In an effort to raise funds for the foundation’s activity, Edward Snowden sold an NFT representing “the entirety of a landmark court decision ruling the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance violated the law, with the iconic portrait of the whistleblower by Platon”. Snowden’s face is superimposed over it and his signature can also be seen in the bottom right corner.
We have a winner, internet friends. I want to extend a very special thanks to everyone who followed this over the last 24 hours, and the deepest gratitude from EVERYONE at our @FreedomofPress to those who bid on our charity event. You help us make a better world. Stay free! https://t.co/A5SJDs5Sjp
The NFT was sold to someone who goes by @pleasrdao, who purchased it for a total of 2,224.00 ETH. According to Edward Snowden, this sum exceeds the FPF’s annual budget by a sizable amount — and has exceeded it a few bids prior to it being finally sold.
The @PleasrDAO juggernaut crashes into the lead with $4,300,000. This is practically the annual budget of @FreedomOfPress, and a real monument to charity. And then immediately overtaken by @xaix2k with 2,021.1337 — $4.9M! By any measure, tonight is a landmark. https://t.co/jqVhQxXrBH
At the moment, this is the only NFT endorsed by Snowden and it is not known if any more will be released in the future.
A Brief History Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden is known worldwide for spilling the beans on the NSA’s snooping — on American citizens, as well as on people of interest worldwide — and consequently being forced to flee to Russia after being accused of violating the US 1917 Espionage Act.
A man who has been called both a hero and a traitor, Snowden stands true to his beliefs to this day, stating that “if this is treason, what they call loyalty is a crime.”
He then fled to Russia — where he was granted permanent residency in 2020 — and since 2017, he has been the president of the Freedom of Press Foundation (FPF), a non-profit organization based in San Francisco that fights for free speech.
On the weekend, WWE released six Undertaker NFTs, preserving some of the wrestler’s most memorable moments for posterity.
NFTs are one-of-a-kind tokens fast becoming one of the leading ways for artists to connect with their fans.
The NFTs sold at auction for prices between US$100 and $100,000, in partnership with crypto wallet provider Bitski.
The Undertaker NFTs sold on auction
Several Tiers of NFTs
The NFTs were sold in four tiers, with two bronze NFTs, two silver NFTs, and a gold and platinum-tier NFT each.
For the platinum tier, bidding started at $10,000 but it sold for $100,000. The buyer will also receive two front-row tickets for Wrestlemania 38 and 39, taking place in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Aside from VIP access and an all-expenses-paid stay at a hotel, the buyer will receive a personal thank-you recording from the Undertaker – real name Mark William Callaway – as well as “an original Paul Bearer urn out of the WWE Vault, used by Paul Bearer and the Undertaker, to be signed by the Undertaker, as well as a personalised WWE Championship title belt with the winner’s name engraved on the side plates”.
Nick Khan, WWE president and chief revenue officer, stated that the creation of the NFTs will help expand the wrestling phenomenon, honouring the longest winning streak of any WWE wrestler – which stands at 21-0.
WWE’s first-ever NFT collection presents an opportunity to own a digital piece of history featuring the Undertaker, one of the most iconic superstars in sports entertainment. This will also allow WWE to deepen our connection with the WWE universe during our biggest event, WrestleMania.
Nick Khan, WWE president and chief revenue officer
With the auction over, avid WWE fans will find their very own pieces of wrestling history stored safely within their Bitski wallets.
Two new NFT platforms are set to launch in Asia to provide marketplaces for digital fashion, art, music, collectables and more. The platforms, based in Singapore and Hong Kong are poised to be launched during Q3 2021.
According to an announcement from Hong Kong Digital Asset Exchange they are launching a NFT trading platform which is going to act as a “one-stop” NFT shop alongside the exchange, since there are no robust ones in Hong Kong’s current market.
