be used to host drops by some of its many launch partners.

Royalties play a very important part in keeping the creator economy alive and are therefore one of the major focus points of the new marketplace: