Australian crypto influencer and Nuggets News founder Alex Saunders is facing backlash over his nonfungible token (NFT) sale from late last year. Nuggets News is a paid group providing technical analysis and crypto tips to subscribers that was founded by Saunders in 2017. As of Tuesday, Nuggets News had roughly 146,000 subscribers on YouTube. In November 2020, Saunders minted 100 NFTs comprising tokenized tickets he said would grant holders access to an exclusive Nuggets News community headquarters being developed in the crypto-powered virtual metaverse Decentraland. Saunders priced the NFTs at 1 Ether (ETH) each, worth around $570 at the time. …

Music-sharing protocol Audius became one of the first streaming platforms to partner with TikTok, allowing users to directly share tracks to the popular app. In a Monday announcement, Audius said it had partnered with TikTok in the creation of a new feature called TikTok Sounds. According to a Rolling Stone interview with Audius co-founder and chief product officer Forrest Browning, the integration will allow users to export songs created with the protocol to TikTok with one click, in an effort to streamline the process. Though Audius claims it seeks to leverage blockchain technology to reward content creators as well as …

Jay Graber, a former software engineer for Zcash and blockchain firm Skuchain, will be leading the anticipated decentralized social media initiative first announced by Twitter in 2019. In a Twitter announcement on Monday, Graber said that they would be in charge of the Bluesky project after working closely with “a group of thinkers and builders” from the decentralized social ecosystem. They plan on hiring for the Bluesky team and “partnering closely with Twitter and other companies” as part of the next steps towards fulfilling the decentralized social media plan. I’m excited to announce that I’ll be leading @bluesky, an initiative …

Popular social media platform Reddit has gained $4 billion in value since its last funding round earlier this year in February. Six months ago, the firm raised $250 million in Series E funding at a valuation of $6 billion. In the latest move, Reddit announced a Series F funding round on Thursday — which is being led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC and is expected to close at around $700 million with a post-money valuation of $10 billion. According to the New York Times, investment in the funding round has reached $410 million so far, with Reddit stating …

Social media platform Reddit announced it would be using scaling solution Arbitrum to handle scaling its Ethereum-based Community Points system. In a Thursday announcement, Reddit administrator jarins said the platform had launched its own layer-2 rollup using Arbitrum technology for its rewards points. Reddit said it had deployed the layer-2 solution on top of the Rinkeby testnet before it plans to migrate to the Ethereum mainnet. The platform cited Arbitrum’s features of being decentralized, being developer-friendly, and having broad ecosystem support in its decision. Arbitrum essentially “rolls up” transactions on a gasless sidechain with a separate set of security and …

Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, will be one of the key trends for the future of Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey declared. The Twitter CEO said that Bitcoin would be a “big part” of the company’s future at the second-quarter earnings call, outlining the digital currency’s potential to further transform Twitter products and services. Referring to Bitcoin as a native currency of the internet, Dorsey described opportunities to integrate BTC into existing Twitter services including commerce, subscriptions and new features such as Twitter Tip Jar and Super Follows. The CEO explained to investors that a lot of …

A common saying in the investing world is “The trend is your friend,” a phrase that points to the idea that the majority of the time, sticking with the prevailing market trend will produce positive results. Some of the common metrics used to identify market trends include: technical analysis, which involves studying price charts to spot opportunities; fundamental analysis, which involves looking at a project’s underlying economic and technological factors; and social media metrics, which help an investor listen to the pulse of what the wider public is focused on. One of the more popular metrics that crypto traders use …

TikTok announced on Friday that certain types of ads would no longer be allowed on their platform. Crypto-based promotional content was included among the now-verboten topics, according to an article from FT Adviser on July 8. The new guidelines on the social video posting site will specifically inhibit users from posting promotional content about financial products, regardless of the poster’s geographic location. “According to TikTok’s branded content policy, the promotion of all financial services and products is now globally prohibited,” the FT Adviser article detailed. TikTok was a hotbed for Dogecoin (DOGE) hype in 2020, when users shared related videos …

Leading social media network Twitter launched a nonfungible token, or NFT, giveaway on Wednesday in a campaign that shined the spotlight on the evolution of the social media network. Twitter announced Wednesday that it will give away 140 free NFTs to 140 of its followers. The tweet, which had already received over 13,000 likes at the time of publication, contained several follow-up messages with themed NFT drops. 140 free NFTs for 140 of you, besties pic.twitter.com/0Pm0tNhIRg — Twitter (@Twitter) June 30, 2021 The first NFT drop was for “Reply Guy,” or “The man behind the mansplaining.” Reply Guy The man …

The ongoing lawsuit between Ripple Labs and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, continues with the regulatory body claiming that XRP token holders are targeting its members on social media platforms with allegedly false statements. In a Thursday motion addressed to Judge Sarah Netburn in the Southern District of New York, the SEC has requested a conference to discuss quashing the motion from Ripple to subpoena the former director of the regulatory body’s division of corporation finance, William Hinman. The SEC argued that Ripple’s motion, if granted, would set a precedent for the company to be allowed “a …

Frank McCourt, a billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is backing a new effort for a decentralized social media project based on blockchain technology. McCourt is investing $100 million into an attempt to reinvent the foundations of social media by building a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections on a blockchain, Bloomberg reported Sunday. “Project Liberty” aims to allow users to move records of their interactions between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant applications. The project would use blockchain technology to construct a new internet infrastructure called the …

You might not know Dreesus, but if you’ve been following crypto the last few months you’re likely familiar with his work. Following the launch of his Simple Cool Automatic Money ($SCAM) token, the pseudonymous developer garnered coverage from a seemingly endless list of mainstream and cryptomedia publications, including Vice, The Wall Street Journal, Benzinga, Mic, The Verge, The Week, and CNBC, among others. Launched in early May at the peak of the memecoin bubble, SCAM was part experiment — Dreesus had never launched a token before — and part an effort to make fun of other, overhyped shitcoin. However, in …