In the world of cryptocurrency, joining projects early may be beneficial. For example, investors who bought Bitcoin (BTC) in 2011 are now reaping the benefits of their investment. They discovered something new, saw its potential and stuck with it. With cryptocurrency’s growing worldwide adoption comes a new fundraising platform: the crypto launchpad. Launchpads allow crypto investors to discover and invest in early-stage crypto projects before they are listed publicly. As a result, they can buy tokens for cheap and profit more when their value increases. In recent years, crypto has enjoyed a significant rise in popularity despite market volatility which …

The war between the luxury industry and counterfeiters is a story as old as the goods themselves, with many normalizing the concept of vendors filling busy city streets with realistic-looking knock-offs and finding quality dupes online. Sadly, what few realize is the impact that counterfeiters have on the economy as a whole, a reality that has forced many companies to invest in ultra-sophisticated tech solutions such as artificial intelligence (AI) to verify the authenticity of their products. When technology hasn’t been an option, brands have looked to the government for their power to seize and destroy fake goods in an …

Traditional funding in the crypto space was once considered useless. After all, the industry itself offers different, controversial, but nonetheless, ways to fund a project – initial coin offering (ICO), initial exchange offering (IEO) and the current darlings of offerings – launchpads and initial decentralized exchange (DEX) offerings. But with the industry maturing and more startups wanting not only the capital but mentorship to build a working and valuable product, venture capital has emerged as one of the most attractive options. Cointelegraph talked to Li Rongbin, founding partner of SevenX, about why venture capital funding is the next big thing …

The 2021 year remains the breakout year for the metaverse. The concept quickly caught on, moving from conversations to project development and public adoption. Yet, it has one shortcoming for all the good it offers, an overemphasis on the gaming aspect. The metaverse is far more than gaming, though. It isn’t a world of entertainment only, and importantly users shouldn’t have to pay for its enjoyment. It’s these pain points that Dontplaywithkitty.io (DPK) seeks to solve. The project sees the metaverse as a world where users can verify private assets. Additionally, it’s creating a digital community with access to a …

Quidd, a marketplace for digital collectibles and a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, has raised a total of $5 million in private pre-sales and an initial DEX offering (IDO). The token sale took place on Polkadot project incubator Polkastarter on Nov. 18. The allotment of 2 million QUIDD tokens at a price of US$0.25 per token sold out in under an hour, raising $500,000. Earlier this month, the private sale of the Ethereum-based QUIDD tokens raised US$4 million from investors including Binance Smart Chain Growth Fund, Genesis Block Ventures, Kingsway, Mind Fund Group Ltd, Sanctor Capital, OneFootball, and other angel investors. …

A decentralized venture capital organization is overhauling its oversubscribed IDO launchpad, betting that a point system will build a fairer token sale platform. DuckDAO’s core open-to-all approach to early-stage investing was running into a common problem stymieing initial token sales held on decentralized exchanges (DEXs): There’s such a thing as too open, at least when it comes to IDOs. Once initial DEX offerings (IDOs) proved to be a viable and less expensive alternative to the initial exchange offerings (IEOs) run by centralized exchanges — which offer expert assistance, marketing solutions, and the credibility of trustworthy vetting in exchange for a …

As promising as the notion of subscribing to an initial decentralized exchange offering (IDO) is at first glance, there is always more than meets the eye. Even some of the most popular launchpads have often left their early investors with crumbs as whale wallets dump their holdings after incredibly short vesting periods. Genesis Pool (GPool) is a community-led cross-chain launchpad that claims to have found the solution to the failings of the current launchpad model. By creating a democratic platform that puts more tokens in the hands of their investors, GPool aims to create a scenario where retail investors can …

Nonfungible token (NFT) games combine both traditional gaming designs with unconventional game mechanisms. With these features, users gain additional control over their in-game assets like virtual property, characters and more -- a possibility due to each of these digital assets being an NFT. Leveraging NFTs gives players the ability to prove each asset’s rarity and uniqueness. Along with the rise of NFTs is the play-to-earn movement -- an emerging trend in the gaming industry where players can collect NFT rewards and convert them into real cash as they rise in value. With this system, each user can claim ownership of …

Yield Guild Games (YGG), a collective of play-to-earn gamers, completed its initial DEX offering via SushiSwap’s Miso platform in under a minute earlier on Tuesday. The offering saw YGG raise roughly $12.5 million on Tuesday, with the token sale distributing 25 million tokens or 2.5% of the project’s 1-billion token supply via a dutch auction. The YGG tokens were sold for roughly $0.50 each. Disappointed investors criticized the sale after 32 wallets exhausted the allocation in 31 seconds, even though YGG’s Discord membership exceeds 47,000. A single address appears to have been able to nab 4.5 million tokens or 18% …

NFT art may be the current Next Big Thing in the cryptocurrency world, but as art, it’s actually somewhat limited to one broad genre: Digital art. This leaves out a fairly large chunk of the art world — paintings, drawings, sculpture, fabrics, pottery — the physical arts that live in three dimensions. That’s where AvatarArt by ByteNext comes in. The Singapore-based NFT artwork company is turning the biggest of those physical arts — painting — into 3D reproductions that are backed by the actual artwork. For each NFT, there isn’t just the blockchain-verified original image. There’s an actual painting in …

Jesse Powell is rethinking Kraken’s plan to go public, which is set for late 2022, following the uninspiring performance of Coinbase stock since its launch on April 14. Speaking with Fortune on Friday, Powell stated that in light of the performance on Coinbase’s direct public offering, the firm is now considering an initial public offering (IPO) more “seriously now,” as the firm is looking to avoid potential issues a direct listing presents: “Not having lock-ups, having billions of dollars of insiders be able to dump their shares, you know, on day one [...] I think it has a dampening effect …

Initial DEX offerings are the new initial coin offerings. So, what’s the difference between an IDO and an ICO, other than that one letter? A lot actually. In some ways, ICOs and IDOs have more in common with each other than they do with initial exchange offerings, which have more than a few features of the traditional initial public offering of stock markets. While IDOs and IEOs are both listed directly on exchanges — decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, in the case of the former and centralized exchanges for the latter — IDOs are very much a do-it-yourself process like ICOs. …