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Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are all the rage. But their popularity may have already peaked. Prices of NFTs, the digital certificates that have taken the art and collectibles world by storm this year, have plunged about 70% from their high point in February.

The average price for an NFT on April 5 was about $1,256 -- down from more than $4.000 in late February, according to market research site NonFungible.com.

Data from The Block, another crypto research firm, shows a similarly large decline for both prices and NFT sales as well.

NFTs have been an investing and pop culture mania for the past few weeks, leading some to wonder if the frenzy is a market bubble fueled by the wealthy and younger traders flush with stimulus money.A JPEG file by the digital artist Beeple recently sold for $69 million at Christie's. NFTs have helped boost the price of sports trading cards. Rock group Kings of Leon released their most recent album as an NFT.





NFTs are suddenly everywhere, but they have some big problems

There was even a recent "Saturday Night Live" skit about NFTs.

And several CNN Business staffers have also wrote about how they've dabbled in the NFT market with the purchase of cartoon cats.

The NFT craze has helped boost the value of ethereum, the cryptocurrency whose blockchain network is used for a large number of NFT transactions. Ethereum prices are up more than 180% so far this year, a surge that exceeds the spike in bitcoin's price (XBT).

 maker Funko (FNKO) and Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment (which owns an NFL themed village in Canton, Ohio) have also soared thanks to partnerships to develop non-fungible tokens. 

Funko announced last week that it was buying a majority stake in TokenWave, LLC, the developer of the TokenHead app and website that tracks NFTs.

Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment inked a partnership late last month with marketing firm Dolphin Entertainment (DLPN) to develop football NFTs,
Proponents of NFTs point out that each token is unique and can't be replicated, which creates a scarcity value that is good for both the artists that make them as well as collectors.




NFTs: Fad or future? 2 experts weigh in


Funko CEO Brian Mariotti noted that in the release about the TokenWave deal, saying that the investment in NFTs marries the digital and physical collectibles business.

"The NFT world is all about content," Mariotti said.That may be true, but the sharp, sudden rise in the value of NFTs and more recent pullback is reminding some of other similar historic market bubbles, such as tulip mania in the 1600s, the dot com/tech crash of 2000 and bank stocks and housing prices in 2008.NFTs may be here to stay, but they just may not be worth the staggering sums of money that some people have shelled out for them in the past few weeks.

Even Beeple, aka Michael Joseph Winkelmann, joked with CNN's Julia Chatterley in March that he might be the biggest winner of what could turn out to be an NFT bubble.

• Bitcoin's three-month realized volatility has fallen to 86%, after its rise to above 90% in February.
• While volatility drops for the leading cryptocurrency, institutions could see this as a green light to enter the crypto space.
• Former SEC chairman Jay Clayton warns of new regulations that could come for Bitcoin. 

Institutions have been entering the cryptocurrency space, as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are two of the latest large banks to join in providing Bitcoin-related products and services to their clients. Researchers from JPMorgan Chase & Co. believe that other institutional investors will follow as Bitcoin’s volatility levels have declined.

Bitcoin funds inflow at the expense of gold

JPMorgan strategists, including Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, noted a three-month realized volatility for Bitcoin has fallen to 86%, after its rise to above 90% in February. The six-month realized volatility has declined to roughly 73%. As Bitcoin’s volatility levels decrease, institutions could find the leading cryptocurrency more appealing. The strategists explained:

These tentative signs of Bitcoin volatility normalization are encouraging. In our opinion, a potential normalization of Bitcoin volatility from here would likely help to reinvigorate the institutional interest going forward.

Bitcoin’s volatility has long been a primary concern for institutional investors, as the higher volatility an asset has, the more risks are associated with it. The pioneer digital currency’s correlation structure relative to other traditional assets could also boost its popularity. As JPMorgan strategists explained, Bitcoin is a more attractive asset from a diversification point of view. 

The world’s largest cryptocurrency has been less correlated with traditional assets such as stocks and gold, which bolsters arguments that the new asset class could offer portfolio diversification benefits. In the past two quarters, as JPMorgan strategists suggested that $7 billion of inflows into Bitcoin funds have come at the expense of gold, which has seen the $20 billion of outflows from exchange-traded funds that track the precious metal.

If Bitcoin were to match the total private sector investment in gold, the leading digital currency would reach the price of $130,000. 

Bitcoin could be more regulated in the future

While institutions are just starting to offer Bitcoin and crypto-related products, the new asset class could be more regulated in the future.Former US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Jay Clayton expects regulation for cryptocurrencies to come in the future, both directly and indirectly.


Clayton, currently an adviser for One River Asset Management on cryptocurrencies, believes that the regulatory environment around the new asset class would eventually evolve. 


Although Clayton clarified that Bitcoin had not been clarified as a security for a long time, its status does not earn protection from new regulations, which he hinted — could be coming soon. 

The former SEC chairman’s remarks on Bitcoin also shed light on the SEC v. Ripple case, as the regulator filed its $1.3 billion lawsuit against the blockchain company and its executives, Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen, for allegedly selling XRP illegally since 2013. 

In the case, the SEC argued that XRP tokens have characteristics of securities and that the company failed to register them as such. Since both Bitcoin and Ethereum were not considered as securities by the SEC, Ripple relied on this stance for one of its main lines of defense. 

Tesla is not making it attractive to pay for a model S, 3, X or Y in BTC.

This week, CEO Elon Musk announced via Twitter (where else?) that his upstart automaker had begun letting interested buyers pay for their electric vehicles in bitcoin.

It’s part of a corporate push to acquire as much of the original cryptocurrency as possible – or at least that’s how it seems – as the manufacturer has no plans to convert the cryptocurrency to fiat. 

But the idiosyncrasies of crypto make it difficult to take advantage of this option.

For example, according to the company’s Bitcoin Payment Terms and Conditions, bitcoin transactions must be completed within a certain window of time, or else the price in BTC expires and the buyer must ask for a new one. “You have about 30 minutes to make a payment,” a Tesla representative for the northeast region said Thursday.

While that condition is not surprising given bitcoin’s infamous volatility – depending which direction the exchange rate moves, either the car buyer or Tesla could get hosed by a wide swing – it underscores how even in a roaring bull market, crypto still struggles to gain widespread acceptance as a payment method. 

The fault lies with the native complexities of the Bitcoin system, the U.S. tax policy around cryptocurrencies and, in this case, a paucity of information available from Tesla’s customer support team. At least, if you’re a member of the press looking for answers.

No BTC discount

Tesla is notoriously media-shy, after disbanding its PR department late last year. So after calling headquarters in Palo Alto and getting bounced around, and then separately emailing CFO Zach Kirkhorn and the black-hole address for press inquiries, this reporter phoned a number of Tesla retailers based in the northeast and along the West Coast … and learned very little about purchasing a vehicle with bitcoin. 

“It’s very simple. If they ask about purchasing it, we can assist them with making an appointment,” the northeast Tesla representative said, unhelpfully. To be fair, a New Jersey resident who is actually in the market for a vehicle said she called a Tesla branch and got all her questions answered. 

She told CoinDesk that the Paramus-Route 17 gallery accepts bitcoin – though was told flat-out there was no early-adopter’s discount. 

But we were able to glean a few telling insights, including the 30-minute payment window.


A Tesla(Cam Bradford/Unsplash, modified by CoinDesk)

Another is that Tesla will only accept exact amounts and will not reimburse payments sent to an incorrect alphanumeric address. 

In fact, bolded passage punctuate the company’s Bitcoin Payment Terms & Conditions document with warning including:

"IF YOU INPUT THE BITCOIN ADDRESS INCORRECTLY, YOUR BITCOIN MAY BE IRRETRIEVABLY LOST OR DESTROYED.” 

And… 

"YOU MUST EXERCISE CARE WHEN INPUTTING THE BITCOIN ADDRESS INTO THE RECIPIENT FIELD BECAUSE BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS CANNOT BE REVERSED. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY FAILURE TO ACCURATELY INPUT THE ALPHANUMERIC CODE INTO THE RECIPIENT FIELD.”

‘Not quite sure’

That document says nothing about tax liabilities, though this is another consideration for U.S. buyers. Under current policy, a purchase of goods or services made with cryptocurrency is a taxable event – even if it’s just a cup of coffee. 

This means that car buyers must account for potential gains or losses if their bitcoin is worth more or less now than when they first purchased it. 

Finally, there are the deflationary incentives in the Bitcoin ecosystem that may discourage potential buyers from spending their coins on cars, or anything.

A hard cap of 21 million coins, a decreasing rate of issuance and a growing number of buyers create favorable conditions for the price of BTC to rise over the years, all else equal.


A Tesla showroom in Miami.(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

While Lamborghinis have long been the objet petit a for many Bitcoiners, those that have made the purchase – or any purchase – often come to regret it. In 2013, someone purchased a $103,000 Tesla Model S Performance for 91.4 BTC. Those coins today would be worth $4.7 million.

Asked whether there has been any interest from HODLers since Musk tweeted this week, the Tesla representative said, “Not quite sure if anything sold yet in bitcoin.”

But another employee sounded excited: “I don’t really know that much, and don’t want to take on the liability of speaking to the press, to be frank. It’s great news,” this Tesla representative said.

Ray Dalio, founder of the $150 billion hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, believes bitcoin (BTC, -3.33%) has “proven itself” in the last 10 years but still sees a “good probability” that it will be outlawed by governments.

Speaking to Yahoo Finance’s Andy Serwer on Wednesday, the billionaire investor said it was “very likely under a certain set of circumstances” that bitcoin would be “outlawed” as gold was in the 1930s.

Under the U.S. Gold Reserve Act of 1934, it became illegal for individuals to own gold because, according to Dalio, governments did not want gold to compete with money or credit as a store of value.

“Every country treasures its monopoly on controlling the supply and demand. They don’t want other monies to be operating or competing, because things can get out of control,” Dalio added, citing India’s proposed ban on crypto as an example.

Read more: Indian Government Officials Give Mixed Signals Over Planned Crypto Legislation

He added that bitcoin has “proven itself over the last 10 years,” having not been hacked and building a significant following.

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Dalio has previously warned about the possibility of cryptocurrency bans by governments.

On other occasions, he expressed positive sentiment about bitcoin’s role as a diversifier in investment portfolios.

In November, prior to BTC’s staggering run-up to $50,000 and beyond, Dalio said if bitcoin or other cryptos become “material,” governments will “outlaw” it. “They’ll use whatever teeth they have to enforce that,” he said at the time.

Since NFTs became ubiquitous enough on the global art market to spark near-instant backlash and controversy, the question still remains whether the Non-Fungible Tokens, sold and exchanged via the Ethereum blockchain, will catch on with the general public like MP3s once did in the past.

With that said, however, new milestones are being struck with alarming frequency: on Tuesday evening, Sophia the robot will become the first robot to ever auction its own digital NFT artwork via an auction on Nifty Gateway. Sophia was created in 2016 by the Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics, and her NFTs were made in collaboration with the artist Andrea Bonaceto.

Bonaceto is also a partner with the blockchain technology investment company Eterna Capital, which should give you an idea of just how much of a boon the NFT explosion is for longtime supporters of blockchain innovations.