HKD.com provides artists with an online platform for the artworks publishing, promotion, trading and payment, with many product categories, including digital art, encrypted collections of animation, music and movies etc. Trading platform, users can trade through public offer or bidding, and carry out token trading and exchange; while artists can also publish their own digital artworks through the trading platform.
Hopefully, the platform will not only help local artists earn more money from their talents but also develop the art market in the region,
Kelvin Yeung, founder and CEO of HKD.com
Singapore’s Luxury NFT Platform
According to a press release from ACN Newswire, Media Publishares in partnership with VIDY are creating a homage to arts and culture by fabricating a 360-degree navigable virtual environment that will showcase digital fashion, art, music and design.
By creating an NFT platform, which essentially acts as a virtual marketplace between creatives and users, it allows us to provide a unique shoppable platform coupled with content for the community in the form of education, interaction and entertainment.
Michael von Schlippe, president of Media Publishares
The platform is looking to cater to the tech savvy audience that wishes to acquire luxury items and for creators to experiment in the virtual world. The main features of the platform will allow minting, trading, and auctioning NFTs through a tokenised system.
We are confident we will create the finest platform that will boost the NFT world by allowing seamless participation from the traditional fashion, art and music communities.
Matthew Lim, founder of VIDY
More Platforms, More Participation?
Having these platforms up and running will enable various individuals to participate in the NFT economy. Not only helping artists profit directly from their work but also encouraging up-and-coming artists to practise with the virtual mediums and add to the annals of digital art.
Y.at is making unique identities through using emoji strings that can be connected to everything that’s connected to you.
“Your Yat is your @ for the whole internet”, is the slogan for Y.at, the project that aims to make personalised emoji usernames that could become your universal internet identity and much more. For example, instead of coffeequeen98 or *insert generic email here*, you could be known as 🤖👻👑.
What is a Yat you ask? It's a username created with a combination of 1 to 5 emojis (subset of the Unicode Standard). Find an example in my Twitter bio combining the sun, sand & surf emojis (☀️🏖️🌊). /1
When you own a Yat, it’s yours forever. You own that specific sequence of emojis and that is your unique identifier, since they’ll never mint another like that again.
YAT Examples
Yat Can Be Used for More Than Just Socials
Your Yat can be linked to other services like payment apps, storage locations, or you can make a Yat Link Page that has everything you want inked to you in one place – send and recieve money, chat or build a website.
One of the aims for Yats is to be used instead of long crypto addresses which can increase user experience as well easing the process complex validating and testing efforts to authenticate a crypto address.
The possibilities are endless with Yat. You can receive payments, use it on your socials, and eventually much more. Your Yat can be used as a link like this: https://y.at/🌊🔱🌴 (click it to see it!) and automatically redirect visitors to any website you want.
Y.at
How They’re Made Unique
A Yat’s Generation indicates the time period in which it was created. People on the waitlist are Gen 0 and every year generation increases with one. The other is Rhythm score, is a number between 1 and 100, determined by: length, popularity, and pattern. The higher the Rhythm Score, the more rare a Yat is, and the more in demand it may be.
Our mission is for Yats to become the best, and most expressive censorship resistant, self-directed, self sovereign identity system ever. We care deeply about privacy as a basic human right, and internet freedom.
Y.at
They are in the process of developing an oracle service so that Yats can be issued as NFTs on EVM compatible chains such as Ethereum or BSC, aiming to become fully decentralised in the near future.
Having a Yat can help privacy by not giving away any unique identifiers and having the extra bonus of an identifier that expresses you. However, this could cause a problem with unwanted sites or portals that would be avoided by checking a more traditional URL.
Worldwide fast-food company McDonald’s is now entering the NFT frenzy. A recent report by la Réclame informed McDonald’s France is planning to issue a limited series of digital artworks as NFTs.
The Macca’s digital art will represent a box of Chicken McNuggets, the famous Big Mac, sundae and fries. McDonald’s France intends to issue five NFTs artwork for each item, 20 in total.
