A DAO set up to fund Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s legal defense has received 14,241 ETH in donations in just four days.
DAO to bid on Assange’s one-of-a-kind NFT
Among those who contributed were Vitalik Buterin and Edward Snowden. AssangeDAO intends to utilize their funds to bid on a 1/1 NFT called Censored, which Julian Assange will release soon in partnership with digital artist Pak.
There is also an open NFT collection included in the release. The revenues from the sale of the NFT will be used to fund Assange’s legal defense. According to AssangeDAO, the Wikileaks founder risks 175 years in prison for “sharing truthful information.” He is accused of collecting and distributing national security material and conspiracy to perform computer intrusions.
If the DAO does not win the auction, contributors can choose whether to receive a refund or continue to support the DAO. Nonetheless, AssangeDAO promotes competitive bidders on their website:
We will be happy if we lose the auction since we know we have still succeeded in raising money for this cause.
AssangeDAO follows the footsteps of ConstitutionDAO
AssangeDAO debuted on the DeFi platform Juicebox, where it has since surpassed ConstitutionDAO, which debuted in November 2021. After earning over $40 million USD, ConstitutionDAO attempted to purchase one of the last remaining copies of the United States Constitution but fell short of their target.
AssangeDAO was also influenced by the FreeRossDAO, which raised 1,553 ETH in favor of SilkRoad creator Ross Ulbricht. The DAO paid 1,446 ETH for Ulbricht’s complete NFT collection.
Fans of the Bored Ape Yacht Club should be aware of some unpleasant news. According to a heated conversation on LinkedIn, the NFT collection has no upper limit. A contract function provides an endless supply of 30 additional Apes in one move.
The conversation drew the attention of industry professionals, including Chainfrog CEO and founder Keir Finlow-Bates, who validated the accusation.
“Adding new tokens to the contract’s list would result in thirty bored apes with no metadata and no corresponding photos to see on NFT platforms like OpenSea.” Because all of the data is stored on the IPFS.
Except that a new IPFS folder containing the original 10000 ape metadata and picture files, as well as 30 more, could be pinned in the IPFS, and the setURI() function could be used to point to that new folder,” he explains.
BAYC is one of the most well-known NFT compilations. The project’s popularity has risen as celebrities rush to join the pricey trend in recent months. The owner of the BAYC contract, who is still active, can mint additional Apes and profit from the project’s expansion.
This, however, will be a source of anxiety for holders, as the value of an NFT collection is mainly determined by its scarcity. This is not the first time the topic has come up on social media. Earlier in 2021, a Twitter user expressed the same skepticism.
i really would like to get one but i'm afraid i will get rugged by the owner who can mint infinitely more (30 at a time) with the reserveApes() function. have you looked into the contract? maybe i'm not getting something. would appreciate an answer/comment
A Utah-based software engineer, Ethan Hunsaker, sheds light on a similar issue in Doodles’ contract.
It will be fascinating to observe how the projects resolve the’error.’ Or whether they will do it at all.
“Definitely appears to be a legitimate issue to me, and while they could solve it (by setting the owner address to the burn wallet), the fact that they haven’t makes me think it’s an error they’re hoping goes unnoticed,” writes Dan T, the post’s author.
Mr. Pushkin Agha, CEO of Vertex Event, who has been the driving force behind several successful events in Dubai for many years, has revealed the exact dates and site of the 4th Blockchain Dubai Summit.
This three-day Blockchain Summit & NOORNFT & ART SHOW will be hosted at the Grand Hyatt Dubai on February 15th, 16th, and 17th, 2022.
This event brings together senior executives to examine the influence of blockchain and related technologies on financial services. The Blockchain Summit 2022 brings together a carefully curated agenda of industry leaders to discuss and accelerate the development of Blockchain Technologies, DeFi, NTF, GameFi, and Metaverse.
“We are expecting projects, speakers, notable guests, sponsors, and tourists from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, China, and the United States,” he told the reporters. This is owing to the prominence of Dubai in the Crypto Industry and the reputation that Blockchain Dubai has gained over the years. We just conducted the India-UAE Partnership Summit & Business Leadership Awards on November 15th, 2021, under the kind patronage of Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, with the endorsement and support of Cashaa.