Because collectors are free to buy and flip NFTs however they see fit within the non-regulated cryptocurrency space it’s possible to rack up huge profits in no time at all, as most elegantly demonstrated by Beeple’s recent $69,346,250 victory at Christie’s.

“We created Sophia herself as a work of art, as well as an AI development platform,” Dr. David Hanson said in a statement. “Her intelligence is a collective of algorithms and humans working together like a hive.

For this show, Sophia created the art entirely using neural networks and symbolic AI, responding to her perception of Andrea Bonaceto’s works, as well as to data from her ‘life’ experiences, under guidance from the Sophia team’s designers and programmers.”




NFT artwork made by Sophia the robot and Andrea Bonaceto. Sophia the Robot

The artwork that’s been produced by this collaboration is certainly intriguing; swirls of paint and disjointed eyes and lips blur together to created a muddled final result.

But with NFTs, it seems like the imagery is entirely besides the point, and that money and novelty are ultimately dictating every innovation that’s to come.

• Bitcoin conditions are "similar to the second half or later stages of a bull market," Glassnode said.
• Analysts pointed to signs of long-term holders spending coins and to a reduction in big wallets.
• Talk of a bitcoin price plunge has grown; a crypto entrepreneur said there could be a 90% drop.
• Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.

Bitcoin may be entering the second half or later stages of a bull market, crypto analysts at Glassnode said on Monday, as nervousness grows in some quarters about a plunge in the price.

Glassnode's weekly analysis found that there had been a pickup in "wealth transfers" from long-term bitcoin holders to newer speculators, which the company said was reminiscent of market peaks.

The report said bitcoin bull markets eventually reach a "euphoric top" that materializes as big holders increasingly spending their coins to realize profits.Glassnode estimated that long-term bitcoin holders had reactivated about 9% of supply so far in 2021 by spending coins, though this was below the 17% reactivation before the market's crash in 2017.

"These studies suggest conditions are similar to the second half or later stages of a bull market," Glassnode said.The bitcoin price was down 6% on Tuesday, to $54,294, well off a high of $62,000 earlier in March but still up by about 700% from a year ago.Glassnode also said on Tuesday that the biggest players - wallets with 1,000 to 10,000 bitcoins - had cut their holdings by 307,000 bitcoins since December.

Read more: Hedge funds are ramping up bets against Chamath Palihapitiya's SPACs and have already taken home $40 million this year. Here's a detailed look at the wagers they're making.

Timothy Peterson, an investment manager, tweeted that falls in big holdings "are often but not always associated with bear markets."

On Monday, Bobby Lee, the founder of the crypto exchange BTCC, told CNBC that 2021 would be a bull market for bitcoin, of the sort that comes around every three or four years. He said the bitcoin price could go as high as $300,000 this year.

But Lee said that the "bubble" was likely to pop. "People should be aware that it could fall as much as 80% to 90% of its value from the all-time peak," he said.

However, many bitcoin advocates have pointed to growing institutional interest as a reason bitcoin is unlikely to crash as it has in the past. Visa, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan are some of the latest big names to get involved.

KEY POINTS

• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, offered for sale as a nonfungible token, was sold on Monday for 1,630.58 ether.
• That’s equivalent to about $2.9 million based on ether’s price at the time of sale.
• Dorsey said he will convert the proceeds to bitcoin and will then donate that to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addresses students during a town hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, November 12, 2018.Anushree Fadnavis | Reuters


Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, offered for sale as a nonfungible token, was sold on Monday for 1,630.58 ether, a cryptocurrency. That’s equivalent to about $2.9 million based on ether’s price at the time of sale.

The tweet, which said “just setting up my twttr,” was first published on March 21, 2006. It was listed for sale as an NFT on March 6. By March 9, the highest offer was from Sina Estavi, CEO of Bridge Oracle.

Estavi won the auction, though his bid was worth about $2.5 million it was placed.

Ownership of these assets is recorded on a blockchain — a digital ledger similar to those that underpin bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

But a person can’t exchange one NFT for another as they would with dollars or other assets. Each NFT is unique and acts as a collector’s item that can’t be duplicated, making them rare by design.

OpenSea has been one of a handful of NFT marketplaces to explode in popularity in recent weeks as collectors wade into the trading of nonfungible tokens on the blockchain.

While new startups have been popping up everyday, platforms that launched in crypto’s earlier times are receiving rampant attention from investors who see this wave of excitement for cryptocurrencies and tokens as much different than the ones that preceded it.

Today, the startup announced that it’s closed a $23 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from a laundry list of angels and firms including Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian, Dylan Field and Linda Xie.

OpenSea launched back in 2017, announcing a $2 million round a few months later from Founders Fund and a few crypto centric firms. At the time CryptoKitties mania was most of what Ethereum had to offer and early NFT projects were being slowly embraced by a community that was enthusiastic but more curious than anything.


Fast forward to 2021 and NFTs are certainly having a moment, and while the specific shades of that moment may be heavily focused on high-dollar artwork sales from traditional auction houses or NFT memes being tweeted out by Elon Musk, proponents see a future for the tokens that upends the economics of content creation and influence on the internet.

The enthusiasm accompanies a months-long rally in the value of cryptocurrencies themselves that have taken Ethereum and Bitcoin to multiples of previous all-time highs.

The market for digital goods expanding widely may depend heavily on further adoption among gaming giants and larger media organizations, but early on there’s hope that digital-first creators can use these marketplaces to connect more directly with fans and begin to bypass the massive platforms they depend on now.

There are still some early hiccups as the tech develops. While Ethereum has committed to moving from its energy-intensive proof-of-work standard to a more efficient proof-of-stake one eventually, the existing structure has been far from efficient, which has opened many of the early NFT artists to criticism surrounding climate change concerns and whether the stakeholders in crypto tokens should be prioritizing environmental worries over the specific challenges of certain proofs.

In February, OpenSea announced support for more efficient Tezos-based NFTs.

A more nebulous challenge for marketplaces like OpenSea may be cutting through the noise of speculation and providing a marketplace for more users that are actually buying to own, an especially difficult proposition given the breakneck pace of growth for the digital currencies being used to purchase the digital goods themselves.

A fun thing about living in modern times is now we have to know what the hell NFTs are in order to keep up with news about pizza. Pizza Hut Canada has announced it is releasing “1 Byte Favourites,” aka digital images of pizza, as non-fungible tokens.

“Pizza Hut believes no world should exist without pizza, especially their pan pizza. That’s why they wanted to make sure it was enshrined in the digital universe,” they said in a release. Each week the company will release a new image of a pizza slice, each of a different recipe, for purchase on Rarible.

The first-ever “slice” was listed for $0.0001 ETH (a cryptocurrency the equivalent of 18 cents), but wound up being sold for $8,824.So, what the hell does this mean?

A non-fungible token is essentially a unique digital asset available for purchase with cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain.

Once an artist or company uploads this digital asset, “the NFT will exist permanently on the blockchain, so long as the chain remains in operation. As a result, no two NFTs are purely identical, since each piece contains unique digital properties,” explains Vox. This idea of rarity is driving a collecting boom, with people paying millions for essentially unique jpegs.

Instead of paying money for a slice of pizza, you’re paying money for a one-of-a-kind digital picture of pizza, even though that doesn’t include IP rights, so is it even yours?

Also, people have already been hacking and stealing NFTs. Honestly this tweet probably explains it best:

On top of all this, NFTs are absolutely destroying the planet. Memo Akten estimates a single NFT’s ecological footprint “is equivalent to a EU resident’s total electric power consumption for more than a month, with emissions equivalent to driving for 1000Km, or flying for 2 hours.

” Some artists have already used the equivalent of an EU resident’s energy consumption in an entire lifetime in NFT transactions.

Pizza Hut made a big deal of its environmental push in the past years, pushing plant-based meat toppings and a round pizza box that used less packaging, and with parent company Yum Brands boasting it saved 1.3 billion gallons of water in 2017.

Obviously there’s no purely sustainable transaction, but it reveals Pizza Hut’s dedication to the environment for what it is: a hypocritical marketing ploy.Pizza Hut isn’t the only one getting into the NFT market. 

Taco Bell has sold NFT gifs of tacos. And the guy who went viral over the summer for drinking Ocean Spray while skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” is selling the original video clip as an NFT, but without the Fleetwood Mac song because, surprise surprise, he doesn’t have the rights to that song.

 And of course you’ll still be able to watch that video literally anywhere. So congrats to whoever thinks they own these things. Hope your slice of digital pizza that you can’t eat brings you a lot of joy!

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have rocketed out of obscurity in recent weeks to become a global phenomenon. Amid this hysteria, France has staked a surprising claim as an epicentre of this virtual gold rush.

Last week NFT startup Arianee, which certifies ownership of virtual luxury goods, raised €9m in VC.

That came just two weeks after NFT-based fantasy football platform Sorare raised a €40m round of VC led by international A-list investors such Benchmark and Accel.Both French companies have been percolating for several years, putting in place the infrastructure and deals needed to lay a foundation. Yet timing is everything, and the pair seemed to have sufficiently matured at just the right moment. 

“I think that we are riding a wave.”

“I think that we are riding a wave,” said Sorare CEO and cofounder Nicolas Julia. “It’s not just gaming people talking about this. All the verticals are literally exploding right now on the NFT market.

”A non-fungible token is a digital identifier that can be used to verify ownership of a virtual item on the blockchain. Attaching an NFT to such items as artwork or playing cards allows them to be bought and sold, often through bidding, while ensuring the identity of the creator and the owners.

That digital guarantee of ownership has, in turn, has allowed creators to sell their works for sums in recent weeks that have stunned those with only a passing knowledge of blockchain or cryptocurrency.




Beeple’s collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s. Credit: BeepleIn February, an NFT-enabled GIF of the animated Nyan Cat, a classic internet meme, sold for roughly $580k. Just last week, Christie’s auctioned a series of digital images by artist Beeple for $69.3m.

This week, London-based roboticist Dr. David Hanson announced that his Sophia the Robot would work with artist Andrea Bonaceto to create NFT digital artworks that would be auctioned later this month.Naturally, there are some fears of a bubble.

But for those working in the blockchain space, NFTs are a natural evolution that is rewriting the fundamental economics of how digital content is valued. The problem with digital works historically is that they can be copied infinitely, making any single one worthless.

By verifying the uniqueness, NFTs create a scarcity online that is causing the value of coveted items to soar. And that has triggered a stampede of creators, investors, and entrepreneurs who are looking for ways to profit from the trend.

“What we’ve seen so far is the very earliest stages of mainstream adoption by artists,” said Mati Greenspan, CEO of cryptocurrency investment advisory firm Quantum Economics. “It’s evolving extremely quickly. And there’s no doubt that this market is hot.”

French timing

Even for founders like Julia of Sorare, the sudden attention is dizzying. He cofounded Sorare in 2018 after first hearing about NFTs. Sorare allows users to collect the trading cards of their favourite football players. These cards are attached to an NFT and can be bought and sold on a marketplace via bidding that drives up their value.

The cards can then be used to assemble teams and play in fantasy football leagues.“We were fascinated because as human beings, people have been collecting things in the physical space for centuries,” Julia said. “With this technology, they have an opportunity to collect in the digital world.

