In her monthly Expert Take column, Selva Ozelli, an international tax attorney and CPA, covers the intersection between emerging technologies and sustainability, and provides the latest developments around taxes, AML/CFT regulations and legal issues affecting crypto and blockchain. Germany has risen to the top spot of Coincub’s guide to the most crypto-friendly countries in Q1 2022. The European country allows its long-term domestic savings industry to utilize crypto investments, supported by its zero-tax policy on long-term capital gains from crypto, and its number of Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes is second only to the United States. Blockchain adoption In 2019, Germany …

Metaverses and blue-chip nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are the driving forces behind the dramatic growth in the NFT market. Projects like the Bored Apes, Crypto Punks, Azuki, Clone X and Doodles collections have steadily attracted collectors' interest in the past year. As a result, these NFT projects have helped the NFT market achieve a growth rate of over 20,000% and a sales volume of approximately $17 billion. For an industry that once occupied a tiny sliver of attention within the crypto/blockchain world, it's clear that NFTs are here to stay despite earlier critiques of their ephemeral nature. However, given the recent …

What is the Metaverse? The Metaverse is a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash to describe a future virtual reality-based online world. Some have gone as far as pronouncing Stephenson’s novel a prediction of the future. Before you agree that it’s some mystical peek into the future and invoke the rules of time travel, let’s first investigate what the Metaverse is through the lens of something much more accessible: Minecraft. But, more on this later. Unlike the internet or even virtual reality as we know it today, the Metaverse would be a fully …

Metaverse skeptics fear the prospect of unprotected data and large-scale user surveillance on a scale never seen before. Ironically, the largest company pushing the Metaverse, Meta (previously known as Facebook), has faced its own fair share of privacy scandals in the internet’s current iteration, culminating in Mark Zuckerberg being infamously hauled before the United States Congress to answer for Facebook's inability to combat hate speech and data privacy violations. In a U.S. Senate committee hearing, whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Meta of prioritizing “profit over the well-being of children and all users” when it came to creating manipulative algorithms that tap …

The cryptocurrency market is known for its high volatility and the wild-west nature of the space is, in part, due to many of the assets having small market caps and the 24/7 operational hours of centralized and decentralized exchanges (DEXs). In addition to being high risk, crypto trading can also be a very time-intensive process. It can be an overwhelming task and a barrier to entry for most investors in determining which tokens to invest in. For these investors, index investing could be a profitable alternative for gaining exposure to some of the hottest sectors of the cryptocurrency market. Here’s …

Web3 projects are the talk of the current digital scene, with thousands of new companies coming to life every day in an attempt to ride out this global wave with their own product releases. Unfortunately, reality has shown most of these offerings do not provide any tangible value to their player or user bases. Instead, they rely on superficial hype of cryptocurrencies, NFTs and related buzzwords, a seemingly unnatural method to pursue user growth. At present, these efforts result in short-term successes and not sustainable growth. To ensure projects are built on foundations that enable long-term value, startups are encouraged …

Since the wake of the nonfungible token (NFT) boom, creators have been leaving their Web2 entities in droves and are carving their own lanes in the Web3 world. It’s not just technologists and artsy-creators who are pivoting toward Web3. For example, former American professional baseball player Micah Johnson pivoted to painting and focused his pieces on representation. In debuting his first digital piece, sä-v(ə-)rən-tē (pronounced “sovereignty') Johnson was not only fueled by adversity but inspired by a question that would change the trajectory of his work. “Can astronauts be black?” Johnson's four-year-old nephew asked his mother. Alas, the main character …

The appeal of blockchain-based gaming is clear: participate in activities you might have already been doing and make some money at the same time in a realm constructed by tokenized and tradable items. While attractive in theory, the reality is that these models cater to those with a familiarity with nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and surrounding technologies. Consider that most of these games present a steep learning curve with some knowledge, costs and other setup required before a player can participate in the ecosystem. Emerging as a low barrier to entry, Bezoge, the first crypto game for non-crypto people, presents Legends …

The world knows the public internet as the best transport network and the backbone of their daily routines. However, if one looks closely, the internet is far from perfect, with many considering the network untrusted and its usage synonymous with poor reliability and performance issues. Although these faults were once overlooked, the impending Web3 revolution has led many to recognize just how far the current internet foundation is from supporting the increased usage and performance requirements that come with the metaverse, decentralized finance (DeFi) and other blockchain-technology use cases. Soon, every major company, industry and consumer experience will be shaped …

Australian media company Basketball Forever has announced a nonfungible token (NFT) project titled Hoop Hounds, which seeks to increase NBA fan engagement and provide substantial real-world utility for the tokens. Critics of NFTs have consistently taken aim at the supposedly ineffectual nature of the tokens, with “right-click save” memes doing the rounds. However, more recently there has been an uptick in utility-focused NFT projects, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Top Shot, where holders are provided exclusive access to real-world events and products. Basketball Forever, the NBA-focused subsidiary of sports media company Forever Network, has developed high levels …

In a statement posted by Shiba Inu (SHIB) Metaverse developers late Tuesday, it appears that a user's wallet address has been blacklisted for drawing a swastika using the project's Metaverse land. The team at Shiba Inu wrote: "SHIB: The Metaverse will place the the wallet identifying the [hate symbol] violation on a blacklist, meaning it will never be able to participate in any and all areas of the platform." The ordeal began on April 12 with the launch of the Shiba Inu Metaverse land sale, with approximately 36,000 out of 100,000 plots up for grabs. Via Shib.io, crypto enthusiasts who …

In his monthly crypto tech column, Israeli serial entrepreneur Ariel Shapira covers emerging technologies within the crypto, decentralized finance and blockchain space, as well as their roles in shaping the economy of the 21st century. In the year 2022, we no longer need to ponder how many stars there are in the sky — Yale astronomer Dorrit Hoffleit has already established that humans can see about 9,096 from Earth with the naked eye. Now that we are past that, we might as well start pondering how many metaverses there are on the internet, and oh boy, are those plentiful. When …