Vertex Events held three Blockchain events in 2020, with prominent International Blockchain experts and projects/sponsors such as TDeFi, Lukka, Lbank, and Cashaa, among others, and built a unique network and global notoriety in the crypto sector.
Pushkin Agha’s enthusiasm for bringing people together and developing communities drove him to get into events and establish Vertex Events in Dubai. Over the course of his 20-year career in the Middle East, he has arranged hundreds of events.
He went on to say of the current series of Blockchain Events, “It’s the need of the hour, and Dubai is a natural choice for many blockchain whales and projects.” With no income or corporate tax, cutting-edge infrastructure, and crypto-friendly legislation, Dubai will undoubtedly emerge as the world’s crypto capital. Vertex wishes to contribute to the realization of that vision.”
Majestic Coin, a leading platform developed by Solomon Mwamba in the United States, is the event’s primary sponsor.
The event’s highlight is the NoorNFT and Art Show, a collaboration between HiiZone FZ LLC UAE and Arthur J Goldman UK. It is being developed as an Augmented Marketplace for NFT minting, selling, and resale high-value art investments on the powerful Cardano Blockchain. It will initially feature ArtNoor’s NFTs and Physical Assets. Following the selection, minting, and curation processes, more NFTs of many other notable artists will be added in the following months.
Mr. Pushkin Agha hinted at more events in the Middle East in 2022, saying, “We have aspirations and large plans but like to take one event at a time.” This gives us the motivation to make the current one a huge success. InshAllah, we’ll reveal the next one soon after this one.”
Dubai Blockchain Agenda
Press Conference at EXPO 2020 Dubai on February 15th –
Summit will be held on February 16th and 17th at the Grand Hyatt Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
NOORNFT + ART SHOW & GALA DINNER @ Grand Hyatt on February 16th
It was once easy for Bitcoin miners to mine in the comfort of their homes. You only needed to get your hands on a couple of gaming computers, and you’d be able to mine a significant number of BTC. However, nowadays, mining Bitcoin seems like a pipe dream, despite the rare instances wherein a miner recently mined a BTC block solo.
The Bitcoin network has gotten so massive these days that mining operations involve warehouses full of powerful machines, and these groups compete with each other to earn the block rewards. However, there are still some ways you can make a profit from being a home miner. This article will discuss the different tools you can use to make it possible to mine crypto and earn from it.
Can You Make a Profit Out of Home Mining?
Bitcoin was the first-ever globally accessible crypto in the entire world to popularize the process of mining. Crypto mining is when you use computational power to produce a winning code (a.k.a a hash). Mining is a competition because you have to generate the code before anyone else does. The first miner to produce the code gets chosen to add a brand-new block to the blockchain.
As a reward, successful miners are offered newly-minted crypto and any fees that come with the transactions they include in the newly-added block. This type of validation system in a blockchain is called “Proof-of-Work” (PoW).
When mining crypto, there are a few liabilities you need to be mindful of, such as the coin’s market price maintenance fees, electricity costs, equipment costs, and how long it will survive against increasingly powerful miners. Your machine may be powerful now, but computer companies constantly release more powerful machines. Sooner or later, your equipment will become obsolete.
Profitability calculators also come in handy when crypto mining, as it helps you decide whether the operation will be futile or if you’ll earn profit. Here’s an example to give you a better understanding: let’s say that you don’t own a hydroelectric dam, nor are you near one. Instead, you’re relying on the US power grid’s average residential rate, which is $0.1411 per kilowatt-hour.
If you’re mining BTC with one of the newer graphics cards from Nvidia, like the RTX 3080, you could produce approximately $139 worth of Bitcoin in a month, as per Nicehash. However, as of January 2022, the price of the RTX 3080 is $1,400.