”Refining the technology and the service took a couple of years, and the company managed to raise a pre-seed round of funding in 2019 of €550k. Julia recalled how difficult it was to explain the concept to investors at the time.

Along the way, Sorare began attracting an impressive array of partnerships with football teams. That led to a €3.5m seed round last summer with French and European investors. Even as Julia felt the momentum building, he’s surprised by how quickly the world turned in the company’s direction.In January 2020, the company booked €40k in sales.

By February 2021, the monthly figure had grown to €11m as Sorare added another 130 clubs. The sports world has become a major pillar of this trend. Players, clubs and leagues are now salivating at a potential revenue from licensing partners from a market for digital sports collectibles that Julia estimates to be worth more than €10bn.

In the US, the NBA’s Top Shots, which uses NFTs to sell video highlights of players, has grossed more than $230m in sales. 




Even Sophia the Robot is making digital artBy late last year, investors were banging on Julia’s door. In November, the company had €10m in the bank and was profitable. But it was hard to turn away money that could accelerate its scaling.

Particularly when offers were coming from people such as Benchmark Venture Partner Peter Fenton, known for his investments in Twitter and Yelp.Within 48 hours of Julia’s first meeting with Fenton, Julia had received a term sheet. Eventually, a host of notable angels also joined the round, including Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Vayernmedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, and French football star Antoine Griezmann.“That was kind of crazy for us,” Julia said.

“The level of conviction from Peter and the partnership was crazy. That was something that I never imagined was possible before.

”While NFTs can be a difficult concept for many to grasp, the key for a company like Sorare is to “abstract” the technology or essentially make it invisible to users. No one who wants to trade cards has to know anything about blockchain technology or distributed ledgers or cryptocurrency.

That’s also the goal of Arianee, which has followed a similar journey.“The blockchain technologies and NFTs and all these kinds of things are not supposed to be mainstream,” said Arianee cofounder Frederic Montagnon. “In the same way that the very core layers of the internet are not mainstream.”




Credit: Arianee

Founded in 2016, Arianee assigns NFTs, or what it calls ‘digital passports’, to digital copies of luxury goods such as watches and clothes that can be used to certify that the item is authentic and not a counterfeit or knockoff. That allows the owners to guarantee the value and the origin should they decide to resell them or pass them along.

But it also potentially reinvents the relationship between the brand, the customer and the product.For instance, Vacheron Constantin, which makes watches that can cost over €70k, is working with Arianee to use NFTs for its products.

Should a customer sell the watch, the NFT goes with it, and the company will know the identity of the new owner allowing them to establish a relationship. In addition, customers who authenticate their watches will be able to join a new digital platform called The Hour Club which will offer exclusive access to content and experiences.

“You start to imagine what can be unlocked online in a digital experience when you can prove that you’re the legitimate owner,” said Arianee CEO Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel.

“You can be granted access to anything with a digital key of ownership that’s used as a sign-in for services, communities, and online experiences.”The Arianee cofounders said the timing of the NFT craze makes sense because of the time it has taken to develop the underlying technology.

They spent several years creating their own protocol, then turning that into an open source project, and then building the first version of its commercial SaaS platform which debuted in 2019.




Arianee Token


While they are excited about the wave of NFT interest, they also worry that the focus on mind-bending sales figures for digital artworks will obscure the broader potential of the technology.

They decided to focus first on luxury items given France’s historical strength in this sector. But they are betting long term that every item purchased will have a digital twin. 

The virtual versions of items may seem ephemeral at first glance. But Montagnon said as people live more of their lives in virtual environments, the financial and emotional attachments to digital items are becoming more meaningful. 

“What’s happened over the past 25 years is that we went from no screen to probably 85% to 90% of our time spent on a screen or with a screen in your hands,” Montagnon said. “We are living connected all the time now.

And the existence of real assets, when you spend most of your time in a digital environment, has no sense anymore. What we are trying to do is to bring all these real assets into your digital life.”

• In the European Securities and Markets Authority's (ESMA) "Trends, Risks and Vulnerabilities Report," published Wednesday, the three bodies that make up the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) said some cryptocurrencies are "highly risky and speculative."
• There's a risk investors could lose "all their money" in the largely unregulated market, they said.
• The ESMA report cited "significant risks" presented by the recent all-time highs of bitcoin (BTC, +3.24%) and other crypto assets.
• The ESAs pointed to the "continued relevance" of their previous warnings.
• More generally, global stablecoins remain under regulatory scrutiny even if there is positive sentiment around central bank digital currencies, the report said.
• It also highlighted the large energy consumption of proof-of-work mechanisms like bitcoin's, and the importance of incentivizing less resource-intensive blockchain mechanisms such as proof-of-authority.

See also: European Commission, ECB Unite to Consider Potential Pitfalls of the Digital Euro

• Mark Mobius told CNBC the market could face a "major" correction if bitcoin prices crash.
• The Mobius Capital Partners founder said bitcoin's rally could be a force behind the recent gains in other assets like stocks.
• He said investors who have made large gains off of cryptocurrency are now putting money and even "gambling" in other assets.
• Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.

Veteran investor Mark Mobius told CNBC on Wednesday he "hopes and prays" the price of bitcoin doesn't crash because the broader market could face a large downturn if that were to happen.

During a CNBC Pro Talk, the Mobius Capital Partners founder suggested the rise in cryptocurrency prices could be partially responsible for the stock market's recent gains, as investors who have made money in crypto - some of them even "cryptocurrency billionaires" - have taken on more risk in other assets.

"This is probably one of the reasons why the market is doing so well, is that people who have bought, let's say bitcoin at $1 or $10, now are feeling rich," Mobius said.

Mobius added that investors who are feeling rich are "more willing to throw money in the market and even gamble."

"I hope and pray that the bitcoin prices do not crash because if they do, I think we are going to see a major market correction," said the investor.

Bitcoin is currently trading around $55,000 after reaching an all-time high above $61,000 earlier this week.In an interview with Bloomberg last week, Mobius said he fears a decline bitcoin prices could hit tech stocks "very badly."

"I think the relationship between bitcoin prices and the tech market is very close," he said in a Bloomberg interview. "So watch that indicator.

I vividly remember the moment I realized NFTs were a thing. I was talking to a friend who's into cryptocurrency. He was regaling me with a particularly turbulent crypto tale.

He'd invested $300 into an altcoin, one of the thousands of tokens not named Bitcoin or Ether, but the developer vanished. Then, after months of silence, the developer returned, revealing they had been working on the coin the whole time.

That coin became the hot ticket in crypto town, and my friend's $300 became $30,000. Just typical crazy crypto shit.  "I'm not going to sell," he told me. "If you hold the coin for a certain number of days, the developer gives you an NFT.

So I'll wait for that." I was staggered. I knew NFTs to be nifty-but-worthless pieces of digital art, but my friend was willing to risk a once-in-a-lifetime jackpot to get one. Then he explained that someone had bought an NFT for 800 ether, or $1.2 million, the week before.

Ah. Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are digital products whose authenticity has been certified on a blockchain. They can be pretty much anything digital: Kings of Leon are selling tokens that give owners access to their new album. A gif of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency mascot (pictured above) sold as an NFT for $69,000, and Christie's last week auctioned a digital art NFT for $69 million.


By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time.This is where "nonfungible" comes in. A fungible asset is one that's interchangeable with others of its kind -- like money.

There are 1.8 billion $50 notes in circulation, and all of them are worth $50. Assets that aren't fungible, like houses, cars or paintings, aren't interchangeable and are valued on a case-by-case basis.

At this point, you're probably confused and maybe even beating yourself up for not getting it. But actually, there's nothing to get. It's incomprehensible that clips, memes and gifs are selling for six, seven and even eight figures. Know what else is incomprehensible?

Cryptocurrency, but that hasn't stopped it from becoming a trillion-dollar market. Just because NFTs are crazy doesn't mean they won't be around for a long time.

NFTs and you

There are a few reasons people are buying NFTs. NFTs are all about ownership. Take Jack Dorsey auctioning off his first tweet as an NFT:

Everyone can see that tweet, but only the person who buys its NFT will own it. That ownership will be certified unchangeably on a blockchain, which is a digital ledger that records transactions for all to see.

It's the difference, NFT buyers will tell you, between having a print or an original painting.Others buy NFTs because they believe in the technology. One of the dominant criticisms of cryptocurrency is that it's a solution searching for a problem.

Some are flocking to NFTs because they're true believers in blockchain. They see nonfungible tokens, which are proof of ownership, as a real-world application of that technology.There's something to this. What NFTs really do is create scarcity.

It's artificial scarcity, but that's nothing unusual: Nike and Kanye West created artificial scarcity when they decided to only produce 200 Yeezy Red October sneakers, which is why that particular pair of sneakers runs over $10,000.

 When the Kings of Leon released their new album as a $50 NFT, they only made it available in that form for two weeks, essentially making a blockchain-powered limited edition.

So the simplest way to think about NFTs is as collectibles. Just like a small group of people are willing to drop six figures on a mint-condition, first-edition Charizard, there's a small group of much richer people willing to pay eight figures to "own" a piece of digital art -- even if you or I can freely see that art with a quick Google search. 

Sometimes, NFTs are completely silly. An NFT of the Bad Luck Bryan meme sold for $36,000. Other times, they're less so. You may have seen that Christie's, a high-end art auctioneer, sold an artist's NFT for $69 million. On the face of it, that sounds like the height of insanity.

But it's not that much crazier than, say, a blue canvas selling for $40 million at a similar auction. But what's less ambiguously bad about NFTs is their environmental impact.

Blockchain technology is extremely inefficient. Cryptocurrencies are created by powerful PCs that mine blockchains, done via the solving of increasingly complex equations.

This process means that more carbon emissions come from Bitcoin mining than the entire country of Switzerland.NFTs are similarly costly to produce. Spurts of energy will be exerted when an NFT is minted and then again each time someone buys that NFT, since its ownership change is reflected on the blockchain.

The sale of a set of NFTs recently consumed 8.7 megawatt hours, reports Wired.That's a lot of energy. The average US household consumes 10.6 megawatt hours -- per year.

Confused? You should be

Even with that explanation, it's galling to see NFT sales in the headlines. Someone recently spent $20,000 on an NFT clip of Logan Paul opening a pack of Pokemon cards. It's hard to see that and not wonder, at your core:

Why?

There's a precedent for this in cryptocurrency, the blockchain cousins of NFTs. Cryptocurrency markets don't make sense, so in a way it makes sense that NFTs don't either. Both are born out of speculation. 

The first Bitcoin was mined in 2009, but it took a few years for the cryptocurrency to become the headline-grabbing craze it is today. Ethereum, the second biggest cryptocurrency, was launched in 2015. In many ways, it's more important than Bitcoin.

Right now, Bitcoin is like gold in that all you can do with it is buy it or sell it, but developers use the Ethereum blockchain to build other coins and applications. NFT is one such application:

Most nonfungible tokens are written on the Ethereum blockchain. As quaint as it sounds, the cryptocurrency world went agog when Bitcoin first hit $1,000 back in 2013.

 It's around then that the quest to find "the next Bitcoin" became an obsession on both sides of the community:

Developers wanted to make the next Bitcoin, punters wanted to find it early and mint their fortune. In the years since, with Bitcoin now hovering around $50,000, that impulse has only grown stronger. The cryptocurrency market operates similar to a stock market.