Rather than playing by the norm, where companies and individual artists create and sell NFT contents themselves, McDonald’s France wants to award the artworks to its social media followers. Hence, it is hosting a contest for its followers from April 9 to April 13, wherein the winners will be awarded the first two NFT videos shared on Instagram. It will host another contest from April 14 to April 18 for the last two NFTs shared on Twitter.
— McDonald's France (@McDonaldsFrance) April 6, 2021
The winners can decide whether to hold or sell the content, according to the statement by Macca’s.
We offer them in full, without placing any monetary value and with no royalty on them. […] We are giving away goodies in NFT in the same way that we could have created a limited series of 20 copies. The winner will be free to do with it whatever he wants. So if a person wants to sell it, it is possible, but it will not be our doing.
We’re giving away an NFT each week for a few weeks to reward our readers, and help them participate in the crypto space and learn about non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
This weeks giveaway is this Cute Baby Unicorn! You can view the item on the NFT marketplace OpenSea.
This item is a Sandbox NFT which means it can be used in The Sandbox Game as an avatar. You could buy some virtual land and take your unicorn for a walk! … or just let it roam free.
What are NFTs?
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are virtual tokens minted on the blockchain for digital scarcity, security, and authenticity. They are unique, indivisible, and non-interchangeable – allowing true digital ownership of in-game assets.
About The Sandbox Metaverse Game
The Sandbox metaverse is split into 166,464 LANDS, creative sandbox areas owned by you, the players. You can create and monetize online games on your land or rent it to someone else to publish their own creation. Each piece of LAND has a pre-defined default terrain, but you can modify this as you build your own content.
The giveaway has ended.The winner was @leahcrypto
Congratulations @lechcrypto you have won the Unicorn NFT! We will send you a private DM with details. You have 5 days to collect the reward, or it goes to next person.
Sound Ventures, a venture capital fund, is launching a “Shark Tank”-style program to audition NFT project ideas, offering $1 million for the winner.
The judging panel comprises Aston Kutcher and Guy Oseary, both co-founders of Sound Ventures, billionaire Mark Cuban, and Musicians like Snoop Dogg and 3LAU.
Like Shark Tank, anyone with an NFT idea, whether a service or a product, can pitch the project to a judging panel. The program will be held virtually on April 21. Aspirants will have time to submit their applications until April 12.
Judging Panel of Sound Ventures
According to the announcement, amounts and terms will vary by company, and not every ideal will receive an investment. The event is private, and only applicants will be participating in it.
Two other essential judges are Whale Shark, a 38-year-old NFT collector who recently tokenized his vault containing valuable digital collectibles, and Vignesh Sundaresan, known as MetaKovan, the anonymous buyer of Beeple’s $69 million NFT sold at Christie’s.
NFT Taking the Mainstream by Storm
The NFT movement has expanded and now calling the attention of wealthy investors, influencers, billionaires musicians, such as Mark Cuban, Kings of Leon, Snoop Dogg, and many others.
NFL (National Football League) stars are also joining the NFT space. The seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady recently announced launching an NFT platform called Autograph, onboarding advisors from Apple, DraftKings, and Spotify.
What are NFTs and Why They Have Become so Popular?
As explained in our guide, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are different from regular crypto-assets as they can only be used to represent ownership of unique items that can be traded on Ethereum marketplaces. NFTs cannot be exchanged with one another because each item is a unique digital asset.
Decentraland, an NFT-powered virtual world and videogame, has become an attractive digital environment for crypto-enthusiast where they can own parcels of LAND, as well as buying, selling, and auctioning NFT collectibles with the community. The protocol also announced a layer-two bridge for MANA token transfers, enabling users to move MANA tokens to Polygon and back.
As we all know, the world of cryptocurrency moves at an alarming rate, with new coins and asset classes constantly going in and out of fashion. One of the hottest crypto trends to have taken the market by storm in early 2021 is Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs for short.
