Do you keep hearing about people buying digital cats, NBA moments and virtual artwork of Donald Trump, but have no idea where they’re getting these NFTs from? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have quickly become one of the most explosive crypto trends since the “DeFi summer” of 2020, with increasingly more cryptocurrency holders and traditional investors seeking to own and speculate on these unique blockchain-based assets.

NFTs are virtual tokens that represent ownership of something inherently distinct and scarce, whether it be a physical or digital item, such as artwork, a soundtrack, a collectible, an in-game item or real estate.

Unlike regular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or fiat money like the U.S dollar, these special types of digital assets cannot be mutually exchanged for one another because each token has a specific value based on its unique traits and attributes.

Also unlike regular cryptocurrencies, NFTs cannot be purchased on centralized or decentralized crypto exchanges. Instead, they are listed and traded on online marketplaces that are specially built for NFTs.

What are NFT marketplaces?

NFT marketplaces are platforms where NFTs can be stored, displayed, traded and in some cases minted (created). These marketplaces are to NFTs what Amazon or eBay are to goods.

In order to access and use these types of marketplaces, you will need to have the following:

• A crypto wallet: You’ll need to choose a wallet that is compatible with the blockchain network that supports the NFTs you wish to buy (below). For example, if you plan to buy or sell NFTs based on the Ethereum blockchain platform, you will need to use a compatible Ethereum wallet such as MetaMask. For NFTs sold on the Solana platform, you will need to use a wallet service such as Sollet.
• An amount of coins in the wallet: You will need to pre-fund your wallet before buying, listing or minting an NFT. Again, you will need to find out which cryptocurrencies are supported by the marketplace you intend to use.
• A user account: You will need to set up an account on the particular marketplace you wish to purchase NFTs from.
  
  

It’s worth noting that, for the most part, listing and creating NFTs on a marketplace platform incurs a blockchain network fee. The fee varies depending on which blockchain-based system you decide to use.

For example, Ethereum boasts the largest ecosystem of NFT dapps (decentralized applications). But it has the most expensive fees.

NFT blockchain options

Ethereum is by far the most popular system for buying, selling and creating unique, digital items. There is, however, a growing list of competitors that have also entered the market, including the following:

• Binance Smart Chain
• Flow (by Dapper Labs)
• Tron
• EOS
• Solana
• Polkadot
• Tezos
• Algorand
• Cosmos
• WAX
• Hedera Hashgraph

Some of these blockchain systems are interoperable. For example, you can buy Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens with Ethereum-based tokens (called ERC-20 tokens, which include USDT, USDC, BNB, DAI, etc).

Others, such as Flow, are closed systems. For instance, you can’t buy NBA Topshot NFTs (that are based on Flow) with ether or BNB.

How do these marketplaces work?

Signing up

Signing up to an NFT marketplace can differ slightly from site to site, but the main steps to follow involve creating an account or connecting a supported digital wallet, or doing both.

The button for this is typically located in the top right-hand corner of the NFT marketplace homepage. When connecting your wallet, you will be asked to enter your wallet password to complete the process.

Buying an NFT

NFTs are usually purchased directly for a fixed price or through an auction. In some cases, prospective buyers can submit offers to the owner and attempt to negotiate a better price.

Selling an NFT

Selling unique digital assets can be a more technically complicated process than buying them, particularly if the user is attempting to sell something they have created themselves (artwork, a soundtrack, a tweet, etc.).

• You will need to upload the chosen digital asset onto the marketplace and enter a fixed price or opt to sell the NFT via an auction.
• Next, the platform will verify the asset. If approved, it will be listed for sale.
• When the seller accepts a bid, the marketplace conducts the transfer from buyer to seller.

Minting an NFT

If you want to create an NFT, you may consider starting with Ethereum, because it’s the largest system for these types of assets.

You will need to have an Ethereum wallet that supports ERC-721 (Ethereum’s token standard for NFTs), such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet. Also, you will have to top up your wallet with about $50-$100 worth of ether to cover transaction fees (depending on how congested the network is).

Once you have completed those steps, you will be able to access and use platforms such as OpenSea, Rarible or Mintable. Most platforms have a “Create” button in the top right corner that will take you to the page where you can begin minting your NFTs.

Read more: NFTs: How to Create, Buy and Sell Them

Types of NFT marketplaces

While there are many types of marketplaces, universal and art-oriented platforms are the most popular ones. There are also niche NFT marketplaces that list specific kinds of non-fungible assets such as in-game items, digital collectible cards and virtual real estate.

Here are the five most popular universal and digital art-oriented NFT marketplaces currently available:

• OpenSea: This is one of the most established universal NFT marketplaces. You can find non-fungible tokens representing ownership of a wide variety of things, including artwork, sports collectibles, virtual worlds, trading cards and domain names.
  
  

OpenSea NFT marketplace

• Rarible: This is an NFT marketplace owned by the community members holding RARI tokens. It puts an emphasis on art, but you can find a wide range of other NFT items here, too.
  
  
  

Rarible NFT marketplace

• SuperRare: Another marketplace focused on digital art is SuperRare, which works with a select handful of leading concept artists.
  
  
  

SuperRare NFT marketplace

• Nifty Gateway – Nifty is one of the largest marketplaces for NFTs. Here you can buy artworks from well-known artists, including Beeple (who holds the record for the most expensive NFT sold for $69 million), Steve Aoki and deadmau5.
  
  
  

Nifty Gateway NFT marketplace

• Foundation: Founded in February, Foundation has quickly become one of the most popular NFT marketplaces for creators, with the all-time trading volume already touching almost $48 million.
  
  
  

Foundation NFT marketplace

For niche digital items like virtual world avatars or digital fantasy football cards, while there is an ever-increasing number of platforms emerging in this corner of the market, there are five main platforms where a majority of NFT sales are made:

• NBA Top Shot: An NFT marketplace built on Flow where people buy and sell digital collectible cards featuring videos of memorable NBA “moments.”
• Axie Infinity: This platform hosts cartoon characters for the Axie Infinity game, where players breed, battle and trade digital pets called Axies. Some people even play it professionally for a living.
• Sorare: Here you can buy virtual cards representing football players and use them for Sorare, which is a global fantasy football game.
• Decentraland: This platform has its own in-house marketplace where users buy and sell virtual land or in-game items such as wearables.
• Valuables: This is a site where users can tokenize tweets and sell them as NFTs. The Twitter CEO himself, Jack Dorsey, sold his first-ever tweet for $2.9 million.

NFTs have become one of the hottest crypto trends of 2021, with overall sales up 55% already since 2020, from $250 million to $389 million. Here’s how you can create, purchase and sell these popular digitals assets.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are unique collectible crypto assets, have been around as early as 2012 when the concept of Bitcoin Colored Coins first emerged.

These coins were simply satoshis – small fractions of a bitcoin – marked, or “colored in” with distinct information that could link the coins to real-world assets, such as “this satoshi represents $500 of John Doe’s New York office building.

” For the most part, however, Colored Coins were used to create and trade artwork like “Rare Pepe” digital cards on Counterparty, a peer-to-peer trading platform built on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain.

These cartoon frog images adapted from a viral internet meme were some of the earliest examples of unique digital artwork tied to crypto tokens.

This paved the way for the ideation and creation of new non-fungible token standards – a set of blockchain building blocks that allow developers to create their own NFTs.

Lee este artículo en español.NFTs can be used to represent virtually any type of real or intangible item, including:

• Artwork
• Virtual items within video games such as skins, virtual currency, weapons and avatars
• Music
• Collectibles (e.g. digital trading cards)
• Tokenized real-world assets, from real estate and cars to racehorses and designer sneakers
• Virtual land
• Video footage of iconic sporting moments

See also: The 5 NFT Trends to Watch

How to create NFTs

Creating your own NFT artwork, whether it be a GIF or an image, is a relatively straightforward process and doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the crypto industry. NFT artwork can also be used to create collectibles like sets of digital cards.

Before you start, you will need to decide on which blockchain you want to issue your NFTs. Ethereum is currently the leading blockchain service for NFT issuance. However, there is a range of other blockchains that are becoming increasingly popular, including:

• Binance Smart Chain
• Flow by Dapper Labs
• Tron
• EOS
• Polkadot
• Tezos
• Cosmos
• WAX

Each blockchain has its own separate NFT token standard, compatible wallet services and marketplaces. For instance, if you create NFTs on top of the Binance Smart Chain, you will only be able to sell them on platforms that support Binance Smart Chain assets.

This means you wouldn’t be able to sell them on something like VIV3 – a Flow blockchain-based marketplace – or OpenSea which is an Ethereum-based NFT marketplace.

Since Ethereum has the largest NFT ecosystem, here’s what you’ll need to mint your own NFT artwork, music or video on the Ethereum blockchain:

• An Ethereum wallet that supports ERC-721 (the Ethereum-based NFT token standard), such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet.
• Around $50-$100 in ether (ETH). If you are using Coinbase’s wallet you can buy ether from the platform with U.S. dollars, British pound sterling and other fiat currencies. Otherwise, you will need to purchase ether from a cryptocurrency exchange. A guide on how to buy cryptocurrencies using the most popular exchanges can be found here.

Once you have these, there are a number of NFT-centric platforms that allow you to connect your wallet and upload your chosen image or file that you want to turn into an NFT.

The main Ethereum NFT marketplaces include:

• OpenSea
• Rarible
• Mintable

Makersplace also allows you to create your own NFTs but you have to register to become a listed artist on the platform beforehand.OpenSea, Rarible and Mintable all have a “create” button in the top right corner.

Here’s how the process works on OpenSea, currently the largest Ethereum-based NFT marketplace.




OpenSea NFT marketplace built on EthereumClicking the "create" button (blue) will take you to a screen that asks you to connect your Ethereum-based wallet.

Once you’ve entered your wallet password when requested it will automatically connect your wallet with the marketplace. You may have to digitally sign a message in your Ethereum wallet to prove you own the wallet address, but it’s just a case of clicking through to proceed.

Digitally signing a message does not incur a fee, it’s just to show that you have ownership over the wallet.

The next step on OpenSea is to hover over “create” in the top right corner and select “my collections.” From there, click the blue “create” button as shown below.




Creating an NFT collection on OpenSea

A window will appear that allows you to upload your artwork, add a name and include a description.

This part is essentially just you creating a folder for your newly created NFTs to go in.




OpenSea NFT collection creation window

Once you’ve assigned an image for your collection, it will appear as shown below (blue). You’ll then need to add a banner image to the page by clicking on the pencil icon in the top right corner (red).




Add a banner image to NFT collection on OpenSea

Your page should end up looking something like the image below.Now, you’re ready to create your first NFT. Click on the “Add New Item” button (blue) and sign another message using your wallet.




Creating NFT collection on OpenSea

You’ll arrive at a new window where you can upload your NFT image, audio, GIF or 3D model.

On OpenSea and many other marketplaces, you also have the option to include special traits and attributes to increase the scarcity and uniqueness of your NFT.

 Creators even have the opportunity to include unlockable content that can only be viewed by the purchaser.

This can be anything from passwords to access certain services to discount codes and contact information.




NFT traits on the Ethereum-based OpenSea platform.

Once you’re finished, click “create” at the bottom and sign another message in your wallet to confirm the creation of the NFT. The artwork should then appear in your collection.

How much does it cost to make NFTs?

While it costs nothing to make NFTs on OpenSea, some platforms charge a fee. With Ethereum-based platforms, this fee is known as “gas.” Ethereum gas is simply an amount of ether required to perform a certain function on the blockchain – in this instance, it would be adding a new NFT to the marketplace.

The cost of gas varies depending on network congestion. The higher the number of people transacting value over the network at a given time, the higher the price of gas fees and vice versa.

Top tip: Ethereum gas fees are significantly cheaper on average during the weekend when fewer people are transacting value over the network. This can help keep costs down if you’re listing multiple NFTs for sale.

How to sell NFTs

To sell your NFTs on a marketplace, you’ll need to locate them in your collection, click on them and find the “sell” button. Clicking this will take you to a pricing page where you can define the conditions of the sale including whether to run an auction or sell at a fixed price.

Ether and other ERC-20 tokens are the most common cryptocurrencies you can sell your NFTs for, however, some platforms only support the native token of the blockchain they were built upon. VIV3, for example, is a Flow blockchain marketplace and only accepts FLOW tokens.

By clicking on the “edit” button next to the collection image on OpenSea, signing the message using your wallet and scrolling down, you have the option to program in royalties and select which ERC-20 token you’d like to receive for selling the NFT.

Royalties allow NFT creators to earn a commission every time the asset is sold to a new person. This has the potential to create lifelong passive income streams for artists and other content creators automatically thanks to smart contracts.





Selling NFTs on OpenSea

Listing NFTs on a marketplace sometimes requires a fee in order to complete the process. While it’s not the case with every platform, it’s something to be mindful of when creating NFTs.

How to buy NFTs

Before you rush to buy NFTs, there are four things you need to consider first:

• What marketplace do you intend to buy the NFTs from?
• What wallet do you need to download in order to connect with the platform and purchase NFTs?
• Which cryptocurrency do you need to fund the wallet with in order to complete the sale?
• Are the NFTs you want to buy being sold at a specific time, i.e. via a pack or art drop?

As you can probably guess by now, certain NFTs are only available on specific platforms. For example, if you want to purchase NBA Top Shot packs you will need to open an account with NBA Top Shot, create a Dapper wallet and fund it with either the USDC stablecoin or supported fiat currency options.

You will also have to wait for one of the card pack drops to be announced and try your luck in trying to buy them before they sell out.

Pack and art drops are becoming increasingly common as a method for selling scarce NFTs to an audience of hungry buyers. These drops normally require users to sign up and fund their accounts beforehand so that they don’t miss out on the opportunity to purchase NFTs when they drop.

Pack and art drops can be over in seconds, so you need to have everything ready ahead of time.

Where to buy NFTs

For crypto traders who are primarily interested in buying NFTs, here is a list of the most popular NFT marketplaces in 2021:

• OpenSea
• Rarible
• SuperRare
• Nifty Gateway
• Foundation
• Axie Marketplace
• BakerySwap
• NFT ShowRoom
• VIV3

Is now a good time to get into non-fungible tokens?

The NFT craze is far from being over. Major brands and celebrities such as the UFC and Shawn Mendez have signed deals to release their own non-fungible assets soon, and even Elon Musk’s girlfriend Grimes has jumped on the bandwagon selling almost $6 million worth of digital artwork in minutes.

Messari analyst Mason Nystrom anticipates the NFT market will exceed $1.3 billion by the end of 2021 as more artists, brands and icons flock to the space to create their own distinctive tokens.

With more blockchains competing to produce better NFT services too and a growing range of platforms to choose from, now is a great time to take part in the space.

This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. Nothing mentioned in this article constitutes any type of solicitation, recommendation, offer or endorsement to buy and sell any crypto asset.

Trading in any financial market involves risk and can result in loss of funds. Before investing any money, one should always conduct thorough research and seek professional advice.

As the world’s first beauty brand-created NFT sells for charity in two seconds, the power of digital artworks is only growing.If the pandemic has been good for anything at all, it’s the fuelling of online shopping, interaction and creativity. Case in point: the recent prominence of artists (and their less-obvious collaborators) pushing non-fungible tokens, or NFTs—digital collector cards that accompany an artwork, providing bonus material.

An idiosyncratic Easter Egg, if you will.If you’ve heard of them, chances are you hadn’t just a few months ago. This doesn’t make you uncool or unaware.

While it’s true they’ve been knocking around since 2014 (see Decentraland or CryptoPunks), they didn’t hit the mainstream until early 2021, with many high-profile and unexpected collaborators wanting a slice of the crypto pie.

For example, Liam Payne of One Direction teamed up with Grammy-winner Zedd and audio-reactive artist Sillygabe to create the Lonely Bug Collection, launched a month ago.

This was a product of lockdown boredom (plus a somewhat stalling solo career and lots of money to play with) and allowed Liam’s fans to bid on NFTs to gain special prizes, such as a place at the table next to the singer himself at an immersive dinner party in Las Vegas.

How successful this has been for Payne has not been announced; he’s gone quiet on the subject since it launched, and his following consists largely of teenage girls (albeit in their millions) who likely don’t have the disposable income to throw around on digital art bidding.

Nonetheless, Payne’s popularity and reach will have opened NFTs up to vast group who might normally be uninterested.

Another artiste tossing his hat into the NFT ring is two-time Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins. The Hollywood star (who famously skipped Skyping into the Academy Awards to accept his gong for The Father this year because he thought he wouldn’t win) appears in Zero Contact, a movie shot mostly on Zoom and the first film released on VUELE, the world’s debut NFT viewing platform.

Meanwhile, in March, Christie’s sold American digital artist Beeple’s work Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3m.

The auction house made further NFT history in May when it offered traditional paintings by women alongside tokens by the anonymous digital feminist collective Rewind.


Having honoured women, Rewind has now focused on LGBTQ+ youth, teaming up with fashion house Givenchy, specialised sales platform Veve, and art space Amar Singh Gallery.

More history has been made by this collaboration. Not only did they sell the world’s first NFT for a beauty brand, they did it in two seconds, making $128k. Gallery owner Singh told V.F.: “Rewind created the work using original photography, editing the images digitally, utilising animation to create this burst of movement that was in celebration of LGBTQ+ rights.

“If you look throughout the artwork there’s the pride flag, the trans flag, two women, two men—it’s very powerful. It was sold in 1,952 editions and they all sold out. That’s monumental. And it’s the first time we’ve seen one of the largest companies in the world embracing digital artwork. And rather than doing this for profit, they’re doing it for good.”



AMAR SINGH 

The artwork is titled “Pride” and draws inspiration from Givenchy’s hallmarks in a series of animated portraits symbolising diversity, the assertion of identity and the fight for equal rights.

The message: a universal kind of beauty.Givenchy Parfums have donated the money raised to Le MAG Jeunes (Movement for the Assertion of Young Gay, Lesbian, Bi & Trans people), a French initiative founded in 1985 in Paris, which raises awareness and delivers support at schools by lobbying international institutions and promoting the implementation of more inclusive public policies.

“It was an honour to partner with Givenchy, Amar Singh Gallery and Veve to raise this money for such an important cause,” says Rewind. “As artists, our mission remains committed to highlighting the underrepresented and marginalised.”



AMAR SINGH And they’re up for more.

“Rewind Collective want to collaborate again alongside me for further LGBTQ+ causes,” Singh says. “We are looking at other digital artworks and artists as a new frontier to help solve global issues around women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

”So are NFTs the way of the future, now that auction houses, perfumers, Silence of the Lambs fans and Directioners are all clubbing together to get involved?

“There will always be physical art, but digital art opens the gate to millions of collectors,” Singh weighs in. “Gen Z, millions of young people, will continue to buy this type of art, I’m certain.”

Earlier this year, when a person with the username “JeffBezosForeskin” paid around $40,000 for Monty Python actor John Cleese’s NFT — a crude iPad sketching of the Brooklyn Bridge complete with disproportionately sized, stick-figure fishies — I lost a bit of whatever faith I had left in humanity.

At the time of that transaction, in the first few days of April, it seemed like NFTs (a.k.a. non-fungible tokens) were all anyone could talk about — despite the fact that practically no one knew they existed in January.

By June, the market for these digital files had absolutely plummeted. The NFT market saw a 90 percent drop before the start of summer, according to studies. What’s unclear now is if they’ll fade back into obscurity or, as many tech-obsessed entrepreneurs still hope, if they can still transform the entertainment industry.

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A Tribe Called Quest Sell Profit-Earning Song Royalties as NFT

NFTs (if you’re lost, see our field guide) are massively innovative, but public frenzy has focused on all the wrong value propositions. Cleese’s chicken scratch is not intrinsically worth bags of cash.

A photo of model Emily Ratajkowski posing with a photo of herself has a subjective, not objective, value. But therein lies the issue: The true potential of NFTs doesn’t have anything to do with expensive digital art, but rather with how NFTs shift the nature of ownership — and add to a buyer’s wealth long after the sale itself.


Let’s turn to music. If you buy an NFT that holds a contract for partial rights to a song, for example, you can grab streaming royalties for as long as you own the NFT and you’re quite literally getting richer as the minutes pass.

And if you buy an NFT that holds a concert ticket, you’re trading currency for an experience that would have a price tag on it whether or not it was tracked on a blockchain.

Video game applications also show promise: If you buy an NFT that equips your favorite character with some special skill, you’re getting richer in the metaverse.

As NFTs mature — and as the tech behind them continues to get greener — they dangle exhilarating possibilities for the music business in particular. Here are some of the biggest.

A Tribe Called Quest and a musical stock market

In June, Royalty Exchange, an online marketplace for buying and selling royalties, was the first company to sell the publishing rights to a song — Lil Dicky’s 2015 hit “Save Dat Money” — as an NFT.

A few weeks later, Royalty Exchange stepped up its game, auctioning off a 1.5 percent ownership stake in A Tribe Called Quest’s sound recording royalties from the hip-hop group’s first five studio albums. That NFT sold for 40.191 ETH (equivalent to about $85,000 at the time.) “We created this new type of income-producing NFT,” Royalty Exchange CEO Anthony Martini tells Rolling Stone.

But to be clear, A Tribe Called Quest did not sell their stake. Another rights-holder did so, unbeknownst to the group, which upset its members. 

Billboard alleged that Royalty Exchange had partnered with the band to auction off the share of royalties, and A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad criticized the article on social media for its “misleading headline” that “worded the story in a way to gain clicks” and adamantly said that the band had not had a hand in the deal.

In a way, this kerfuffle actually highlights exactly why royalties should be handled as NFTs in the first place.Muhammad was a teenager when he signed a five-album recording contract with Jive Records in 1989.

For negotiations, he and Q-Tip were represented by Ron Skoler and Ed Chalpin, who owned PPX Enterprises. In his recent post, Muhammad says that Chalpin deceitfully added a clause to the agreement so that PPX could get paid a percentage of the recording fund for every album.

The group did not discover the “hidden clause” — which they’d eventually dispute — until they started recording their second album, The Low End Theory.

“Neither Ed or Ron ever told us about this bullshit language in the agreement,” Muhammad claims. “It was unwarranted and where I come from ‘crooked.

’ Ed sued us and he lost. He appealed the case. He was rich and had deep pockets to litigate. We however were not rich. We were kids with a dream, an album slowly selling and deeply in debt to our record company.”

At the end of Muhammad’s age-old story of the music business screwing over the very people that fuel it, he shared that “it wasn’t until reading this incomplete article by Billboard … that I learned PPX Enterprises wasn’t entirely out of our business.

” Apparently, PPX had sold its share of a settlement made with Jive Records to an individual who then partnered with Royalty Exchange.Martini called Muhammad after seeing the post. “It’s a sore spot for the group,” he says.

“He was really upset by the positioning of the headlines, which caught them off guard. We talked about it. We had a great conversation and hung out in the studio.

” Martini says Muhammad’s anger reflects some of the problems of the music industry he hopes to help fix: “Those are the inherent pitfalls of these old school music industry structures.

”Firstly, blockchain technology could have prevented the group from having to discover that secret arrangement. And not only is it more efficient for all the buyers and sellers to see these transactions transparently, it’s also more enticing to the artist.

A person who owns a royalty-holding NFT will receive revenue generated from areas like sales, streaming, satellite radio, samples, and TV, film, and commercial placements every quarter, but should they ever decide to resell these rights, the token’s smart contract ensures that the original creator gets a percentage of the transaction.

Catalog sales, though red-hot right now, only provide artists with a one-and-done opportunity: “You sell it and you get paid at that time, but if the next owner resells it, you don’t get money again,” Martini says. “If we do that with NFTs, the original artist will always receive a royalty on secondary sales.”