There are thousands and thousands of tokens to buy. Some replicate real-world financial tools -- there are tokens that work like hedge funds or lending platforms, for instance -- while others claim to work faster or more reliably than Ethereum. Some, like the famous Dogecoin, are billion-dollar memes.
A piece by the artist Beeple was sold at a Christie's auction for over $69 million.Christie'sCryptocurrencies have yet to find meaningful real-world applications, so at this point it's all speculation.

But that hasn't stopped hundreds of altcoins from becoming incredibly valuable, and making thousands of people rich in the process. I recently saw a cryptocurrency explode from 27 cents to just over $75 in less than three weeks. That's 275x profit if you bought the low and sold the high.

A Tesla investor would have seen similar gains if they bought in at its all-time low and sold at its all-time high -- 11 years later. 

NFTs, like cryptocurrency, are all about speculation. Just like people buy a useless cryptocurrency for $50,000 strictly for the purpose of selling it at $100,000, people will buy an NFT of Homer Simpson meshed with Pepe the Frog for $38,000 just because they think they can sell it later for more.And they can.

Someone did buy that NFT -- and sold it later for $320,000.So no, NFTs don't make sense. But cryptocurrency has shown that a trend doesn't need to make sense in order to grow exponentially every year.

We're probably witnessing an NFT bubble right now, and as with Bitcoin in 2017 that bubble will probably burst -- but don't expect that to kill NFTs for good.My friend never got his NFT:

The developer vanished again. And while he was waiting, his $30,000 crashed back down to around $500. He won't be the last person to lose a car's worth of money chasing NFT dreams.

A 20th-century avant-garde artwork is being auctioned later this month, with the buyer to receive a certificate of authenticity in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT).

According to a press release shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday, the auction is for a 1926 painting titled “Abstract Composition” by Ukraine-born Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine. The sale will take place on the Mark Cuban-backed NFT marketplace Mintable, which says it has been working closely with the artist’s family as part of a series of sales of his works.

The artwork will be sold in its original frame, signed by the artist and with the NFT certificate that digitally verifies the artwork’s provenance and authenticity using blockchain technology.

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Additional sales, to be solely digital NFT representations of Baranoff-Rossine’s works, will be conducted via three auctions and six limited edition sales beginning March 25.

Mintable CEO Zach Burks told CoinDesk via email the artist’s grandson had reached out to Mintable a few months ago seeking to use NFTs as a means to digitize the family legacy.

See also: Sotheby’s Moves Into ‘New World’ of Digital Art and NFTs

Baranoff-Rossiné was a Ukrainian, Russian, and French painter, sculptor and inventor. 

He was part of the Cubo-Futurism movement before being swept up in Nazi persecution based on Jewish heritage which saw him transported to Auschwitz where he subsequently died.

Non-fungible tokens (NFT) have generated an unprecedented level of mainstream interest in cryptocurrency technology. Believers claim NFTs represent a “paradigm shift” whereas detractors compare NFTs to the “Tulip Mania” and the initial coin offering era. 

We have seen similar polarization of public opinion before with blockchain technology and dot-com stocks, which resulted in several breakthrough innovations and some epic commercial failures. 

Ajit Tripathi, a CoinDesk columnist, is the head of Institutional Business at Aave. Previously, he served as a fintech partner at ConsenSys and was a co-founder of PwC’s U.K. Blockchain Practice. The views expressed are those of the author alone.

In this article, I will explain why I believe NFTs in the form of digital art, music and collectibles represent only the beginning of a much larger wave of real-economy “e-commerce” transactions on public blockchains. 

What are NFTs?

While for a purist, “NFT” stands for any non-fungible token, in popular parlance today NFT is used in the sense of a “digital collectible.”  The New York Times recently described NFTs in somewhat irreverent terms as “blockchain-certified computer files.” In a previous article, the Times wrote, “Most importantly, NFTs make digital artworks unique, and therefore sellable.” 

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See also: What Are NFTs and How Do They Work?

Influencers such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Marc Cuban and Chamath Palihapitya have expressed their enthusiasm for NFTs, triggering a large amount of investment in NFT issuance and trading platforms such as NBA Top Shot and Sorare.

This has been followed by a sudden burst of of products coming to market in a bit of a gold rush.  

For the purposes of this article, we will stick to NFTs as digital collectibles that people love to own, pay for and brag to their friends and strangers about. 

NFTs are valuable objects

If I am part of a community that assigns a value to a digital object, that value is the value of the object. This is why Pokemon cards and baseball cards are valuable, why bitcoin (BTC, -0.81%) and ether (ETH, -0.51%) are valuable and why NFTs such as Aavegotchis, NBA Top Shot, Non-Fungible Pepes and NFTs minted by Beeple are valuable. There is a community of humans that finds the objects valuable and largely agrees on their value. 

See also: Vinay Gupta’s Big Idea: An Identity Layer for Your Things

In my last CoinDesk article, I wrote about the challenges involved in bringing off-chain assets to decentralized finance (DeFi). As it turns out, most NFTs, though digital, are representations of off-chain assets. It’s not surprising, then, that many of the challenges associated with off-chain assets are directly or indirectly relevant to NFTs as well.
çEssentially, an NFT “binds” or maps a unique object, the blockchain native non-fungible token to a digital object, e.g., a document, image, audio or video file or a physical object such as a house or a bicycle or your own private Island.That is the crux of the issue. Most NFTs are not crypto-native assets.

Unlike bitcoin, a non-fungible asset that lives its entire lifecycle on the Bitcoin blockchain, a digital work of art such as Beeple’s $69 million painting, “The First 5000 Days” is not blockchain-native.

This painting was created as a collage made of 5,000 different digital works of art in desktop software and then bound to a non-fungible token created by Beeple on the Ethereum blockchain. That means while the token, i.e., the bytes on Ethereum, are blockchain-native, the underlying work of art is not. 

More valuable than a copy

The distinction between the token and the digital object to which it binds is quite crucial. In the crypto-native world, property rights and ownership are defined by “not your keys, not your crypto” – meaning that (absent certain circumstances) you control the private key that can send (assign) the token to someone else, you own the token (and all associated rights). 

However, in case of a digital collectible, the ownership of a token may or may not mean you own the underlying computer file to which the token maps. Blockchains use a hash function to establish uniqueness but a JPEG file and its copy both produce the same hash. 

See also: Ajit Tripathi – How to Bring Off-Chain Assets to DeFi

Content addressable systems (systems that allow information to be retrieved based on its content rather than location) such as IPFS (a decentralized network) can solve this problem by allowing an NFT to bind with an IPFS URL such that you own the resource but the copy of the JPEG is a different resource. 

In this scenario, the URL bound to the token becomes worth $69 million whereas the URL corresponding to the copy is basically worth $0. Essentially it’s the token minted by Beeple that “makes” the artwork worth $69 million more than a copy of the digital artwork. 

Double-spend scenarios

However, purely from a technical point of view, an artist or another actor can double-spend a digital object on (a) the same blockchain (b) on a different NFT platform (c) on a different blockchain. 

Further, multiple non-fungible tokens can be mapped to the same underlying digital file or IPFS URL or to different copies of the same digital file. Indeed, on-chain ownership is not sufficient for off-chain objects unless the legal framework governing the rights of an NFT owner respects and enforces these rights in the off-chain world.

I might own a Beeple artwork on Ethereum but Justin Sun might mint the Beeple artwork on the Tron blockchain and thus claim ownership of the artwork anyway. A court in the U.S. might enforce MetaKovan’s rights, whereas a court in Macau might decide in favor of Sun. 

NFTs and contracts

So when you buy an NFT, what do you really get? The answer is, it depends. In one of my discussions with Vinay Gupta of Mattereum, he pointed out that in the case of NBA Top Shot, you own a “worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use, copy and display the art for personal, non commercial use … or to purchase or sell on a marketplace that meets conditions specified … ” and so on, as described in the NBA Top Shot’s Terms of Use.That means in any of the above double-spend scenarios, what I own could depend on what an NFT marketplace will do to honor and enforce my rights. 

NFTs as Ricardian contracts

It’s unclear what happens if a web-based platform used to buy and sell NFTs updates its terms of use. Does that update alter my rights as I understood them when I paid for the digital collectible? The answer is unclear. It’s possible that if the terms of use themselves are off-chain, such terms of use and therefore the rights they assign are not immutable.  

Fortunately, in the blockchain world there’s already a design pattern called “Ricardian contracts” that provides self-contained enforceable contracts implemented in source code. Ideally, NFTs should be implemented as Ricardian contracts that define the terms and governing law in the preamble and then use these definitions to impart rights and obligations in the source code that follows.

In case of a dispute, courts can refer to the source code itself and not have to rely on the website terms of use and such. 

The long-term value of NFTs

NFT platforms are doing three critical things. First, by creating a large, digitally native market for off-chain assets using on-chain tokens, these platforms are providing a proof of value for bringing other off-chain assets such as land titles, cars, houses and bonds – basically everything of any value on to Web 3.0. 

Second, by building robust, scalable infrastructure for minting, trading and settling NFTs on-chain, NFT platforms are bringing ordinary, nontechnical people to crypto platforms in the way nothing else has so far.

I’d not be surprised if 100 million new people become comfortable with using wallets like Metamask and DeFi products this year and next year because they want to trade digital collectibles. 

See also: Jeff Wilser – How NFTs Became Art, and Everything Became an NFT


Third, by sparking debates such as the one contained in this article, NFTs will force common and civil law frameworks to align off-chain rights with onchain rights. Before NFTs, this has not been the case. If degens lose their bitcoin or USDC (+0.06%), they lose it and courts and legislators aren’t particularly called upon. 

On the other hand, if investors, asset managers, grandma and grandpa lose their Beeples or Top Shots to a double-spend, they will vote and these votes will force legislators to create laws that enforce their rights. 

Essentially, with NFTs we are looking at technical consensus evolving into a market which in turn forces the social consensus. While I may personally prefer to own FLOW and ETH than Beeples and Top Shot moments, it’s the Beeples and Top Shot moments that have suddenly accelerated Web 3.0 like nothing that came before.

This is why I am so excited about NFTs.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has filed an amended prospectus for its much-anticipated public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

• The S-1a form, published Wednesday, states Coinbase plans the resale of 114,850,769 shares of Class A common stock for a proposed maximum offering price of $943,218,155.
• That value is only a guide because it will depend on the pricing of the shares at the time of the offering.
• The offering would take place on the Nasdaq Global Select Market with the ticker symbol “COIN.”
• No date has been provided for the offering in the filing, though it is expected within weeks.
• The company will be treated as an “emerging growth company.”
• Bloomberg has put the firm's valuation at near $100 billion.
• In financial details provided in the prospectus, the exchange says it took $1.14 billion in net revenue for 2020 and held assets worth $90.3 billion. It now has 43 million verified users.
• As reported by CoinDesk previously, the firm's prospectus provides a long list of risk factors, including decentralized exchanges and the identify of Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto being revealed.
• Rumors first emerged Coinbase was exploring a direct listing on a U.S. stock exchange last summer, though the company didn’t confirm the news until December. 

