Category: Tokens

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Crypto News Metaverse Tokens

MANA Soars as Barbados Establishes World’s First Embassy in Decentraland Metaverse

The Caribbean island of Barbados is set to become the first sovereign nation to have a digital embassy in the metaverse, signing an agreement with popular blockchain-based virtual reality giant, Decentraland.

Decentraland’s MANA token is up more than 15 percent in the past week and over 280 percent over the past month. The pump has followed the announcement of recent news such as HashKey opening its first virtual headquarters in Decentraland and Facebook’s rebranding to Meta in late October.

Buzz and interest around the metaverse has seen other metaverse-based token prices increase, including Axie Infinitie’s AXS, The Sandbox’s SAND, as well as a pump for Enjin’s virtual gaming crypto token ENJ, which is up over 67 percent in the past month.

How the Embassy Will Work

Barbados will become the first country to legally declare digital real estate sovereign land with the establishment of its metaverse embassy, offering digital land for sale within the metaverse, along with e-visas and avatar teleporting services. The opening of the embassy is scheduled for January 22, 2022.

H.E. Gabriel Abed, Barbados’ ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, says the country has plans to “expand aggressively” to build infrastructure and purchase digital land in a variety of virtual worlds. According to a press release from CoinDesk, the Barbadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade is also signing deals with other metaverse platforms, including Somnium Space and SuperWorld.

This all adds to the overall bullish sentiment of gaming-based crypto tokens and metaverse platforms built on the blockchain.

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DeFi Economics Hackers Tokens

CREAM DeFi Token Falls 43% Amid News Hack Compensation Will Increase Supply

When Decentralised Finance (DeFi) lending protocol Cream Finance suffered a devastating US$130 million attack two weeks ago, the team decided to compensate users for their losses in CREAM by pushing up the total supply and in return pulling down the price.

Following the hack, the Cream team moved to redistribute 1,453,415 coins from its treasury to the impacted users. In September, Cream also paid back its users for a different attack that cost the protocol US$19 million.

In terms of changes in security, Cream has tightened its token listing strategy to no longer include long-tail assets or tokens that can be wrapped/unwrapped.

Collateral Cap limits are deployed across all markets to increase security, while additional monitoring and alerting solutions are undergoing assessment and implementation.

CREAM Finance

Price Drops as Compensation Inflates Token Supply

While Cream has 9 million coins in its total supply, according to CoinMarketCap only 150,000 of those are in circulation. A rapid increase in supply was bound to have an effect on demand, and therefore the price per coin.

CREAM price chart. Source: CoinGecko

The price of the coin had fallen from around US$88 to as low as $49.80 at the time of writing – a 43 per cent drop, according to CoinGecko. Before the October 27 exploit, Cream was trading above $152, suffering a 66 per cent drop in price since then. This is now the second significant drop in price the protocol has seen in a short span of time, and the mood among users is dark:

Individuals hit by the attack seem to have divided into two camps: some of those seeking recourse also seek to undermine the effort to compensate Cream’s users, while others realise the risk of DeFi and that it’s their responsibility to do their own research and understand the risks associated with the nascent technology.

Most of the time victims of such attacks never see anything in terms of compensation, which makes Cream quite the gift-giver, having paid out its users twice after attacks.

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Crypto News DeFi Tokens

UMA DeFi Token Continues to Soar Following Protocol Launch, Up 63% in a Week

UMA, the native token of Universal Market Access, skyrocketed more than 60 percent over the past three days after the launch of Across Protocol, a bridge from layer 1 to layer 2 on the UMA mainnet. 

Across Protocol is Live

The UMA token’s performance was average at the beginning of the last week but that changed quickly after the announcement of the Across Protocol, which will provide a secure and fast bridge for DeFi users, allowing them to bridge USDC, ETH and UMA from Arbitrum back to the Ethereum mainnet. 

The bridging function works by offering incentives for relayers to offer short-term loans to users on L1, which are repaid after two hours from a liquidity pool on L1. This pool is refilled when the funds arrive from L2 transactions. These transactions are insured by UMA’s Optimistic Oracle.

Across Protocol Medium post

The token has been rallying rapidly since then, up 63 percent to a market cap of US$1.05 billion in the past seven days. Data from Messari shows the token has achieved 100.52 percent in YTD gains, now trading at a range of US$16.50 in most exchanges.