On the other hand, if you’re using the AntMiner S19 Pro, Nicehash says you could earn a daily profit of $17.79. However, buying one S19 Pro miner will already cost you $10,000, and it’s not good for anything else aside from mining BTC. Not only that, but electricity costs alone could eat up nearly half of your total revenue if you use this purpose-built miner.
Since Bitcoin’s price is constantly changing, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get your money back in 10 months with an RTX 3080 or 25 months with the S19 Pro. It’s challenging now that Bitcoin has been experiencing a constant downtrend.
Not only that, but Bitcoin’s network difficulty is also unstable. Network difficulty determines the difficulty level of mining Bitcoin in computational terms. The asset’s network difficulty nosedived by 28% on July 2021, when China had an intense crackdown on crypto trading and mining. In other words, it was easier for miners to discover new blocks. However, this moment was only short-lived, as the network difficulty quickly returned to normal.
Crypto mining benefits from scale, which is why home miners typically receive less profit than, say, a professional mining company. To cover the costs of crypto mining, professional mining companies typically flit between finding cheap electricity, making broker deals with local power grids, or somehow producing electricity themselves. Not only that, these companies tend to throw away outdated mining equipment at an astounding rate.
Which Coins Should You Mine at Home to Make a Profit?
Bitcoin may be out of the question, but there are still many crypto projects out there you can mine at home. However, there are so many options that it can be challenging to compare them accurately.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of truisms worth keeping in mind. For instance, mining BTC than ETH is generally more efficient with computer chips than graphics cards. This is because Ethereum favors graphics processing unit (GPU) miners. However, things will change drastically soon for the Ethereum network, as the blockchain will be migrating to a “Proof-of-Stake” (PoS) consensus mechanism.
Getting your hand on sufficient mining hardware can also pose a real challenge. The GPU market went wild during 2021’s bull run, which saw leading graphics cards nearly impossible to buy at market value. Some networks like Chia only support hard drives rather than computer chips or graphics cards. As a result, many started pointing fingers at Chia mining as the cause for the hard drive shortage during the same year.
On the other hand, profitability calculators like CoinWarz show the profitability ratio assuming that your hash power is constant. So, if you have a hardware budget of only $1,000, CoinWarz ranks these coins according to profitability:
Ethereum
Peercoin
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin
Ethereum Classic
If you have an electricity rate of $0.411 per kilowatt, you could generate $20.94 worth of ETH a day if you have a thousand dollars worth of hash power, according to CoinWarz. This figure is double the amount you could produce with Ethereum Classic, which is only $9.63.
Small, lesser-known coins tend to be more profitable, but the value of these coins is also more volatile. In other words, it would be more challenging to determine the value of your returns.
According to Whattomine’s prediction, you could earn a daily profit of $1.21 mining firo, $1.07 with ravencoin, and $0.9 with sero if you use three Radeon RX 480 graphics cards.
Alternatives to Solo Home Mining
As you may have guessed, solo mining from home is a challenge that doesn’t guarantee fruitful rewards. If you want to amp up your chances of reaping mining rewards, one option you should consider is joining a Bitcoin mining pool.
Participating in a mining pool means you’ll be joining forces with other miners like yourself to significantly increase your chances of discovering new blocks, ultimately earning a profit. However, you’ll need to split the rewards among everyone in the pool.
Another option is cloud mining if you don’t have sufficient computing power at home. As always, weigh the pros and cons of this endeavor first before making any final decisions.
Network congestion on the Ethereum network is a very real and present problem, which has led to even more serious and pressing problems. Users of the network, particularly small-time investors, have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to these difficulties because they have been the most affected. With prices growing, carrying out modest transactions on the top smart contracts network is becoming increasingly difficult.
The hefty costs and congestion have generated discussions on how to abolish them. Other developments in the works include the Consensus Layer (previously known as ETH 2.0) and other developer ideas. This time, it is Vitalik Buterin, the founder of atheneum, who suggests a solution to network congestion and, by implication, expensive network costs.