See also: Coinbase Is Going Public: Everything You Need to Know

• Michael Burry subtly criticized non-fungible tokens (NFTs) this week.
• "The Big Short" investor shared a quote comparing NFTs to "magic beans."
• Burry has blasted Tesla, bitcoin, Dogecoin, GameStop, and other popular bets this year.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Michael Burry isn't a fan of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), if his Twitter profile is any indication.The investor has changed his header image to a screenshot of this quote:

"NFTs exist so that the crypto grifters can have a new kind of magic bean to sell for actual money, and pretend they're not selling magic beans.

"The quote is from "NFTs: crypto grifters try to scam artists, again," an article posted by David Gerard on his "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain" blog last week. Gerard is the author of a book with the same name as his blog, which tackles bitcoin, smart contracts, and other cryptocurrency topics.The quote shared by Burry is a "correct description of the process," Gerard told Insider in an email.

"The crypto world has always been about creating a new kind of worthless magic bean to sell for actual money - first bitcoins, then altcoins, then ICO tokens, then DeFi, now NFTs."


"You *could* say something is worth what someone will pay for it; but it's *also* fair to state that the intrinsic value of these things is zero," Gerard continued.

 "And you can definitely get rich with them, but you're much more likely to lose your shirt."NFTs serve as virtual certificates of ownership and authenticity for digital items, and are stored securely on a blockchain.

They're getting lots of attention after a digital art NFT was sold for $69 million at a Christie's auction last week.Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, "Shark Tank" star Mark Cuban, and other high-profile figures have also discussed and dabbled with the technology in recent days.

However, critics question the value of NFTs given it's virtually impossible to stop others copying, downloading, and sharing digital images and videos.

Moreover, Gerard argues on his blog that NFT proponents are using artists as "aspiring suckers" to pump cryptocurrencies, and handing them "crumbs" for their efforts.

Burry is best known for his billion-dollar bet against the US housing bubble in the mid-2000s, which was chronicled in the book and the movie, "The Big Short.

" He's slammed popular investments including Tesla, GameStop, bitcoin, and Dogecoin this year, and warned investors against buying into speculative bubbles.

The Scion Asset Management boss recently signaled he was taking a break from tweeting. However, the latest change to his Twitter profile suggests he still wants to have his say.

Ireland is suspending use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine as a precautionary measure following further reports of blood clots in people who have received it, this time from Norway.

The deputy chief medical officer, Dr Ronan Glynn, said Ireland’s advisory body on vaccines had recommended that deployment of the AstraZeneca jab should be “temporarily deferred” with immediate effect. He stressed, though, that there was no proof that the vaccine had caused blood clots.

The pause in Ireland’s use of the AstraZeneca vaccine came as the head of the UK’s Office for National Statistics, Prof Sir Ian Diamond, said he had “no doubt” there would be a further wave of coronavirus infections in the autumn.

His comments on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show echoed warnings from England’s chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, who has said there are risks in reopening society and the UK will experience another surge of cases at some point, potentially in late summer or through the autumn and winter.

Diamond said the vaccine rollout had been “wonderful”. “But having said that, we need also to recognise that this is a virus that isn’t going to go away. And I have no doubt that in the autumn there will be a further wave of infections.”

The first reports of blood clots in people receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine came out of Austria and caused a flurry of concern, leading to a number of European countries, including Denmark, pausing their use of it pending investigations.

The northern Italian region of Piedmont suspended its use of the vaccine as an “extreme precautionary measure” on Sunday to investigate if there was a causal to the death of a teacher who had received it the day before.Ireland cited a report into a death and three hospitalisations in Norway that came out on Saturday.

Prof Karina Butler, the head of Ireland’s National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC), said it was acting out of an abundance of caution but wanted to know more about the unexpected cluster of “very serious” clotting events in younger people; Norway said this happened in people under 50. In three cases, it had involved clotting in the brain.

In one of them, it was fatal.There were similarities to other cases reported elsewhere in Europe, she said. It was necessary to know “was there a possibility of a relationship with the vaccine, something which was rare but very serious and could have significant outcomes”, she told Virgin Media News.

The agency did not yet know whether more blood clots were happening than expected in the population generally.

“But they do seem to have clustered together at a level and in younger people – I mean less than 65 – where we wouldn’t necessarily have expected them to happen and thus the question was should we just pause until we get that information, because above all we want to maintain confidence in the vaccine programme so that people can feel that what they are getting is safe, that any serious safety signal is being thoroughly investigated,” she said.



No reason not to keep using AstraZeneca vaccine, says WHORead more

In a statement, Glynn said: “It has not been concluded that there is any link between the Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca and these cases. However, acting on the precautionary principle, and pending receipt of further information, the NIAC has recommended the temporary deferral of the Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca vaccination programme in Ireland.

”Millions of people have had the AstraZeneca jab without any significant side-effects, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has said. Very rare events cannot be detected in clinical trials, however, which involve tens of thousands of people.

The Norwegian Medicines Agency said the four people under 50 who had the AstraZeneca jab all had a reduced number of blood platelets. It added: “People under the age of 50 who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine and feel increasingly unwell more than three days after vaccination, and who notice larger or smaller blue spots in the skin (skin haemorrhages) must consult a doctor or out-of-hours medical service as soon as possible.

“Similar incidents have been reported in other European countries, and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is considering whether there may be an association with the coronavirus vaccines. So far, no conclusion has been reached.

”The MHRA said there was no reason to pause use of the vaccine in the UK. “We are aware of the action in Ireland.

We are closely reviewing reports but given the large number of doses administered, and the frequency at which blood clots can occur naturally, the evidence available does not suggest the vaccine is the cause,” it said.

AstraZeneca vaccinations make up almost 20% of the 570,000 shots administered in Ireland, mainly to healthcare workers after its use was not initially recommended for those over 70.

A spokesperson for the company said there had been no signal from clinical trials or its safety data covering more than 17m doses of an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis or thrombocytopenia.

In fact, the reported numbers of these types of events for AstraZeneca jab recipients were lower than the number that would have occurred naturally in the unvaccinated population, he said.

If you have even a single toenail touching this mortal coil, you’ve undoubtedly heard about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and their potential to upend the art world as we know it.

But trying to determine whether they will, let alone in what ways, demands doing what few buyers plunging into this emerging market want to do: dance with the devil in the details, starting from the foundation. It’s helpful to think of NFTs as crypto-collectibles: tradable digital assets (in both the coding and investing senses of “assets”) whose authenticity, identity, ownership history, and sales prices are all tracked on a blockchain. 

Like physical art and collectibles, NFTs are either unique or produced in limited editions. The “non-fungible” aspect comes from the fact that each NFT has a value independent of all others, including different editions of the same work, kind of like fine-art photographs or prints.

“Token,” meanwhile, is a term of art for a unique alphanumeric code recorded on the blockchain. Like an inventory number or tracking code, the token locates the actual asset within a larger system.That larger system, a blockchain, is essentially a database maintained by a distributed network of computers rather than a central authority such as a corporation or a government.

 The database consists of unalterable “blocks” of transactions, verified cooperatively by the network. The idea is that you can trust the system without having to trust any individual contributor.Once data is “on-chain,” it cannot be deleted, and it can be reviewed forevermore by anyone with access privileges and enough technological know-how.

This means each NFT’s scarcity and provenance are secure, which in turn amplifies demand, which in turn builds a more confident, more robust market than we’re used to seeing for digital artworks without blockchain backing.Not so confusing, right? Like any other technology, however, NFTs are much more complex than a decent elevator pitch can make them sound.

Digging into the fine print exposes new possibilities and old pitfalls that will define their future.Given the “chain” analogies, it’s fitting that the four issues below are all interlinked.

On one hand, this imbues every individual factor with transformative potential; on the other, it also means that permanently anchoring any one of them will make the rest harder to alter, too. What happens from here will determine whether NFTs become a vehicle for generational progress in the art industry, or just another bubble with all-too-familiar contours.


Addie Wagenknecht, Sext (2019). Courtesy of the artist.

1. The Power of Gatekeepers

 The Old Art World’s Problem:People and institutions with long histories, fat pockets, and/or pre-existing industry connections wield enormous influence over who gets to participate in a fundamentally hierarchical system. The NFT Difference:

New, decentralized marketplaces can welcome artists and buyers independent of the art establishment’s approval. While some NFT platforms (such as SuperRare and Nifty Gateway) will currently only accept artists by invitation or application, others (such as Rarible) allow any interested creator to start selling in their marketplace.

Ameer Suhayb Carter—an experienced designer and consultant in the crypto space gearing up to launch the Well Protocol, an NFT platform, archive, and support system with a special focus on BIPOC and LGBTQIA artists—represents the most revolutionary potential of the blockchain art space.

“In a lot of cases these are people who can’t even safely make work where they’re from. We’re giving voice to the voiceless,” Carter, who also works as an artist under the alias Sirsu, told Artnet News.

“The goal is to make sure they can build the communities they want to build as they see fit. I give them the tools to give them agency. I won’t build for you, I’ll build with you.” The Roadblock to Revolution:Yet decentralization is not always what it’s cracked up to be.

As blockchain-fluent artist and developer Addie Wagenknecht told Artnet News: “The glitch is coming to terms with the mythology that distributed systems lead to disrupted power.

” While the crypto economy thrives on utopian rhetoric about freedom and democratization, she noted, the underlying technology is complicated for a layperson to even understand, let alone use on their own.“Instead, what we are seeing unfold in real time is that complexity makes the majority of people buying and selling NFTs dependent on platforms,” she said.

Those platforms vastly simplify the process for users, but extract concessions—sometimes significant ones—in exchange.“We have seen this a million times before,” Wagenknecht continued. “Facebook won because learning to host your own sites, chat clients, and blogs was too much work.

 So what is happening is the same people who disrupted banking or technology or the web in the Valley are now claiming that they have changed the world again, when really it’s just the same people making the same stuff for the same people to get rich from.

” What to Watch:What matters now is how much of the NFT market consolidates on the most prominent marketplaces, and how many grassroots platforms can emerge and sustain themselves.“You can’t rely on the technology, and things built on this technology, to be inclusive,” Carter added.

 “It takes human work and active choice. What we’re going to do as a community, as an organization, is be on the lookout, assist, and uplift when we can.”


Beeple, Everydays – The First 5000 Days NFT, 21,069 pixels x 21,069 pixels (316,939,910 bytes). Image courtesy the artist and Christie’s.

2. The Values of Collectors 

 The Old Art World’s Problem:Part of what makes established gatekeepers so powerful is the cyclical nature of upper-echelon art collecting. Dealers compete with dealers to represent the same kinds of artists that collectors want so desperately to buy: all too often, the artists that look like them, meaning people who are predominantly white and male, and have connections inside the high-art community.  

The NFT Difference:So far, many, if not most, NFT buyers hail from outside traditional art industry circles, and tend to have little interest in established dealers’, advisors’, and collectors’ opinions on what is worth acquiring—and at what price.

“The money coming into the space is money that was already in the space,” according to Kevin McCoy, the artist who created the first NFT as part of Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference in 2014. “Crypto people are buying NFTs. I’ve always thought that’s the strength: new makers and new collectors, not the old art world.


”  The Roadblock to Revolution:But here’s the thing: many, if not most, of the crypto-wealthy tend to look a lot like the traditionally wealthy—again, predominantly white and male.

