Without a doubt, 2021 has been a momentous year for nonfungible tokens (NFT). The nascent market has seen unprecedented growth as sales volume from January to date nears $10 billion — a 14,500% surge from 2020. The NFT marketplace OpenSea is responsible for processing a great chunk of that. OpenSea controls a majority of NFT sales and has processed more than $10 billion worth of transactions since launching in December 2017. Its 2021 volume alone even topped the revenue earned by Etsy and is comparable to the revenue generated by eBay. But despite this, it appears as though OpenSea and …

Boson Protocol is a decentralized commerce protocol that seeks to enable the sale of physical goods, services and experiences in the Metaverse as nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and hopes to provide an infrastructure layer for exchanging assets of non-monetary value. For example, an NFT of a pair of sneakers bought using the Boson Protocol in the Metaverse would then be redeemable for that physical pair of sneakers in the real world, and vice versa. Ahead of the launch of its first Metaverse commerce experience in Decentraland, called Boson Portal, Cointelegraph spoke with Justin Banon, co-founder of Boson Protocol, to learn more …

Inflation was once seen as transitory as the United States economy moved from dealing with a pandemic to more normal operations. Unfortunately, rather than lift, inflation has not alleviated in the slightest as many citizens have seen a hike in the prices of food, toiletries and other necessities, with wages that have not risen to match. Many economists have since recognized that inflation may persist long into the new year. Inflation itself is to be a product of the world bracing for an economic downturn, only to be met with a quick recovery led by increases in government spending. Businesses …

As the digital asset market continues to break new ground, seemingly with each passing day, there is no denying the fact that crypto adoption has continued to increase at a fairly rapid pace globally. In this regard, it now appears as though online content creator platform Patreon is actively looking to devise its very own social token — or “creator coin” as it likes to call it — as a way of diving into the world of cryptocurrencies. Patreon executives recently teased the idea at the 2021 Creator Economy Summit with CEO Jack Conte making an appearance alongside chief product …

To understand the complexity of digital rights management, or DRM, one must first understand the DRM challenges of current systems and then the challenges (and opportunities) presented by blockchain technology that prides itself on transparency, data linkage and immutability as some of the main characteristics that lends itself to the trust systems. With Web 2.0, content creation and dissemination are via a platform that acts as an intermediary and, like any intermediary, has developed business models that monetize the avenues of content distribution, resulting data and metadata. Digital content (movies, images, music, etc.) can be replicated easily, and the platforms …

On Monday, distributed domain protocol Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, launched its own governance token in an effort to distribute voting rights for its new decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, to active users of the ecosystem. Cointelegraph spoke with Brantly Millegan, ENS’ director of operations, to learn more about the nonprofit’s decision to shift to a DAO model and his thoughts on the power of the ENS community: “ENS is an open public protocol. The core components of ENS are decentralized and self-running (e.g., no one can take away another person’s .ETH name), but there are a few things that …

When high-quality healthcare research exists, medical personnel can more effectively collaborate to prevent diseases, providing people in general with a better quality of life. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, many around the world noticed a discrepancy in response to this specific disease in comparison to other healthcare concerns plaguing the world. This led to questions such as, “why was it that researchers and scientists were able to create a vaccine in 3 months? How was it that researchers from around the world were able to unite towards a common goal ?” And, “what was it that motivated them to race towards …

It’s only been two years since its founding, but decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol 1inch Network has already surpassed $85.8 billion in cumulative trading volume. At a May 2019 hackathon in New York City, 1inch co-founders Anton Bukov and Sergej Kunz developed a prototype DEX aggregator that became the basis of the network. DEX aggregators are platforms that source liquidity from multiple DEXs, thereby providing better token swap rates with less slippage. The network has a 57.40% market share in the DEX aggregator industry and well over 820,000 users. According to CoinMarketCap, 1inch Exchange is the eighth-largest DEX in the world, …

Nifty News: MADworld partners with Xtreme Pong for nonfungible token (NFT) drop, CryptoDragons NFTs sell out in 10 seconds, and Beeple collector buys Rare Pepe meme NFT for 500K. NFT meets ping pong Animoca-Brands backed NFT developers MADworld has partnered with popular content creator Airrack to drop NFTs dedicated to his upcoming Xtreme Pong tournament. Airrack has around 2.58 million Youtube subscribers and is hosting a live-streamed ping pong tournament on Nov. 13 at 1 pm PST that will feature other content creators such as Zach King, Brent Rivera, ZHC and Bryce Hall. The tournament will feature on Airrack’s Youtube …

Decentralized finance protocol Acala announced Monday that they have raised 8.5 million DOT (worth $451.8 million USD at time of publication) from over 53,000 participants. The protocol is also set to win the first parachain auction on Polkadot. Unlike typical crowdfunding rounds, Acala's financing mechanism is a crowdloan, which means it will eventually need to pay back the "crypto debt" it has solicited from investors. On Nov. 5, Polkadot developers added the first parachain onto its network. Parachains are custom, project-specific blockchains that can be integrated into a main blockchain. The distinguishing feature of Polkadot is its Cross-Consensus Message Format. …

Meme tokens and dogcoins have been an integral part of the ongoing market-wide bull run in the cryptocurrency markets. Among the plethora of these tokens that have been flooding the market, two of these tokens, the longer-standing memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), have gained the most traction and popularity. Most recently, SHIB started rallying on Oct. 23 from trading $0.000028 to hitting an all-time high of $0.000086 on Oct. 28. The token has since cooled down to exchange hands at $0.000052. Despite that, the token has posted 195.5% gains in the last 30 days and an incredible 72,954,679.8% …

American social media giant, Reddit, may soon convert users’ karma points into Ethereum-based (ERC-20) tokens and onboard 500 million new crypto users in the process, according to a newly hired Reddit engineer. A series of tweets made by Reddit engineer, Rahul, highlights Reddit’s efforts to improve user interaction through various cryptocurrency initiatives. As Cointelegraph reported in July 2021, the platform had launched its own layer-2 rollup using Arbitrum technology for its rewards points, named Community Points. According to the website: “Your Community Points exist on the blockchain, independently of Reddit, where they can only be controlled by you (just like …