Some proposals to add "blob-carrying transactions" in a near-future hard fork, bringing higher scalability to rollups before full sharding is complete. https://t.co/oRTSwAC1oD
In a debate shared on the prominent social media platform Twitter, Vitalik Buterin and developer Tim Beiko proposed solutions to the problem of excessive network congestion. With the network’s adoption rising at a rate that the creators could not have predicted, it has become a competition to identify the best approach to scale the network appropriately. Buterin suggests a new feature termed “blob-carrying transactions” at this point.
Buterin notes that this feature will be introduced to a hard fork that will take place in the near future. In the interim, blob-carrying transactions would allow more scalability for rollups before the entire transition to the consensus layer. It is just a stop-gap measure till network sharing is introduced. This new functionality would be linked to both the Beacon block and the new consensus nodes joining the network.
“Until that point, this EIP provides a stop-gap solution by implementing the transaction structure that would be used in sharding but not sharding those transactions,” the founder explained. “Instead, they would simply be part of the beacon block and would need to be downloaded by all consensus nodes (but maybe erased after only a brief wait).”
When Is This Going to Happen?
The blob-carrying transactions may be used with the Shangai hard fork. It would provide a solution to the network’s ongoing mempool difficulties. Additionally, for blob transactions and standard transactions that transport a large amount of data, “raise the minimum increment for mempool replacement from 1.1x to 2x, reducing the number of resubmissions an attacker may conduct at any given fee level by 7x,” according to the notes.
Ethereum continues to have some of the highest fees in the space. Fees have been reported to go as high as $300 in some circumstances when the network is jammed owing to a high-profile NFT minting. Even the Layer 2 rollups created to assist consumers in dealing with the high transaction costs have seen their rates rapidly rise as they cannot meet demand.
On the pricing front, Ethereum is performing well as it continues to track the price of bitcoin closely. Both digital assets entered the weekend with pessimistic outlooks and emerged on a bull trend, with ETH’s price breaking above $3,000 for the first time.
The privacy coin Monero (XMR) spends much of its time in the shadows, which is precisely how its community prefers it. To this day, it is hard to breach the digital asset’s anonymity, making it the go-to solution for investors who want to keep their crypto transactions and holdings private. However, the cryptocurrency has just emerged onto more investors’ radars as it surpasses a crucial milestone.
As more cryptocurrency users learn that their transactions are not as private as they believed, they are gravitating toward coins like Monero, which provide the anonymity they need. This has resulted in an increase in the number of users on the blockchain, as well as an increase in total transactions, which has more than doubled in just the first quarter of 2022.
Monero (XMR) has exceeded 20 million transactions
Monero is, without a doubt, the dominant privacy coin in the crypto industry, as seen by its latest milestone. The coin appears to have grown in popularity in just the first two months of 2022, with the number of transactions more than doubling from the previous year. Last year, the total number of transactions reported was 8.65 million. The volume of transactions tells a different story with less than two months into the new year.
The number of Monero transactions has surpassed 20 million, an increase of about 150 percent in just a few months. According to Blockchair data, over the existence of the digital privacy asset, a total of 2,554,175 blocks have been mined, resulting in more than 20,023,000 transactions.
This is significant for a digital asset like Monero, whose main utility is that it is untraceable. It means higher usage from crypto users as they strive to hide their crypto traces. It also signals more coin acceptance, and as the market rises from the ashes of the previous burn, it may mean significant price gain for the digital asset.
Growing in tandem with the market
When the market crashed, the price of Monero (XMR) fell, as it did for the majority of cryptocurrencies. This caused the cryptocurrency to fall from a peak of nearly $525 to a low of $140, where it has been trending for the past week. However, with the recent market bounce over last weekend, Monero has followed suit and is up 16 percent alone in the last 24 hours.
However, this does not indicate that the digital asset is out of the woods. The cryptocurrency’s sentiment continues to skew heavily pessimistic as sell signals continue to dominate the asset. According to Barchat statistics, Monero’s sell signs have taken hold, with 88 percent indicating a sell. The 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day MACD oscillators indicate a sell signal.
In the short term, though, the 20-day moving average has shifted to the buy-side. When combined with rising acceptance and growing volume, this tendency is projected to continue, driving the digital asset price higher in its wake. With a good closing above $180 before the end of the day, the next key support level will be at $200, where bulls will be able to sink their claws firmly into the asset.