And while they may not care what art-world tastemakers think, their concept of merit is just as much of a feedback loop—this time, fixated on Silicon Valley idolatry and social-media stardom.As Tina Rivers Ryan, an assistant curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and historian of video and digital art, put it: 

“Is an art market that clearly, openly, brazenly ties an artwork’s value to labor-intensive social networking accessible?” Her question exposes the fault lines in the NFT marketplace. It’s true that Beeple (AKA Mike Winklemann) had no chance of selling his NFT work for $6.6 million through Gagosian or Sandy Heller despite his 1.9 million Instagram followers.

But this isn’t the type of inclusivity most urgently needed in the traditional art industry.  What to Watch:“What I’ve seen happening the last year is NFTs selling into the millions, showing us in real time what disaffected white bros trafficking in meme culture looks like,” Wagenknecht said. If this activity continues dominating the headlines and the marketplaces by year’s end, it would be a troubling sign.


Bria Thomas, Flower From the King’s Meadow (2020). Courtesy of the Mint Fund.

3. Redistribution of Wealth 

 The Old Art World’s Problem:When it comes to cashing in on art, nearly all the major upside accrues strictly to the collector on resale. Even the most fortunate artists generally only receive, at best, a meager resale royalty. The UK, for example, caps resale royalty for its residents at €12,500 (about $17,300), no matter how much money a work fetches when it returns to market; the US offers no resale royalty at all—at least, outside of sales made during a one-year period in California in the late 1970s.


 The NFT Difference:Artists have the potential to benefit proportionally and perpetually as their works circulate through the marketplace over time, because percentage-based resale royalties can be baked into the terms of every NFT sale.Perhaps best of all, this redistributive function can be entirely automated. Why? Because the underlying mechanism of NFT trades is the “smart contract,” a set of commands that executes on the blockchain without human intervention once objectively verifiable conditions are met.

(Hypothetically, say, “ownership of this asset transfers to the sender as soon as the sales price reaches the current owner’s account.”)To Amy Whitaker, a professor of visual arts administration at New York University who began researching blockchain in 2014, the possibilities become especially fascinating when NFT artists use smart contracts to redistribute wealth to more than just themselves. 

Artist Sara Ludy, for example, recently negotiated a novel sales split with her New York gallery, bitforms, for any upcoming NFT works: 50 percent for Ludy, 15 percent to the NFT platform, and 35 percent to bitforms—with that last figure evenly divided in seven percent increments between the gallery’s owner and four staff members.Whitaker analogized this move to a tip pool for restaurant workers.

It’s a means of “collectivizing economics” and, if the artists choose, even “combining for-profit and nonprofit structures so people can funnel some of the proceeds into grantmaking or charity” without needing to fill out additional tax forms. 

The Roadblock to Revolution:

When it comes to resale royalties, McCoy cautioned that there is a gap between the “utopian possibilities” of NFTs and much of the current reality.By and large, artists are still using a standard Ethereum smart contract (known as ERC-721) with no resale redistribution component at all, while—true to Wagenknecht’s warning—each platform dictates its own resale royalty limits.  What to Watch:

In McCoy’s view, this pattern needs to be inverted, with NFT artists working together to reinvent resale royalties, marketplace structures, and even exhibition design in ways that prioritize their own needs.

Carter provides reason for optimism. Aside from the Well, he is also a cofounder of the Mint Fund, a grassroots organization that provides crowdfunding and community support to artists—especially BIPOC and LGBTQIA outside North America and Europe—looking to produce their first NFTs. (To “mint” means to register an artwork on a blockchain so that it can be offered for sale.) 

Buying and selling through the Mint Fund gives users the option to donate part of the proceeds back to the organization via the blockchain, in an effort to create “generational and circular economic structures” for “every artist, whether they’re making $200 or $2 million consistently.

”Between its Twitter account and Discord channel, the Mint Fund currently has about 3,600 community members. It also just onboarded 35 artists out of its first round of applications, and Carter said it is receiving “hundreds more applications every couple of weeks.”


Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Still from Public Key / Private Key, 2019. Image courtesy of the artists.

4. Ownership and Preservation 

 The Old Art World’s Problem:Beyond traditional tangible media, ownership of (and copyright to) artworks such as installation, performance, and video often descend into a marsh of confusion.

Dealers and artists must generate term sheets for each work from scratch, with the resulting documents normally whipsawing between overly simplistic and maddeningly complex—all for the collector to frequently misunderstand or ignore their responsibilities, especially concerning the work’s long-term care. 

The NFT Difference:The blockchain contains the work’s complete provenance and copyright details, with the potential to add a wide range of surrounding information that could benefit historians and archivists. Standard contracts like ERC-721 are available for wide use by artists unsettled by the prospect of drafting their own agreements.

Should intellectual property disputes arise, an NFT’s full transaction history can be audited all the way back to its minting, providing unassailable “on-chain” proof of which party’s claims are legitimate. 

The Roadblock to Revolution:Glossed over in most descriptions of NFTs is a crucial fact: what lives on the blockchain is data describing and tracking the asset, not necessarily the asset itself. 


Remember, the token is basically just an inventory number. It links to an artwork, but in what McCoy called “the vast majority” of cases, the artwork is hosted off-chain somewhere else. This setup raises a horde of uncertainties about ownership, copyright, and preservation that many NFT participants are unaware of unless they painstakingly pore over the terms and conditions.

For example, if an animated GIF is actually stored on a server controlled by the marketplace where you acquired its NFT, do you own the GIF… or just a license to access it? Either way, what happens if the marketplace eventually goes out of business or sells to another company? “There’s a question around the permanence of the media, the conservation and archival issues around that,” McCoy said.

“Of course, almost no one is worrying about that now in this ‘go go go’ moment.”McCoy experienced this friction directly during the lifecycle of Monegraph, the NFT platform he iterated with Anil Dash at Rhizome almost seven years ago. “The original Seven on Seven work in 2014 was very much how NFTs work now: If you own this blockchain entry, you own the work,” he explained.

But when the Monegraph marketplace opened for business, attorneys pushed it to become “much more licensing-oriented” through complex agreements and terms of service that pushed it away from its original intent.  

What to Watch:Monegraph’s evolution illustrates the tension between “the underspecified, crypto-native, YOLO approach, and the overdetermined, legalistic, less exciting approach” to NFT ownership, McCoy said.He judges that the market is currently still operating much closer to the former than the latter, but that it will be important to see if and when that shifts.


Addie Wagenknecht, There Are No Girls on the Internet, 2020. Courtesy of GIPHY.

Summing Up

The four issues above are hardly the only ones that will determine the transformative impact of NFTs. Take environmental impact.

The vast majority of existing platforms run on the Ethereum blockchain, which by some estimates now matches the annual energy burn of Ecuador; a coalition of artists (including Wagenknecht) recently collaborated to produce A Guide to Eco-Friendly Crypto Art, but it remains to be seen how many platforms and participants will heed the call. 

Back on the operational level, smart contracts may or may not be enforceable in an offline court of law. Even if they are, it’s unclear how unalterable, but nevertheless problematic, blockchain records could be corrected—a major concern if an artist, say, finds their work and/or identity have been appropriated into NFTs and dealt without their authorization.It’s even possible that crypto isn’t the optimal technology for addressing these inequities. 

For Carter, the potential energy comes much less from the specific capabilities of blockchain than from the way interest in NFTs has galvanized people to radically restructure how the art market could work if they started from square one.

Because in a way, they can.“A lot of people say, ‘Oh it’s early,’” he said. “But by being first and being early, we have a responsibility.”“If you want to set a precedent where people respect the space, the artists, the medium, then we have to come at it with generational forward thinking,” he added.

“I’m urging people to start thinking about intentionality and being actively present in this moment. Because when it’s gone, it’s gone.”
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Art theft is nothing new: As long as artists have posted their work online, thieves have appropriated them to try and profit off others’ work. Now, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), in theory a tool to give artists greater control over their creations, might be making it easier for malign actors to sell other people’s art.

This matters, not least because there is real money at stake. NFTs continue to draw headlines, with one selling for nearly $70 million Thursday in an auction on Christie’s. Smaller sales on various platforms continue as well, with NFT creators selling everything from jokes in tweet format to pieces of art – including art they didn’t actually create. 

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While NFTs may look like the WIld West, artists do have legal protections when their work is stolen, said Collins Belton, managing partner at Brookwood P.C. 

“There’s your standard copyright and [intellectual property] laws that apply to these things,” Belton said. Users who believe their art is being appropriated can try filing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices against the sites selling these NFTs, Belton said. 

The DMCA was passed in 1998 for the specific issue of addressing the dissemination of copyrighted material online. 

“If these content creators do own valid copyrights … then they could just go to these platforms and send them DMCA takedown requests. Eventually, people would decide it’s not worth dealing with right now,” he said. 

Olta Andoni, an attorney with Zlatkin Wong LLC and an adjunct professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, noted that artists or other copyright holders have to make sure they file these takedown notices to the right parties, whether that is to the creator of the NFT or to the platform facilitating the sale. 

Read more: State of Crypto: It’s Time to Talk About NFTs and Intellectual Property Law

“It is up to the platform to ensure that the transfer of rights between the artists and the creator still protects the artists’ rights,” she said.

Belton said that while he believes tokenizing others’ art is unlikely to last as a trend, NFTs as a unique unit will continue. 

“I don’t think selling isolated tweets of random 20-follower accounts is the future of this technology. Out of the absurd often comes real innovation. Just like CryptoKitties led to [NBA] Top Shot, I imagine tokenized tweets will lead to something else,” he said.

Legal protections

For those who do own the rights to the work they’re selling, it’s important to specify what it is they’re actually giving to buyers, Andoni said. For example, do buyers own the rights to the underlying art or just to a digital representation? And how can they resell the NFT or transfer the rights to it?

That could mean the platforms facilitating NFT sales have to structure their smart contracts to clearly include the rights that are being transferred. 

“If we do not have an agreement on what the creators are giving and what the buyers are buying, this space is not going to offer the benefits we expect to,” she said. 

Buyers and sellers should watch for both contractual and statutory rights, said Belton. 

At present, it is legal to sell physical artworks if you own or have purchased, for example, a painting, Andoni said. Under the first sale doctrine enshrined in copyright law, anyone can sell an artwork after they’ve purchased it, without the artist’s permission. However, this might not apply to NFTs, as they are intangible, not tangible works.

Read more: NFTs: A Legal Guide For Creators and Collectors

It’s not just art that is being tokenized, and users have more than just copyright law to watch out for.

Those creating NFTs should also watch out for the terms and conditions on the various services they use. Twitter, for example, would appear to prohibit others from permanently archiving tweets in its developer terms. 

It’s unclear whether or how the platform would enforce these rules when it comes to tokenizing tweets, particularly given Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s auctioning of his first tweet as an NFT.

“If you look at Twitter’s terms, there’s a pretty good argument that even Jack’s activity was probably prohibited,” Belton said. “Obviously he’s the CEO but … if you squint you could say it’s not a commercial use, it’s a personal use but I’m not really sure how strong that argument would be or should be.”