“The art boom made people think of NFTs as a fad, but the underlying technology is what’s important. The future of NFTs is going to be based in functionality.”

Martini, whose past includes stints at management and record companies, sees NFTs as business game-changers. “Transparency’s an issue, it’s fragmented, and there are control issues with it being a top-down type of industry,” he says.

“Blockchain is a way to break down some of those walls and democratize things more. The art boom made people think of NFTs as a fad, but the underlying technology is what’s important. The future of NFTs is going to be based in functionality.

”Martini says he has no interest in the kind of inflated value that currently exists in art NFTs.

“The assets we’re selling have a value, and we tell you the value,” he says, explaining that Royalty Exchange provides investors with detailed information on its catalogues with notes on top-earning songs, what they earned over the last few years, and where those earnings come from. “It’s not about hyping it up and trying to get some insane price.

Whether you think it’s a great piece of music or not, it’s earning X amount. We’re arming the buyers with information. If they want to overpay, that’s up to them.

We want it to be a good investment on both sides. We want to get the artist and the seller the highest value possible, but we also want the investors to buy something that’s going to make them some money, so that they feel good and become repeat customers.”

Massive catalogue deals are also only one part of the plan. Martini believes fans will want to invest in baby bands in a manner that’s akin to the stock market.

If a fan can help pay for an indie artist’s studio time so they can record their debut album — and is promised a percentage of the revenue generated from its eventual streams — it’s a win win.“Imagine if you had the Drake rookie card,” Martini says.

“Let’s say he sold a thousand NFTs for his mixtape at 10 dollars. That piece you bought for a dollar is going to be worth a lot more. Everyone likes to say, ‘Oh, I knew about this guy before everyone else.’ With NFTs, you could prove that.

”Before the world gets there, though, Royalty Exchange wants to popularize the idea of single song deals.

“Younger artists aren’t ready to sell their whole catalogues yet,” Martini says. “It’s not at a good value, because it’s not old enough to give them the multiples they’d want. A song sale is a much easier way to dip your toe in the water. Before we were doing NFTs, it didn’t really make sense to sell one song.

”A cover of “I Apologize” by Kacey Musgraves is up next, but Martini says the public will hear about many more single-song deals in the next few weeks. “We want to convert any potential sale we have into an NFT if possible.

It opens it up to a wider market,” he says. “The crypto investors may not normally be looking at royalty investments, but this opens them up to the market. We’ve seen new buyers come on board. With the first NFT we did, we had over 500 people sign up within 24 hours.”

Skin in the game (literally)

NFTs could also help bridge the narrowing gap between the gaming world and other areas of entertainment and storytelling, like music.

This spring, rapper 6ix9ine developed a series of rainbowfied NFTs with help from the Bondly platform and game company Atari. Notably, some of the NFTs unlocked “special significance” in the Atari metaverse, according to item descriptions.

What that really means, however, is still unclear — mainly because Atari was not yet finished designing the special perks when Bondly let the cat out of the bag. Even Atari’s CEO, Fred Chesnais, was surprised when Rolling Stone reached out for details:

“[The descriptions] must’ve been done by Bondly, because I was not aware of that,” Chesnais tells Rolling Stone before confirming that the company is indeed working on a new “virtual world” and stressing that he’ll only talk about it in general terms for now. He promises, though, that all will be revealed in due time.

“The idea is: If you buy an NFT of an artist, you can basically play with it in the digital world. All these worlds [in video games] are about building and evolving. You may want to look at them and say, ‘Oh, this is super complex.’

But, at the end of the day, every game revolves around three factors, which are health, wealth, and happiness.” Imagine, for instance, that your digital avatar is running low on health.

What if, instead of buying a “health pack” as a boost, you buy an NFT from an artist that has a song attached to it? “So, you watch an exclusive video from your favorite artist [in the game] and that increases your health.

” Another idea he’s been ruminating on involves future concert tickets being linked to NFTs that unlock an in-game meet and greet between the celebrities and their fans.

 “Those are just two examples,” he says. “If you give me like five hours in a room with three designers, we’ll come up with 50 examples.”Despite the naysayers, Chesnais believes that NFTs are key to making once-futuristic developments and experiences like in-game concerts more streamlined and approachable.

“Think about it,” he urges. “What is a token? The token is a way to measure and count something, and it’s verifiable. With tokens, you could organize the waitlist for the meet and greet.

”He also envisions a future wherein bands make merch for gamers’ avatars, so artists can promote their music in a new way and expand their reach globally.

 “Let’s say there are 10,000 tee shirts in the digital world,” he says. “And then, all of a sudden, the band decides to make a real-life tee shirt. They could say, ‘Hey, we’re going to prioritize the ones who own the NFTs.’ And since those are numbered, it’s not first come first serve.

[Fans] send in their orders. Whoever has an NFT is given priority. And, if two people have the same NFT. If you have the second out of 10,000 NFTs, you will be served first.”


“I think this is just the beginning,” Chesnais says, who adds that he started looking into the ways in which crypto could be applied to Atari’s business back in 2017. “You will see more stuff starting online and then moving into the real world as we make progress.

” While he recognizes that there are cash-grabbers infiltrating the NFT scene right now, he doesn’t think that matters.

“It’s the responsibility of the buyers to look at what they’re buying and keep their heads cool. People are always going to try and sell you stuff. So, please just be careful.

If you buy some bad stuff, that’s your problem. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, but you have to give the product a chance. It’s a product like any other.

”Atari introduced its own Atari token last year — and, this March, the company announced its plans to develop a cryptocurrency casino in partnership with Decentral Games. Gamers can find the Atari-branded digital property in “Vegas City,” a district in the Ethereum-based Decentraland‘s metaverse.

Chesnais says users can gamble with the Atari token in that casino, which opened in April with a virtual launch party that included a “live” performance by DJ Dillon Francis.

Given how hard it is for smaller-scale acts to book shows right now, Chesnais thinks these types of events provide artists with more opportunities to “make money and stay relevant.

” As for next steps, Chesnais will only vaguely allude to “many, many other musical partnerships in the works.”

Tickets to ride

NFTs aren’t just reserved for the digital events space. As long as you own a mobile smartphone, they can act like an inimitable ticket or backstage pass. Next year, Lewis Capaldi hopes to host the first-ever show to require entry through NFT ownership, according to press materials reviewed by Rolling Stone.

Capaldi’s Big Fat Sexy Collectible Cards, which are actually NFTs, unlock a variety of perks, including access to a 2022 album playback. The most expensive card also includes two spots on any of Capaldi’s future headlining shows for life.

Lewis’s is a niche example, but companies like Yellowheart — in which Live Nation invested — are trying to put NFTs at the center of the concert industry’s modus operandi. (Yellowheart also designed NFTs for Kings of Leon that housed lifetime VIP concert passes.)

“What Yellowheart does is it writes the rules for a concert’s tickets in a smart contract,” Adam Alpert, who manages The Chainsmokers, runs a record label through Sony Music, and partnered with with veteran executive Josh Katz to launch Yellowheart in 2018, told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “So, it can say, ‘This is how many seats there are.

These are the rows and seat numbers. This is how much the seats cost. This is what they can be resold for. This is how many times they can be resold. This is how old you need to be to buy these tickets.’ Any kind of information that can be governed by a smartphone or computer.

”NFTs can also ensure that the revenue generate from the ticket sale is easily and transparently split between any involved parties, including promoters, venues, artists, and even charities.

That applies to the initial sale as well as the resale. “The secondary [i.e. resale] market is a ten billion dollar market — if not more,” said Alpert. “That money is the biggest elephant in the room of the music business… Venues, promoters, and ticket-sellers all want to solve this together.

There are [random] people, not promoters, not venues, not artists, that are getting this money.

”While it’s true that no one really needs a 52-minute recording of flatulence in the form of an NFT, it’s also clear that the music industry does need more transparency and tech savviness at its core — especially as modern life becomes increasingly digitalized.

Blockchains that make NFTs possible provide just that. Not all NFTs are created equal, but, if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that there’s so much room for growth online.

With the Tokyo Olympic Games set to officially start, Team Great Britain (GB) has become the first to adopt non-fungible tokens (NFTs) featuring the athletes’ previous achievements, which can be purchased through a dedicated store.

The collectible digital items, minted within the blockchain to make them unique, will be sold to allow fans of Team GB to connect directly with the athletes despite not being allowed to travel to watch them in person.

The initiative has been developed with NFT commerce provider Tokns with the partnership set to run until the end of the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing next year. It will include the celebrations of 125 years of British Olympians and will be sold nightly through auctions and at fixed prices.

In a statement, Tim Ellerton, Team GB commercial director, highlighted how pleased he was to be forming the partnership with Tokns ahead of “what is set to be a very different Games for our Olympians in Tokyo.

”With fans not allowed to travel to attend, he added that the team was “delighted” to be able to “provide moments digitally that will be available for fans and collectors.

”One of the first items to be sold as an NFT will be Team GB Gymnast Max Whitlock celebrating his double gold medal-winning achievements in Rio.

Artist-in-residence for Team GB Ben Mosley will create expressionist-style wall paintings to capture inspiring moments from the previous day during the games.

These will be bundled with other physical and experiential offers within an auction taking place through the dedicated website from the studio on Carnaby Street in London.

Has the hype died off? Is the fad over? With Google Trends reporting an 80% drop in search interest for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) since its peak in late March, do NFTs have a future in the digital marketing ecosystem?

Early adopters have started to settle down and the flashiness of the latest shiny object looks like it’s starting to fade.

However, the topic of NFTs still looms in headlines, suggesting curiosity hasn’t entirely dissipated.Marketers would be smart to keep an eye on the NFT industry as it matures and becomes mainstream. 

The potential is not in what has already happened; it’s in the ideas of what copyright, production and ownership mean in a digital world.

The cost of getting involved

Though brands as diverse as Gucci, Taco Bell and the NBA have benefited from the NFT PR wave, there are a few issues that will need to be resolved before more marketers innovate with the concept:

The price of selling NFTsThe cost of selling NFTs is a double-edged sword. The high price reduces mediocre products on auction blocks but also prohibits brands from entering the market. Other costs associated with selling NFTs, include:

• Minting Fees: To generate a certificate of authenticity
• Listing Fees: The auction listing fee
• Commission Fees: Depending on the platform and auction type used
• Transaction Fees: The amount you pay for getting the money out of escrow and transferring it into your digital wallet

Uncertain ROIFor example, working with the blockchain company, Dapper Labs, the NBA has set up its own marketplace called NBA Top Shot, where fans can buy and sell their favorite NBA highlight clips or “moments.

” Sales peaked in February ($231.6 million) and March ($230.4 million) but have since dropped off sharply (an approximate 60% decline) despite being one of the industries (i.e., sports collectibles) most likely to develop a sustainable NFT revenue stream. 

With such high associated costs and low guarantees of return, marketers are hesitant to experiment in this space. 

Legal challengesNot only is the NBA Top Shot a pioneer in NFT minting and selling, but it is also the lucky recipients of the first NFT lawsuit.

In short, the plaintiff accuses Dapper Labs of selling securities when also selling NFTs on its platform, causing a conflict of interest. With any new ventures involving emerging tech and money, there is sure to be conflict and risks most marketers can’t afford to take.

Environmental impact


Despite being a virtual asset, the process of minting, recording and selling/buying NFTs has real-world implications. Blockchain transactions consume an immense amount of electricity, which produces a fair amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition to the monetary costs, those seeking to play in the world of NFTs must also bear the burden of the carbon footprints they’re creating as well, which may conflict with a brand’s sustainability values.

What to expect with NFTs 2.0

The downsides must be addressed if NFTs are set to evolve and be part of digital and content marketing. Here are some things we expect to see in the near future:

• Going beyond the ledger: Bragging rights are more impressive when you have something to point to other than a line of data in a public ledger. Collectors will want a public forum to display their valuables and their stamp of ownership. Be on the lookout for the rise of the “NFT Museums.”
  
  
  
• Wearable NFTs: The idea of dressing your avatar in a one-of-kind, exclusive virtual outfit has appeal for those traversing the metaverse. In contrast to the NFT Museum, which serves as a centralized destination to showcase your valuables, the opportunity will arise for avatars to showboat on the go!
  
  
  
• Going green: Various organizations are already attempting to tackle the environmental barrier by exploring alternative protocols such as off-chain minting transactions or proof-of-stake versus proof-of-work validation to reduce energy consumption.
  
  
  
• On and offline integrations: Pairing a tangible good along with a virtual asset gives incremental value to the whole experience. Imagine being able to wear an exclusive pair of sneakers autographed by Pharrell in the real world and also having your virtual self wear them in your favorite games. 
  
  
  
• M.I.S.S.: Until we make it stupid simple to buy, sell and collect NFTs, this market will remain exclusive to only the most technologically comfortable. This evolution is sure to coincide with cryptocurrency as it becomes more ubiquitous.

Revolutions are the product of the masses, not the elites. Accordingly, we need to update the blockchain narrative to something more easily palpable for the average consumer and get on a path of attracting the millions of users. 

William Mougayar, a CoinDesk columnist, is the author of “The Business Blockchain,” producer of the Token Summit and a venture investor and adviser.

Granted, the decentralized finance (DeFi) revolution is already on its way and poised to challenge traditional finance, but aside from DeFi what are some promising scenarios that could take the blockchain into mainstream experience? Let’s flip blockchain’s promise on its head and think of mainstream users first. 

Here are four usage scenarios that have a chance of being understood and adopted by mainstream consumers. 

Earning by doing

Who wouldn’t like to be rewarded or compensated for their time, knowledge, data or hard work, whether online or not? Today, we have all become self-service slaves to a variety of online activities. Over the course of the Web 2.0 era, value capture shifted to the landlords who presented users with a buffet of actions. While these central players gave users some satisfaction and benefits, they reaped a lot more than they sowed or gave back.

By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms & conditions and privacy policy.

Blockchains are money systems that transcend the real world. Of course, cryptocurrency is the perfect internet native currency, but cryptocurrency can also touch the physical world. It could usurp loyalty programs and provide users with a more fluid and universal currency. 

See also: William Mougayar – We Still Lack a Rational Way to Value TokensBlockchains can reward people for taking actions just as consensus protocols reward computers for mining and validating transactions.

Steemit (now called Hive) users have already received $60 million in rewards since 2016. The Kin ecosystem (where I am an investor) grants a variety of earnings to users and developers, and has already dispensed over $15 million in rewards to its ecosystem of mobile App developers in the past two years. Earning by doing will become a fundamental right. It is a general purpose capability, just as user-generated content was for Web 2.0. 

Self-custody of value

We are used to storing valuables at home such as money, jewelry or art. However, when the value of these goods exceed what we can insure, or what we feel safe in keeping at home, we usually turn to banks or special custodians as more convenient safeguards for storing our liquid assets. 

Cryptocurrency offers alternative storage options via personal wallets or easy on-ramps to exchanges or a new category of crypto custodians that possess their own secure vaults.

Today, many self-custody wallets already exist, allowing users to experience the self-service option for assets storage. Those same wallets also enable the storage of another blockchain novelty: “digitally unique” artifacts also known as non-fungible tokens (or NFTs; think CryptoKitties).

In the long term, banks and old-style physical storage services may not be the most popular or safest storage methods anymore. Being your own custodian is an attractive value proposition that comes with a degree of freedom and efficiency, as long as its relative ease of use and trust levels continue to improve.

Many users will gradually de-bank their assets and move them into self-custody to take advantage of new services that are only available in the blockchain world.

Remote privileges

Our driver licenses give us an explicit permission to drive on public roads. A bank card allows us to withdraw money or initiate transactions. Our house key lets us inside our homes. You can’t fake one key for another just as you can’t use your friend’s driver license as a substitute for yours and you can’t access any one else’s account with your bank card. 

What if there was a solid equivalent to all these “access” options online? What if blockchain technology (combined with our smartphones and biometrics) could be used to grant us a wide array of access privileges, both in the physical and online worlds? 

See also: William Mougayar – For DeFi to Grow, CeFi Must Embrace ItThe equivalent to the physical keychain holder will be a smart wallet that contains a variety of “special keys,” also known as tokens, that open access to a mix of activities, web sites or actually places.

The software just needs to check that you have the proper “access right” in your possession, in the same way as when you pull a token from your pocket to retrieve your garment at a coat check, or rely on the electronic device in your car to automatically calculate and grant your toll payment when your car passes through.

Many of the same self-custody wallets will also allow us to vote on a variety of issues just as easily as opening a mobile app and posting a picture or sending a tweet.

Community empowerment

We live in an age of instant online connections, yet most of these interactions are optimized for the individual, not the group. We sign up individually to sites that recognize us as one unique person.

What if communities of similar interests were able to govern and rule themselves via clear and enforceable procedures such as voting, decision making and operational executions?

Today, we can do some of that via online community forums (e.g., Discord, Facebook Groups) or a variety of online chat platforms (e.g., Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal). But once these groups are formed, implementing governance and instilling enforceable systems that mirror the values of its participants is not so easily done.

Blockchain is perfect for empowering online community governance. Early versions already exist within DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), but a lot of work is still required before getting close to mainstream adoption, because these early DAO-based versions are quite geeky and assume that participants are steeped in technical capabilities. Newer apps to turbo-charge online communities are on the horizon.

Web 3 should not be technical

The above four use-cases are lighthouse beacons from which we can seek guidance. They are not perfect, but they are acceptable entry points that will usher us into a Web 3.0 era that is more about mainstream usages, and less about technical infrastructure jargon.

The blockchain world is full of big ideas. Beyond DeFi, the narrative needs to inspire a much wider segment of the population.

What if we could start earning real value by being online while also able to safely store what we earn? What if we became more efficient at self-organizing, while being empowered to also collectively act soon after? 

These use cases already exist within several microcosms. Now the rest of the world must get inspired to move them into the mainstream.

Blockchain is disruptive, but it doesn’t change human nature. In fact, Plato and Aristotle considered technology — which has roots in the ancient Greek word “techne,” or craftsmanship — an extension of nature. Today, many innovators' techniques are flawed. 

Exciting solutions are unnecessarily complex, hard to understand and impractical. Regular folks don’t meddle with applications like crytpocurrencies, therefore tokens are derided with nicknames like "shitcoin." It's an innovation that elides potential target customers like small-business owners who are too busy to read a technical manual.

Simple vs. Complicated Currency

Human nature should encourage technologists to create a streamlined user journey. In the office, people want ergonomic furniture so that work is pleasant and effortless. And when it comes to the wallet, people want currencies that are simple and don’t fluctuate in value.

Aristotle’s commodity theory of money declares that money is a commodity with three functions: medium of exchange, a unit of account and store of value.

But to function in daily life, money should be convenient to handle, store and transport. It should be easy to measure and divide. And money should be difficult to destroy so that it lasts many generations.

Fiat works well, but its major weakness is the destruction of purchasing power by a quantitative easing of central banks around the world. Since the Federal Reserve issued the current version of U.S. dollar in 1913, the greenback has lost almost 97% of its value. 

Related: What's Next for PayPal After Integrating Cryptocurrencies?

That’s unacceptable. And so it creates an opening for Bitcoin and non-sovereign, decentralized coins to become newly accepted denominations of money.

Unfortunately, cryptos fail to fulfill the aforementioned essential functions. (Yes, Bitcoin is sustainable, but many wannabe currencies have precipitated the loss of hard-earned wages and savings, resulting in the loss of trust in unbacked mediums of exchange.)

Regulators’ Sanctioning of Digital Coins

Governments and central banks are cautiously exploring, experimenting with and regulating digital currencies, and that's because history is on the side of digital, not paper. Moreover, officials are recognizing that fiat users want borderless and frictionless transactions.

If they don’t give what the customer wants, then part of the population may leave for the crypto Wild West for good due to lack of alternatives.In September, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a letter that allows regulated banks and thrifts to hold deposits as reserves for stablecoins that represent the U.S. dollar.

Stablecoins aren’t the same thing as Bitcoin or other non-sovereign coins, but they at least provide tokenized, borderless and frictionless settlements.

“Companies that issue stablecoins often desire to place the funds backing the stablecoin, or reserve funds, with a U.S. bank," the letter states. 

"Public independent auditors’ statements of several stablecoin issuers indicate reserve funds are placed as deposits with U.S. banks. Several of these issuers promote these reserves — and the fact that they are held by banks — to support the trustworthiness of their stablecoin.

 In light of the public interest in these reserve accounts, this letter addresses the legal authority of national banks to hold stablecoin reserves on behalf of customers.

"Aside from 1:1 pegged stablecoins, state regulators are making fiat and cryptocurrencies interoperable for daily use. Last month, the Wyoming Banking Board approved Kraken’s application for a Special Purpose Depositary Institution (SPDI) banking charter. 

The San Francisco-based crypto exchange “will be the first regulated, U.S. bank to provide comprehensive deposit-taking, custody and fiduciary services for digital assets,” according to a Sept. 16 company announcement.

“From paying bills and receiving salaries in cryptocurrency to incorporating digital assets into investment and trading portfolios, Kraken Financial will enable Kraken clients in the U.S. to bank seamlessly between digital assets and national currencies.”

Creating a Streamlined User Journey

Blockchain innovators are realizing the critical need to make the customer journey painless and effortless. In September, crypto exchange BitMax.io announced support of deposits and withdrawals with FIO Addresses.

These are human-readable addresses (like bob@wallet) as part of FIO Protocol’s initiative to make crypto products usable by anyone. Cryptocurrency addresses can have dozens of characters that make irreversible errors common, and simple addresses are considered by some observers as a step in gaining more mainstream adoption.

Moreover, FIO Requests let users respond to requests for funds knowing the exact amount and proper token chain. As more tokens like USDT operate on multiple chains, it’s becoming important that users only send tokens from the expected chain.

The blockchain industry is heading down the path of cross chain communication. Such details can be hidden from the end user with FIO.HARD Protocol is another example of how cryptocurrency can become more integrated and user-friendly.

Tapping into the appetite for decentralized finance, HARD Protocol allows users to lend, borrow and earn with their digital assets. However, whereas DeFi has evolved to be hard-wired to Ethereum — and as such, clunky and difficult to use — HARD Protocol is transcending global investments through crypto technology.

 It’s based on the Kava DeFi hub, providing an intuitive user interface along with cross-chain capabilities, supporting multiple assets, including BTC, XRP and BNB. Cross-chain interoperability is proving to be a big hit among holders of non-Ethereum assets who were previously locked out of the so-called “open finance” ecosystem.

HARD Protocol only launched in mid-October; however, it already shows close to $19 million in value locked at the time of this writing. Further, HARD Protocol and Kava are also the only DeFi protocols supporting multi-chain assets. 

Related: Cutting-Edge Online Financial Strategies for the General Population

Money should be easy to use, convenient and difficult to destroy. Innovators can and do more to make the user experience simple and pleasant.

A blockchain-based health records system is gradually making it possible for mainland China to resume cross-border tourism to Macao. The platform makes it easy and fast for tourists from mainland China to verify their health status when entering Macao, taking just 3 seconds.

While it has only been in use for one month, it has processed health data for 17 million people.

The Macao blockchain health code launched in May 2020, relying on the technology to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. It serves as an electronic pass for residents to access public places.

A few months later, Macao expanded it to add the mutual recognition mechanism with the health code system in Guangdong province in China.

The health code is built on China’s open-source blockchain platform FISCO BCOS. In a press release, the nonprofit revealed the impact the platform has had, including reviving tourism between mainland China and Macao.

The latter had suspended tourist visa application in January this year in light of the pandemic.

According to the organization, since its launch on September 23, more than 17 million people have used it to clear customs between Chinese mainland and Macao.It further revealed, “The average time of receiving, transforming, and generating the health code for the first time is only 100 seconds.