Cryptocurrencies are making substantial gains as investors capitalize on the recent stock market surge and increasing risk appetite. Bitcoin reaches its highest level in two weeks, extending gains from earlier this week, which saw it reach $41,938 per coin on Saturday morning (January 24).
Bitcoin, the world’s most valuable digital currency, has reached $41,938. It is 16% higher than Thursday’s low and 27% higher than the current year’s low of $32,950. Ether, the second-largest digital currency, has reached $3000 for the first time since January 21.
Since mid-June, Bitcoin experienced its greatest single-day gain as expectations of faster-than-expected Fed rate hikes fueled inflation, while the cryptocurrency was also roiled by technological innovation. However, Friday’s 11% increase was sufficient to consider it a haven against this trend and garner some favorable news at least until Monday, when everything will most certainly fall back down again.
Despite a long week of results volatility, US markets finished the week strong. The tech-heavy NASDAQ gained ground as a consequence of Amazon’s strong growth. However, Facebook owner Meta Platforms’ poor results that evening provided them greater confidence in their business strategies going forward.
Bitcoin has smoothly entered the mainstream. As a result, investors try to get in on the action when risk appetite is low. Tyr Capital’s Chief Investment Officer, Ed Hindi, stated:
“The current panic and volatility surrounding bitcoin are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of it as an asset class. When valuations on the Nasdaq fall, misguided institutional investors start liquidating bitcoin positions en masse as if it were a tech stock.”
The recent gain in the stock market has boosted the value of other listed crypto assets. As a result, certain currencies hit fresh highs.
Though Bitcoin prices fell significantly in the last week of January and were at 47 percent of its all-time high, the cryptocurrency recovered marginally after hitting a low of $33K on January 24, 2022, and is now worth over $42k.
Should you buy, sell, or hold? Analysts are divided on whether or not to invest in cryptocurrencies. However, more than half of those polled say now is a good time to buy, with only 45 percent opposing.
Experts from prominent fintech firms anticipate that by the end of 2022, bitcoin will have reached an all-time high of $93,717, which is more than $24,000 higher than its current all-time high price.
Now is an excellent time to invest in cryptocurrencies. Experts anticipate that bitcoin will trade for $192k by the end of 2025, up more than 300 percent from its November 2021 peak, and reach over half a million dollars by 2030. While they may appear to be big targets at first glance, they are much lower than what experts anticipated back in July 2021, when their most recent projection predicted bitcoin prices might reach 265k or 706K, respectively.
It’s not every day that a DAO votes on a multi-year, $40 million protocol spend on a sports sponsorship. However, Terra holders have been voting on just that this week in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind event.
Do Kwon, creator of Terraform Labs, made a new proposal to the Terra community this week, allowing LUNA holders to vote on a new five-year, $38.5M partnership with an unknown team across one of the United States’ “big four” sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL). It appears to be the first time in the history of sports sponsorship that a DAO (or similarly structured entity) has had a collective vote to engage in a sponsorship.
The idea is the second of three big announcements made as part of Terra’s newest campaign, dubbed “[REDACTED].”
The first phase of the three-part announcement, Terra’s ‘Luna Foundation Guard,’ or LFG, was made just a few weeks ago.
The proposed funding is from the community pool, and the proposal itself is built on a few primary pieces: the first is the narrative, the idea that the premier decentralized stablecoin machine gaining this level of sponsorship is representative of a larger “DeFi to the masses” campaign. The second is the notion that being brave is primarily for the sake of advancement. The third rationale, arguably, is best stated in the proposal itself: “stimulating DAO governance inventiveness to fulfill its full potential.”
The NBA is the most likely target, with the MLB and NHL also being possibilities, and the NFL has a non-zero but low probability of showcasing the franchise involved in this arrangement.
The plan has sparked a heated debate regarding the degree to which the Terra network and the Terraform Labs team should be centralized. The Terraform Labs wallet has a significant amount of LUNA, but Do Kwon and the TFL team have been doxxed, giving the community cause to believe that Kwon’s vision of full decentralization is well on its way.