But what are NFTs all about? Why are they considered so important? And why has this new asset class taken off?
From super-rare CryptoKitties (don’t worry – we’ll explain) to famous tweets selling for millions of dollars, this guide will take a detailed look into NFTs and bring you up to speed as quickly as possible.
What is a NFT?
A Non-Fungible Token is a unique digital asset which cannot be subdivided in smaller parts, which makes it different from cryptocurrencies. Although NFTs can be stored on a secure database, they are most commonly developed to leverage the Ethereum blockchain because of its benefits, so this guide is focused on that case.
The main point of NFTs is that they cannot be exchanged with one another because each item is a unique, one-of-a-kind digital asset – hence the term ‘non-fungible’. To explain this property, imagine NFTs as airline tickets: each ticket has specific information like passenger details, flight’s date and destination. These unique sets of data make it impossible for flight tickets to be used as if they were currency.
Physical
Digital
Fungible
Money, gold, casino chips
Loyalty points, Bitcoin, Ethereum
Non-Fungible
Artworks, tickets to an event, houses
Trademarks, videogame skins, CryptoKitties
Applications of NFTs can vary greatly, from sporting collectables to “virtual real estate”. However, what has recently put NFTs under the spotlight globally is digital art, as it fits particularly well to NFT’s intrinsic features. Just like an original piece of physical art, all NFTs are unique by design. Contrary to regular pieces of artwork, which can be copied or forged to be passed off as original, NFTs are practically fraud-proof as they can be instantly verified via the blockchain. The ownership the token can be verified, tracked and transferred like other blockchain transactions, opening the possibility for trading.
What are some important NFT characteristics?
After an introduction to NFTs and how they work, let’s look a little closer at some of their key characteristics.
Unique – each token has a unique set of properties stored in its meta data.
Verifiable – their rarity can be verified on the blockchain, making them fraud proof.
Indivisible – they cannot be split into smaller denominations so it’s impossible to transfer or buy a fraction of a NFT.
Guaranteed ownership of the asset – when purchased, the buyer holds the right to claim ownership of that unique token but not the rights to its distribution.
Easily transferable – NFTs have been standardised on public blockchains, making transfers across different digital ecosystems quick and simple.
Indestructible – as data is stored on the blockchain via smart contracts, NFTs cannot be removed or destroyed.
What are some different types of NFTs?
Sales for the booming crypto ‘niche’ are estimated to be well over a billion dollars, with over $250 million of NFT traded last year alone, but what are some examples of digital tokens that are hot at the moment?
Here is where CryptoKitties come into play as mentioned earlier. These cute, collectible digi-kittens were the first token to really put NFTs on the map back in 2017. Since then over $42 million have been spent acquiring different CryptoKitties according to Non Fungible, with one digital cat being purchased for $170,000.
Despite CryptoKitties being the trailblazers of the NFT world, it is argued that the first NFT was developed in around 2013 with Colored Coins. To emphasise how far things have come since then, earlier this month, international auction house Christie’s sold a JPG file by famous digital artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, named “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for US$69.3m.
The concept of art is somewhat subjective and digital art is no exception, as it seems that there are no real boundaries restraining where this industry will go next. For instance, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is currently selling his first ever tweet that read: “just setting up my twittr” for an estimated US$2.5m.
Musicians are also getting in on the act too, with the band Kings of Leon releasing their new album, When You See Yourself, as a NFT. Exclusive artwork, limited edition vinyl access and also the potential to win lifetime front-row tickets was included in the $50 NFT album package which was on sale for just two weeks.
Where can I buy NFTs?
Having understood what NFTs are and what they are used for, when it comes to buying them there are a few options to consider.