UMA was created in December 2018 as a protocol designed to allow users to create synthetic assets on the Ethereum blockchain. UMA started its bullish rally on December 23, 2020, when the currency broke above the US$9.35 mark, trending upward along with many other altcoins.

Another token that has seen tremendous trading volume is SCRT, the privacy token of Secret Network, a DeFi protocol that aims to be a privacy-centric platform for the community.

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Crypto News Tokens

Decentralised Video Streaming Token Livepeer Pumps 150% Amid Flurry of Announcements

Livepeer, the Ethereum-based altcoin, has made considerable gains in the past few days, breaking the top 100 crypto assets. This comes after a flurry of announcements made by the project after reaching some of its major anticipated milestones.

Tokens Surge as Market Pushes New Heights

As bitcoin (BTC) pushes new all-time highs, the crypto industry at large has also recently broken its high of US$3 trillion market capitalisation, showing that the market is getting an increasing amount of attention.

Decentralised video streaming project Livepeer (LPT), an altcoin backed by Coinbase Ventures and Digital Currency Group, soared to a new all-time yesterday of US$100.99, rallying more than 140 percent within a 24-hour period. The price of LPT is currently sitting around US$70, and the altcoin is now the 98th-largest crypto by market cap.

Livepeer price chart. Source: CoinGecko

Livepeer has been busy brewing up a storm of announcements throughout October, which turned out to be a month of firsts for the project. It made its first acquisition, buying MistServer, a media server that offers broadcasters an alternative to high-cost cloud providers. It commissioned its first NFT, and logged a first week above 3.6 million minutes. The momentum carried through to NFT.NYC last week, where Livepeer co-hosted COLLIDE, the first-ever concert with live NFT minting:

Livepeer’s mission is to build the world’s open video infrastructure … Together, Livepeer and MistServer provide a disruptive infrastructure that offers a high-quality, low-cost alternative to the traditional proprietary vendors running on expensive big tech cloud platforms.

Livepeer announcement

Hype and Excited Markets

In a market as bullish as crypto, certain announcements can make coin prices soar through the roof. With loads of exposure across social networks, news travels fast and if the market sees it as a buying opportunity, it could mean a possible parabolic spike in a coin’s price. For example, when Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta, many metaverse tokens saw considerable gains, including SAND token, which pumped 158 percent during last week.

Popular meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE) also made headlines again last month when the cryptocurrency recorded an up to 40 percent increase in value, following an announcement that Chainalysis would start providing insights on crypto.

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Crypto Art Crypto News NFTs Tokens

18,666 Simpsons NFTs Sell Out in Minutes in Issue-Ridden Drop

The first-ever official non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for hit animated TV series The Simpsons dropped November 7 on VeVe, but not without some glitches.

As part of its Golden Moments collection, Disney dropped its first collection of NFTs, The Simpsons. The collection will feature some of the most beloved characters from the franchise featured on Disney+, with the entire collection minted in gold.

About The Simpsons NFT Range

Sold via NFT marketplace ECOMI, the collection launched via blind boxes. This essentially means that buyers did not know which collectible they would receive until after they were purchased.

The two available for purchase were Homer and Bart (“common” collectibles, of which there were 12,333 editions) and Bart’s skateboard (“rare” collectibles, of which there were only 6,333 editions). Each blind box cost US$60.

Problems on the Platform

When users logged on to get in on the drop, however, they were met with endless glitches. According to a tweet by VeVe, “one of our third-party providers [was] not scaled properly at drop time, which caused the performance issues”, leaving many unable to buy NFTs.

Many users took to Twitter to vent their frustrations:

Homer Makes History

With the Homer and Bart collectible sold as “common” and Bart’s skateboard sold as “rare”, questions have been raised about this classification. Buyers are wondering why a mere skateboard, instead of significant characters such as Homer and Bart, is classified as a “rare” collectible.

In any case, buyers are urged to HODL to this piece of history.

Added Utility for Simpsons NFT Range

As with other NFT collectibles, buyers bought in just for the sake of collecting them. With The Simpsons NFT range, buyers who purchase NFTs from the Simpsons Golden Moments range will also receive a three-month subscription to Disney+.

