Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin believes NFTs can be applied to socially relevant causes such as charities and funding public goods, but not while the technology is still viewed as a “casino that largely benefits already-wealthy celebrities.” The author of the Ethereum whitepaper said there was little social value in helping celebrities like Elon Musk add another $1 million to their bank balance by selling NFTs. But he does believe that with support and coordination, non-fungible tokens could have a significant impact on other areas of society. In a blog post titled “The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy,” Buterin said …
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has issued a warning to would-be Bitcoin (BTC) buyers looking to follow Elon Musk’s investment strategy. Speaking to Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, Gates suggested Musk had access to sophisticated trade management techniques that the average investor isn’t privy to. When asked about the susceptibility of Bitcoin to tumble in price in reaction to a mere tweet — undoubtedly a reference to Musk’s own social media posts — Gates said Musk was probably insulated from such market crashes: “Elon has tons of money and he’s very sophisticated so, you know, I don’t worry that his Bitcoin would randomly …
Yat Siu of Animoca Brands Yat is the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, which delivers digital property rights to the world’s gamers and internet users, thereby creating a new asset class, play-to-earn economies and a more equitable digital framework contributing to the building of the open Metaverse. “2021 was the year of NFTs, and in the second half of the year, we saw a growing emphasis on GameFi. This trend will continue well into 2022. Real mass adoption of DeFi will happen via GameFi, which will explode in growth during 2022 as the potential for mass financial inclusion …
Many of the blockchains in use today are public, offering complete transparency and requiring smart contracts, each of which operates in a centralized manner. Unfortunately, these same chains are often subject to outages, hard forks and delayed processing, not to mention a lack of security and role definition necessary in conducting business transactions. For this reason, the permissioned blockchain has risen as a solution to control the activities on a given network. With a permissioned blockchain, not everyone is permitted to join the blockchain. Instead, participants must be granted special permission from the network’s owner. The result is a blockchain …
Ethereum went through a key network upgrade on Sept. 15, shifting from its proof-of-work (PoW) mining consensus to a proof-of-stake (PoS) one. The key upgrade is dubbed the Merge. The Merge was slated as a critical change for the Ethereum network that would make it more energy efficient, with later improvements to scalability and decentralization to come. A little over a month later, however, some industry observers fear the PoS transition has pushed Ethereum toward more centralization and higher regulatory scrutiny. The Merge replaced the way transactions were verified on the Ethereum network. Instead of miners putting in their computational …