Employees from Microsoft and Apple are jumping ship to join Meta Platforms as the company sets its sights on creating the Metaverse. According to former employees of Microsoft quoted by the Wall Street Journal, around 100 people have ditched the tech giant’s augmented reality team over the past year to join Meta Platforms. They claim that Meta has been particularly focused on snapping up people who have worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality (AR) headsets. According to the WSJ, Linkedin profiles show that more than 70 people who were part of Microsoft’s HoloLens team have left the project over the …

Crypto startup Palm NFT Studio announced a Series B raise of $27 million on Thursday led by Microsoft’s venture fund M12. Palm NFT, cofounded by ConsenSys founder and Ethereum cofounder Joseph Lubin, provides strategic and technical services for creators to build NFT marketplaces. Other major backers include Griffin Gaming Partners, RRE, Third Kind Venture Capital, Sfermion, the LAO, Warner Bros., and SK Inc. According to the statement issued on their company blog, the raise will enable the team to scale the Palm NFT Studio’s technology platform and offer it to third parties looking to deploy NFT projects across movies, games, …

Decentralized gaming guild Yield Guild Games (YGG) has partnered with, and invested in, eight new play-to-earn (P2E) blockchain games. YGG lends out nonfungible token (NFT) gaming assets to Guild players so that they can earn rewards from a long list of P2E games without having to front the costs of purchasing the NFTs themselves. The guild boasts assets from widely popular games such as Axie Infinity and Splinterlands. In an announcement shared with Cointelegraph on Nov. 16, YGG revealed that it had backed eight games with “strong play-to-earn models” including Influence, CyBall, Thetan Arena, KOGs SLAM!, MOBOX, Aavegotchi, DeHorizon and …

In his monthly crypto tech column, Israeli serial entrepreneur Ariel Shapira covers emerging technologies within the crypto, decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain space, as well as their roles in shaping the economy of the 21st century. What’s in a name? A whole metaverse is what one could be led to believe when looking at the buzz around Facebook’s recent transformation into Meta. In reality, of course, there is more to the new name than that — there is also the whistleblower scandal, alongside the previous controversies tarring the company’s image, as well as the encroachment of rivaling social media platforms …

Crypto leaders are divided over whether Mark Zuckerberg should lead Facebook into the Metaverse, with Hodl Asset’s Jenny Ta saying he needs to resign if Meta is to succeed while Animoca’s Yat Siu says Zuck is the only one who can drive the company forward. Ta is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of nonfungible token (NFT) platform developer Hodl Assets, and said that Zuckerberg needs to head off lawsuits and protect the company’s image by relinquishing his role as CEO. But the co-founder and Chairman of blockchain game and virtual property developer Animoca Brands, Yat Su said that Zuck is …

U.S. tech giant Microsoft is taking the plunge into the Metaverse via updates to its Teams and Xbox gaming console services, along with a new product called “Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the firm’s Metaverse plans for Teams and Spaces on Nov. 2 during the Microsoft Ignite conference. “The Metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing. Bringing real presence to any digital space. What’s most important is that we are able to bring our humanity with us, and choose how we want to experience this …

Cudos is a layer-one blockchain and layer-two computation and oracle network that enables the scaling of computing resources to 100,000 nodes. It aims to bridge the gap between cloud and blockchain by making the world's available computing power more decentralized. With the launch of phase one its incentivized testnet – Project Artemis – the blockchain plans to lay the foundations of a decentralized, competitive, fair, and sustainable computing market. Even in its early stages, Cudos has ignited a considerable amount of developer interest, with over 20,000 developers joining its waitlist. “This stage is the culmination of many years of work. …

Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN) has launched a new blockchain-based platform that could potentially track one-third of shipping containers across the globe. The GSBN was incorporated in March 2021 by eight global national freight maritime cargo companies to build a blockchain platform that digitizes shipping processes, such as document issuance, clearance and logistics data. Members of the Hong-Kong-based nonprofit consortium GSBN are said to “account for one in every three containers handled in the world,” and this may soon be verifiable on the blockchain once the platform is fully utilized. The GSBN announced the launch of the new blockchain platform …

American tech giant Microsoft has won a blockchain-related patent for techniques for implementing a cross-chain token management system. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted the patent to Microsoft’s subsidiary, Microsoft Technology Licensing, on Tuesday. Filed in February 2019, the patent describes a “ledger-independent token service,” or a software service enabling individuals and organizations to create and manage tokens across multiple distributed ledger networks and platforms. Examples of such platforms in the patent filing included major blockchain platform Ethereum, IBM-backed Hyperledger Fabric, JPMorgan’s enterprise blockchain platform Quorum, R3 Corda and Chain Core. The described computer system aims to …

Windows operating system and Office productivity suite have always been top performers on any software piracy platforms. So, it’s no wonder that Microsoft, the developer of both products, works hard to establish anti-piracy measures. In a new paper released by Microsoft’s research department, with the participation of researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University, the Redmond-based software giant studied a blockchain-based incentive system to bolster anti-piracy campaigns. As the title of the research, “Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns,” suggests, Microsoft’s new system relies on the transparency aspect of blockchain technology. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Argus …

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor thinks that Bitcoin (BTC) is more like digital property than digital currency. He was speaking on the July 15 edition of the Coin Stories podcast with host Natalie Brunell. Asked if he thought that Bitcoin was a threat to the United States dollar, Saylor replied: “I would call it a digital property; it’s a threat to property; it’s particularly a threat to other forms of property. Gold is property; real estate is property. I don’t think the United States government is threatened by real estate or buildings or companies or gold.” The comments follow on from …

Just as the cryptocurrency sector is constantly changing and evolving, the enterprise blockchain industry has been undergoing its fair share of developments lately. Most recently, enterprise blockchain solutions are shifting from private, closed networks to public, open systems. This has largely been made possible due to advances from the Ethereum network, which are ensuring better privacy, scalability, throughput and more for enterprise clients. A new industry analysis report demonstrates this shift, noting that the global blockchain technology market size is expected to reach $72 billion by 2026, rising at a market growth of 51.8% CAGR during the forecast period. Interestingly …