And it will only take less than 3 seconds to complete the procedure when traveler clears customs again.”The blockchain platform has solved a critical challenge—the privacy protection regulations in China and Macao.

While health officials need to verify health information for those crossing the border, they must not exchange data directly with each other.

Blockchain allows the authorities to encrypt the personal health data and record it securely. Once a user shares this data at the border, the health official can verify the integrity of the data by comparing with the corresponding digital credentials on the blockchain.

“In addition, the mutual recognition mechanism enables the seamless conversion of health codes for the users without the need to fill in personal information repeatedly on different platforms, offering great convenience and ease of use for cross-border travelers,” the organization added.

China has continued to adopt blockchain aggressively in recent years, both at a state and national level. As CoinGeek reported, Shenzhen city recently gave away $1.5 million in digital yuan to boost its adoption.

The CBDC has now been used in over 3 million transactions, with 1.1 billion yuan ($160 million) exchanging hands.

See also: EHR Data presentation at CoinGeek Live, “EHR Data: The First Healthcare Data Platform Using the Bitcoin SV Blockchain track from CoinGeek Live 2020.”

Social tokens — or tokens backed by the reputation of an individual, brand, or community — are gaining traction and some believe they could be the next big thing in the cryptocurrency community. 

But what are they, and why are artists, musicians and social media influencers rushing to tokenize their efforts in order to gift, or sell them, to followers?Social tokens are a little different to the slew of DeFi liquidity farming tokens that have appeared over the past couple of months.

They are built around an “ownership economy” principle with the premise that a community will be more valuable tomorrow than today.Creators can monetize their work as an non-fungible token (NFT), or social token, and supporters can give something back to show their loyalty.

Influencers minting their own tokens to offer them as rewards, or sell them for additional revenue.Cooper Turley from Audius explained in Bankless today:

”Social tokens provide a means of not only sharing financial upside with their favorite creative but also enables tiered, tokenized access based on active contributions.”

For example, artist Laura Driskill runs a popular Instagram channel and produces Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos to aid in relaxation and sleep.

She has now created her own ERC-20 social token called TINGLE for her followers to buy in exchange for further interaction or purchasing merchandise.

Grammy award winning artist RAC, aka André Allen Anjos, has just announced a token created with Zora, a platform for artists, creators, and brands to craft their own markets. The token will be distributed to subscribers of various associated platforms and used to unlock access to various perks and exclusive content. RAC stated:

“Crypto enables communities to capture the value they create instead of being monetized by preexisting platforms and $RAC is an active experiment pushing the envelope on these primitives.”

A startup based in New York called Roll has taken things a step further by offering to mint Ethereum-based branded digital tokens, or “social money”, for influencers and creators.

There are around 160 social tokens currently offered on Roll and the number is growing as everyone from rappers to NBA stars to entrepreneurs experiment with this latest method of monetizing content and incentivizing community loyalty.

Tokenomics vary depending on the objectives of the creator but they all have one thing in common; participants all have financial exposure and share in the growth.

On Sept. 23, auction-house giant Christie’s announced plans to sell its first nonfungible token, or NFT, at an auction. This was just one week after the record-setting $100,000 sale at auction of a digital art piece that also used a blockchain-based token to vest the collector’s new ownership rights.

Meanwhile, Anthony Pompliano, Morgan Creek Digital co-founder and partner, wrote on Sept. 21: "I personally believe that the digital art market cap will grow to become larger than the physical art market cap. This may sound ridiculous today.

” Clearly, the digital art market is heating up. Duncan Cock Foster, co-founder at digital gallery Nifty Gateway, told Cointelegraph: “The digital art movement is growing at an incredibly rapid pace. The amount of growth we are seeing has surprised everyone involved I think.

” Much of this can probably be attributed to the coronavirus pandemic that has curtailed travel and shut down art museums.

“Digital art allows people to engage with art from their homes, on their computers, on their phones, and send images/videos back and forth easily, which makes digital art especially suited to this time in history,” Blake Finucane, co-author of a position paper on NFT-based art titled “Crypto art: A decentralized view,” told Cointelegraph.

But something else may be going on. One of the historic issues with digital art has been that it is “essentially impossible to monetize,” said Finucane, adding:

“If something exists only in digital form — i.e. a gif, a meme, a digital image, a digital video — it is easy to simply screen shot, copy or paste it, or replicate it. A digital artwork’s value is diminished when it comes to selling it commercially because it is so easy to copy — and difficult to track what is, in fact, the original artwork.”

But on the other hand, if a digital artwork is tokenized, the original can always be traced back via token, “making it much easier to garner commercial value because someone can actually ‘own’ the original,” she said.

“It is extremely important for digital art,” Giovanni Colavizza, assistant professor of digital humanities at the University of Amsterdam, told Cointelegraph, adding that tokenization “allows us to exchange and create value from forms of art which previously were problematic.

”On Sept. 18, NonFungible.com, a website that tracks NFT sales data, reported a record high in art-related NFT volume ($162,385), and that was followed on Sept. 22 by the second-highest daily total ever achieved ($123,205). The uptick since June in U.S.-dollar sales of blockchain-based digital art has been notable.

Digital art + blockchain = crypto art

Digital art has been around for decades. Artists began experimenting with computers back in the 1950s and 1960s, but it’s only recently that digital art has been tokenized on a blockchain platform.

For instance, Ethereum’s nonfungible token, ERC-721 — which is used by many digital galleries — wasn’t developed and rolled out until early 2018.

The traditional art world often dismisses electronic art, asking: Why bring out digital art when copies can be made from it? — explained Vladislav Ginzburg, CEO at Blockparty. However, "I can use [NFT] technology to prove that I have the original digital asset.

" Ginzburg compared digital art to eBooks, which, like digital art, existed for decades without much interest until reading devices such as the Kindle and iPad emerged.

"Digital art is having its Kindle and iPad moment right now," he said while speaking at art festival CADAF Online.

“The art world has been craving a way to collect digital art and NFTs are a picture perfect solution to this problem,” said Cock Foster, adding that everyone should distinguish between digital art and crypto art, the latter being the tokenized or blockchain-enabled version of the former.

According to the aforementioned “Crypto art” position paper, which Colavizza also co-authored, the theory goes something like this:

“When a digital asset made by an artist is added to a digital gallery, a token is generated by a smart contract and deposited in the artist’s wallet. The token is permanently linked to the artwork, and is a unique, one-of-a-kind asset that represents ownership and authenticity of the underlying artwork. Once created, the artwork starts its life on the given blockchain, where a fan or collector can purchase it, and where it can be subsequently exchanged, traded or held by collectors like any other rare artifact.”

Will artists embrace the cryptoverse?

Surely enough, obstacles remain. Persuading mainstream artists to use NFTs, an esoteric technology, could be a challenge, arguably. Cock Foster opined: “We had a lot more trouble recruiting mainstream artists to the space six months ago. It is not that difficult anymore.

” Meanwhile, artists see a market that seems to be bubbling over — like with the $100,000 paid for “Right Place & Right Time,” a digital art piece based on Bitcoin’s (BTC) fluctuating price action, or the $55,555 paid on Nifty Gateway in July for artist Trevor Jones’ digital artwork “Picasso’s Bull.

”Moreover, “NFTs are an incredible new creative medium,” said Cock Foster. “Artists are able to do things in the NFT medium that are unable to do with physical art. This is the primary reason that they are interested.

”Secondary sales are an enticement, too. If a collector purchases a digital artwork on Asynchronous Art, the artist is paid a commission on that sale (e.g., 10%). But if the collector sells the artwork two years later, the artist also earns a 20% commission for that secondary sale.

This happens automatically — it is written into the software — and is one of the “revolutionary” aspects of blockchain-enabled digital art, Conlan Rios, founder and CEO of Async Art, told Cointelegraph.

Such sales were “impossible before blockchain technology came along,” confirmed Finucane.Another novelty with digital art is the sale of layers, said Rios, whereby collectors can separately purchase “layers” — derivative works made from the masterwork that often offer an owner programming options such as changing the artwork’s colors, rotation or even its “state.

” This represents an entirely new revenue stream.

A counterintuitive concept 

“The biggest barrier to growth is that people have difficulty understanding what an NFT is,” Cock Foster told Cointelegraph. It’s a counterintuitive concept that people have trouble getting their minds around, but “Once people understand what an NFT is and why the concept is so powerful, they quickly become obsessed.

”Still, Rios told Cointelegraph that “You can’t just plug in your credit card” when you purchase a tokenized artwork. You first must create a digital wallet to hold the NFT, and you should know something about gas fees and the like: “That’s probably the biggest hurdle.” Colavizza agreed: “You need to put a lot of time and effort into knowing how to navigate crypto art.

This creates a barrier to entry.”“Many people are still intimidated by blockchain technology,” said Finucane, telling Cointelegraph that the main challenges center “around the authentication/validation of works before they are entered on to the blockchain.” She added:

“NFTs are particularly useful for artists working in purely digital form, many artists may not be sure how it fits into their practice if they are working in physical mediums like painting, sculpture, etc.” 

Elena Zavelev, founder and CEO of CADAF and New Art Academy, told Cointelegraph that “The global digitization that happened during COVID created opportunities for the digital artists that weren’t available before.”

Moreover, the popularity of blockchain technology has brought hope that once it becomes more widely accepted within the traditional art community, it will increase monetizing opportunities for digital art. But so far:

“Its adoption remains anecdotal. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in some time, new technology will be easier to utilize than blockchain for the mainstream art community and replace it as a better tool.”

Crypto art still needs to develop an ecosystem more like that found in traditional art, too, with museums, exhibitions, curators, auction houses and fairs, added Colavizza.

“The social mechanics which create recognition, prestige and thus value are not there yet, which is both an opportunity and a challenge for collectors and artists.

”Then there’s the question of scalability: Can blockchains really handle all that data flowing their way? Rios runs the gallery business on Ethereum now, using ERC-721 tokens, but he is “blockchain agnostic.” Ethereum is “durable, but expensive and slow,” he told Cointelegraph.

The platform’s shortcomings, like high gas prices, might be justifiable for artists creating works for the ages — the platform will be around for decades, presumably — but newer artists might prefer to try out nonfungible tokens on less-expensive platforms that work passably well. 

As big as physical art?

Could blockchain-enabled digital art surpass physical art in market value one day, as Pompliano suggested? Not many are prepared to go that far — yet.

Finucane told Cointelegraph: “I wouldn’t say that it will ever ‘be as big’ as traditional art but I believe it will have a prominent place in art galleries and art history classes alongside traditional art.” Cock Foster added: “I don’t see this eating into physical art sales in the short term.

” Art is not a zero-sum game. “NFTs are growing by increasing the amount of art sold in the world, not by stealing buyers from the physical art world,” he said, adding:

“The biggest beneficiaries of this are digital artists who could never sell their artwork prior to the invention of NFT technology. One of the artists on our platform just bought a house using the proceeds from his Nifty Gateway sales. Blockchain technology is allowing more artists than ever the chance to live through their art.”

Pompliano, too, noted that there are things that can be done with digital art that can’t be achieved in the physical art realm: “Each piece can incorporate complex movement and motion. [...] A single screen on a wall can periodically cycle through different pieces of art at the predetermined direction of the homeowner or art collector.

” Digital art is also immune to physical damage because it lives in the ether. Expensive art-insurance coverage may become a thing of the past. 

Colavizza told Cointelegraph that digital art interest is surely accelerating in 2020, but this may just be the beginning.

“As soon as the Tate [museum] or a similar venue holds an exhibition of digital/crypto art — something that could happen quite soon — things will really happen.”In brief, digital art generally, and blockchain-based art specifically, have surely gained traction in the time of COVID.

Museums are closed — how else can one view art? But for digital art to burst forth over the long term, it has to find a way to reward artists, gallerists and others. They need to make money from their toil.

This is where blockchain technology and NFTs change the game: They furnish enduring proof of an artwork’s uniqueness, enabling it to be sold and resold again and again. And each time that happens, the artist profits. It’s written in the code.

Unlike traditional custodians who take care of safekeeping physical assets, the role of digital custodians is basically to allow financial institutions to use blockchain, which is a digital book of records, and integrate digital assets into their business operations in a highly secured, scalable and compliant solution.

It used to be that banks and financial institutions ignored or did not invest in digital assets for various reasons but mainly because of their high-risk and unregulated nature.

But the financial world is changing and digital assets are increasingly becoming important as a means of diversification and generating returns. It is estimated that the digital assets market could reach US$10 trillion by 2023 and when this happens it is expected to result in a big shift in the overall structure of financial markets.

Banks and other financial intermediaries will soon be forced to devise and implement new digital asset strategies.

Because digital assets are different from physical assets, the role of digital custodians is becoming more important. “We believe there are three critical responsibilities for digital asset custodians, namely safekeeping, connectivity and compliance.

Digital custodians are the foundation of a successful digital asset solution. The role of digital custodians will be a critical building block for the new financial markets infrastructure and will be necessary for the widespread adoption of digital assets,” says Alessio Quaglini, chief executive officer of Hex Trust.

Unlike other fintech practitioners who come directly from a digital background, Quaglini was a telecommunications engineer who also worked at the Italian Securities and Exchange Commission, Insider Trading Office, as well as BBVA and the First Abu Dhabi Bank, before co-founding Hex Trust in January 2018.

As such he is in a unique position to see asset servicing from the perspective of banks, regulators, and investors, in addition to its financial technology aspect.

For Quaglini, safekeeping means securely custodizing digital assets to protect the private keys (basically a code that grants ownership of digital assets), and developing secure workflows to support transactions in and out of custody, mainly deposits and withdrawals.

In addition to storage of the private keys, custodians must build their technology architectures to manage cybersecurity risks when interfacing with a public blockchain to facilitate transfers of these assets.

“As the blockchain market becomes institutional, the current wallet (a digital code that allows storage of digital assets) implementations will not be scalable enough to cater to the requirements of financial intermediaries.

A new approach will be required to offer custody solutions which can scale and process thousands of transactions per second with the necessary levels of security,” Quaglini says.

In terms of connectivity, the key responsibility of digital asset custodians lies in simplifying the underlying complexities of blockchain technologies and creating a standard access layer to connect capital and service providers across the ecosystem.

“This is a critical building block to extract the maximum value that blockchain networks can offer to its users and an opportunity to design a new financial market structure fundamentally different from the current one,” Quaglini says.

Hex Trust is licensed under the Hong Kong Trust Ordinance and, holding a Trust or Company Service Provider (TCSP) license under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance, is now offering an end-to-end digital asset servicing solution.

In Germany, Hex Trust has a provisional license from Bafin (Federal Supervisory Authority) for crypto custody and in Singapore it is applying for two licenses under the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Hex Trust is also affiliated the SIA Group, the largest software fintech in Europe, which opens the doors for it as a digital asset service provider for EU banks.

Although based in Hong Kong, Hex Trust has for its clients the Bank of Singapore and Mason Bank, a European private bank formerly known as the Raiffeisen Privatbank Liechtenstein that was acquired by Mason Group (a corporate group listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange) in 2019.

It should be clear by now that over time, technology is going to influence how people transact business.

As a business owner, it’s incumbent on you to accept this fact and prepare yourself and the business to accept new challenges.

While it may seem cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have been around forever, the truth is the whole cryptocurrency revolution is still in its infancy.

While many people view cryptocurrency more in terms of an investment option than a means of exchange, the reality is quite different. Merchants all over the world are starting to realize that payment by crypto may someday be a must, not a choice.

Is your business ready to start accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option? If not, the following information should help you understand why your business should be heading in this direction. It will also explain the challenges that lie ahead.

Providing Service to Customers

As a business owner, servicing your customers should always be a top concern. While the demand to accept crypto payments now might be small, that’s something that could change in a hurry.

When the tide does change, the ability of your business to accept crypto could give the business a competitive edge.

With that said, it’s possible this whole issue could be a lot simpler to address.

There is nothing wrong with offering to accept coins like Bitcoin or Ethereum just as a matter of convenience for customers. If there are takers, that’s fine. If not, what’s loss by having the option available?

Dealing With Value Volatility

Unlike fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies will always offer challenges in terms of valuation. That’s one of the reasons consumers still seem to view cryptocurrencies as investment vehicles and not a means of payment.

As a business owner, you have to be ready to deal with the fact that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are volatile.

A portion of coin placed in a crypto wallet today might rise or drop in value by as much as 10% overnight.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a huge problem for a business that has limited crypto transactions. However, the volatility problem could have a major financial impact on a company that is transacting a lot of business through cryptocurrency.

By the way, there is no safe haven. All cryptocurrencies tend to move in the same direction at the same time.

Bitcoin might be more volatile than say Ripple, but both coins will have similar valuation patterns.The solution is easy but not so easy to follow.

There would need to be a mechanism or process in place that would immediately turn a crypto payment into fiat cash within hours. Today, this can be done by buying and selling cryptocurrency through an exchange.

 It’s the only reliable way to ensure a coin doesn’t lose value after the business has been transacted.

Preparing to Handle Multiple Cryptocurrencies at the Same time

For the longest time, it looked like Bitcoin would be the dominant coin. In the last couple of years, it has become clearer that several coins could end up being major players in the crypto space.

Since this is where the market seems to be going, the pressure is going to fall on business owners not to discriminate against certain coins.

If a business is going to accept Bitcoin, they don’t want to risk losing business from customers who prefer to use Litecoin, Ripple, or Ethereum.Fortunately, most crypto wallets are set up to accept a wide range of coins.

As the business owner, you would have the inconvenience of actively monitoring your wallet and making conversions as frequently as possible.

 With that said, that could be a small price to pay for accepting a variety of cryptocurrencies if it will entice more customers to transact business with your company.

The Big Four—Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), KPMG, and Ernst & Young (EY)—are the largest accounting firms in the world. Few corporate matters escape the grasp of their employees, who, combined, number more than a million.

They were quick to pick up on cryptocurrenciesand the wider potential of blockchain, using the technology to help “clients” (the Big Four’s word for people and businesses) overcome “challenges” (solve problems). 

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The crypto and blockchain work of the four firms is broad and, at a glance, fairly similar. All four companies grind through “risk” (pointing out the dangers of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, such as price volatility, poor code or hacks), and build “enterprise solutions” (software) for their clients. 

But what better way to cut through the jargon than to hear from the people leading the crypto and blockchain efforts themselves? So… we did! Here’s what each of the Big Four firms is doing with blockchain and cryptocurrency.
 

KPMG

Size: 219,000+ employees (2019)Annual Revenue: $29.8 billion (2019)If KPMG were a blockchain, Sam Wyner, co-leader of KPMG’s crypto wing, would be one of its most prolific miners.

From his “home office” (bedroom) in New York, he “solves problems with blockchain”, for which KPMG rewards him with tokens, called “US dollars.

” Services offered by Wyner and his team include, according to the firm’s website: “strategic realization;” “requirements guidance;” “systems and operations integrations;” “managed services with the potential to address data governance” and “audit services such as platform audit and tax services.

” But what does any of that mean? Wyner unraveled the mystery. He told Decrypt that the company’s work is split between blockchain and crypto.

“When it comes to enterprise blockchain, clients are coming to us with problems where they think blockchain might be the right way to solve it,” he said. “

We help clients, whether it's looking at business cases, evaluating them, determining if blockchain is the right solution,” he said. 

A case in point is life sciences, where KPMG’s built a blockchain system that tracks and traces pharmaceuticals across the supply chain. 

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Next comes crypto. “On the crypto side, it's a little bit of a broader mix. We see clients that are asking us everything about strategy and product strategy, as well as on the risk compliance, anti-money laundering side,” said Wyner. 

He mentioned that a big area of interest for KPMG right now is crypto custody. Ever since the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), under Coinbase’s ex-counsel Brian Brooks, said that banks can act as crypto custodians, Wyner said that several large financial institutions have reached out to KPMG for help.

“We've been working with clients on how to solve some of the problems that go along with that, whether it has to do with data, security or compliance,” he said. 

Wyner also said that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) have the potential to change KPMG’s blockchain practice the most.

“I think that's going to have a significant impact on how our clients are viewing blockchain based or digital assets in general,” he said, especially in larger economies. 

Ernst & Young (EY) 

Size: 284,000+ employees (2019)Annual Revenue: $36.4 billionPaul Brody is EY’s global innovation leader for blockchain. Normally based at the heart of Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto, California, he’s currently to be found quarantining in the Welsh countryside.

Before embarking on his intercontinental odyssey, Brody took time out to talk to Decrypt.

“There’s a few things that we’re focused on,” he told Decrypt. “The first are business applications. We want to help our clients do business effectively on blockchain.” 

To grease the wheels, EY’s created a platform called OpsChain, which helps companies manage the creation, transfer, purchase and sale of physical tokens.

Though, sure, these could help, say, Goldman Sachs deliver on their plans for a world-dominating stablecoin, “right now, the major parts we have in OpsChain are things like product traceability [and] blockchain based procurement.” 

Canadian Blood Services uses OpsChain to keep track of blood donations, and Merck Animal Health for vaccine traceability or Spinoza in Italy for food traceability.

Another platform is Public Finance Manager, or PFM, used by governments and multinational agencies to manage public service applications.

Next up is its audit, tax, compliance and security platform, Blockchain Analyser.

That lets auditors batch trace transactions, look up transaction history, apply tax rules to blockchain business transactions, and so on.

“Our goal is to build a set of tools that allow you to manage pretty much any kind of tax and regulatory issue, or audit and compliance issue that you're going to face over time doing business transactions on blockchain,” Brody said. 

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And then there’s blockchain consulting and development, as well as an R&D team, which focuses on privacy products, like the Baseline Protocol, Nightfall, and Zero-Knowledge Proof technology.

All this helps the firm’s work on public blockchains—and this is what sets EY apart from the rest of the Big Four, said Brody.

“We are committed to building scalable business applications on the public Ethereum blockchain. We’re the only large firm that has focused on public blockchains,” he said with pride. 

EY’s also handling the Quadriga CX case, helping customers of the now-defunct crypto exchange retrieve funds lost when Gerard Cotten, its CEO, suddenly died while on a honeymoon to India. “I can't actually tell you really almost anything about that,” Brody said. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

Employees: 276,005 (2019)Revenue: $42.4 billion (2019)Alex de Vries is a senior consultant and blockchain specialist at PwC in the Netherlands.

He tells Decrypt that the firm’s been experimenting with blockchain for the past two years, producing various proof of concepts for companies interested in blockchain, and explaining blockchain to companies that wanted to use it but weren’t sure how. 

But times have changed. De Vries said that the industry has now matured to a point where he’s no longer simply educating people about the merits of blockchain, but double checking their work and helping them run their businesses.

“People have kind of figured out how you can use this technology,” he said.

“The ones that made it to the experimenting phase are now getting very serious and actually moving to production. And then of course, they need someone to, ideally, check what they’re built.

” Smart contracts are immutable, after all, and an immutable error is hard to change after launch. PwC helps out with this sort of stuff. To audit the smart contracts, PwC this year partnered with Swiss firm ChainSecurity, and in July published its first report, an assessment on a smart contract that tokenizes shares in a multi-million dollar real estate project regulated by Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission.

“We were able to highlight several weaknesses in both the technical specification and the code itself, all of which have been successfully addressed prior to the go-live,” wrote Ralf Hofstetter, of PwC Switzerland, in a blog post late last month. 

Deloitte

Employees: 312,000+ (2019)Revenue: $46.2 billion (2019)Last, but by no means least, there’s Deloitte—the biggest of the Big Four.

Tyler Welmans, who leads Deloitte UK’s blockchain team, tells Decrypt that Deloitte does it all. “Deloitte operates across most parts of the business world,” he said.

“Our role over the past five years really has been embedding capability that relates to blockchain and crypto assets, and all the different flavors of public and private blockchain that are out there.” Deloitte has even dabbled with integrating blockchain into itself, allowing employees in Luxembourg to pay for canteen lunches with Bitcoin. 


