The founder of the $723.5 million Azuki nonfungible token (NFT) project “Zagabond” caused a sh*tstorm yesterday after revealing that they had previously worked on three abandoned NFT projects. After facing strong backlash from the NFT community, they have since apologized for their “shortcomings.” The three projects in question are Tendies and CryptoPunks copycats CryptoPhunks and CryptoZunks. “Zagabond” suggested all three had failed due to a lack of community support and other factors such as team members leaving or high gas fees on Ethereum. After releasing the blog via Twitter, most replies were in support of “Zagabond’s” honesty on the trial …

People and companies are investing a lot of money in land and spaces in the metaverse, just the way they do in the real world, hoping to get a return. This means understanding the metaverse and its full potential, especially in terms of using advertising to generate passive income from their investments. Consider that the metaverse is more than a trendy new thing; it is the next iteration for the internet and, therefore, a logical transition for investors and marketers. Within this metaverse, also described as a digital realm, users can participate in another channel in a user’s marketing mix, …

Twitter’s decentralized social media project Bluesky has released its first batch of code and also committed to content moderation on the network. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey first announced Bluesky back in late 2019, but the project went independent in February after receiving $13 million worth of funding from Twitter. However, Dorsey is still a member of the board. Bluesky released its “Authenticated Data eXperiment” (ADX) protocol code via a Thursday blog post titled “Working in Public.” The team noted that it will be publicly sharing the process of developing the platform by “releasing work before it’s complete, but also …

Major crypto exchange Binance has participated in Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, according to data filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. On May 5, Musk filed an amended general statement of the acquisition, announcing that Twitter received an aggregate of about $7.2 billion in new financing commitments in connection with the merger agreement, subject to the conditions in co-investor equity commitment letters. According to the document, Binance is one of 18 co-investors in the acquisition alongside major crypto industry players like Sequoia Capital Fund and Fidelity Management and Research Company. Having invested $500 million, Binance …

In the hours and days before Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s purchase of social media giant Twitter, discussions on free speech were common among many online users both in and out of the crypto industry. Twitter announced on Monday that it will become a privately held company following its board of directors accepting a bid from Musk to purchase the firm’s stock for $54.20 per share in cash — roughly $44 billion. Though the transaction is expected to close in 2022, it is still subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders as well as certain regulators. In one of his last …

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 …

With a reported net worth of more than $300 billion, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he could “technically afford” to purchase Twitter outright and also had plans to change the user experience of the major social media platform. In a TED Talk held at a TED conference in Vancouver on Thursday, Musk told curator Chris Anderson that if his offer to buy Twitter were successful, he would consider changing the way the platform handles controversial content by not promoting certain tweets and adding the ability to edit tweets as well as show that edit history. The Tesla CEO …

The world is largely governed by the creator economy, an economy defined as a class of businesses that rely on the 50 million content curators, bloggers, creators and videographers that bring something new or original into existence. This differs greatly from the previously defined attention economy, where brands were forced to fight to be the loudest in a saturated market. Now, social media platforms have enabled the easy distribution of content, encouraging the growth of something bigger than a company’s offerings— the creation of communities. Creators provide value to the economy through their ability to entertain, inspire, and inspire trust …

Animoca Brands co-founder and chairman Yat Siu stated that his firm will continue to “shepherd companies into Web3” to speed up the evolution of the internet into an open Metaverse. Siu has long advocated for the broader concept of an open Metaverse as opposed to a closed one that is dominated by large centralized Web2 companies. Central to Siu’s argument is that decentralized Web3 platforms and tech such as NFTs offer users a chance to maintain ownership rights over their data and content online, instead of it being controlled and utilized by firms such as Meta (formerly Facebook). Siu made …

Advertisements are in abundance everywhere we go — from billboards seen throughout road trips to commercials displayed every fifteen minutes or so during television shows. It’s also the case that most advertisements today display messages from major internet-based brands like Amazon, which was ranked as the largest advertiser in the United States in 2020. Telecommunication providers and payment giants like American Express have also been listed as some of the biggest advertisers in the United States. These companies typically spend billions of dollars per year on marketing messages aimed to inform, persuade and remind consumers about their products and services. …

Web3 infrastructure platform Our Happy Company has announced their inaugural product, OurSong — a social commerce mobile application designed to enable digital creators to monetize their content and cultivate their communities via NFTs — will utilize Circle's established payment infrastructure to drive demand in the creator economy. Our Happy Company was incorporated in July 2018 by globally renowned musical artist John Legend — the company's Chief Impact Officer — alongside several pioneering tech entrepreneurs, including co-founder and CEO of KKCompany, Chris Lin, co-founder of Twitch, Kevin Lin, among others. The platform launched OurSong, its first product offering, in February to …

Behance, the creative showcase platform owned by Adobe, announced on March 7 that users can now connect their Phantom wallet to their Behance accounts and showcase Solana NFTs on their profiles. Phantom is a Solana wallet built for decentralized finance, or DeFi, applications as well as for non fungible tokens, or NFTs. QuickNode, a Miami-based Web3 infrastructure platform, helped build out this feature with Adobe on Solana. Behance creators can already display their NFTs minted on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain within their profiles. William Allen, Adobe VP leading Behance, explained on Twitter that many Behance’s users, however, may no longer …