There are many NFT marketplaces such as Crypto.com NFT Marketplace, often dedicated to specific categories of tokens. For example, if you were interested in buying the Kings of Leon NFT album mentioned previously, most music-related tokens can be found on YellowHeart. OpenSea is a very popular marketplace that can be used for purchasing all sorts of collectibles and gaming items. Sought-after NBA highlight reels are available at NBA Top Shot, where US$230m has already been spent for “Top NBA moments”. Other digital goods marketplaces include Decentraland, Nifty Gateway, Rarible and SuperRare.
Purchasing NFTs, for example a piece of digital art, is quite straightforward in general. You only need a digital wallet that is compatible with the marketplace you are purchasing from. Fund your wallet with the supported currency options and you are pretty much ready to go ahead. Remember to check for specific instructions as they may differ from marketplace to marketplace.
Celebrities are gradually picking interest in Bitcoin (BTC) and the emerging digital currency market in general.
During an interview with Vanity Fair, a famous American rapper, Snoop Dogg, formally known as Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., endorsed BTC, adding that he believes in its technology. He also disclosed his interest in the booming non-fungible token (NFT) market as he prepares to issue one on the Crypto.com NFT platform.
Bitcoin is “here to stay”
Snoop Dogg said he believes in Bitcoin “one hundred” percent. According to him, the coronavirus pandemic helped accelerate more interest in the cryptocurrency, and it wasn’t a fad.
I believe in it. I believe in the technology and I believe in the global connection it creates. I’m not too caught up in the value of the coin, because I’ve been around long enough to see things go up and go down, and I know it’s here to stay.
Snoop Dogg
Concerning NFTs, the US rapper is also a big supporter who believes that such technology is changing how artists can connect with their fans globally.
I am excited about it, ya dig? I’m happy to participate in the movement. I’m definitely gonna bring more attention to the game. Cut me in, or cut it out.
Snoop Dogg
Snoop Dogg’s NFT launch
The rapper also revealed in the interview that his NFTs would launch on the Crypto.com platform. The name? A Journey with the Dogg. The contents include an original track called “NFT.”
Recently, Crypto News Australia reported that Crypto.com named Snoop Dogg, Aston Martin Cognizant Formula OneTM, Axel Mansoor, and a few other celebrities as official launch partners of its NFT marketplace. For a start, Crypto.com said the platform would mostly feature exclusive NFT contents from celebrities in diverse industries, including music and sports.
Enjin, the largest social gaming website, plans to venture into the non-fungible token (NFT) market. Recently, the platform was able to raise nearly US$19 million from prominent crypto venture companies to further the development of its dedicated NFT blockchain on Polkadot.
Per the announcement, the company precisely raised US$18.9 million through the private sale of EFI, the native cryptocurrency of the planned NFT blockchain dubbed Efinity. The fundraising round was led by the venture arm of Crypto.com, DFG Group, and Hashed.
Other prominent crypto companies like HashKey Capital, Blockchain.com Venture, BlockArk, Arrington XRP Capital, etc., participated in the token’s private sale.
The capital raised will be used to develop Efinity and also support the blockchain’s parachain.
We are strong believers in the potential of NFTs and are confident the Enjin team will play a pivotal role in developing the infrastructure required to meet that potential.
Bobby Bao, Head of Corporate Development & Capital of Crypto.com
Enjin is Building a Cross-chain NFT Highway
Through the Polkadot-based Efinity, the team at Enjin intends to establish a blockchain network that can support multiple NFTs from several blockchains, including Ethereum.
Digital assets should exist in a metaverse of blockchains. Opening up liquidity across multiple blockchains and use-cases will connect a broad ecosystem of creators, buyers, and sellers.
Witek Radomski, CTO at Enjin
Enjin chose Polkadot over Ethereum for Efinity due to the scalability and other properties of the blockchain. Efinity is expected to process between 700-1,000 transactions per second (TPS).
The development of Efinity comes amid the growing interest in the NFT market. Over the past months, many artists, musicians, and celebrities have issued and sold digital content as NFTs, some of which sold millions of dollars. In March 2021 alone, over US$200 million digital contents were traded as NFTs.