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So, what does Deloitte do? First up is strategy consulting, the business of telling businesses how to do business with blockchain. Welmans and his team run a well-stocked software shop, helping out clients to implement blockchain projects, as well as integration and maintenance.

Among the educational services offered in its “blockhain in a box” mobile demo platform, which communicates to clients the magic of the blockchain. 

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Next is tax advice—the standard Big Four stuff. “We have the kind of skills that can help companies that are dealing with crypto-assets interpret rules and regulations,” said Welmans.

Niche specialist advice, like technical due diligence during corporate acquisitions, or audits of crypto companies, are also up for sale. But much of Welmans’s role still revolves around education.

”We do find that there is still generally not a particularly strong level of understanding in comparison to some other technology trends,” he said. However, Welmans argued, there’s a deeper understanding of the technology among specialists.

Deloitte also acknowledges that educating clients is partly about “teaching them to focus on how they can benefit from using blockchain, rather than getting tied down trying to understand every technical or cryptographic detail around how exactly a blockchain works.

” “After all,” he added, “that’s what the specialists are for.”In a June survey, Deloitte found that 55% of 1,488 senior executives in advanced economies considered blockchain “critical and in our top-five strategic priorities,” an increase of 12% compared to 2018.

And 88% thought that it will “eventually achieve mainstream adoption,” an increase of 4% compared to 2018. 

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Newer startups, those that are “disruptors from the outset,” are more likely to try out radical financial services, such as those that operate under the umbrella of decentralized finance (DeFi), Welmans said. “The rate of innovation is phenomenal.

” However, for traditional financial services institutions, DeFi is still far too risky a proposition.

“The level of risk that is associated with the current DeFi ecosystem is off the charts,” Welmans said. “I don't think it's likely that we're going to see mainstream financial institutions embracing DeFi in the near term, purely because of the level of risk.

” He added that while they may start exploring DeFi once the market “irons out its creases,” larger companies are predominantly still interested in “enterprise blockchains which permit greater control and risk management.”

I didn’t know James Belding very well before our call, but I have always appreciated his professional insights about tokenization and smart contracts.

He is the CEO of a company called “Tokenized,” after all, but the thing that really stood out in this interview was his passion.

He has so much, undying hope for a future that is made more fair and efficient through the use of smart contracts, that it hurts to even consider the fact that his vision is still viewed as “pie in the sky” by old world financial institutions and most of the Bitcoin world. 

We also spent thirty minutes just getting to know each other before the call, and it would be unfair not to mention that James is just plainly a kind and personable man when he isn’t in public with his “Professional CEO” suit on, and I think that matters. 

Our conversation occurred amid the giant DeFi pump and dump on the obsolete Ethereum network, and it seemed like James just wanted to reiterate the importance of real value to the world. There is a lot to digest here, so let’s get into it!James, let’s hear your brief history.

How do you get into Bitcoin?

And then how did that lead to the creation of Tokenized? Yes. I was studying engineering at university. Electrical was my focus, and I’ve always had an engineering interest.

But I’ve also complemented that with a deep interest in economics and philosophy. And it is actually when I think I was 16, I was given the book, My Dad, The Sovereign Individual, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. It had a profound impact on me. I read it five or six times, and I was at an age where it certainly informed my worldview.

One interesting thing in that book was that they predicted the rise of cyber cash and they predicted the logical foundations for why it could work and how it might work; not just about cryptography and the internet and some of the pieces there. And it resonated for me at the time.

 I remember pausing that page and thinking quite a bit about it. I know Milton Friedman had spoken about it, too, and predicts it across his work as well.So basically, I was fairly primed on the idea, but I wasn’t a cryptocurrency researcher or advocate online.

It was just an economic kind of thing; a thought experiment. And then when Bitcoin came on the scene, I noticed it in 2013, and it just immediately hit me.

We figured it out! This is it! But I didn’t feel like it was worthy of changing careers or spending too much time on yet. I wanted to see how the regulators reacted, how the technology skills and just let it mature.

And so I watched it from a distance for a good four, five years—just a little bit here and there and played with it, but didn’t really spend much time on it until the end of 2017 when I caught up on the scale.

I was watching this game, and I was kind of disgusted with how all that played out. Then, when I started to see some real sensible voices start to gather and then take the momentum, the Bitcoin Cash project was starting to really find support.

That’s when I thought, “OK, the time is now. I see a clear path forward to mainstream adoption. I see regulators reacting in a favorable manner. They were starting to understand the risks. And I can see this working.

” So I decided to basically take six months off and study the details and figure out how I can make a contribution. During that period, I was just analyzing value propositions, customer experiences, business models, white papers, writing, all that kind of stuff.

And quickly, it became very clear to me that the main and most compelling value proposition was going to be commercial records. And particularly the smart contracts and honest records like tokens.

And so the business models I started to develop around that idea required a very compelling, smart contract protocol on a platform that could scale—on a decentralized ledger that can scale. 

So it was a no brainer for me to use BCH and Bitcoin SV (BSV) now, because that protocol, that concept, the documentation, that theory behind it, was all very, very sound. And in my view, every other ledger that I looked at didn’t have those critical components together. And even then, it was not just a matter of the right technical formula, but it’s also a cultural component.

To get this thing started, you need miners to understand its value and understand its role in the world and how their business is going to perpetuate, and all those key components. So I saw all that in BSV or BCH. So it was clear to me that we need a really good protocol on that network. And there wasn’t one.

So I evaluated everything at the time, and pretty much out of necessity to get my businesses that I had plans for off the ground, I had to do my own. So I started tinkering away, and came up with a protocol. And then I read some stuff by Joannes Vermorel, and he had a paper that he published with a previous design.

It was a multisig design, and when I read his paper, it clicked for me. His request-response model was the missing ingredient that brings it all together—that just makes this super compelling. So I quickly added that into the protocol.

 The contest had been announced prior to that, but I hadn’t even considered entering at that point, to be honest.

I was just sort of playing with protocol and making something that would work for the business. But when I had that light bulb moment and I flushed the rest of the details out, I decided to have a crack at the contest.

And so I reached out to some people I knew in the “Metanet ICU” or whatever it was called before. I built a team and did a proof of concept, and ever since then, we’ve been working towards building the businesses that I always wanted to build. 


That’s awesome. What a great story. It’s funny you mention Joannes Vermorel. That’s a name I haven’t heard in about two years now. Has he completely disappeared from the Bitcoin conversation or where did he go? 


He’s still watching from afar. He’s still a strong supporter of Amaury and Bitcoin Cash. I haven’t spoken to him for a little while now, but I’m very respectful of him. I’m very friendly with him. I don’t agree, obviously, with his assessment, but he’s a very smart guy, and a very valuable contributor. 

Yeah, he seemed like a very sharp guy. I heard him interviewed and I’ve read some of his stuff before. So, yeah, that’s interesting to hear that he was one of the inspirations for you. 

So let’s get into the drama. What is the status of Tokenized today? 

So the Tokenized protocol has been live and released for over a year now. It was the middle of May that we actually published it. So that was six months after being announced to us as the winners of the contest. And in that six months, we basically just did lots of R&D, polish, improving the robustness of the feature set. And what we released in May, over a year ago, was a pretty complete and very compelling protocol. 

So full governance features, full compliance, enforcement features, all the transfer features that allow for not only multi asset like atomic swaps, but with all of the privacy features that you’d need from like a typical in the same manner that you’d have in a typical Bitcoin transaction.

So spread across multiple inputs and outputs and all the… everything you needed for it to be a viable foundation for a new financial system with full, expressive, smart contracting in place. And that’s been the case for ages now. And we know a few businesses that have been working with it, issuing their own tokens and proof of concepts and building around it as we speak. So it has been life for a long time.

Our company has been focused on building those businesses that I described, which even before the contest, we’ve had a very clear vision on. We’d never wanted to spend any time appeasing the community in trying to do an open source fun project and gain popularity in this world.

We wanted to be laser-focused on going straight for the big prize, which is a real compelling value proposition that we can go market to real enterprises, bring real value to customers and not have them care whether it’s on a distributed ledger or not. 

But to benefit in such a way that it becomes a no brainer that their behavior fundamentally changes in a way that they’re willing to pay their good, hard earned money to actually use the service.

So that’s our focus as a company, but the protocol itself is available to everyone, and we support it. Any question that people have, we answer within 24 hours and we share a lot of information privately to help support [the protocol.]


So that leads to my next question. It looks ready to go. I’ve been paying attention to Tokenized for a long time. Could I, if I wanted to, launch Kurt Token on Tokenized Protocol today? 


Absolutely! Haha Great!

So what does the process look like? 


So you could spin up your own smart contract agent if you liked—and we have a guide that can help you—or the documentation is complete enough that you can work it out yourself. And you can basically just send instructions on chain through the different actions that we have specified as part of the protocol to spin up a contract, define the key terms and conditions of the contract and then create an asset that’s controlled by that contract.

And then you can transfer it to any Bitcoin address or locking script, if you like. So it’s all ready to go now. The only real and difficult part of it is really implementation like wallets that support all the features and platforms, and the licensing and things like that. 


Yeah, that seems like a big sticking point. I think even if somebody were to launch a token product, I don’t think any of the wallets have any simple integration for, you know, “Hey, send me tokens!” Is there something out there or do you guys have some product? 

DotWallet is currently functioning and does some… it has support for Tokenized protocol. They created a few tokens a while back, like Ethereum and BTC tokens. They had a little video on Twitter showing the performance of it on ShowPay—just like a Point-of-Sale type thing.

But, yeah, lightning quick as you expect, as fast as Bitcoin and all the low fees and what have you that are expected on Bitcoin SV. So that’s one public example.I know BitBoss were playing around tokens for a while and they were using it. So it means it is certainly possible.

You can certainly reach out to those companies and get the wallets. We haven’t got a public implementation or wallet release just yet. We’re working on it. But we can certainly help with hosting and anything else.

Very cool. So let’s segue a little bit. All of a sudden, Ethereum tokens have gotten super hot. We’ve seen some 200X moves on tokens that don’t seem to do anything. I’ve seen hot dog, pizza, sushi tokens and stuff. They’ve gotten from a dollar to four grand and then back down to a dollar in a week or two. 

And that led to all these BSV people starting to say, “Hey, wait where are our tokens? Why aren’t we trading any tokens anywhere? …which I think is a little silly, but I understand people being jealous of four thousand X gains on vaporware tokens. But, if it can be done, and it sounds like it can be done with Tokenized, what is the issue? Where are these tokens that everybody seems to think they want? 

Yeah, I think it comes down to who. Who are the people that are going to be willing to put their reputations on the line to facilitate that type of activity? And I don’t see many people in the BSV community interested in doing those things.

The Ethereum community seems to be very well not grounded in reality. Like the financial instruments and the value of anything is just completely nuts. But they’re all just tinkering and playing. A lot of developers are totally disconnected from the economic realities of things, and they just are playing. And there’s a lot of hype around it and focus and a lot of money has been injected into the industry, from Ethereum Foundation.

They put a lot of money into projects like five years ago, and that is sort of paying fruits in a very unproductive way. There are things that are working and things like that. But, yes, for me, like I personally would never put my reputation on the line to do anything that’s not of the highest caliber of quality.

I don’t want to be associated with garbage ever, in anything I do in my life, so I’m just not interested. But people can do that if they see a valuable business proposition there. They can certainly do it, and we’ll support them on it.

But yeah, from a business point of view, I’d just never be interested in it. And I think that’s the missing component: the commerciality and the sensibility and the conservatism of the BSV community. If that is an accurate assessment of the community here, which I think it does lean that way. I think it just lends itself to being more practical and doing things of value rather than complete nonsense that gets whipped up into a hype frenzy. 


Sure. Do you think we miss out? Maybe a little bit on that sort of “go fast and break stuff” opportunity? Even if 95% of all these things are scams or they go away, there is that five percent, that maybe would be a good idea. I look at a theory and projects and say, “Oh, yeah, we don’t need this or that or this or that.” But occasionally, I’ll hear a business idea I actually like and think, “Man, why didn’t somebody think of that on a ledger that can scale?” So do you think it’s a cultural blocker in the BSV space? Are we possibly too conservative? 

I don’t think. It’s really just a symptom of being early like so I think that the BSV community and the products and the businesses are just super underdeveloped because there was no opportunity to think about these things because we were consumed with the scaling debate and the critical foundational pieces like getting the platform correct.

 And even when I was thinking about tokens in 2018, no one wanted to talk about them. I remember reaching out to lots of people and shocking people that are super big into tokens now. They didn’t want to talk about it.

They weren’t interested. All they wanted was Craig scaling things, BCH, all the personalities, right? So I think there’s just an aspect of maturing in our minds, and in the community’s minds about what to focus on next and what needs to be addressed.What were the real problems for them before and where do we stand now?

So I think it was driven by emotion, but now we’ve settled the debate about all those key foundational issues. And now that everyone’s focus is turned towards “what’s next? What can we really build? What are the real things we can do?”

Whereas Ethereum had a poor foundation, they didn’t think out the foundation correctly, but they did that sort of thinking in their community six, seven years ago. And people just started building from that period on. So they’re just very far ahead of us in a lot of ways in these building kind of aspects. 


You know, it’s funny to hear like the way you talk about building the right foundation. I think it’s really obvious in the way that Tokenized is built. One of the things that really stands out is the incredible amount of documentation. For example, you guys have a PDF about everything: absolutely world class stuff, like the regulatory navigation, all the potential use case examples. It’s just fantastic. And I think that, first of all, calls back to your character based on hearing how you think about Bitcoin and business in general. But to me, when I read that, it sort of implies that there’s some demand from big business and or, you know, heavily regulated industries or even governments. Is that demand real? Is it out there? Is it being worked on quietly or does somebody need to go out and really hit the road and do some serious business development to gin that up and explain it to the big players like, “hey, this is all right here and we can deploy it faster than anybody in a way that is legally compliant and functional and not going to create all kinds of regulatory issues.

” So I see a lot that others don’t obviously, and I’ve had many, many meetings with very talented—I would even consider them—mainstream enterprise type people or regulatory type people or… Even retail clients, users that are very interested, but they’re not necessarily a crypto-focused kind of person. And smart contracts and tokens: when the value proposition is articulated correctly, (which I actually don’t see it articulated correctly publicly very often) is very compelling.

 It gets their attention, their eyes light up. And I’ve had a lot of inquiries that are coming out of the blue—they just heard about us—hedge funds and things like that. And they want to be a guinea pig. They want to try it out. They’ve got real problems that they’ve identified that they think they can solve with it, which resonates with my belief as well: what we think the value proposition is. And the conversations always led to “great when can we try it?

When can we use it?” And that’s why we’ve been, as a company, just laser focused on getting the product implementation and the business ready so that we can go and get these people on board and start demoing it and start issuing these security tokens.

So the demand is very, very real. I hear it constantly to the point where it’s almost turning people away because I don’t want to go through that same song and dance to end up with “great when we try it?!” I know that they want to use it. So we’re just building as fast as we can so that we can bring that conversation to the next level and start to iron out real business deals effectively. 

Absolutely. That leads to my next question. So what is that next major step? Is there a specific hurdle that you need to get over to start to do that? 

So, I mean, to make a compelling value proposition for financial instruments (we think that’s the most compelling value proposition), particularly in the alternative investment space… So private securities, alternative investments, hedge funds, private equity, VC, investing, tech, startups, that type of thing. Those instruments are all paper contracts effectively.

PDFs aside, the software does not make sense of them. It’s disorderly. It’s very complicated and convoluted. And there is real, serious demand from nearly everyone in that ecosystem and all sides to have a better way of doing things. 

So as an example of that, HSBC has an assets services division which is basically managing private investments for wealthy family offices and things like that. And one of the main pain points we have identified is that their customers have really been screaming about a better way to manage their investments.

So an example would be like if they have a private loan, like a bond of some sort, where they get a coupon to find out when they get that coupon paid or how much it is going to be or what the status of a certain term retention is… That pretty much has to be emailed to their customer, or their lawyer, at this firm, and they dig through the contract, and then they do some special calculations and they return an email about a week later.

So there’s no real time possibility, and that’s shockingly common for basically most of the private equity world. So, that’s where the real hard work is. But it’s where the real forcing function or the real value proposition is. So to actually achieve and really solve those problems there, though, you need to have a payment token like a currency token to be able to interact with the financial instrument tokens so that you have smart contracts.

You can really make that a valuable proposition. But then you need the licenses that go not only with the payment side of things and the integration with the bank’s system, but also the security side of things. So in most jurisdictions, if it’s done on a P2P basis, you don’t really need it as a platform or really need licenses at all. You can get away with some reporting and things like that, but put the onus back on the customers to do their own reporting and their own compliance.

But with the payment side of things, you can’t get away from it. You really need that properly accounted for, and that’s a big sticking point because it’s doable, but it requires capital and it requires a significant organizationally OpEx expenditure to manage the risk.

So you have people around the clock that not only manage the operations side of things from an I.T. perspective, but you have people that can support the customer service and stuff like that. And if you don’t have that, you just don’t get the licenses!

So the regulators just won’t be interested in allowing you to have a license. There’s all this qualification. So if you’ve got a business like that, the regulators want to see that you have a very sophisticated business plan with operational redundancy, like “what happens even if you have capital to closed down shop in an orderly manner?” If you do run out of steam or your business fails, do you have insurance in place?

Do you have credible relationships? Do you have something like AWS, for example, a credible relationship, but every supplier can’t have any impact on your business in terms of being out of service. Or do your customers need to be qualified and of a high standard and have existed for a long time as qualification procedures?

So all that stuff is very, very important. And it’s something that I wouldn’t want to run a business like that without doing anyways. But the regulators require it and every jurisdiction is a little bit different. 


So there’s a lot of complexity there. It’s good. It’s actually a very interesting challenge. It sounds like a nightmare [chuckles]!

So I’m not trying to be negative at all. It’s a really fun challenge to tackle. There’s all kinds of arrangements where you can partner with companies already to do this and cover a lot of jurisdictions very quickly. So those are the strategies that we’re employing.

But at the same time, it’s important to get your feature set in the platform right before you start churning through OpEx and spending a lot of money to get those partnerships and licenses, because if you do that too early, you’re just going to kill the company. Right?

No investor is going to want investment in the whole thing, and it just spirals out of control. So the timing is very, very important. And that’s what we spent a lot of time on. And the timing is not only dependent on us as a company and our build rate and all that. But it’s also on external factors like regulatory attitudes, which are not the same in every jurisdiction.

Certain policies, like some businesses, if you go to partner with them in terms of banking as a service or a payment system service, some companies just have a board level policy where they won’t touch any company that has anything to do with crypto and they won’t even listen to the details. 

So you just have to navigate that kind of stuff or convince them. And that might take 10 calls to tackle the BSV side of things, then tackle the smart contracting side of things, then tackle the AML side of things and the technical side of things… And it just takes a long time to kind of get everyone’s head around it.

 I think the critical point here is that we’ve got to be patient in running our business to make sure that we get the timing right. We’re not too early. But also, from the community’s perspective, we need to be very cautious with starting businesses and getting our hopes up too early because BSV is very, very early. Still, it’s very underdeveloped. 


Yeah, I agree. There’s a lot of tool sets that need to be built out still. And to that, I guess my next question is: does Tokenized have scaling issues or is there some kind of 2.0 version or anything that we need to wait for to truly be ready for prime time? Or what’s the status of all of that? 

If, let’s say, the Federal Reserve showed up and said, “Hey, we want a digital dollar in three months out to the whole country,” is that something you guys could just do, or what would be the hurdle? Could you accommodate that in a matter of two, three months? 

So we’ve done all the work to improve the bottlenecks and the benchmarking to take us up to 100,000 plus transactions per second. We can go even well beyond that. We can go up to, essentially for a single contract instance, the limits of the Bitcoin network itself; even up to the terabyte blocks. So fundamentally, there’s no scaling issues there.

Obviously, to get to that level, we need to do some more engineering to parallelize it. But we did spend a good few weeks proving its scaling capabilities and understanding the bottlenecks. And we have no concerns there. We would happily engage any central bank now and be able to show them proof of concept in a matter of weeks.

 That’s awesome. That’s great news. 

But I will caveat one thing is that we do have a big update coming soon, which is mostly going to be in the data structures of some of the actions. It’s going to basically start to bring out more features, not only from different financial instruments, but more terms and conditions that you typically associate with shares, for example, where those terms and conditions become codified. It’s very easy to upgrade, but essentially it’s just something that people need to be aware of. 

That’s exciting. So what’s what’s something that you want people to know that isn’t being discussed? What do you wish everybody was talking about? 

I think it would be nice to see more analysis, or at least the deeper thinking about the real value proposition of tokens. So I think people inherently think that a token share certificate is more valuable than a traditional share certificate stored on Google Drive and sent over email. I would argue that it is minorly more valuable, but not by much. So I think the real value proposition is in the smart contracts themselves and the expressiveness and the user experience that can be derived by building great products around that feature set. 

I don’t know how much experience you’ve had in contracting and drafting and dealing with financial instruments, but if you have a chance to look at some agreements or play with them, how the drafting experience goes, the way that lawyers and their clients and the other lawyers interact and how they come to an agreement to fully execute an agreement is actually quite a sophisticated process with a lot of like checkpoints and sign offs and passing them back and forth.

The complexity and the toolset in the contracting world is really underdeveloped, like it’s been frozen in time for 20 years. Most lawyers agree that’s terrible. It’s garbage. And that can be improved. I think when you build a foundation that’s smart contract based on the ledger and you combine it with what is possible in the tooling of drafting contracts and then the contracting experience, you have like a real 10x improvement in how we manage or administer commercial activities. I think that’s the sort of bigger picture thing that when you really tease out all the advantages and you tease out what kind of user experience you can have, it really is equivalent to like going from snail mail to email. But in the commercial records worlds. It seems like a big deal. I used to work in logistics many, many years ago now. But, we had crazy record keeping requirements for certain clients. I’m talking about a whole warehouse full of boxes of scanned paperwork and stuff. It was a nightmare.

So, yeah, being able to clean that up and search it easily and to have it be stored forever in a global database like that would be a big change too.

Absolutely.

And there’s really lots of interesting things that when you bring in smart contracts and make them interoperate with those types of commercial records, there are some really profound implications when it comes to very specific financing deals. Like I’m sure you’re familiar with factoring or like supply chain financing. It’s pretty simple in its foundation.

But there’s some real interesting opportunities where you consider micro transactions, micro fees, micro distributions, fractionalization, those types of instruments, so that no longer becomes heavily relationship focused, but it becomes a much, much bigger global market where risk is manage in totally different ways where you can perhaps buy fractions of an invoice across many different sectors, across businesses and manage it much more with data. And we can make it so easy to do that.

The global market is able to participate with a few clicks of a button and it does not require one single entity to facilitate. We create a public exchanges of sorts. Not like a traditional ATS, but marketplaces where these kinds of options become available. And even retail investors can get some exposure to it, especially if they have a degree of expertise in particular industries or sectors that they’ve worked in themselves.

It really removes elements of what make retail investors exposed to risks investing typically a lot less reduced because they are genuine experts in that case. So there’s a lot of really interesting things, and you can really explore and take the potential of smart contracts on the BSV ledger at scale with micro transactions: right to the outer limits and edges in terms of financialization from securitization.

Really, really interesting things become apparent and it changes the game in terms of risk. It changes the game in terms of liquidity. It changes the game in terms of cost structures and diversification, even at very, very granular levels. 

Yeah, that’s fantastic. That’s the world that Bitcoin is supposed to create. So that’s, that’s very exciting stuff. 