A Twitter spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

After a flurry of more than 180 bids in the final hour, a JPG file made by Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, was sold on Thursday by Christie’s in an online auction for $69.3 million with fees.

The price was a new high for an artwork that exists only digitally, beating auction records for physical paintings by museum-valorized greats like J.M.W. Turner, Georges Seurat and Francisco Goya.

Bidding at the two-week Beeple sale, consisting of just one lot, began at $100.With seconds remaining, the work was set to sell for less than $30 million, but a last-moment cascade of bids prompted a two-minute extension of the auction and pushed the final price over $60 million.

Rebecca Riegelhaupt, a Christie’s spokeswoman, said 33 active bidders had contested the work, adding that the result was the third-highest auction price achieved for a living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

Billed by the auction house as “a unique work in the history of digital art,” “Everydays — The First 5000 Days” is a collage of all the images that Beeple has been posting online each day since 2007.

The artist, who has collaborated with Louis Vuitton and pop stars like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, uses software to create an irreverent visual commentary on 21st century life.Beeple’s collaged JPG was made, or “minted,” in February as a “nonfungible token,” or NFT.

A secure network of computer systems that records the sale on a digital ledger, known as a blockchain, gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership. Most pay with the Ethereum cryptocurrency. “Everydays” was the first purely digital NFT sold by Christie’s, and it offered to accept payment in Ethereum, another first for the 255-year-old auction house.

Todd Levin, a New York art adviser who saw Leonardo’s “Salvator Mundi” sell at Christie’s for $450.3 million in 2017, said he had “mixed emotions” about the Beeple sale.
“On the one hand, it’s super exciting to witness a historical inflection point,” Levin said. “On the other hand, the amount of money involved could skew and damage a nascent emerging market.”


Image

A detail from “Everydays — The First 5000 Days” by Beeple.Credit...via Christie's


Image


Another image incorporated into “Everydays — The First 5000 Days.”Credit...via Christie's

Christie’s record-breaking auction was held at a moment when the mainstream art world has become transfixed by the fast-moving, speculative market for NFTs, which have recently achieved exceptional prices on specialist websites like Open Sea, Nifty Gateway, Super Rare and Makers Place.

Last month, buoyed by a $1.5 billion Bitcoin investment from Tesla, the electric-car company run by Elon Musk, and support from major institutional investors including hedge funds, the total value of cryptocurrencies hit a high of more than $1 trillion.

The value of crypto-traded NFT art also soared, setting prices that are out of kilter with the rest of the art market.Another Beeple piece, “Crossroad” — a 10-second video NFT showing animated pedestrians walking past a giant, naked likeness of Donald J. Trump, collapsed on the ground and covered in graffiti — sold for $6.6 million in Ether on Nifty Gateway.

The seller was Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, who had brought the piece in October for about $67,000, according to Reuters.

NFTs have also become a medium of choice for new performance artists. On Sunday, Burnt Banksy, an anonymous group of “tech and art enthusiasts,” sold a unique NFT consisting of a digital copy of a 2006 Banksy limited-edition print called “Morons.

” The group claimed it had destroyed the original print, worth tens of thousands of dollars, in an “art burning ceremony,” shown on YouTube and Twitter. The blockchain-certified “Morons” NFT was all that remained.Offered on Open Sea, this digital copy of the Banksy sold for about $382,000, more than three times the price that any of the original “Morons” prints have made at auction.

The successful bidder was an Open Sea user with the screen name GALAXY, who immediately put the piece up for sale.

Although their popularity has increased in recent months, NFTs are nothing new. In 2017, when the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum first began to climb, there was a speculative craze for Dapper Labs’ CryptoKitties, blockchain-certified images of cats, the rarest of which sold for more than $100,000.

The price of cryptocurrencies collapsed in 2018, and with it the nascent market for NFTs. But now Dapper Labs has recapitalized and collaborated with the National Basketball Association to create N.B.A. Top Shot, a marketplace for digital highlight clips that are the tech equivalent of baseball cards.

On Thursday, these had raised $345 million in sales, mostly in the past 30 days, according to Cryptoslam, a site that tracks the prices of NFTs.

Blockchain-certified computer files are also being used to market and monetize an ever-widening range of cultural, commercial and personal items, in what some have likened to a digital gold rush.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and chief executive of Twitter, is currently selling his first tweet as an NFT in a timed charity auction. Bidding had reached $2.5 million by Thursday.

This month, the virtual sneaker brand RTFKT Studios sold 600 pairs of its NFT products in seven minutes for $3.1 million in total.And in the realm of music, where a combination of digitalization and pandemic cancellations has diminished performers’ earning power, NFTs are creating income sources.

The rock band Kings of Leon was the first group to release an album as a series of digital tokens. The album, “When You See Yourself,” became available last Friday in three NFT formats, each with extra enhancements, from $50.


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“CryptoPunk 6965,” also known as “Ape, Fedora.”Credit...via Larva Lab

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“CryptoPunk 7804” sold on Wednesday for the equivalent of about $7.6 million.Credit...via Larva Lab


In the art world, where the market for NFTs is more established, the current top-sellers are “CryptoPunks,” a cohort of 10,000 individual algorithm-created characters, 9,000 of which were given away in 2017 for trading and collecting on a dedicated Ether platform. Early the next year, the most sought-after “punks” were selling for about $13,500.

On Wednesday, “CryptoPunk 7804” sold for the equivalent of about $7.6 million in Ethereum, a record for any computer-generated artwork, according to Georg Bak, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art.

The price was five times the previous record for a CryptoPunk, set last month.

John Watkinson, the co-founder of CryptoPunks, said in an interview that he first noticed a resurgence of online interest last spring, during the early days of worldwide coronavirus lockdowns.

“There was a showing-off factor,” Watkinson said. “Flashing what you have to other people in a virtual way was the only way to do it.

”According to Watkinson, CryptoPunk collectors were mostly “die-hard crypto fans” and “the crypto-wealthy.” “There are some wealthy individuals in Silicon Valley collecting these now.

If you own a rare one of these, it’s meaningful,” he said. It was rumored that “people in the contemporary art space” were also buying CryptoPunks, he added.Other contemporary art collectors have yet to be convinced.

“I don’t have the right software in my head to understand what’s going on,” Sylvain Levy, who has a large collection of Chinese contemporary art, said of the latest prices for Beeple and CryptoPunks.

“Art is no longer about a relationship with an object. It’s about making money,” he said. “I feel bad for art.”Being pegged to the price of cryptocurrencies, whose ups and downs resemble the route of a fearsome mountain cycling race, the market for NFT art has a reputation for volatility.

But for many in the analogue art trade, the possibility of making significant sums from inventory with no physical presence remains a mesmerizing prospect.

“The potential for it to disrupt the traditional art auction model is humongous,” said Noah Davis, the specialist in charge of the first NFT auction at Christie’s. Beyond the record-setting sale of Beeple’s “Everydays,” he said, NFTs’ “lack of objecthood” meant auction houses faced no costs required for storing, handling, cataloging, photographing and insuring a physical work of art, making a “really attractive opportunity” for auction houses.

“Will we be offering more NFT artworks? Definitely,” Davis added. “Does this mean they will replace paintings and sculptures at auction? Absolutely not.”The Digital Art Market

Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000Feb. 22, 2021Beeple Brings Crypto to Christie’sFeb. 24, 2021For Creators, Everything Is for SaleMarch 10, 2021

Correction: March 11, 2021An earlier version of this article described in error "Everydays" in relation to Christie's. It was the first purely digital NFT sold by Christie's, not the first NFT sold by the auction house.

An earlier version of this article also misstated when the Kings of Leon was releasing its album "When You See Yourself" as a series of digital tokens. It was last Friday, not March 12. 

A piece of digital artwork has sold for a mind-blowing $69.3 million at auction.Storied auction house Christie’s has wrapped its sale of “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” by crypto artist Beeple.

The winning bid just after 10:00 a.m. ET for the non-fungible token (NFT) was a staggering $60.25 million. The buyer’s premium upped the final price to $69,346,250.

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In the final minutes of the auction, the price jumped from the $20 million range to over $50 million.

It’s by far the largest known sale of an NFT, a special type of token that lives on the Ethereum blockchain and proves digital ownership of its associated media.Read more: What Are NFTs and How Do They Work?

Ether (ETH) was supported as a payment option in a first for the 255-year-old auction house. At press time, it is unclear if the buyer used fiat or crypto to buy the now-famous Beeple.

Beeple’s previous record-breaking auction was in February on NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway. That piece, a video clip of a digitally illustrated Donald Trump lying face down in the grass, sold for $6.6 million in ETH.

According to the New York Times, the most expensive painting ever sold was a Leonardo da Vinci that went for $450.3 million in 2017.This is a developing story and will be updated.

Fast food chain Taco Bell has just sold its first batch of Taco-themed digital collectibles on NFT marketplace Rarible—and they were snapped up in a flash.

The tacos were sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), unique digital items that can represent GIFs, artwork or even short video clips.

“Our Spicy Potato Soft Tacos can now live in your hearts, stomachs and digital wallets,” the company tweeted when the NFTs dropped.Taco Bell created five distinct NFTs, selling them in batches of five.

The collectibles were put on sale for 0.001 ETH ($1.79), which is quite cheap as NFT sales go. But the company will receive 0.01% of future sales, with all proceeds going to the Taco Bell Foundation, which focused on helping young people find careers.

The digital tacos are called the “Ever-Crunching Tacos,” “Gimme That,” “‘Tato Dimensions,” “Transformative Taco” and “Swivel, Taco.” Some of them are images, some GIFs and some short video clips.

NFT DROP | Coming in March EulerBeats Enigma LP
If you want to buy your own digital taco, your options are limited. The only taco-llectibles that are currently available for sale are the “Swivel,Taco” NFTs, which are all owned by one person.

Someone has already bid 0.15 WETH ($262) for one of them. The others are not for sale, but you can still make bids on them; if the owner likes the bid they may choose to accept it.The highest bid is 0.4 WETH ($700) for one of the “Tato Dimensions.” But the owner may not be interested in selling it.




The Transformative Taco. Image: Taco Bell.The official Taco Bell account on Rarible also owns two NFTs of its own. They are both themed around Chainlink, a network that helps blockchains interact with real-world data and has its own eponymous token.

The growing NFT craze

In recent months, a number of major brands have launched their own digital collectibles using NFTs. The NBA Top Shot series turns key moments from the basketball league’s matches into non-fungible tokens, with trading volume hitting $32 million in a day last month.

The likes of Bratz, Doctor Who and video game characters the Rabbids have all found their way into NFTs, while musicians and artists including Kings of Leon and Grimes have all launched NFT products.

According to one recent study, the NFT market was worth around $250 million in 2020; but with February trading volumes topping all of 2020, it looks set to grow further in 2021.

By Tom Wilson, Anna Irrera and Jessica DiNapoliLONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Elon Musk's Tesla became the biggest name to reveal it had added bitcoin to its coffers last month, many pundits were swift to call a corporate rush towards the booming cryptocurrency.

Yet there's unlikely to be a concerted crypto charge any time soon, say many finance executives and accountants loath to risk balance sheets and reputations on a highly volatile and unpredictable asset that confounds convention.