Kwon has mentioned a ‘killswitch,’ sometimes known as ‘Armageddon,’ that can switch the Terra ecosystem into a fully-decentralized mode with no Terraform Labs attachment required. It is widely assumed that any remaining funds in the TFL, as mentioned earlier, will be burned once that mode is activated. While Terra isn’t “as decentralized” as other participants in the sector right now, it’s certainly on its way — and it’ll be interesting to see how decisions like this one affect this decentralization in the long term.
Chainalysis has published a report that provides insight into the NFT market during the last year, including information on NFT wash trading and money laundering.
Market segmentation
Chainalysis’ data explains in detail where the buyers of NFTs come from. According to web traffic data, the majority of visitors to NFT marketplaces come from Central and Southern Asia, North America, Latin America, and Western Europe.
According to the report, retail investors mostly drive the market, with collectors accounting for only 10% of transactions but 30% of total volume. Both the overall volume and the average transaction value climbed throughout the year.
Chainalysis believes that the entire volume is at least $44.2 billion USD. In contrast, the total value of NFT transactions in 2020 was only 106 million USD.
Money laundering and wash trading are prevalent practices
However, if wash trading becomes more popular among NFTs, that figure may be overstated. Traders in this fraudulent operation inflate the prices of digital art works by selling them to a self-owned wallet.
Chainalysis highlights in a recent blog post that they have found 262 wash dealers, the majority of which were unprofitable due to gas fees. However, the 110 profitable wash traders made a total profit of $8.8 million USD. According to the blockchain security firm, NFT wash trading is a legally murky area:
While wash trading in conventional securities and futures is forbidden, no enforcement action has been taken against wash trading in NFTs. This may change as regulators adjust their focus and use existing anti-fraud laws to emerging NFT markets.
Physical art is a typical way for money to be laundered. Many people are wondering if the same holds true for digital art. Chainalysis discovered that 2.4 million USD in bitcoin was delivered to NFT marketplaces from addresses affiliated with frauds, in addition to a smaller amount of stolen crypto money.
As the world accelerates toward a tech-driven future, it’s no surprise that the vast majority of private equity funds now have a tech focus, with software-as-a-service companies at the top of the list.
Chirpley is a brand-new tech start-up that is capitalizing on this trend and shaping it.
The influencer marketplace is being transformed
Chirpley, a decentralized platform that combines tech investment and influencer marketing, is changing the influencer ecosystem by functioning purely in the interest of its end users: tiny influencers and the marketers who rely on them.
Nobody knows this better than Chirpley: nano and micro-influencers are the future of influencer marketing. The platform claims to liberate small-scale influencers by allowing individuals to make a living for the first time. This empowers marketers by removing the worry, time, and inefficiency that usually comes with engaging with smaller-scale influencers.
Through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain technology, the Web 3.0 influencer marketplace enables end-to-end automated influencing efforts.
Chirpley has combined these cutting-edge technologies in a way that no other automated platform has done before. This is possibly why Chirpley isn’t simply building a name for himself in the influencer marketing field. Its ultra-high-tech mascot and usage of blockchain technology have set the crypto-community abuzz.
The $CHIRP coin powers Chirpley’s deflationary system
The impending issuance of Chirpley’s own coin is likely to excite crypto-investors interested in high-growth start-ups.
The utility token in the Chirpley ecosystem is $CHIRP. The deflationary token provides a 50% discount on on-platform fees when used. Furthermore, 20% of all revenue generated by the platform is used to undertake hourly market buy-backs, after which the purchased $CHIRP tokens are delivered to a burn address.
Why should you be interested in the newest crypto asset, $CHIRP?
Instead of being based solely on conjecture, the fundamental value of the $CHIRP token is calculated based on the Chirpley platform’s anticipated performance. The platform has designed a fee-free deflationary strategy that benefits the entire Chirpley community in order to protect its financial advantages and implement holder rewards for Chirpley users.