So what’s the big goal? When do you, James Belding, say, “all right, we did it! We’re going to have a company wide party. We’re gonna break out all the expensive champagne” and say, “holy cow, guys, we actually accomplished that!” What is that big goal? 

So I think the real big goal, which I think would be an awesome milestone, would be to have a financial institution—like a top 100—start to interoperate with the protocol on chain in their own capacity.

So what I mean by that is they start to offer identity oracle and authority oracle services to the banking side of payments, AML and CBF for on-chain currencies or even their own demand deposits on chain or certificate deposits or other even mortgages on chain. I think that would be brilliant. And I think that’s a major, major marker.

And it’ll probably come along the same time as the central bank, to start to really take the pilot projects of that kind of nature to the next level. 

A lot will sort of all flow from that sort of point or being around that point. 

So it’s like the domino that really starts the big boom! That’s awesome. Any last thoughts, any shout-outs to anybody? 

Just to the Tokenized team! These guys are absolutely busting their butts right now to make this vision a reality. Not only is it an honor working with the guys, but their passion is just something! It’s a rare moment in time to be able to work with people that are so talented. And I believe in the product so much. And it’s just really a great experience.

And I really appreciate the efforts that they’re making to make this a reality. That’s awesome.

All right. I appreciate your time, James. Been really good. Yeah. Kurt, thanks for your time, mate! 

New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek’s Bitcoin for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin—as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto—and blockchain.

Is Cryptocurrency the Future of Online Gaming?

Cryptocurrency has become a global phenomenon in recent years. Various industries are benefiting from the convenience of cryptocurrency, and one of those industries is online gaming.

As per a report by the Wax, around 75% of online game players want to exchange their virtual assets for a currency that they could use to buy and sell on other platforms.

Cryptocurrencies enable players to collect and trade in virtual assets, which they can exchange and trade across anywhere in the world.

Hence, it offers the gaming industry a safe and easy medium to make money.

What is Cryptocurrency?

A cryptocurrency is a virtual asset secured by cryptography. It leverages blockchain technology to ensure decentralization, transparency, and immutability.

Cryptocurrencies are immune to government interference and manipulation as generally, no central authority issues cryptocurrency.

The most popular blockchain-based cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. Other competing cryptocurrencies are Litecoin, Peercoin, and Namecoin, as well as Ethereum, Cardano, and EOS.

How Does Cryptocurrency Work in Online Gaming?One can buy or sell cryptocurrencies via exchanges from wallets.

For example, when a user wants to send cryptocurrency units to another user, he/she sends it to the digital wallet of that user.In online gaming, monetization strategies adopted are in the form of in-app purchases, in-app advertising, and affiliate or referral marketing.

In-app purchases allow players to buy something directly in the game, such as coins, extra lives, and custom characters. In online bitcoin games, players buy items using crypto or buying crypto itself.

In-app advertising in online games is present in the form of rewarded ads, in which players have to complete specific tasks, watch video ads, and fill surveys to earn cryptocurrencies.

Affiliate marketing is new to the market, in which players have to click affiliate links and banners to refer a friend, earn rewards, sign up for a free offer.Nowadays, there are online Bitcoin casinos that have adopted payments in cryptocurrencies, where players can play or trade in digital assets.

Benefits of Cryptocurrency in Online Gaming

Online games are adopting cryptocurrency to solve problems related to transactions and frauds that players encounter while playing online games.

Some of the benefits are streamlined payments, the real ownership of players, the decentralization of payments, and cross-game compatibility.Let’s have a look at some of the benefits of using cryptocurrency in online games.

1- Instant TransactionCryptocurrency eliminates the authority of bureaucracy and removes inefficient intermediaries from the process, allowing players to enjoy their favorite games quickly.

It makes the process of exchanging crypto units instant and efficient.

Another issue that gaming developers usually face is the difficulty in selling their software outside app stores. Blockchain allows these developers to process nano-payments to receive payment instantly.

2- Ability to Play AnywhereThe use of cryptocurrency allows gamers to play internationally without any security and exchange rate issues.It provides the option for gamers to play without confirming their identity or email.

It allows gamers to pay and withdraw funds faster from anywhere in the world without any restrictions. 

3- Safe and SecureSecurity is crucial when making multiple purchases in online games, as many online gaming websites have trust issues.

Blockchain technology in online games prevents illegal trading of digital assets. It also terminates the hacking and stealing of keys by creating an immutable ledger and eliminates the duplication of keys.

It helps players to remain confident about the smart contracts that ensure they are making secured and safe payments.

4- More for Your Money

Cryptocurrencies are more cost-effective than credit cards, bank transfers, and PayPal. The use of bitcoins involves no hidden fees, and there is no waiting for your money to move.

The use of cryptocurrencies in online games eliminates handling fees and exchange fees because it is a peer-to-peer transaction between the users, cutting out the middlemen.It makes the model more viable for players and game developers.

Players get more for their money, and developers boost their profits.

5- Hide Your IdentityWhen playing online games, sometimes your money may be secure, but your personal information may not.If you are not comfortable or interested in sharing your personal information, then online bitcoin games are the ones for you.

Also, cryptocurrency purchases are discrete unless a user voluntarily shares his/her transactions. It is because the anonymous cryptocurrency address generated for user purchases changes with each transaction.

Final Thoughts

As per a study by the Newzoo’s Analytics Platforms, 2.7 billion gamers will spend around US$159.3 billion on online games in 2020. As per the estimation, the market will surpass US$200 billion by 2023. It is an opportunity for crypto or bitcoin online gaming to grow.

Crypto games and blockchain technology may seem technical, but the benefits for gamers and developers are apparent.

For players, crypto games improve their gaming experiences, and for developers, there is an increase in profits. Bitcoin usage is on the rise but not without problems.

The development of blockchain technology in online games is still in the early stage, but the future is certainly bright.

The global economy has been severely disrupted by Covid-19, with the virus wreaking particular devastation on the travel industry. While international travel will eventually return, either as governments start to bring infection rates under control or with the development of a vaccine, it’s a waiting game that many airlines, tour operators and hotels aren’t willing to play.

In recent months, the idea of introducing digital immunity passports has begun to circulate as a potential lifeline to jumpstart international leisure travel.

“An immunity passport is a presentable proof of immunity to Covid-19,” said Husayn Kassai, co-founder and CEO of Onfido, a London-based technology company specialising in facial biometric certification.

“It is designed to help an individual prove that they have been tested and that their test result belongs to them, but without having to share any personal information.”



Digital immunity passports are being touted as a way to jumpstart international leisure travel (Credit: Guvendemir/Getty Images)


Immunity passports are currently being examined primarily for the benefit of frontline medical workers, allowing them to continue working safely with reduced risk of an outbreak in hospitals.

An immunity passport is a presentable proof of immunity to Covid-19

In April, Onfido was invited to submit a proposal for digital health certificates to the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee. In their proposal, Onfido casts immunity passports as “the linchpin of a new normality”.

They would allow users to create a digital identity by uploading an official document (such as a passport or driver’s licence) along with a selfie taken on their phone, which would be verified using AI technology.

The identity would then be paired with a certificate of immunity issued by a national health service. The end result would be a code on their phone that could be scanned to enter workplaces, public buildings or even airports.

Onfido would provide the technology to verify users’ identities, but it would be up to the UK government to securely manage the health data and introduce a system of testing for immunity.

Consideration of immunity passports in the UK is still in its early stages, with the British government examining submissions from other facial recognition and identity firms, such as Yoti, Nomidio and Berlin-based IDnow, as well as a range of medical experts and academics on the viability of an immunity-based scheme.

The jury is still out on whether the UK will formally adopt immunity passports, but the potential for such documents to accelerate reopening parts of public life has caused similar proposals to pop up in Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Israel, Colombia, Argentina, Estonia and the US.




Its currently unclear exactly how accurate antibody tests are or how long antibodies remain in someone’s body (Credit: SOPA Images/Getty Images)


Some of the earliest countries to be impacted by the virus have been quick to adopt health certificates, with China embracing the use of a health code app that shows whether a user is symptom-free in order to check into hotels or ride the subway, as reported by Reuters.

While not officially an immunity passport, the Chilean government has begun issuing “virus-free” certificates to citizens who have recovered from Covid-19, allowing them to return to work without restriction of movement.

The ticket to reviving the travel industry?Restoring travel is crucial for global economic recovery. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, in 2019 tourism contributed nearly US$9 trillion to the world’s GDP and accounted for 330 million jobs – roughly one in 10 jobs around the world.

However, for travel to fully recommence, governments will understandably require proof that people aren’t bringing Covid-19 with them. Presenting verified proof of immunity might become a requirement for passengers before airlines will allow them to board a flight, similar to a passport or visa.

John Holland-Kaye, CEO of the UK’s busiest airport, Heathrow, has welcomed the introduction of an internationally recognised immunity passport, while acknowledging the success of such a scheme would depend on other countries adopting similar systems.

“If the UK government, with one of the biggest aviation sectors in the world, were to get together with the European Union and United States, between them they’d have the global diplomatic and economic power to set the international standard,” he told Sky News in May.

On a call with investors in April, CEO of Delta Air Lines, Ed Bastian said he would “make whatever changes to the business model that will be necessary”, including adopting immunity passports if required by the US government.

Bastian pointed out how readily travellers adapted to new security regulations introduced by TSA and Home Security in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and said the most important thing for travellers is confidence their safety is being well managed.




Some countries have already adopted health apps or certificates, including China and Chile (Credit: VoronaArt/Getty Images)

Health certificates are also beginning to be trialled by hotels. Sidehide, a contactless online reservations platform, announced in May it would partner with Onfido to deliver a contactless booking system using immunity passports.

Users will be able to use a QR code to verify their immunity status and then book participating hotels directly through the app.


Travellers check in on arrival via the app and can go straight to their room without any contact with hotel staff.

The problem with testing for immunityPerhaps the biggest hurdle standing in the way of the introduction of immunity passports is the scientific knowledge about Covid-19 itself. It is still unclear exactly how accurate antibody tests are, and when antibodies are detected, how long they remain in someone’s body.

When the human body comes under attack from infection, our immune system’s response is to produce antibodies that help detect and destroy the virus.

These antibodies can remain in our blood for a period of time after recovery to guard against repeat infections.

Antibodies are one of the key defences against infection, which is why they have become a focal point for testing.

But for an immunity passport to work in practice, governments and health practitioners need reliable serology tests that can accurately identify antibodies in a person’s bloodstream, which the World Health Organisation says is not possible at this time.

A scheme by Emirates to screen airline passengers for Covid-19 antibodies using rapid immunodiagnostic tests was withdrawn after an audit found only 30% of results were accurate. False results could lead to individuals being granted immunity status even if they have never contracted the virus.



Presenting verified proof of immunity might become a requirement for passengers before airlines will allow them to board a flight (Credit: skyNext/Getty Images)

The reason serology tests aren’t yet fully reliable is because Covid-19 is still new and researchers are working to better understand it.

So far, the virus doesn’t seem to be playing by the rules when it comes to traditional immunity theory. Scientists have discovered patients who had recovered from infection, but mysteriously didn’t develop any antibodies. 

Historical blood samples have been found to contain traces of Covid-19 immunity cells that predate the discovery of Covid-19, suggesting some people had pre-existing levels of resistance before the virus was discovered in China in December 2019.

There is also growing doubt about how long people who have been infected with Covid-19 remain immune to the disease.

There is some evidence to suggest that while antibodies can be detected in patients who have recovered from a severe case of Covid-19 for at least three months, a growing number of studies that show in milder cases the antibodies appear to rapidly decline from around three months after infection.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted one study on antibody-longevity, urged caution over using antibodies as a basis for immunity passports.

Another part of the immune system known as T-cells have shown more promise, however, as a longer-lasting source of immunity against Covid-19.You may also be interested in:

• Will travel be safer by 2022?
• A new way to fly, guilt free?
• The last big unknown on Earth

A further complication is that in some cases Covid-19 patients have been shown to also carry and potentially spread the virus for up to three months after their recovery. In addition, the world's first proven case of reinfection, with a different strain of Covid-19, has just been reported out of Hong Kong.

The sum total is that we are still grappling to understand the nature of immune responses to Covid-19 and it is too early to pin our hopes on serology testing.

There are also concerns that immunity passports, which create a rubber stamp of approval, may mislead the public as to the complexity of their immune status, resulting in them ignoring public health advice and increasing the risk of continued transmission.

It could also create a perverse incentive for individuals to seek out infection in order to gain immunity and return to “normal life”. In May, a poll by the Daily Mail found 19% of Britons would consider deliberately becoming infected if immunity passports were introduced by the UK Government.



Immunity passports could create a new privilege in the form of an antibody elite (Credit: AlexLMX/Getty Images)

If, or when, a Covid-19 vaccine is developed in the future, it is possible a vaccination certification scheme similar to that already used for yellow fever could be introduced to permit travel.

However, most experts believe a vaccine could become widely available by mid-2021 – an agonising wait for the tourism sector – and even this is an optimistic prediction.

A slippery slopeCivil rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have flagged the introduction of immunity passports as the potential beginning of a slippery slope.

At a time when Black Lives Matter has forced the world to critically examine its structural inequalities, these groups warn immunity passports could create a new privilege in the form of an antibody elite.

Combining health data with biometric data further increases the ability of states to build up highly detailed, intrusive and intimate records of people

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says immunity certificates could exacerbate existing racial disparities in the US. This is because the industries most likely to adopt them are those where employees cannot work from home – such as food production, sanitation, transportation and delivery.

These industries typically employ immigrants, workers of colour and women: demographics who already experience unequal access to healthcare. These workers risk infection to earn a paycheque and have limited safety nets if they become ill. Workers who do survive infection and gain immunity could be given preference for work over others without immunity, creating a new underclass.

These workers are confronted with a terrifying choice to either remain unemployed or take the risk and become infected.If that sounds unbearably bleak, it has happened before. When yellow fever swept through 19th-Century New Orleans, workers who weren’t immune to the disease were considered unemployable.

This disproportionally impacted migrants and people of colour, who were forced by their conditions to keep earning money, while wealthy white families and business owners could retreat indoors for protection.



If Covid-19 vaccine is developed, we may see a vaccination certification scheme to permit travel, similar to the one for yellow fever (Credit: Boy_Anupong/Getty Images)

The ACLU has warned immunity passports could form part of “a new health surveillance infrastructure that endangers privacy rights”, a concern shared by Ella Jakubowska at European Digital Rights (EDRi), an association of civil and human rights organisations from across Europe.

Jakubowska says that “combining health data with biometric data further increases the ability of states to build up highly detailed, intrusive and intimate records of people”, including housing, employment and travel history.

“This can, in turn, have a chilling effect on freedom of expression” with governments using immunity passports to restrict freedom of movement under the pretext of fighting the pandemic.

The tension of balancing civil liberties with collecting big data is nothing new. What matters is how governments strike that balance between freedom and security.

China’s mass surveillance network, which has previously come under criticism from Western media as overreaching, has proven remarkably effective in managing Covid-19.

However, in an interview with the BBC, Adam Schwartz, a senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in California, said historically governments have been reluctant to wind back security powers after they’ve been introduced.

“For example, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US created vast new surveillance powers.

Nineteen years later, those powers are still very much in the hands of the US government.

” This retention of special powers beyond the scope of which they were originally intended is referred to as “mission creep” and experts warn Covid-19 may usher in a new age of global digital surveillance.

Governments are already in the unenviable position of balancing public health with the need to revive the economy.

While immunity passports appear, on the surface, to be a panacea to reviving tourism and a significant chunk of the global economy, they also bring the added complexity of human rights to a table already groaning under the weight of a once-in-a-century event.



Experts are warning that Covid-19 may usher in a new age of global digital surveillance (Cristian Storto Fotografia/Getty Images)


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Social trading can be described as those activities that engage or facilitate interactions among traders to strengthen the crypto community.

On the other hand, copy trading is an element of social trading that allows users to mimic the trading patterns of other traders, in particular, experienced or professional traders.

As industry players and professionals in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, it’s helpful to understand why these terms are different and how they are similar.

Not only will we better understand these concepts but it also makes it easier when explaining them to those who might be new to the industry.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of copy trading?

There is no magic trick to understanding how copy trading works. Once traders make a successful trade, they have the option of sharing their trades with other users. If they choose to share, then copy traders can opt to copy them.

There are benefits for both sides in copy trading.

Other than potentially gaining more trading profits from copying the practices of professional traders, copy traders acquire knowledge and new techniques that may be useful for them in the future.

Those who choose to share their trades receive a commission, usually in the form of a percentage or a fraction of the earnings each time their trade has been copied.

Such incentives are encouraging and motivate professional traders to share their trades for other users to copy. In this respect, copy trading is a win-win situation.

This has helped the practice of copy trading to quickly become popular.

As more new traders join in with copy trading, they gain more practice and become better traders. In turn, they’re more likely to share their own success with future copy traders to get the additional rewards of copy commission. However, there are some precautions to be observed.

It is no secret that many who utilize the copy trading feature are predominantly amateurs. Due to their inexperience, they might make unfavorable copy trades that prove to be unprofitable in the long run.

One common mistake from new copy traders is that they’re swift to copy others, especially those with a large number of followers. It may not always be the case that traders with a large following are trustworthy.

Why is social trading so important for the industry?

According to Statista, the number of cryptocurrency users grew by 25% between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020, reaching an all-time high of 50 million.

Therefore, it’s evident that more and more people are searching for new investment opportunities in the cryptocurrency industry, but a large portion of these investors are newcomers.

Becoming involved in social trading activities is a perfect way for them to kick-start their crypto journey.When traders share information about trading or events occurring in the industry, they will gain more insight into trading.

They can even share ideas or ask questions about trading procedures to get input from those in the know.However, the influx of newcomers puts responsibilities on crypto companies to ensure that they aren’t jeopardizing the ongoing growth of the cryptocurrency community.

Operators offering social trading should scrutinize traders to ensure that they do not cheat others or engage in behaviors that create distrust within the industry.

Knowing they’re using a safe social platform will give investors and leaders more confidence and will help to boost the reputation of the cryptocurrency sector.

What’s hindering exchanges from becoming more innovative with social trading?

There is still quite a bit of work to be done regarding the innovation of copy trading and social trading. Only a few exchanges have integrated the copy trading feature.

However, that could quickly change because exchanges can freely borrow innovative ideas from their competitors without any legal restrictions.

What the industry lacks and needs is a robust, comprehensive and intellectual property legal framework that prevents exchanges from stealing the work of other players.

Emerging exchanges are particularly vulnerable to this threat.While that is so, some may argue, on the contrary, that adopting shared ideas has been working for the industry so far, and any interference could create problems.

 The counterargument is that it takes dedication, commitment and a lot of hard work to create something innovative, so laws governing unfair competitive behaviors like this are essential.

Having sound intellectual property laws may even encourage companies to be more creative, and, who knows, they might come up with unique social trading innovations that can bring the community closer.

Furthermore, investors would be more likely to back crypto exchanges that can prove themselves to be innovative.

Once the crypto community practices and complies with similar industry standards as its traditional counterparts, it will gain more respect from the financial community, and exchanges can be creative without any fear.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Daly Young has led many projects throughout his career that allowed him to gain a wealth of experience and knowledge about the finance and technology sectors. Daly pursued and completed his bachelor’s degree in communication engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University — one of the top five prestigious universities in China. Right after, Young kick-started his career journey with Tencent, one of China’s top tech conglomerate giants, and was employed as the product manager for five years. He later moved on to Futu Securities International (Hong Kong) Limited, a fintech company ranked among Asia’s top online brokerages. Daly now works as the product lead for Bingbon.

Last year, before a pandemic changed the world, surveys showed millennials and adult-age Generation Z respondents steadily developing a curiosity in cryptocurrencies if not buying into the bigger idea that the technology will transform money. 

A Michelmores survey in the U.K., for example, found that 20% of affluent millennials – the cohort born between 1980 and 1996 – invested in cryptocurrencies, compared with just 3% for the general population.

Meanwhile, an online Harris/Blockchain Capital poll found 60% of people aged 18-34, a demographic covering six years of Gen Zers and 10 of millennials, were “somewhat familiar” with bitcoin, compared with 43% overall. 

But the results also revealed that, in the U.S. and U.K. at least, this generational pairing still holds much more faith in traditional investments such as stocks and bonds.

The data suggest a cohort of crypto dabblers, not outright converts.You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system.

You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

What will take this all-important group of digital natives to the next level? How might they see crypto and blockchain technology as diehard believers do, as the driver of an entirely new paradigm for money, investing and wealth accumulation?


Perhaps COVID-19 is the catalyst. 


Consider the pandemic’s global economic fallout: the equivalent of 400 million full-time jobs in lost work hours, a mountain of deferred bankruptcies, government debt levels above or projected to exceed 100% of GDP.

Just as the Great Depression shaped economic decision making for decades, the shock of  COVID-19 will be felt for a very long time. 

The future decisions that matter will be those of Gen Zers and millennials, who together account for more than 60% of the global population. I see their decisions leading them to bitcoin. 

Attitude shock

I have two Gen Z daughters. One is entering her second year of college just as she ended her first: homebound, learning virtually. The other is starting her critical junior year of high school in the same situation. It’s hard not to feel they are being denied some key rites of passage in their journey into adulthood. 

Yet, they are among the luckiest. A Pew Research survey early in the crisis found that half of adult-age Gen Zers (ages 18 to 23) said they or someone else in their household had lost a job or suffered a pay cut because of the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, many millennials, the youngest of whom are 24, are facing life-defining decisions about marriage, children, home-buying, career paths and long-term investment strategies in a uncertain economic environment. COVID-19 has barged into this defining period of their lives. It seems inevitable it will reset their expectations of the future.



Source: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

Already, per a Harris Poll study for Edward Jones and Age Wave, about a third of both Gen Z and millennial respondents foresee an “extremely or very negative impact” on their personal financial security due to COVID-19. That compares with 24% of Generation X, 16% of baby boomers and 6% of the silent generation. 

Given that a currency’s worth as a store of value is dictated by how users view its value over time, deteriorating expectations about future earning potential will inevitably shape how millennials’ and Gen Zers’ think about the money they use. 

Even before this tragedy, these two generations were primed for a major attitude shift toward digital money. Growing up with the internet, they’re more inclined to its DIY ethos and notions of autonomy, as the lines between user and publisher blurred online and gave everyone the sense that they had their “own voice.

” It might not be that much of a leap for them to embrace the “be your own bank” mindset of bitcoiners.

What to do when yield Is zero

Expectations and attitude shifts provide a potential cultural impetus for these groups to change how they think about money. Now there’s also a financial motive, as stocks and bonds, pumped by unprecedented central bank quantitative easing, are delivering stubbornly low yields – their earnings as a percentage of price.

With central bank rates anchored close to zero in dozens of countries, checking and savings accounts are paying a pittance and government and corporate bond yields have plunged, in some cases into negative territory.

Meanwhile, with companies’ profitability whacked by the crisis, stock dividends have suffered their biggest quarterly drop in 11 years.

The two-decade fall in bond yields that got us here was a positive development for those who owned them because a decline entails a rise in price delivering a capital gain. Very few of those owners were millennials and even fewer, if any, Gen Zers. Rather, the benefits accrued to older Generation Xers and baby boomers.  

Now, yields can go no lower. The younger generations can expect neither interest rate earnings or capital upside, right when they are primed to invest in these markets for the next half century. 

This mightn’t matter if stocks were destined to rise. After all, low bond yields make stocks look attractive by comparison. 

But it’s impossible now to argue that stocks aren’t in a bubble inflated by massive amounts of central bank intervention. Valuation measures are screaming “overbought.” In addition to plunging dividend yields, the S&P 500 median price-earnings ratio has never been higher.

If this is the top, millennials and Gen Zers have nothing left to buy. The same goes for home prices, now completely out of their range and with future gains curtailed by the lower-bound limits on near-rock-bottom mortgage rates. 