This is similar to what actor/producer Mila Kunis is doing for the Stoner Cats series. Fans of Stoner Cats have to mint an NFT to get access to the first five-minute episode, but that NFT will also function as a lifetime pass for all subsequent Stoner Cats episodes.

Hollywood Gets Into the NFT Game

Amid the NFT boom, Hollywood also has skin in the game. Just last week, writer-director Quentin Tarantino announced he would release seven never-before-seen scenes from his cult classic film Pulp Fiction as NFTs. Earlier this week, Warner Bros, owners of popular film franchise The Matrix, also announced it would release a series of NFTs for just US$50 each from November 30, ahead of a Matrix reboot, The Matrix Resurrections, due for cinema release on January 1.

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Crypto News Crypto Wallets Solana Tokens

BAT Token Surges 30%+ After Solana Partnership Announced for DApp Support

Breakpoint 2021 was the first conference organised by the Solana Foundation, held in Lisbon, Portugal, from November 7-10. Featuring an all-star guest speaker lineup of coders, co-founders and CEOs in the business, the event brought together industry leaders, builders and innovators from around the globe.

Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave, announced on stage with Solana CEO and founder Anatoly Yakovenko that Brave will be partnering with Solana to integrate it into the browser and make it the default for DApp support.

Solana Default For Brave Browsers

Together, the companies will bring best-in-class crypto wallet features for the Solana blockchain into Brave’s Web3 desktop and mobile browsers, to be rolled out in the first half of 2022. 

We’re gonna make it so any dApp that is Solana enabled … we will make it use Solana by default. So dApp builders who built for Solana as well as other chains, in Brave it’s going to use Solana and that’s going to just help, I think, bring dApps over to Solana.

Brendan Eich, CEO, Brave

After the presentation and news of Brave announcing its Solana partnership, the price of Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) pumped up from US$1.00 to reach US$1.36 on November 9.

Source: CoinGecko

The news was tweeted by both companies announcing the new coming features:

Watch the full presentation at Breakpoint 2021 on YouTube below.

In September, Crypto News Australia reported Brave’s in-browser crypto swaps with 20 percent BAT rebates. Click to read and learn more about the best browser for crypto enthusiasts. Also, Brave has built its own in-app Decentralised Exchange Aggregator (DEX), which enables users to swap tokens using the Brave browser.

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Coinbase Crypto Exchange Crypto News Crypto.com Tokens

CRO Token Rallies 30% Amid Coinbase Listing

Crypto.com’s CRO token is now available on the Coinbase.com exchange and the value of the asset has increased as a result, hitting a new all-time high of almost US$0.40. On November 4, after listing on Coinbase, it pumped to US$0.39 within two days after months of tracking sideways under US$0.20.

CRO is ranked the 28th-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of almost US$9 billion. Boasting more than 10 million global users, Crypto.com is among the world’s five biggest centralised exchanges and has been growing fast.

Crypto.com’s new advertising campaign includes celebrity partnerships with Matt Damon’s Water.org, and team sponsorships for UFC, Formula 1 and French football powerhouse Paris Saint-Germain, which aims to establish the brand in front of a wider mainstream audience and bring crypto to the masses.

Aggressive Marketing Campaign

This classy high-budget commercial (see below), featuring A-list actor Damon, is an example of the strong video marketing the brand is using as part of its promotional campaign to aggressively grow Crypto.com’s presence and establish the exchange as a top player in the cryptocurrency marketplace.

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Crypto News DeFi Dogecoin Tokens

SHIB Recovers 50% in 24h after Massive Sell-off Last Week

SHIB, the Dogecoin-inspired Shiba Inu memecoin, experienced tumultuous price corrections last week, plunging more than -10 percent on Thursday, only to bounce back with a 50 percent rise over the weekend. 

SHIB Rallies 50% in 24 Hours

The price of SHIB went from its ATH last week of 0.00008616 to 0.0000583 at press time, a -30 percent price drop.

SHIB/USD chart. Source: Messari

SHIB currently has a market cap of US$32.02 billion, with a $2.88 billion 24hr trading volume, as per data from Messari.

The token dropped on November 4 amid a massive sell-off from one whale that triggered a price drop of 22 percent, its biggest since September 10 when it plunged over 85 percent.

The whale had around 40 trillion SHIB, worth roughly US$2.8 billion at the time. Many were wondering where the tokens would end up. At the time of writing, the token holder had relocated the funds to three wallets, where they remain.

