Townsquare Media, a New York-based digital marketing and radio station company, is the latest business to back the original cryptocurrency with its addition of $5 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) to its balance sheet. A filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosing Townsquare’s purchase of Bitcoin was first picked up by Macroscope, a Twitter account that focuses on institutional trading, posted the find on Monday. In an SEC filing today, Townsquare Media (NYSE: TSQ), based in New York, stated: "During the first quarter of 2022, the Company invested an aggregate of $5.0 million in Bitcoin. The …

A study claiming that psychopaths and others with "Dark Tetrad" personality traits are drawn to crypto has been criticized as "meaningless" for showing very weak correlativity by a psychology expert from the University of Otago. Researchers with backgrounds predominately in marketing and advertising from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) surveyed 566 people on their attitudes toward crypto and correlated the results with four specific personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and sadism. The findings were first shared by The U.S. Sun, and were widely syndicated by the mainstream media, with the New York Post headline screaming “Bitcoin fans are psychopaths …

One of the most significant issues content creators and artists face today is a lack of control regarding their overall content. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch constantly alter the rules when it comes to content uploads, forcing users to cater to these new algorithms if they wish to succeed. Instead of media conglomerates owning and controlling content, creators posit a different idea — that media organizations should be owned by creators and consumers rather than third-party intermediaries. Such a view is standard in the Web3 space, and fortunately, decentralized technology such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies enable this future. And one …

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volumes, is making a strategic investment in the 104-year old magazine Forbes to improve consumer understanding of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Forbes and Magnum Opus Acquisition Limited, a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), officially announced Thursday securing a $200 million strategic investment from Binance. Forbes previously announced plans to go public through a business combination with Magnum Opus in August 2021, with the deal expected to close in Q1 of 2022. Binance’s strategic investment will be through Binance’s assumption of subscription agreements representing $200 million of commitments in the $400 million private …

American Internet media and entertainment company Buzzfeed has revealed the identities of two of the four original Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection founders “Gordon Goner” and “Gargamel” as being Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow in real life. Journalist Kate Notopoulos authored the Feb. 4 article, which was entitled “We Found The Real Names Of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders.” Notopoulos was able to uncover the pair’s identities by search the publicly available records of Yuga Labs, the company behind the collection. Yuga was incorporated in Delaware with an address associated with Greg Solano, and other records pointing …

More than three months after its release, the ad from crypto exchange Crypto.com featuring Hollywood star Matt Damon was the subject of ridicule in the latest episode of the animated series South Park. In the first episode of its 25th season titled “Pajama Day”, the creators of South Park took on people in the United States refusing to wear a mask and once again associated crypto investments with scams. Characters in the show attacked Damon’s appearance in an TV spot titled “fortune favors the brave”, showing the actor speaking about Crypto.com amid a digital landscape of historic figures. “My dad …

The media and entertainment industry, in particular Hollywood, has a grip-like monopoly on the intellectual property, or IP, produced for public consumption. Writers and artists rarely maintain true ownership over the characters they create and have little to no say in the merchandise or content that is ultimately presented. Similarly, viewers and fans rarely have power over the stories that are told by the franchises they consume. Let's take Marvel comics for example. Many of the company's most famous characters were originally created by comic book artists like Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. The late Stan Lee, however, …

Operator-led venture capital firms Velvet Sea Ventures and 01 Advisors invested $100 million into Pixel Vault, a large nonfungible token collection of superheroes, to jointly launch the rebranded multi-franchise NFT entertainment company, Pixel Vault Inc. According to Pixel Vault, the aim of the new venture is to leverage NFTs and intellectual property to tell the stories of crypto-native communities across a variety of mediums, including television, movies and video games. Pixel Vault owns 100% of the IP, assets and operations of PUNKS Comic, MetaHero, and all future franchises. Pixel Vault's founder and CEO Sean Gearin, also known as GFunk, launched …

Content creators on BroadbandTV Corporation (BBTV) will soon be able to get paid in crypto. BBTV recently announced Pay to Crypto, a payment solution that lets creators get paid in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and USD Stablecoin (USDC). With the newly-launched solution, creators only need to choose a crypto asset and provide a compatible wallet address, and BBTV will send their earnings directly. For some creators, being paid directly in crypto is a welcome benefit. In the announcement, content creator Joseph Hogue expressed his delight, stating “Being paid directly in cryptocurrency saves me time and at a minimal charge compared …

The Associated Press (AP) is launching a nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace where collectors will be able to purchase tokenized photographs from the global news platform. The initial collection of NFTs will include photographs of subjects like space, climate, and war from AP photojournalists. They will be released over several weeks starting on Jan. 31 for varying prices, according to the marketplace’s website. The photographs will be minted as NFTs on the Ethereum layer-two scaling network, Polygon. The platform will support secondary transactions using debit or credit cards, and payments in Ethereum. The marketplace is being built by Xooa, a blockchain …

The cryptocurrency community has raised concerns about Maricoin, a new token supposedly related to the LGBT+ community, with some people even suspecting the project to be a scam. Launched in December 2021, Maricoin promises to enable a “social, ethical, transparent and transversal means of payment” targeting the global “pink economy,” which is estimated to amount to trillions of dollars. One might question Maricoin’s ethics though, as its name is a portmanteau that plays on a Spanish slur for homosexuals. According to the project’s website, Maricoin runs on the Algorand blockchain, with creators planning to list the token on several crypto …

As Bitcoin (BTC) was hitting new historical highs above $68,000 this year, global cryptocurrency naysayers were increasingly blasting BTC for its extreme volatility and potential risks. According to Bitcoin Obituaries data by Bitcoin education portal 99Bitcoins, the original cryptocurrency was declared “dead” as many as 45 times in 2021, which is at least three times more than in 2020. Despite the growing number of Bitcoin critics in 2021, the amount of obituaries is still significantly less this year than was recorded in 2017, the year when BTC first reached close to $20,000. That year, Bitcoin “died” 124 times. Incepted in …