No infinite treadmill

If the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan could keep up the trillions of dollars of new money creation ad infinitum, maybe this treadmill could go on forever. P/E ratios would go into the stratosphere and millennials and Gen Zers would just hitch themselves to the ongoing stock market inflation, passing the risk onto whatever generation is coming up behind them. 

At a minimum that would require a continuation of the best-of-both-worlds conditions that have sustained stocks for almost three decades: low inflation and solid economic growth. 

COVID-19 – and the policy response it is encouraging – will, I believe, render both impossible. The handling of the pandemic has severely hurt global confidence in the U.S. government, while the Fed’s monetary expansion (essentially confirmed by a policy shift announced Thursday), has undermined confidence in the dollar, generating inflation.

Meanwhile, the blow to growth from the lockdown and future constraints on travel and work, coupled with ballooning debt levels that must be reined in, will make it much harder for businesses and governments to fund themselves. 

In short, inflation will outstrip both bond yields and corporate earnings for the foreseeable future, which means a loss in real terms. That, clearly, is bad news for millennials and Gen Zers who are looking for a reliable way to accumulate wealth for the future. 

More fundamentally, that loss-making equation will challenge their very faith in the fiat currencies in which they currently save. 

Will that lead them to store value in bitcoin, which earns no nominal interest on its own? Maybe. 

If younger generations can accept bitcoin’s promise of digital scarcity and censorship resistance and value its protection against currency debasement, political uncertainty, confiscation and economic dependency, it will look increasingly valuable relative to the low yields on overvalued fiat-based assets.Ultimately, it’s the millennials’ and Gen Zers’ prerogative.

Do they throw their lot in with the old monetary system of the boomers and Gen Xers, or build themselves a new one that serves their interests?

50 Years of Fiat Yields

Doing research for this week’s column, I took a look at a long-cycle trend for 10-year bond yields.

Fifty years seemed like the right time frame, given that next year around this time the world will mark the half-century anniversary of the “Nixon Shock,” the moment when President Richard Nixon removed the dollar from its peg to gold and single-handedly created the fiat money era.

What we see in the first 10 years of the chart below (courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s fabulous FRED service) is the initial impact of that dramatic change.

Coupled with the OPEC oil embargo, the arrival of floating currencies triggered a frightening surge in inflation, which ultimately forced Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to jack up interest rates to nose-bleed levels.

That meant the yield on the 10-year Treasury note also soared as the cost of borrowing money climbed. Volcker’s painful move triggered two recessions in quick succession – recessions are marked in gray on FRED charts – in the early 1980s.

But once he’d broken the back of inflation and established a sense of solid trust in central bank independence as a principle, a period known as the “Great Moderation” began. Inflation fell and yields came down. And it didn’t stop for 40 years.


Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

For a long time, this was, quite reasonably, seen as a good thing. Killing inflation and lowering borrowing costs established the conditions for a long period of U.S. economic growth.

 It paid for the United States’ victory in the Cold War, which in turn paved the way for a new American-modeled version of global capitalism, which poured money into emerging markets. 

But the enthusiasm it generated also bred a more pernicious boom-bust cycle as a series of crises, especially in those emerging markets, demonstrated the vulnerability of global investors to credit risks in an increasingly interconnected world.

In the 1990s, that ushered in an era in which central banks – especially the Fed – were seen not only as managers of price conditions but as market backstops in times of uncertainty and panic. (Background reading: “The Greenspan Put.”) It reached a crescendo with the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath.

 That’s when the Fed drove rates down to their final bottom limit, the “zero bound,” but still saw a need to stimulate a shell-shocked economy, creating trillions of dollars in bank reserves via an unprecedented “quantitative easing” policy.  

Now, amid a new crisis, we’re back there again, with the Fed issuing even greater amounts of new money, propping up the stock market, and wondering what more it can do to stop things from falling apart.

Why the concern? Why not just let the market retrace? Because it could trigger a reversal in that 40-year rally in bond prices – the flipside of the slide in yields – a situation that some see as the biggest, most dangerous bubble in the world.

Those U.S. government bonds are held by all the world’s central banks and commercial banks in huge quantities, where they provide sought-after collateral for all sorts of secondary loans. If that house of cards was to fall, it might have a bigger impact than even the Nixon Shock.

Global town hall

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. During one of the finance industry’s most heavily anticipated speeches, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell dropped news of a significant policy shift. From now on, the Fed will not just target inflation around 2% but will do so on an average basis over longer periods.

In other words, to compensate for periods in which inflation is too low, it will tolerate a rate above 2% for a longer period.

While Powell was clear that the Fed can dial up monetary tightening at any time, that it will prioritize employment goals over those of inflation, and that it’s not bound to a fixed time frame, the key question here is what this new message does to people’s inflation expectations.

Can the Fed manage them?

These kinds of announcements are often designed to manage expectations and demonstrate the Fed’s commitment to its objectives. The policy itself is not the only tool.

Announcing the policy itself signals intent – like saying, “See, your fears that we are going to suddenly withdraw monetary easing are unwarranted: We’re so committed to doing all we can to keep borrowing rates low that we’re pledging to let inflation go over our target for longer.” 

But what if the messaging is too clear? What if the market reads this as the “Fed will create inflation, no matter what?” Inflation is a function of inflation expectations and of market confidence that central banks will protect the value of the currency.

In an environment where confidence in government is waning, where gold is at record highs, and stocks are overvalued, will the Fed’s explicit promise to allow some degree of excess inflation inadvertently create a worse problem once the economy recovers? That’s the trillion-dollar question.

CONFUSED ABOUT CRYPTO? ASK THE IMF

This could have been cringey. The International Monetary Fund, a bastion of bureaucrats synonymous with the old-order fiat financial system, published an explainer video on cryptocurrencies.

But in many respects, the two-minute piece, featuring a woman narrator walking through a field of animation talking about the problem of payment intermediaries and the “science of cryptography,” was a masterful effort. 

To be sure, it didn’t dive into proof-of-work consensus mechanisms or protocol-based monetary policy, and it inevitably attracted mockery from maximalists who complained that it glossed over their favorite bitcoin features such as digital scarcity and censorship resistance.

But as something to share with newbies, to get their heads in a place to start going down the rabbit hole, this is a surprisingly useful addition to the Crypto 101 resource list.

We really shouldn’t be so surprised. The IMF has had an energetic and intelligent team of economists digging into cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies for about five years. 

OMG OMFIF! 

The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, a think tank commonly referred to as OMFIF, includes among its membership many central banks, sovereign wealth funds and multilateral institutions (as well as private sector entities such as investment firms and banks), which gain access to new ideas around monetary policy, including on digital currencies. 

So, it’s striking that OMFIF’s deputy chairman penned a lead article for its online publication with the title “Dollar Supremacy at Risk.” Philip Middleton’s argument will be familiar to readers of this column in that it ties the rise of digital currencies to a challenging macro environment marked by financial stress and international tensions.

He writes that a “perfect storm produced by the convergence of geopolitics, technology, social change and the [COVID-19] crisis could bring about a profound shift” to knock the dollar off its perch as the world’s reserve currency. 

Talking about this kind of thing was unimaginable in official circles a year or so ago. Also striking: Middleton’s suggestion that, in order to get ahead of this risk, the U.S. “might do worse than commission a Silicon Valley giant to offer a digital dollar to its billions of users worldwide.

” A much friendlier message than a certain Silicon Valley giant received from central bankers a year ago when it proposed rolling out a basket-based digital currency to its billions of users worldwide.

Relevant reads

What Ethereum’s Fees Mean for Its Future. CoinDesk columnist Nic Carter brings a new argument to an old debate.

The high fees the DeFi mania have brought to a now overburdened Ethereum network prove that public blockchains’ place in the world lies in acting as financial infrastructure, as the settlement layers for large-scale financial transactions; transactions are simply too expensive to play an effective role enabling non-financial data transfers or small, “cup of coffee” transactions.

Carter says that Bitcoin Core advocates resolved themselves to this some time ago during the bitterly fought block-size debate with Bitcoin Cash advocates, but only now, amid the DeFi boom, are many in the Ethereum community doing similarly. 

No Collateral Required: How Aave Brought Unsecured Borrowing to DeFi. The early phase of DeFi depended on taking cryptocurrency holdings and locking them in over-collateralized smart contracts to unlock automated credit lines that manage to keep asset values stable without the intervention of an intermediary.

But what if the borrower doesn’t have collateral? Brady Dale explains how the Aava protocol has built a DeFi system that uses a delegated collateral system to allow people to borrow without putting down assets as security. Unsecured credit: yet another way in which DeFi innovators are trying to replicate traditional finance in a decentralized setting. 

Boston Fed Is Looking at ’30 to 40′ Blockchain Networks for Digital Dollar Experiments. The Boston Fed, which only recently went public with the fact that it has been experimenting with a digital dollar solution, is casting a very wide net to figure out the best approach. And it’s not just thinking about an in-house solution. Nikhilesh De reports.

DeFi Is Just Like the ICO Boom and Regulators Are Circling. Lawyers Donna Redel and Olta Andoni offer a friendly warning to DeFi entrepreneurs in this OpEd. Citing clear similarities with the initial coin offering boom of 2017, Redel and Andoni say that the token issuance activity that DeFi is spawning will inevitably attract regulatory attention and that it might not end well for them.

They suggest working with regulators to develop “sandbox” experimental arrangements that allow for some innovative free rein but also give government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission an opportunity to build some certainty and order to this Wild West sector.

As the US and indeed the world, faces one of its most important elections for many years, the Covid19 world has brought increased political pressure on the under-funded US Postal Service and the security of remote / mail-in voting generally.Important themes for all of us globally.

Even though conservatives are generally more fearful of voter turnout than liberals, it’s debatable whether election results would be different if the entire population voted.

Regardless, better voter turnout is clearly more democratic and therefore should be pursued.

According to the Sanders Institute, voter turnout in the United States during presidential election years has remained around 50%-60% of the voting eligible population since the early 1900s. In the United Kingdom, between 1922 and 1997 voter turnout never fell below 70% – in 2001 it reached 59.4%.

Most people want to vote but can’t due to a number of factors, some systemic and some situational. What is clear however is that the availability of electronic voting (registration, identification and voting) will have a positive impact on voter turnout.

Considering how willing we are to have technology make our lives easier, this shift to electronic voting has faced considerable headwind from the institutions of Government and Media.

There was the Iowa caucus app issues, recent hacking of electronic voter machines, all seized upon and inflated by a political atmosphere eagerly looking to discourage remote voting by sowing electorate concern with security.

In a 2019 Study on Social Permission and Technology, global tech consultants Ketchum revealed the following statistics – distrust around voting machines (59%), distrust around voter databases (60%), foreign interference through technology (63%) and the influence of social media (61%).

This level of mistrust towards alternative voting is alarming. Without faith in our electoral systems there will be even more political division and less belief in final outcomes.

This will create a myriad of issues too broad and depressing to consider in this piece with ramifications across society.

Blockchain’s fundamental characteristics — transparency, immutability, and accountability — underscore the technology’s potential for securing elections and allowing the world to move more confidently to electronic voting.

An ideal voting system resists corruption by authorities or hackers and empowers citizens and auditors to agree on an election’s outcome. Conveniently, auditable consensus among parties who do not fully trust one another is exactly what the blockchain offers, an available technology that can provide an end-to-end verifiable and fully-transparent voting solution.

It makes perfect rationale sense.

Blockchain election technology is still in its early days and naturally there has been limited use. The following countries appear to have used some form of blockchain-based electronic voting system to date; Estonia, Netherlands, Belgium, Armenia, the Philippines, Venezuela, Sierra Leone and Russia.

Estonia has been using electronic voting since 2005 and is a world leader in government use of the blockchain. Not exactly A grade poster children but it’s a start.For the larger Western nations, the absence of a Government sponsored initiative has led to the private sector trying to fill the development space.

A number of private companies have taken the initiative including Spain-based Scytl, Australia-based SecureVote, UK-based Smartmatic Corp., South America led Democracy Earth and US-based Votem Corp.

All with great technology, great vision, but suffering for scale and effectiveness as it is a difficult task to change the way the world votes as a small individual start-up without any national infrastructure to support the endeavour.

A leading example of the end use case is Voatz, a leading blockchain based voting system. Users cast ballots remotely through an Application, with identities verified through the same reg-tech facial recognition and ID check systems that HAYVN uses.

Software automatically checks if the voter is eligible to cast a ballot and displays the list of candidates according to where the voter is registered. After voting, votes are encrypted and securely sent to the vote-collecting server. Every vote receives a timestamp to verify later whether the vote was forwarded to the collecting server.

All in the space of a few moments. Voatz uses a private blockchain distinctly different from the public blockchain network used by cryptocurrencies.

Voatz limits the role of verifying nodes through a strict vetting process which allows the network to limit verifying participants to the geographical boundaries of the jurisdiction, and to allow for the inclusion of any required election observers and stakeholders.

This is where the experts see a problem.

Unlike a Bitcoin-style open model, this consortium-managed node model potentially wipes out the blockchain’s supposed security benefits.

Having voter identities dispensed and revoked by a central authority puts voters back at the mercy of a few administrators who validate entries onto the election Blockchain.

The marriage of a distributed ledger with a central authority is an area which has been highlighted as a focus for improvement.

Some argue that although the Blockchain works for recording votes, work is needed on additional layers of technology for challenges such as validating voters, keeping ballots secret and letting each voter verify their vote was tallied.

Some cryptographers have spent decades advocating for their preferred solutions to those challenges—a suite of techniques known as “end-to-end verifiable voting”.

The marriage of this E2E verifiable voting with the Blockchain will help unlock the solution for secure technology led election administration. There is work to be done in this field.So who to turn to?

Although the free hand of the market can innovate and accomplish a lot, it seems that on issues on national security and voting, electronic voting initiatives should in these early stages be led and encouraged by Governments in collaboration with the private sector.

Consider in England and the United States alone how many federal, state and municipal election laws and voting systems, regulations and certification requirements would be managed in the course of an election.

A multi-year, multi department mandate in collaboration with technology leaders in the private sector. An opportunity for big tech to rehabilitate its current broken reputation around fake news by working in partnership with Government to create a secure nation wide electoral system across multiple platforms.

A chance for Media and Technology and Government to combine to reverse the current mistrust in elections and election outcomes.

A process to bring democracy safely and securely to everybody with a smart phone.  The future of election security cannot be a padlock on a box stuffed with paper votes, the future of election security sits with E2E technology on top of the blockchain.

Yet strangely this is not part of our national agenda. Securing democracy is a national security initiative. We are so proud of our democracy that we used to wage unnecessary wars in foreign lands for ‘democracy’, perhaps it’s time that we, the people, pressed our Governments to now intelligently protect our own democracy.

How in 2020 can our democracy be at the mercy of a poorly funded postal system when the solutions are at our fingertips? Ask Joe Biden to commit to leaving the United States with the most secure, widely available, electronic voting  system on the planet when he leaves office at age 81 in 4 years.

Ask Boris Johnson to do the same before he departs in 2024.

Now THAT is democracy and THAT is a legacy.Christopher Flinos is the Co-Founder of HAYVN, an online OTC and Custody trading platform for cryptocurrencies (www.hayvnglobal.com).

He also holds a BA, BCom and an LLB in Constitutional Law.

What exactly is the tokenization of sports?




Source: Shutterstock

Well, forget the sports industry for a moment, and let’s instead focus on the asset tokenization part of the question.

“Blockchain tokenization is the process of issuing blockchain-based tokens that represent a right, which can be the owner of real-world or intangible assets.

These tokens may represent partial or complete ownership of the asset that can often be easily transferred from one person to another and used on different services,” says James Sangalli, the co-founder of AlphaWallet. 

“These tokens can represent practically any right, including the ownership of previously indivisible assets like real estate, patents, works of art, contracts, and more, the process of tokenization unlocks previously illiquid assets and converts them into tokens that can be bought, traded, sold or used by anybody without intermediaries, which highly reduces the market friction and allows limitless integration through tokens.”

• The 6 Best Solar Stocks to Buy Right Now
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So, in a nutshell, tokenized assets make the trading of assets, and other things of value, far more efficient. 

Why Buy Tokenized Assets?

In March, I discussed three reasons for investors to consider tokenized assets: The democratization of investing: This would allow investors to buy assets anywhere in the world, at any time, in any amount like fractional shares of today.

If I wanted to buy $50 in a stock that trades on the Nairobi Stock Exchange, I theoretically could without a third-party intermediary.

Of course, we’re a long way from that model, but it’s certainly more than possible.  Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities:

Tokenization would allow assets and other things of value to be purchased more efficiently. No longer will one person or company buy an asset. Instead, the ownership can be divided into as many pieces as demand dictates.

Further, those tokens could be resold at any time in the future. So, a company might control a business by holding a majority of the tokens. Still, if you owned a token in this business, you could turn around and sell it without involving a middleman like a brokerage house. 

Common sense investing: Investors could use tokenized assets to sell revenue streams within a company. So, I could buy more than a piece of the company. I could also buy a portion of the company’s various revenue streams and divisions.

And, the company will keep control of the overall business. Sports shows where all of this is heading, and that’s great news for the flow of capital. Here’s why. 

Early Days in the Tokenization of Sports

Brooklyn Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie recently tried to tokenize a portion of his contract by selling 90 shares at $150,000 each. This sale represented $13.5 million of his $34 million, three-year contract.

The plan provides Dinwiddie the $13.5 million immediately. Investors get 2.5% interest annually over three years and the principal repaid on maturity. 

A good plan in theory. However, investors only bought eight of the 90 shares, raising just $1.3 million or 10% of the original goal. In the months and years ahead, one area of sports that can benefit from tokenization is college athletics.

Top athletes, while still in high school, might sell tokens representing a portion of their future income from pro contracts, advertising and marketing sponsorships, branding, etc.

The athlete and his family would receive a lump sum upfront in return for giving up a percentage of future income secured by tokenized assets. 

Ownership of Teams

David Otto, president and co-founder of CounterPointe Sports Group, recently discussed the issue in the context of the NBA owners holding minority positions in league teams. CounterPointe was formed in 2019 to innovate how professional sports teams are owned and financed through the blockchain.

“Currently, the team ownership model in many professional sports franchises is highly centralized, illiquid, and the province of a select few with the capital and net worth necessary to acquire some or all of a team,” Otto writes. 

“This model – as the NBA is currently experiencing – is inefficient, cost-prohibitive, and economically punitive to sellers, particularly with respect to the sale of minority interests.

”Otto also discusses the benefits of tokenizing team ownership, both in terms of economics, team governance, and even fan engagement. 

Fan Engagement Would Increase

I’ve often wondered why publicly traded companies don’t own more sports teams. 

In part, it has to do with archaic league rules. And, of course, some believe sports investments don’t make suitable public investments because revenue streams ebb and flow on team success. 

For example, Madison Square Garden Sports (NYSE:MSGS) has a three-year annualized total return of -0.96%.

It’s no surprise, then, that the New York Knicks and New York saw little success on the court and ice over this period. However, what f James Dolan, whose family controls 71% of Madison Square Garden Sports’ votes, was able to sell some of those votes to fans through a security token offering while retaining control of the organization.

My guess is the teams would get better in a hurry. Engaged fans with a vested interest in outcomes tend to voice their opinions more readily. 

Level the Playing Field

As Otto states, “Tokenization also represents a sustainable model for broadening economic access to and increasing levels of fan engagement in professional sports franchises.”

The ownership of sports teams ought to be more broadly owned, genuinely reflecting the fan base at large. Tokenization will help us get there much faster.Tokenization will truly level the playing field.  

Will Ashworth has written about investments full-time since 2008. Publications where he’s appeared include InvestorPlace, The Motley Fool Canada, Investopedia, Kiplinger, and several others in both the U.S. and Canada.

He particularly enjoys creating model portfolios that stand the test of time. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At the time of this writing, Will Ashworth did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

The post How the Tokenization May Level the Sports Playing Field appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions
 of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Jeff Dorman, a CoinDesk columnist, is chief investment officer at Arca where he leads the investment committee and is responsible for portfolio sizing and risk management. He has more than 17 years of trading and asset management experience at firms including Merrill Lynch and Citadel Securities.

Decentralized money is important, but tokenized ownership is perhaps an even bigger and more important concept, as it stands today. The idea an ownable asset can be both a utility and an investment at the same time could change the course of investing, and company formation as we know it. And based on recent actions from the government and corporations, we may be closer than ever to achieving this. 

A capitalist society means private property rights and the free market serve as the basis of trade, distribution of goods, and development, whereby private ownership and production is operated for profit. But society is now beginning to recognize that “shareholder capitalism” is also rife with negative externalities.

You need only look at the pressure companies felt (and the greediness and misaligned incentives of management teams) to increase stock prices by spending billions of dollars of idle cash on stock buybacks, only to be left with no rainy day funds during a three-month pandemic. 

See also: Jeff Dorman – What I Learned the First Time I Lost a Million DollarsThis, of course, led to trillions of dollars in bailouts at society’s expense; a negative externality that will affect multiple generations for decades. Joe Biden recently said, “It’s way past time to put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism – the idea that the only responsibility a corporation has is to its shareholders. That’s simply not true and it’s an absolute farce.

They have a responsibility to their workers, to their country. That isn’t a new or radical notion.”

Independent of political leanings, companies are feeling this pressure more than ever. Not just from Washington, but from society. Is there a way to cater to shareholders while also catering to society and your customers? As usual, we can look at Amazon as an example.

More than 150 million people have an Amazon Prime membership, and everyone pays the same price for it. However, a much smaller percentage of people own AMZN shares.

You might argue that most AMZN shareholders probably have a Prime membership, but it is certainly not the case that most Prime members own AMZN stock. The Venn diagram might look like this:





This chart is illustrative, not based on actual dataSource: Jeff Dorman

When you buy AMZN stock, you know exactly what you are getting – a share of the company’s profits and a “claim on future cash flows.”  However, when you buy a Prime membership, you have no idea what you are getting. At first, purchasing an Amazon Prime membership only gave you faster and cheaper delivery.

But over 10-plus years, Prime membership has been rewarded with additional benefits like music, movies and now discounts at Whole Foods. 

As a Prime member, you have reaped the benefits of good management and network growth, but it made no difference whether you were the first Prime member or the last to join because you pay exactly the same price as everyone else and receive the same rewards.

The same cannot be said for AMZN shareholders, where the price you pay depends on when you purchase.

THIS IS THE ONLY PATH WHERE CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM CAN CONVERGE, AND WE’RE SEEING IT HAPPEN IN REAL TIME.

Had Prime membership been tokenized, this Venn diagram of ownership would have overlapped much faster. As an early adopter, you would have gained both financially from the increased demand for Prime membership (driving token price higher) and still gained utility as Prime membership benefits were enhanced. 

Further, you would have become a strong evangelist for the brand, as you would be financially incentivized to get others to join Prime faster.

Both Amazon shareholders and Amazon Prime members have been rewarded, but one could argue both would have done even better had the incentive structure been tweaked through tokenization.



Source: FactSet, Statista, Arca estimates

As Arca sees it, this is the only path where capitalism and socialism can converge, and we’re seeing it happen in real time. Debt, equity and tokenized digital assets will all have a place in an investor’s portfolio, and more importantly, in customers’ portfolios.

The lines are likely to blur as investors become active participants in the bootstrapped growth of the companies they love. 

The best example of this to date is Binance and its BNB token. At first, owning the BNB token simply gave you discounts when you used Binance’s services. Today, BNB’s use cases have expanded to:

Referral program staking – If a person holds 500 BNB or more, they receive double the referral bonus, as well as a portion of the trading
See also: Jeff Dorman – If Crypto Is Anything Like Fixed-Income, It’s Going to Need a Fatter Textbook

IEO staking – The number of tickets you can claim depends on the amount of BNB you hold.