SHIB Takes the Lead

The Shiba Inu memecoin is one of the riskiest tokens in the market due to its extreme volatility. It is also one with the biggest returns. During Q3, for example, SHIB had a three-month ROI of 704 percent.

The coin is famous for being the rival of Elon Musk’s beloved Dogecoin. Musk tweeted last month that he doesn’t hold any SHIB, which in itself caused the price to drop 20 percent. However, it seems the SHIB army doesn’t care one way or the other for Musk’s opinions and plans to move on despite his claims.

One of the biggest price boosts for SHIB came after the October auction of Shiboshis, a collection of NFTs inspired by the memecoin. They sold in just over 35 minutes, each piece snapped up for between US$350 and US$1050.

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Crypto News Gaming Tokens

Axie Infinity’s SLP Token Surges 74% Amid Launch of Ronin DEX

Katana, the decentralised exchange (DEX) for Ronin – Axie Infinity’s sidechain for Ethereum that allows users to easily swap various assets within the Axie Infinity ecosystem – is now live and $SLP has enjoyed a price pump as a result.

Ronin Facilitates Token Exchanges on the Sidechain

The launch of the Ronin DEX will make it easier for Axie Infinity players to swap tokens directly on the sidechain itself, without players having to bridge tokens to Ethereum, thus reducing transaction fees.

Axie gamers can now quickly and easily swap between AXS, SLP, USDC and WETH on Ronin’s DEX Katana.

The Axie Infinity SLP token has pumped 74 percent since Katana’s launch, reaching almost US$0.13 per token, according to CoinGecko.

Axie Infinity has been leading the P2E (Play-to-Earn) blockchain gaming sector. As Crypto News Australia reported last month, ASX, Axie’s native token, surged over 80 percent in just 30 days.

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Australia Crypto News Cryptocurrencies Cryptocurrency Law Regulation Superannuation Tokens

ASIC Shuts Down Gold Coast Crypto Investment Scheme ‘A One Multi’, $2.4 Million in Crypto Seized

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has obtained Federal Court orders to shut down unlicensed Gold Coast financial services business A One Multi for suspected unlawful activity.

Interim orders and injunctions have been filed by ASIC against the company and its directors, Aryn Hala and Heidi Walters, to protect investors.

Self-Managed Super Funds Misappropriated

It’s alleged that Hala misled investors by convincing them to loan their superannuation funds to A One Multi and receive annual returns of over 20 percent.

Between January 1, 2019, and June 30, 2021, more than 60 self-managed super fund investors deposited approximately A$25 million into A One Multi’s accounts. ASIC alleges Hala used more than A$5.7 million of those funds for his and partner Walters’ personal benefit, including acquiring real estate and luxury vehicles in their names, and that a further A$2.4 million was transferred from A One Multi to buy crypto-assets.

On October 21, the Federal Court in Queensland made the following orders to protect investors:

  • that A One Multi be placed in receivership;
  • that asset preservation orders be issued against Hala, Walters and A One Multi;
  • that Hala transfer crypto-assets in his name to the receivers;
  • that orders be issued requiring the disclosure of information to ASIC against Hala, Walters and A One Multi, including in relation to the crypto-asset holdings; and
  • that travel restraint orders be issued against Hala and Walters.

The first tranche of crypto-assets held in Hala’s name was transferred to the receivers on October 25, and the court has since ordered the defendants to attend an ASIC office to facilitate the transfer of remaining crypto-assets.

Busy Week for ASIC in Queensland

While the A One Multi case is ongoing, it follows action taken by ASIC against Gold Coast timeshare business Ultiqa earlier this week. It also imposed a three-year ban on Queensland investment adviser Keith Robert McDermott for similarly failing to provide advice in clients’ best interests.

In what was clearly a busy week for crypto-related financial activities in Queensland, an A$100 million class-action lawsuit was filed against the Gold Coast-based issuers of controversial token Qoin.

As Crypto News Australia also reported in July, ASIC’s then-incoming new chairman Joe Longo warned that crypto trading in Australia was becoming “a significant area of concern”. Just a month later, ASIC issued further warnings to Australian investors about using unlicensed crypto companies.

Last month, ASIC began monitoring social media and messaging platforms as an early warning against pump-and-dump schemes.