Discounted Trading fees – Binance discounts transaction fees by 25% (decreasing to 12.5% in July) whenever a transaction fee is paid for in BNB. Assist network transactions using BNB on Binance DEX.

Voting power – The more BNB you own, the more votes you have regarding which coin should list on Binance.

Like Amazon, Binance’s business lines and revenues have exploded.  Unlike Amazon, Binance’s customers have benefited financially, in addition to benefiting from enhanced services.

 As a result, Binance’s Venn Diagram might look much closer to this:





This chart is for illustration purposes; it's not based on actual data

Source: Jeff Dorman

It may sound terrifying to invest in something like a digital asset without knowing exactly what rights you are receiving for your investment. That token designs can change, and features can be added or subtracted, may give you pause as you wonder what your rights are as a token holder.  

But when you dissect this, it’s no different than what you do as a shareholder. Those who bought AMZN stock in the early days of the company thought they were investing in an online bookstore.

When you back good management teams, it doesn’t really matter what your rights as a shareholder or a token holder are, what matters is that you and management saw the potential before others did. The flexibility of a token’s use cases is just as exhilarating as it is terrifying.

The best token designs will, therefore, be those that incentivize customers to take a risk in adopting a new platform before it is clear that it is worth it, and they will be rewarded via increased token prices that will have future value based on how much token holders contribute to the company’s growth.

As communities form around these network effects, token holders may be incentivized even further to evangelize on the company’s behalf, thanks to “ownership” rights and a sense of community involvement. 

Tokenized ownership may be an effective way to reduce monopolies while still encouraging development and innovation. While companies and politicians fight, the solution may already be here.

Blockchain as a great facility is expected to play a vital role in information and technology in the coming years. It has started to progress more rapidly because more and more organizations now realize the importance of the blockchain.

Moreover, it’s not easy to implement blockchain for several reasons. Blockchain development services support critical system and hardware necessities to attain a significant decrease in attack vulnerability.



Blockchain as a service supplier like IBM, Microsoft Azure and other top companies have researched BaaS to make blockchain execution easier for the industries whose chief capabilities remain in fields than information and technology.

It assists enterprises to emphasis more on the main areas, than to focus on the development space.

What do you understand by the term Blockchain as a service?

Blockchain as a service is a blockchain facility that enables consumers to use cloud-based facilities to progress, use and organize their blockchain applications, operation and smart dealings.

BaaS comprises a cloud-based facility that manages performance to keep the structure functional and agile. It’s still working on some areas to increase its growth across different businesses:

Web development company plans and codes applications for online purpose.Industries and businesses both are eager to execute the blockchain feature due to the technical difficulties in generating, functioning and handling the blockchain structure act as problems to its broad adoption.

Blockchain, as a service provides solutions to release companies of the complication of new technology.

How does it work?

A BaaS provider organizes and maintains the blockchain technology and arrangement for a consumer. The customer pays some amount to the BaaS provider for arranging and managing blockchain linked nodes on their concern.

 A BaaS provider maintains the back-end for the customer and their business. The customerprovides money to the BaaS provider for arranging and handling blockchain connected nodes on their concern.

A BaaS worker manages the back-end for the client and their industry. It is the duty of a BaaS operator to make blockchain structure work continuously. A Blockchain worker also takes care of theevents like proper distribution of sources, bandwidth controlling and organizing requirements.

By using BaaS procedure, customer can concentrate on more of the main fields and the working of blockchain without worrying about the arrangement issues.

The different method to organize your website on any web hosting provider such as Amazon Services or Azure, and they will handle all maintenance and set-up difficulties.

Blockchain as a service performs similarly to the second procedure, thus releasing you from the burden of handling structure of a blockchain application.

Some of the famous BaaS providers in the market

Microsoft

Microsoft is one of the first sellers to offer BaaS when it created Azure blockchain services in 2015. They grouped up with the industries to progress Microsoft azure services.

The administration purposes of following designers and trades consumers to test with blockchain technology and development. Microsoft Azure BaaS also permits its customers to generate private, public, and association blockchain setting with industry context and bring their blockchain applications to the market. 

Blockchain App Development Company helps with diverse blockchain platforms to improve business efficiency, effectiveness, and growth.However, by incorporating the artificial intelligence-based support system, many large companies help its customers understand and execute dispersed ledger technology.

Features of Microsoft Azure

• It helps Several Blockchain contexts, including large industries
• Constructed-in Group Management to handle associates of the network
• Total functioning and Sorting

Amazon

Like other industries, Amazon has also come up with its BaaS facility known as amazon managed blockchain. Amazon managed blockchain is a complete facility that provides its customers to arrange and maintain an accessible network with just a few hit.

The amazon managed blockchain assists two famous blockchain expansion contexts, making its simple for the customer to handle both approved and public blockchain systemsthrough a particularcontrolledservice.

Therefore, amazon managed blokchain provides you with the procedure to choose the proper sources for your workload.Features of Amazon Managed Blockchain

• Completely maintained
• Supports two famous blockchain development frameworks Fabric and Ethereum
• Follows Amazon QLDB equipment to handle amplified ordering facility

R3

The blockchain platform as an administration provided its R3 facilities that offer industries access to the one-click organization of cloud-based nodes.

Maintained R3 platform decreases the organization time of blockchain nodes for a few minutes’ permits industries, R3 associates and governments to organize the Corda system in just three clicks.

Created on the latest release of Corda, designers can advance their private systems for verifying and install CorD applications on the private network. It decreases efforts and sources and provides flexibility over a shorter period.

Designersno longer need to concentrate on the management of systems.Features of R3 Corda ServiceR3’s unique feature permits designers to function with more than one element at a time.

Features that will help you choose right Baas applications

Smart Agreements IntegrationYou need a smart deal instrument to combine business ideas into your blockchain solution. Smart deal not only comprises the instructions like typical deals but also applies penalties in case any part breaks the norms.

However, the BaaS platforms are enduring; it makes proper testing of smart deals quite complex for designers. It is vital to consider that the BaaS Company offers you the intelligent deal combined with the organization.

Identity Access Management Platforms

An authorized system permits consumers to access precise data or layers.

Combining a managed platform will make the blockchain system properly secure, and you will be capable of giving permissions to individuals.

Different Runtimes and Frameworks

Some BaaS workers only assist one kind of enterprise blockchain organization. Guarantee to select a BaaS that offers a wide range of contexts. It will help bring scalability to your enterprise necessities.

Conclusion

Blockchain as the administration is a promising offering that helps industries become flexible solution created on the blockchain technology. SaaS Development Company is an enterprise that organizesa feature and makes it accessible to consumers over the internet.


Categories: Uncategorized





Amit Agrawal

Cyber Infrastructure (p) Ltd

As the Founder and COO at Cyber Infrastructure (P) Limited, it is my aspiration to drive our global clients ahead in the competitive technology world by enabling them to receive huge financial and operational benefits in software development through my years of experience and extensive expertise as technology adviser and strategist.

In my current position at CIS, I spearhead management of various technology initiatives, expansion of our technology capabilities, and delivery of quality excellence to our clients.

Over the last two years, the cryptocurrency industry has gone through a paradigm shift, as developers, projects and users have begun applying blockchain technologies to ever more innovative and intriguing use cases.

Among these, the tokenization of entertainers, sports stars and big personalities stands out as one of the most unusual recent trends because traditional sports, entertainment and modern technologies like blockchain seem like an unlikely pairing.

However, the tokenization of sports contracts, intellectual property in sports, stars and players is actually the logical next step in the evolution of blockchain use cases.

What is tokenization exactly?

In a sense, blockchain tokenization is a way of creating a digital representation of a right, using a blockchain ledger (the right can be the ownership of an asset or any type of tradable rights).

Similar to the way that stablecoins, like Universal United States Dollar (UPUSD) and Tether (USDT), represent the ownership of one asset worth one U.S. dollar held by Tether somewhere, tokenized rights represent rights in/from systems.

These digital representations of tradable rights, known as tokens, can be easily transferred between individuals just as easily as sending a Bitcoin (BTC) payment, essentially allowing anybody to buy, sell and trade the ownership of practically anything without having to go through any market hosts and the original token issuers.

Therefore, they highly reduced the market frictions. Furthermore, tokenized rights can be integrated across systems, allowing limitless integration.

These tokens are generally created through smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain with different smart contract standards — ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-875, ERC-1155, ERC-1400, etc.

Based on the type of rights being tokenized, token issuers choose different smart contract standards for fungible, nonfungible or semi-fungible tokens.

Nonfungible token smart contracts have been used to tokenize real estate, art, stocks, cars, and more; it is rapidly gaining popularity as a way to bring sports personalities and celebrities closer to their fans, while potentially opening up exciting new avenues for investment and entertainment.

Spencer Dinwiddie tokenizes his contract

Perhaps the most prominent example of a tokenized sports contract occurred earlier this year when professional basketball player Spencer Dinwiddie tokenized part of his $34-million contract with the Brooklyn Nets, creating a unique tokenized investment opportunity, which was done on a platform known as Dream Fan Shares.

In essence, Dinwiddie split a chunk of his Brooklyn Nets contract into 90 separate SD8 Professional Athlete Investment Tokens, which can be purchased by accredited investors for $150,000 each.

By doing this, Dinwiddie is able to access up to $13.5 million of his three-year, $34.4-million contract upfront, while investors are provided a tokenized bond that pays out 4.95% APR — paid out as a single bullet payment at maturity.

By providing an interest rate of 4.95%, Dinwiddie’s three-year bond pays out far more than most other financial instruments and certainly more than most government or corporate bonds, giving investors the potential to generate lucrative returns, while Dinwiddie can extract money from his contract much faster than otherwise possible.

Dinwiddie is currently the first big name to use the Dream Fan Shares platform to launch his own tokenized debt instrument, but there are plans to launch a similar token for both famous artists and influencers — opening up an even wider range of stars to decentralized investments.

The potential to bring fans and their favorite athletes closer together through tokenized investment models goes well beyond simply securing an attractive interest rate for investors.

Imagine being able to contribute to a tokenized sponsorship for an up-and-coming athlete and then later share in his or her success, or even outright own part of a popular team — gaining a say in how it operates and the revenues it brings in.

Potential use cases

Tokenization in the sports industry is still very much in its infancy, and the kinks are still being worked out. However, a number of platforms offering tokenization services have begun to crop up, offering more exciting use cases.

Among these, the recently launched Socios platform stands out as one of the most successful examples.

Through Socios, sports fans are able to purchase a special type of cryptocurrency, known as Fan Tokens, that confers voting rights to holders, allowing them to help make decisions that affect their favorite sports teams. Holders may also be in a position to benefit from a range of special incentives, such as VIP experiences, meeting the players, guided tours, and more.

Through this system, Socios allows fans to truly feel like a part of the club, but they still don’t benefit from the financial success of the team. Because of this, Socios fan tokens are not considered security tokens.

Therefore, you don’t need to be an accredited investor to get involved.Token Stars takes a completely different approach to celebrities and tokenization.

Token Stars bills itself as “the first celebrity management platform on the blockchain,” and that’s exactly what it is.

Through the platform, celebrities can host their own initial coin offering, allowing themselves to essentially divide their time into tokenized blocks that can be redeemed for activities like an after-party with fans, Skype shows, one-on-one training, among other things.

The flexibility of this system can be adapted to practically any use case, allowing both stars and their fans to establish what each token represents and how it can be redeemed. It can also be used to tokenize performance, allowing players to bankroll themselves at a tournament like the World Series of Poker.

 In addition, users have the chance to sponsor their favorite players or teams at prominent events, for example, Major League Gaming, and to earn a chunk of the proceeds if their star or team performs well.

Where is the tokenization industry headed?

One of the main reasons tokenization has become drastically more popular in recent years is that it has the potential to increase the core value of the rights through increased utility and liquidity.

Tokenized rights can be traded on the market with less friction, increasing the liquidity of the rights.

Tokenized rights integrate across systems, allowing limitless integration, and increase the utility of the rights.

This allows for the formation of entirely new asset classes that were impractical or simply impossible to create prior to the advent of blockchain technology, potentially unlocking hidden troves of wealth stored in physical possessions; creating new investment models that can be accessed by anybody; and allowing brands to become far more decentralized entities.

The future of the tokenized asset industry is clear. Anybody or anything with significant potential to accrue value over a fixed period has the opportunity to be tokenized and sold over the internet.

This could be anything, ranging from celebrities to online personalities, up-and-coming athletes, brands, companies, patents, and just about anything that has an attributed value.

With that in mind, now is the time to lay down the framework that will keep investors safe — enabling everyone to participate in the new token economy without running the same risks that burned many investors during the recent ICO craze.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Victor Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of AlphaWallet. He has spent the past five years working to transform the way banking and blockchain technology intersect. Prior to his venture into blockchain technology, Zhang worked for 17 years in international business in Asia and Australia.

In the days of COVID-19, there are new challenges in participating in democracy. There are unique challenges in how people vote. Traditional polling centres must be equipped to support social distancing.

In the US, some cities and states are working to consolidate polling locations. And although there are no imminent elections here in the UK, similar changes will be required here to address issues of public health and safety.

Since 1918 postal voting has been possible for service personnel unable to vote due to the nature of their position. In 1948, regular citizens could vote by post. And according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in April 2020, 58% of Americans believe that everyone should be allowed to vote by mail, primarily due to the threats arising from COVID-19.

There are issues and challenges with postal voting related to the potential for fraud as well as the administrative overhead of verifying signatures and lost or nullified ballots. 

Beyond postal voting, there have been numerous attempts to implement electronic voting at polling places and via mobile applications. The stories of errors and inconsistencies in digital data have created a severe urge for caution in trying to move too far too fast into the digital age.

But what role might blockchain technology play in the future of voting?Voting has been part of blockchain technology since Ethereum was launched in 2015. Many early blockchain projects allowed for voting by community members and token holders through blockchain to help decide the direction of the projects.

An advanced concept of a distributed autonomous organisation (DAO) has no official leader. Community votes make decisions on the blockchain. Blockchain records these votes and tallies the result. But what makes blockchain the right choice?

The blockchain system would only assure a) that any individual would only vote once and b) that the network agreed to the tally of votes.

A public permissionless blockchain has three core characteristics: The data written onto the ledger is immutable (tamper evident), the system is distributed (multiple copies of the data lending itself to high-availability) and the system is decentralised (no single entity or group are in control).

A critical design step is deciding what data to store on the blockchain. Applying a principle of Minimum Effective Blockchain (MEB) the only data on the blockchain would be recording that a particular citizen had cast a vote and the tally or cumulative sum of the votes.

Entries on the ledger would not contain any personal information, nor would they include the specific details of how a person voted.The blockchain system would only assure a) that any individual would only vote once and b) that the network agreed to the tally of votes.

Blockchain systems provide maximum value when there are multiple distrusting parties all agreeing to reference a single source of truth. In this case, there are most undoubtedly various distrusting parties. Different political parties do not trust one another.

Many voters do not trust governments. And some voters do not trust one another. There must be a simple explanation of how the system works to achieve acceptance of blockchain for voting. And the system must be open to audit and inspection by anyone. So far, so good. Now we come to the challenges – and there are more than just a few.

Citizens must be registered to vote. Each citizen must be issued a unique token to vote on the blockchain. Voter registration agencies would be responsible for issuing these tokens and ensuring that no one was issued more than one token.

The voter is responsible for managing their token and for keeping it safe. The agency is responsible for protecting the personal information of the voter and keeping that data safe. Just as with postal votes, the agency must have a method to validate the signature of the vote. In a blockchain, this is done with cryptography using public and private keys.

The blockchain network (the computers managing the ledger) utilises public and private keys to verify the authenticity of each vote, without verifying the identity of the voter.

The blockchain network utilises public and private keys to verify the authenticity of each vote, without verifying the identity of the voter.

Security experts are rightly concerned with protecting these digital signatures. This is true of all forms of electronic voting – both blockchain and non-blockchain. Various levels of biometric security (facial recognition, fingerprint verification) are available, and none are without their problems. 

Once in the digital world, there are also concerns about malicious software on people phones or computers. Malicious software could attempt to read people’s votes, capture their identity or even change their votes.

And yet, society has rapidly moved to adopt digital banking, mobile banking, contactless payments and even online digital identity services like those from Estonia. Each of these systems has evolved and put in place security measures sufficient to earn the trust of a majority of consumers.

Electronic voting solutions can be built at least as securely as online and mobile banking.

Other e-voting systems are based on a centralised architecture which is subject to direct attack by malicious third parties. Creating a blockchain ledger can prevent multiple votes from a single person.

It can avoid attempts by one person attempting to appropriate someone else vote fraudulently. And blockchain can securely and accurately record the tally of votes in a way that is auditable and visible to all.

Blockchain can achieve this through its properties of being decentralised, distributed and immutable.

A frequent challenge when discussing blockchain is in making clear the problem blockchain solves. In the case of voting, a blockchain-based ledger and associated network solve the problems of data integrity, transparency and security.

Blockchain has never claimed to address the challenges of identity, device security or ease of use. Whether electronic voting happens via email, web, mobile app, there are issues to be addressed.

Blockchain technology is secure, mature and available as a superior solution when it comes to storing the data in a way that ensures trust in the democratic process.





Get in touch with us [email protected] /

Twitter @igetblockchain

Troy Norcross, Co-Founder Blockchain Rookies

Check out the Disruptors for GOOD Podcast Presented by Causeartist:

Disruptors for GOOD explores social entrepreneurs around the world who have dedicated their lives to ethical fashion, impact investing, sustainable travel, and businesses that impact the world in a positive way. The founder of Causeartist, Grant Trahant, does one-on-one interviews with some of the most creative and impactful startups and brands around the world.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Over the past few years, cryptocurrency, and the technology that powers it, blockchain, has burst into the mainstream on many levels. Much the same can be said for social entrepreneurship and impact investing. The social impact economy is real and it is absolutely coming.

According to the World Economic Forum the social impact economy could reach a market size of between US $400 billion and US $1 trillion by 2020. This is an amazing and inspiring number.The question then becomes, what will power this potential trillion dollar economy? 

The simple answer is blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but as of now only 0.5 percent of the world’s population is using blockchain, while more than 50 percent of the population has access to the Internet.

The low usage of crypto and blockchain is a normal trend for a distributive technology, but when disruption truly occurs it will happen quickly and on a mass scale.

Currently there is an estimated 24 million active Bitcoin wallets around the world. In comparison there is an estimated 3.2 billion people active on the internet.

In December of 1995 the internet was starting to spread, but still it only had 16 million users(0.4% of the population).

In December of 2005, ten years later, the internet had over one billion users!Can blockchain have this robust growth over the next decade?

As blockchain matures more and more; companies, investors, and organizations will begin to implement new and creative ways to use it. This is already happening, but as we saw the robust growth of the internet over just a ten year span, we could be on the cusp of seeing that with blockchain and digital currencies around the world.

The developing world in most respects are way ahead of the developed world when it comes to implementing blockchain and cryptocurrencies. There is an estimated 2 billion working-age adults globally (38%) that do not use or have access to formal financial services.

Blockchain is creating a flexible and robust financial system for the developing world, skipping the large financial institution banking model all together.

For more on this particular subject please read this great post from CoinCentral: How Blockchain Can Eradicate Poverty in Third-World Countries

Below are already some amazing ventures looking at blockchain as a true path to connecting the world through social impact and being transparent in doing so. As the world becomes more and more integrated into the internets eco-system, more and more will soon be integrated into the blockchain and create a more efficient world.

Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition

Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition (BSIC) incubates, develops, and implements confederated blockchain products and solutions that can address social and environmental challenges across the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The coalition aims to inspire, federate, and create bridges between NGO’s, and government agencies, foundations, impact investors, philanthropists and technologists. The Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition is an initiative of ConsenSys.

Vera

Vera is a simple way for businesses to offset their plastic footprint. By becoming Vera-Certified, you’ll help create new jobs for people who collect ocean-bound plastic.

You’ll not only alleviate poverty, but also ensure that plastic never ends up in our oceans! The best part about Vera, is that everything is transacted through the blockchain, which creates a traceable, auditable supply chain that guarantees our promise. Join Vera’s collective who already offset more than 40,000 plastic bottles every month!

Impak Coin(MPK)

Impak Finance created an Impak Coin, the first stable cryptocurrency designed to support the growth of the impact economy. By design, Impak Coin will build loyalty, reward collaboration and encourage its holders to buy from impak.eco accredited members.

Impak Finance is building an ecosystem to bring citizens, businesses, and investors together, both digitally (impak.eco) and face-face, to grow an economy built on social values. By using Impak Coin you will create meaningful purchasing habits and support impak.eco businesses.

For each Impak Coin transaction you get an MPK reward and the business doesn’t have to pay transaction fees.

GiveTrack/BitGive

GiveTrack is a platform nonprofits use for taking donations and sharing with donors exactly how their contributions are used while tying donations directly to a project result. GiveTrack is a project of BitGive. 

GiveTrack is built on a public ledger that provides financial transaction information in real time. Donations made in bitcoin are displayed on the Bitcoin blockchain, a public ledger that is immutable and transparent.

Project results are tied into GiveTrack through a reporting mechanism that provides notification of project milestones and written updates from the charity’s representatives in the field.

Akcoin

AKoin is a new cryptocurrency from visionary changemaker Akon and is the foundation of the AKoin Ecosystem– a unique global project that offers an abundance of digital and in-real-life platforms and experiences that create opportunity and inclusion for youth entrepreneurs by allowing consumers to buy, hold, and spend cryptocurrency right from their smartphone through a suite of blockchain-powered apps.

Created by Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum selling artist, producer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Akon, who successfully founded and grew Akon Lighting Africa to provide scaled solar power solutions throughout 18 countries to date in Africa, the AKoin Ecosystem’s exclusive suite of sustainability and growth-building crypto-based apps offer immediate and ongoing new revenue generating opportunities to stimulate micro-exchanges and financial stability.

Plastic Bank

Using blockchain technology, the Plastic Bank offers a secure and transparent way to monetize ocean-bound plastic with a dual mission of protecting the environment, and banking the unbanked in some of the world’s poorest regions. 

The Plastic Bank helps build recycling infrastructure in the world’s poorest countries, such as Haiti, and addresses the inefficiencies of existing informal systems in highly urbanized areas such as Sao Paulo in Brazil or Manila in the Philippines.

Collection centers are built in close consultation with local communities, and are run by local entrepreneurs to ensure that the operations are self-sufficient and sustainable on the long run – people living below the poverty line are offered a stable source of employment, often earning twice their regular income as a result.

The Roots Token

ROOTS tokens create an economic logic that aligns the interests of those who possess capital and those who are trying to escape poverty. RootProject creates a virtuous circle by creating an ongoing demand mechanism for ROOTS tokens via on the ground, crowd-funded projects that produce a public good.

Ownership of ROOTS is encouraged by providing economic opportunities to token purchasers as well as low skilled workers. When the currency appreciates, it creates value for everyone in the system because ROOTS tokens are held in a pension-like fund for those who complete RootProject activities while those who have purchased tokens see their value grow due to reduced supply and continued demand.

ixo Foundation

ixo is optimizing the way the world creates impact. Using blockchain and next generation web standards, the ixo protocol combines data with trust. The world is starting to realize how important it is to really count what matters, for people and the planet. With ixo, all measurable changes that have an impact can now be transformed into Verified Impact Data with crypto-economic Proof of Impact, which enables anyone to value what counts for sustainable social, environmental and economic development.

Trusted Impact data grows investments into impacts and optimizes the results, assisted by machine learning and intelligent oracles. The ixo protocol generates Impact Tokens that are traded through decentralized impact exchanges. These digital assets will create new marketplaces for the Impact Economy.

Watercoin

The watercoin WTR will allow O’Claire, a subsidiary of SUNWATERLIFE,  to have sufficient means to distribute its O’Claire drinking water on 3 continents. The funds raised will be used in particular to acquire and set up drinking water production units, set up production, distribution and sales and marketing teams, and make the necessary communications investments to deploy the brand.

A portion of the proceeds raised will be locked-in to meet sufficient financial guarantees. The WATERCOIN WTR, a cryptocurrency with a strong societal impact!

Everex

Everex is the first fully transparent microfinance platform. Built on Ethereum blockchain technology and accessible from mobile devices, the Everex network allows anyone to request microcredit and send fiat payments from anywhere in the world.

We offer technology and services within an ecosystem involving software applications to facilitate cross-border lending, remittances, merchant payments, and currency exchange. Our solution assists 2 billion underbanked individuals to build and improve their credit history on the basis of mobile phone data, granting them access with EVX to the global financial system for the first time.

Cherr.io

Cherr.io harnesses the power of charitable blockchain solutions to supplement the ones in need. Cherr.io’s main focus is to bring the product with full support of smart contracts and attract new charity organizations with live campaigns.

Cherr.io is partaking in the future of charity by offering blockchain solutions for charitable donations. They aggregate these resources towards the Global Goals in a cohesive and systematic way.

Cherr.io’s goal is to make this technology available to all charitable organizations by creating an universal platform that will improve and expand the existing fundraising processes, increase transparency and reinforce the trust that the people have in charitable organizations.

Blue Whale Foundation

Blue Whale will empower the world’s freelance community by creating the largest worker-centric decentralized ecosystem where independent workers can pursue their passions and get the value they deserve from the gig economy. 

With freelancing demands on the rise, middlemen tech giants like Uber and AirBnb have been profiting from the gig economy from exorbitant commission and marketing fees, while freelancers are left with little to no security for performing these jobs for their customers.

Blue Whale plans to answer the gig economy’s problems by providing a decentralized ecosystem that takes these middle men out and establish a direct connection between the freelancer and customer.

Alice

Alice is a social funding and impact management platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. The platform incentivizes organizations (charities, NGOs, social enterprises) to run projects transparently, by making sure they get paid more when they achieve their goals.

The performance of each project is publicly available, making it easier for funders (philanthropic organizations, impact investors, small donors) to identify and help scale social projects that actually work. Shared impact data also helps reduce due diligence and reporting costs, and helps social organizations collaborate more effectively.

Clean Water Coin

The Clean Water Coin Initiative is the first ever coin designed and developed to be a nonprofit organization.

The organization created a Crypto Charity and coin that lets a community actively participate in helping provide clean water. The organization has teamed up with CharityWater.org so that we can create campaigns and raise funds for clean water projects.

Everledger – Diamond Time Lapse

The Diamond Time-Lapse Protocol is a traceability initiative built on a blockchain-based platform for the diamond and jewelry industry. The aim is to engage all industry participants including manufacturers, retailers and consumers to know a diamond’s story from the origin to the end customer.

This has been developed from understanding that consumers have a keen interest in the lifetime journey of their diamonds and jewelry, as well as the industry desire to demonstrate authenticity, transparency, and provenance.

Amply

Amply is a digital identity protocol that builds trust. Amply provides every child with their own self-sovereign digital identity based on the blockchain. This will enable children to receive benefits and services that they might have previously been excluded from. In their pilot project, Amply is being used to replace an existing paper-based system to register children for a government funded pre-school subsidy in South Africa.

Service providers use a mobile app to verify children’s attendance at classes and to capture other useful information.This will increase trust in the funding mechanism and make funding available to more children who need it. It will save administration time and costs. And it will provide really useful information about how and where services are being delivered.

Amply is unique in that it places each individual child at the centre of their relationships with Early Childhood Development services in a way that is ‘self-sovereign’ and directly beneficial to them.

This means that a child’s digital identity and personal data are privately owned and controlled by the individual (with some help from their guardians).

Header Photo by David Shares on Unsplash

The sharing economy is fast transforming how we interact as people and work. Valued at around $15 billion five years ago, the sharing economy is predicted to be worth over $335 billion by 2025.

The potential for the industry is massive.

Based on peer to peer (P2P) activity where individuals acquire, provide, or share access to goods and services through a platform, some skeptics believe that the blockchain’s role is minimal in this industry. But, contrary to this belief, blockchain has a more significant role to play.

The Problem With The Sharing Economy 

According to the Blockchain Council, a group of experts dedicated to research and development of the technology, the sharing economy suffers from a poor model where the revenue generated isn’t fairly shared with all the members involved.

Also, there is an issue with how platforms like Uber and Airbnb act as intermediaries in what are supposedly peer-to-peer transactions leaving participants with no option but to follow the terms and conditions on offer.Direct connections are highly discouraged.

Even though these platforms may offer decent user interfaces, individuals cannot communicate with each other outside the platforms without violating the terms of service.

These companies have the power to dictate prices, and they also take a considerable chunk of the earnings in a supposedly “peer-to-peer” system. Additionally, there have been cases of safety and crime.

Even though incidents occur rarely, there have been reports of sexual assaults with Uber cataloging 2,936 cases in 2017 and 3,045 cases in 2018 in the US alone. Other ride-sharing companies such as Grab in Malaysia and Ola in India have seen similar cases reported.

Astonishingly you can even find entire websites dedicated to horror stories about Airbnb from both the guests and hosts. From shootings during Halloween, theft, prostitution, and even voyeuristic hosts using spy cameras to watch guests.

Even though a platform like Airbnb does undergo background checks to improve security, the verification process can be improved. Blockchain can help with verification of identity and background checking, thus making the process more efficient. It can even go a step further to incentivize good behavior and punish bad actors.

The decentralized nature of the technology ensures databases are safer, limiting the vulnerabilities of centralized servers.

Rise Of Blockchain-Based Sharing Economy Platforms

With the many benefits the sharing economy stands to gain from the blockchain technology apparent, we are witnessing the emergence of blockchain-based platforms in the sector. 

Blockchain’s role in the sharing economy is being facilitated by protocols like TimeCoinPrototol that offers a platform where new projects can build a sharing economy service.

The project also believes it can solve some of the issues within the gig economy. Having launched last year, the project uses “time tickets,” allowing users to tokenize their business hours.

These tickets can be bought in exchange for various services, including consulting, photography, and relationship counseling. Other potential use case includes offering financial advice, fortune-telling, programming, and coaching.

According to Cointelegraph, “TimeTicket has already succeeded in raising $3.2 million in equity, and now, an initial exchange offering is being planned in Hong Kong to get the TimeCoinProtocol up and running. A total of 100 million TimeCoins (known as TMCN for short) are going to be issued, 58% of which will be allocated to the token sale.”

TimeCoinProtocol is just one platform that is utilizing the blockchain to offer benefits to the sharing economy, there are others like Origin based on the Ethereum blockchain, and a few others that can be seen on Defiprime.com, a platform that lists top DeFi projects.

The sharing economy is expected to grow much faster than traditional operating companies. One study by PWC found out that between 2013 and 2025, the revenue of sharing economy will grow by a mind-boggling 2233%. In contrast, companies with traditional operating models will increase their income by just 39.6%.

The study conducted in 2015 also found out that around 44% of Americans were familiar with the sharing economy business model, and 19% had already tried it. Fast forward to 2020, and this number has increased tremendously.Statista predicted that over 86 million Americans would be taking part in the sharing economy by 2021.

This number is almost double the 44.8 million Americans exposed to the sharing economy by 2016.

According to Credit Suisse, 17% of people were open to the idea of sharing their sofa. This goes to show how the sharing economy is gaining popularity with more people willing to share items they don’t frequently need.

According to China Daily, over 700 million Chinese citizens took part in the sharing economy back in 2017. That more than half the entire population. The industry was estimated to be worth more than $760 billion at the time.

According to Airbnb, hotels worldwide are losing over $450 billion annually due to the platform. More people prefer using the platform since its cheaper, and while you are at it, you can even rent one of the 1,400 islands available, or choose a castle from the 3,000 available.

Ultimately, the blockchain will help platforms in the sharing economy sector reduce their reliance on corporations. By eliminating managers, intermediaries, and employees, fees will be reduced significantly.

Security is guaranteed using an in-app rating system that is censorship resistant since it's based on the blockchain. Additionally, fairness is also ensured through a financial incentive as users administer the platforms collectively.

Dislosure: I don't have any vested interests in any mentioned projects.

Global, Ireland July 1 2020

This article looks at some of the ways in which blockchain technologies are being used by international organisations, state authorities and health institutions to tackle some of the challenges associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.

We also highlight some of the legal issues arising from the use of blockchain technology.

The unique features of blockchain – its use of cryptography, peer-to-peer networking and a distributed public ledger – make it ideal for tracking the spread of the virus, facilitating the sharing of essential Covid-19 related data, and securing medical supply chains.

Data SharingA key issue in managing the pandemic is the need for reliable, up to date data concerning the outbreak and spread of the virus. One of the advantages of blockchain is that it can provide verifiable data using distributed ledger technology and peer-to-peer networking.

A blockchain is a public database, or "ledger", which is stored in multiple locations across a decentralised network. Data is added to the ledger in "blocks".

Each time a new block is added it must first be verified by all participants in the network.

This way, multiple parties can collaborate over the validity of rapidly updating data, thereby ensuring the data recorded on the ledger is accurate and up to date.A number of platforms have recently been launched which use this technology to facilitate the sharing of Covid-19 related data.

In March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) in partnership with several major tech companies launched MiPasa, a blockchain-based platform which purports to facilitate “fully private information sharing between individuals, state authorities and health institutions.

”MiPasa synthesizes location data and health information from various sources such as the WHO, the U.S. Centre for Disease Control and other similar agencies, and attempts to reconcile them by allowing the public to report data discrepancies, thus creating a single source of verified and up-to-date information.

The platform also facilitates privacy-enabled self-reporting by allowing public health officials and individuals to upload data about the time and exact location of different infections.

This data source is stripped of personally identifying information, allowing a person to see if they have been in the vicinity of someone who has been infected before.

In Honduras, the Toronto-based technology firm Emerge has launched Civitas, a mobile phone app which associates users' government-issued ID numbers with unique records managed on a blockchain-based network.

This helps government agencies with determining whether an individual should be approved for a permit to leave their residence to receive medical treatment.

 If a user reports that they are experiencing Covid-19 symptoms, then the Civitas app can assist with determining when would be the best and safest time for them to leave their home to get essential items such as food and medicine.

The app can also assist physicians and other healthcare providers by allowing them to track Covid-19 symptoms and include any notes related to the patient’s care. Such data is made available exclusively to the user and healthcare provider, and is cryptographically secured, thus alleviating any privacy concerns.

Medical Supply Chain ManagementIn addition to facilitating the sharing of data, blockchain solutions can also help manage and optimise supply chains in medical equipment and other essential supplies needed for treating and containing the virus.

In the Netherlands, the distributed ledger technology firm Tymlez has provided its blockchain platform to the Dutch government as the underlying technology for mapping and analysing the country's medical supply chain.

The use of this blockchain platform ensures that supply and demand are matched and creates transparency across the supply chain, reducing the risk of price gouging and hoarding in relation to critical supplies such as PPE and ventilators.

A similar network has been launched in the United States and Canada, by IBM in collaboration with the blockchain firm Chainyard.

The network, called Rapid Supplier Connect (RSC), is a blockchain-based network designed to help government agencies and healthcare organisations identify new, non-traditional suppliers who have pivoted to address the shortage of essential equipment, devices and supplies needed for Covid-19 relief efforts.

RSC aims to alleviate the strain on medical supply chains by accelerating the process for verifying and onboarding non-traditional suppliers and providing real-time inventories of life-saving equipment.

Contact Tracing AppsGovernments around the world are taking steps towards introducing contact tracing apps – smart phone apps which use phone tracking technology to enable users to determine whether they have come into physical proximity with infected persons.

One of the main challenges associated with the adoption of these apps is the need to ensure data protection and privacy for users. Blockchain could potentially provide a solution to these privacy issues.

As a complementary tool to the tracking technology, a blockchain ledger could be used as the basis for recording data relating to users' movements and sharing this data with other participants on the ledger.

The use of a blockchain platform would ensure that users' identity is protected through encryption and anonymous identifiers. Instead of usernames and passwords, each user would be provided with a unique, encrypted digital identity which could be used to manage and share personal data.

The use of private key technology would give users ultimate control over the data they wish to share. Furthermore, because the blockchain ledger is immutable, this means that any shared information will remain safe and secure and cannot be tampered with.

Blockchain: Legal IssuesThere are a number of legal issues associated with the use of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies.Smart ContractsOne of the emerging uses of blockchain is as a platform for "smart contracts".

These are automated self-executing contracts, consisting wholly or in part of computer code, which are deployed on a distributed ledger and which can be used to execute transactions between participants on the ledger.

In principle, the ordinary rules of contract law apply to smart contracts and these types of contracts may give rise to legally enforceable obligations if the traditional formalities for the conclusion of a contract are complied with (ie offer, acceptance, intention to create legal relations and consideration).

In Ireland, the use of electronic signatures to execute contracts is valid under the Electronic Commerce Act 2000 (the 2000 Act). It is likely that private keys used on blockchain platforms, which are intended to authenticate documents or transactions, would fall within the definition of "electronic signature" contained in the 2000 Act.

Data PrivacyTo the extent that data stored on a blockchain ledger could constitute "personal data", there may potentially be a conflict between blockchain technologies and data protection law, specifically as regards compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 679/2016) (GDPR).

Ultimately, this would depend on the particular use case in question and each case would need to be analysed based on its own particular facts.

SINCE its first competitive race in the early 19th century, motorsport has become one of the most popular sports in the world; attracting millions of fans from more than 194 countries all looking to benefit from the exhilarating, emotional experience of the track.

However, despite its popularity and the advancement of different technologies impacting various sports, motor racing has essentially remained unchanged in the way it is experienced and commercialized.

Whilst the majority of sports have embraced various technologies that make competing fairer and more accurate – such as video assistant referee (VAR) and Hawk-Eye technology – more are now looking at ways they can utilize technology to transform the way fans engage and interact with the activity.

It could be argued that betting apps were one of the first iterations of this transformation; making it more accessible for fans to place bets on their favourite teams. Now, these sports are looking at the next phase of this transformation.

Past times such as football, basketball and even F1 have benefited from a technological facelift in the form of e-sports; changing the way fans interact with the sport and allowing them to experience the adrenaline of competition.

 What’s more, rather than the technology being shunned or remaining disconnected from traditional governing bodies that oversee the sport, the Premier League has embraced this change with the upcoming launch of its ePremier League in January 2019.

In addition, technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been revolutionizing the way audiences view and engage with sports. Allowing fans fully-immersive experiences, these technologies have already established themselves over the past few years.

Yet, in terms of a technological revolution, it seems motor racing is still lagging behind with an apparent lack of a unified platform for the racing community allowing fans to connect.

This, combined with often expensive technology that smaller teams aren’t able to afford and limited exposure for those teams, has left a glaring disconnect in the modern motorsport industry that is becoming increasingly isolated to the general community.

However, there is an opportunity for blockchain technology to transform the industry and address some of the industry’s pain points.

What was once a buzzword, blockchain has established itself as a game changer for a number of industries including finance, supply chain and healthcare.

Therefore, could it be the technological revolution the motor racing industry has been in need of?

Blockchain technology heavily revolves around data; specifically how that data is stored, shared and secured using the latest cryptography technologies. So once the information is written it’s virtually impossible to alter it. It is what can be done with this that could bring forward a new era of motor racing.

Firstly, using the blockchain presents an opportunity to build a global community of hobby racers and fans that doesn’t currently exist within the sector.

Similar to the Premier League app that connects football fans and enables them to create their own fantasy league to compete against their friends, motor racing has the opportunity to connect the global racing community using blockchain technology.

It’s no secret that motor racing is not an inexpensive hobby. Not only can it be costly for fans to attend races, but also for hobby racers, who are often burdened with the expense of licenses, event entries and vehicle maintenance.

 Therefore, the blockchain could be used as a way to provide multiple pathways to generate financial support.

Blockchain technology is still heavily associated with finance and can be used as a way to source funding or even corporate sponsorships.In addition, motor racing is bound by geographical restrictions, unlike many other sports.

 For example, there are over 130 football stadiums in the UK alone. If we compare this to the number of racetracks, which is around 70, not all of which can accommodate all forms of motor racing, the restrictions for fans and hobby drivers become apparent.

Currently, if drivers wish to race each other, they need to be in the same location at the same time. However, by combining motorsport with blockchain technology, the industry has the opportunity to deliver 'phantom racing' whereby two or more drivers can race each other regardless of location or time zone.

By installing sensors on racetracks and in cars, data can be collected as racers drive around the track analyzing various aspects including time, track conditions and weather. Once this data has been collected it can then compared to a driver in another location to race against the set time using similar parameters.

The global motor racing market is currently worth $5B+ with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% for the next 3 years. However, for an industry that carries so much monetary worth, as a whole it is struggling to keep up with those that have so readily embraced new technologies to provide fans with new ways to interact and experience their favorite past times.

Blockchain technology could be the way to deliver a whole new experience for racing enthusiasts and drivers.

By failing to embrace new technologies, motor racing could also be unwittingly closing the door to additional commercial opportunities and, with more racetracks being abandoned, it’s not in a position to turn its back on these opportunities.

Article by Joachim C. Baron von Behr-Baerwald, CEO of RaceCoin

Since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, world-class hospitals from New York to Atlanta to San Francisco struggled with shortages of basic safety equipment.

Masks, gowns, and face shields have all been in short supply, and the race to get more has meant hospital staff and public officials desperately searching for reliable suppliers.

Elsewhere on the front lines, there have been critical shortages in the test kits that experts agree are essential to reopening economies the world over.Swift escalation in demand meant staff couldn’t rely on long established procurement processes.

They needed to source new vendors and find and reallocate supplies quickly — and this pressure brought new visibility to long-festering problems in the medical supply chain. In the U.S., CDC and FDA officials warned that fraudulent respirators are in distribution and fraudulent test kits for Covid-19 are being sold online. The federal government recently placed more than $110 million in N95 mask orders at high prices with unproven vendors.

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Problems in the medical supply chain are neither new, nor uncommon, and it’s easy to see why:

These products can travel through tangled, global supply chains in which documentation is often manual and paper based, piling up at each handoff and border crossing.

As a result, theft and quality control issues are common, and regulators and distributors struggle to locate substandard products that have entered the system.

The World Health Organization estimates that one in 10 medical products — including pills, vaccines, and diagnostic kits — are substandard or falsified in low- and middle- income countries. In other regions, theft is the greater problem.

BSI Group, the national standards body of the U.K., estimates pharmaceutical cargo theft at over $1 billion a year, with the U.K. and U.S. accounting for nearly half of all theft.Unfortunately, today’s chaos may prove to be a practice run for even more concentrated pressure on our health care supply chains.

When we do produce effective treatments or, eventually, a vaccine, millions — and even billions — of people around the world will simultaneously want the same thing, and it will be in limited supply.

To fix some of these supply chain vulnerabilities, the industry is turning to blockchain technology.

With a blockchain — which can make it cheaper, easier, and faster to verify what is true when a business process spans organizations with competing interests — companies can safely work together in a shared, permanent ledger.

They can do this without giving up control of or even revealing their data, as mathematical proof of data can stand in as a trustworthy proxy for actual data. Instead of being owned and managed by a single company that everyone must trust, the ledger is governed by all members of a network.

Because this makes it possible to delegate the work of checks and balances to cryptography and code, blockchains can reduce friction, expose fraud, and assure product authenticity with new speed.

Better Together

The advantage of a blockchain-based system is that competitors can collaborate on a shared platform to, say, raise drug safety without sharing sensitive information.

That’s exactly the idea behind the MediLedger Network, a consortium focused on pharma supply chains that counts leaders including Gilead, Pfizer, Amgen, Genentech, AmerisourceBergen, and McKesson among its members. Chronicled, a startup, provides the underlying technology.

The first solution in production from MediLedger is a product verification system that makes it easier to verify that a returned drug is authentic — a common, but difficult process. According to the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, approximately 60 million units of saleable drugs are returned annually.

The work of verifying that these drugs are authentic before they’re resold falls to wholesalers, who must contact manufacturers to track down serial numbers, a process that can take up to 48 hours.

Using blockchain, wholesale distributors can make the same verification in less than a second using a barcode scanner, so product can be quickly put back into commercial distribution, and manufacturers maintain control of their data.

This rapid serial number verification can also be used to help hospitals and pharmacies. With no infrastructure beyond a web browser and a barcode scanner, staff can verify that a drug is authentic as it is placed on the shelf.

Counterfeiters could still copy barcodes in an attempt to pass drugs off as legitimate — but the ledger will flag and permanently record suspicious activity.

MediLedger is working on a next phase: to apply this technology to “track and trace,” the process of identifying where a specific box of drugs is and where it has been, at any time. With the blockchain, this process can be done without revealing confidential business intelligence to anyone in the ecosystem.

MediLedger recently completed a pilot using a blockchain for track and trace with 25 participants, including retailers Walgreens and Walmart, transportation provider FedEx, standards organization GS1, wholesale distributors including AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health, and manufacturers ranging in size from 100 employees to 125,000.

Ultimately, MediLedger Network participants will be able to enforce business rules in real-time as a box of drugs travels from one handoff point to another across an entire supply chain, even in the outer recesses of an ecosystem, far beyond a manufacturer or distributor’s control.

Along the way, auditing is automated and embedded, flagging problems and who has custody as it happens. When drugs reach their final destination, it’s as if they arrive with a black box of data to assure not only authenticity but they have complied with business rules during their entire journey.

In an interview, Chronicled CEO Susanne Somerville said, “It’s like placing your own embassy behind a trading partner’s firewall.”

Forging the Links

There is, of course, a catch: Blockchains are an ecosystem technology and only bring benefit when the technology is not only broadly adopted, but when physical systems work with it. More industry standards are needed to make it all truly interoperable.

For example, the visibility of any technology is limited by manufacturers’ packaging. In some of the countries with the greatest fraud, serialized numbers are not yet required on a box of drugs; pharmacies move drugs into hoppers before they repackage them; hospitals use dispensing systems. Full track and trace, for example, would need to connect the network to these systems.

However, there are new, strong incentives adding to the pressure for change. New regulation is amplifying pressure for the pharmaceutical industry to work better together on developing standards.

In the U.S., the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), which was signed into law in 2013, has a deadline of 2023 for manufacturers to achieve track and trace of all transactions involved in transporting medications from factory to patient.

The E.U.’s Falsified Medicines Directive lays out rules to combat fake medicines in the region, and includes anti-tampering security on packaging and tracking requirements.

As both the technology and the industry’s processes for working together matures, blockchains could help us get better and faster at getting medicines and vaccines to where we have the most epidemiological urgency.

With more granular visibility, stakeholders could better zero in on clogs in supply chains, more quickly locate and remove expired, damaged, or fraudulent products, see where supplies are low, and efficiently redistribute inventory to where it is needed most.

This will most certainly not be our last global health crisis. Blockchains could not only help us increase agility during extraordinary black swan events, but also help us operate better in day-to-day operations.

While this work is focused on the pharmaceutical industry, the underlying protocol can be repurposed and customized to advance any supply chain — from the personal protective equipment that has been in such short supply to products in any industry.

As we wake up to the fact that our health and economic welfare is interconnected with those thousands of miles away, it becomes clearer that we need to leverage our global resources to effectively fight large-scale problems.

Blockchains could help us do this more safely and efficiently.