"When I did my treasury exams, the thing we were told as number one objective is to guarantee security and liquidity of the balance sheet," said Graham Robinson, a partner in international tax and treasury at PwC and adviser to the UK's Association for Corporate Treasurers.

"That is the fundamental problem with bitcoin, if those are the objectives for treasurers, then breaking them could get them in trouble."Tesla Inc's $1.5 billion bitcoin bet saw it join business software firm MicroStrategy Inc and Twitter boss Jack Dorsey's payments company Square Inc in swapping some traditional cash reserves for the digital coin.

Proponents of the cryptocurrency see it as a hedge against inflation at a time of unprecedented government stimulus, a falling dollar and record-low interest rates that make attractive high-yielding assets hard to find.

While the moves have prompted more boardroom discussions though, headaches from bitcoin's volatility to accounting for it and storing it are likely to preclude a big wave of companies holding large amounts on balance sheets in the short term, according to over a dozen financial officers, board members and accountants interviewed by Reuters.

"It will take more than a small handful of disruptive companies investing in bitcoin to impact the narrative in boardrooms," said Raul Fernandez, an entrepreneur and investor who sits on the audit committee of the board of chipmaker Broadcom Inc as well as other companies.

"Larger global companies, I can't see those conversations happening right now."GRAPHIC: Betting on bitcoin -

  https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/jbyprdydope/Pasted%20image%201614856822322.png

BITCOIN'S INTANGIBLE TANGLE

One problem could lie in the devil of the accounting detail in a bookkeeping industry that, like many others, is still taking stock of the nature of cryptocurrencies.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets accounting standards for U.S. corporations, does not have guidance specific to the accounting for cryptocurrencies.

However, consistent with discussions among a separate U.S. trade body, companies apply existing FASB guidance on the accounting for "intangible assets", which usually includes intellectual property, brand recognition or goodwill.

Under these rules, companies other than investment firms or broker-dealers cannot book gains in the value of holdings should the price of bitcoin rise - but must write down their investment as an impairment charge if it falls.Furthermore, once a company writes down its holdings, it cannot record subsequent gains until it sells.

By contrast, companies periodically reflect the impact of fluctuations in traditional currencies in their financial statements.

The FASB has no immediate plans to review its treatment of bitcoin as the issue affects few of its constituents, according to a source familiar with the matter.

"I don't think it's the best accounting so far," said Robert Herz, a former FASB chairman. "I am hoping that if more mainstream companies get into bitcoin, the accounting standards board may revisit the accounting treatment.

"Outside the United States, cryptocurrencies are usually treated as intangible assets too. But in contrast to guidance under the FASB rules, writedowns can be reversed in future years. In certain cases, companies can record bitcoin at market value.

See EXPLAINER:

COMPANIES' CRYPTO BILLIONS

Publicly listed companies together hold around $9 billion of bitcoin, data from the Bitcoin Treasuries website shows. Around 80% is held by Tesla and MicroStrategy, the latter with over $4.5 billion.

Square, which allows users to buy and sell bitcoin, said last month it had added an additional $170 million of the virtual coin to its coffers.Of course, if the price of bitcoin rises, a company can always simply sell its holdings, thus realising some gains.

Yet it is still a risky investment, given the cryptocurrency's record of wild swings.In 2013, for example, bitcoin started at around $13 and spiked to over $1,000. In 2017, it went from about $1,000 to around $20,000. In early 2020, it sunk below $4,000.

It fell more than 25% late last month only a week after hitting a record high above $58,000. It has now recovered part of its losses.

About 5% of chief financial officers (CFOs) and senior finance leaders said they planned to hold bitcoin on their balance sheets in 2021, a survey of 77 executives by U.S. research firm Gartner found last month.

Some 84% of respondents said they did not plan to ever hold it as a corporate asset, citing volatility as the top concern, followed by board risk aversion, slow adoption as a widespread method of payment and regulatory issues.

"I think for the most part you will find companies will avoid that sort of thing," said Jack McCullough, president of the CFO Leadership Council and a former CFO."CFOs are likely to be very conservative in managing corporate treasuries.

 They're happy sinking money into very safe places with low interest. Their job is to help grow the company through its operations, and the treasury needs to be safe and secure.

"WHY PUT MY NECK ON THE LINE?

Cryptocurrency supporters, however, say the rationale for companies to buy bitcoin is clear, not least the decline of the dollar - the dominant reserve currency - which has fallen about 4.5% against a basket of major currencies in the past year.

"The value of the dollar over time is getting weaker and weaker," said Dave Sackett, CFO of ULVAC Technologies Inc, the U.S. subsidiary of a Japanese vacuum equipment maker, and an active cryptocurrency investor.

"Bitcoin flips the script on that."Sackett pitched ULVAC executives on investing in bitcoin last April, suggesting they take a chance and then cash out with potential gains.

They passed on the opportunity, he said.Other potential headaches for executives include questions over how a company can safely hold a cryptocurrency, and how much it should disclose to shareholders about security precautions, said Tim Davis, principal in the financial and risk advisory practice at Deloitte & Touche, which advises firms on holding crypto on their balance sheets.

High-profile thefts from exchanges have highlighted problems over safely storing digital assets. The loss of passwords for digital wallets is also a risk. Offline or "cold" storage is widely seen as the best defence against hackers but there are few, if any, regulatory standards.

"Do you custody it yourself?" Davis said. "Do you have an exchange custody it?

How much of it do you want to have in a hot wallet versus a cold wallet?"Ultimately, experts added, the expansion into bitcoin by companies without existing ties to the cryptocurrency market may depend on the willingness of financial executives to take on risk.

"The general consensus among treasurers is that very few of them are going to follow this trend initially," said Naresh Aggarwal at the UK's Association for Corporate Treasurers.

"As a treasurer, if I am right and the price doubles, the company may sell its holding and make a profit. Whilst the company may be worth more, it won't be reflected in my compensation," he added.

"But if the price falls, I am pretty confident I will be fired. Why bother putting my neck on the line?

"(This story fixes spelling in Robert Herz's name)(Reporting by Tom Wilson and Anna Irrera in London and Jessica DiNapoli in New York; Editing by Pravin Char)

NYDIG, the firm that facilitated MassMutual’s $100 million bitcoin buy last year, has raised $200 million from a cadre of big-name investors.

The round included Stone Ridge Holdings Group, Morgan Stanley, New York Life, MassMutual, Soros Fund Management and FS Investments, NYDIG announced Monday. Past investors Bessemer Venture Partners and FinTech Collective also participated.

“The firms participating in this round are more than investors – they are partners, each well known to us for years,” Robert Gutmann, co-founder and CEO of NYDIG, said in a press statement.

“NYDIG will be working with these firms on bitcoin-related strategic initiatives spanning investment management, insurance, banking, clean energy and philanthropy.”

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NYDIG burst onto the scene in December as the firm that got an 169-year-old insurance institution to embrace bitcoin in full. MassMutual took a $5 million equity stake in NYDIG at the time.

The firm has since become a key player in catalyzing Wall Street’s embrace of the original cryptocurrency. Just last month, Gutmann said NYDIG will likely manage over $25 billion in bitcoin on behalf of clients by the end of 2021.

In Monday’s announcement, Gutmann offered a tease of sorts:

"In the months and quarters ahead, look out for an explosion of innovation in bitcoin products and services delivered by NYDIG, in partnership with our new investors."

A work called Nyan Cat by Chris Torres sold for $590,000 recently. It's part of growing interest in digital assets, known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, that are generating millions of dollars in sales every day.

Chris Torres

The artist Grimes recently sold a bunch of NFTs for nearly $6 million. An NFT of LeBron James making a historic dunk for the Lakers garnered more than $200,000.

The band Kings of Leon is releasing its new album in the form of an NFT.The auction house Christie's, bids on an NFT by the artist Beeple are already reaching into the millions.And on Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey listed his first-ever tweet as an NFT.

Safe to say, what started as an Internet hobby among a certain subset of tech and finance nerds has catapulted to the mainstream.Which leads to some obvious questions. Chief among them: What on earth is an NFT?

NFT stands for what now? It stands for "non-fungible token.

"Non-fungible, meaning you can't exchange it for another thing of equal value. A $10 bill can be exchanged for two $5 bills. One bar of gold can be swapped for another bar of gold of the same size. Those things are fungible. An NFT, though, is one of a kind.

The token refers to a unit of currency on the blockchain. It's how cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is bought and sold.

"Remember those days where people would line up for the newest Nike Air Jordan sneakers at the physical store? This is the new digital equivalent," said Katie Haun, a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.

"It's everything that brings together culture, and it's also a bet on the future of e-commerce," Haun said.Still. What exactly do you get when you buy an NFT?This question unleashes a fury of debate among NFT enthusiasts. The answer is not simple.

Are you buying what amounts to an Internet trophy? Clout? A feeling? A digital collector's item?

Perhaps, but you are also purchasing a kind of barcode, almost a certificate of authenticity that serves as proof that a certain version of something in uniquely yours.

"The underlying thing that you're buying is code that manifests as images," said Donna Redel, who teaches courses on crypto-digital assets at Fordham Law School. "You're buying a different format of art."

But note that when you buy an NFT, you're usually not getting the copyright or trademark to the item. And just because you own an NFT doesn't mean there aren't endless other versions of that thing on the Internet. There will be. It's the Internet.

Still, NFT enthusiasts say owning a piece of code in a blockchain has shown itself to be an incredibly valuable thing.

"You're not buying the picture," said Jake Brukham, founder of crypto-currency investment company CoinFund. "You're buying the property rights to the picture."

Why don't people just right click on an image instead and save it to their desktop? That's free.True.But like with other collectables, whether it's baseball cards or rare books or fine art, having an original is special.

Take CryptoPunks, pixelated avatars that have fetched millions. Sure you could download one of the alien avatars, but collectors would not consider it authentic. A real alien CrytoPunk costs, on average, $900,000.

To be clear, there's no visual difference between an original and a copied version.

And to make it even more confusing, not all NFTs are originals. Many are the digital equivalent of a reprint. But in this case, the reprint has what is essentially a unique barcode, or "token," on the blockchain, which is a type of decentralized record keeping.

In other words, instead of one institution, like a bank, having a ledger of transactions, a blockchain uses a vast network of computers that all hold each other accountable on a shared public record.

That makes it hard to remove an NFT from the web entirely. It also means there's a way to trace an NFT's origin and transaction history.

How do you buy or sell an NFT?It takes some steps.First, you usually have to buy a cryptocurrency, like Ethereum. That's a process in and of itself. But once you do, you can go to an NFT marketplace.

Some of the popular ones include Known Origin, Rarible and OpenSea.There, you can bid on an NFT and wait for the auction to end. If no one else outbids you, you get the bragging rights.

How do you make an NFT?Log on to one of the NFT marketplaces and upload a file. This process is called "minting" an NFT.

You'll usually be asked if its a one of a kind, or if there are multiple copies, or if it's part of a collection. (A quick glance at an NFT marketplace shows just how easy the process is — maybe too easy. Some people are trying to sell tweets and even colors as NFTs.)

Once you're done, collectors can start bidding.Digital artists can build in a royalty into their NFTs, even for future sales, which is why many artists see promise in NFTs: It can cut out the middleman and open up a new way to make money.

If you're not interested in buying or selling them, why should you care?As tens of millions of dollars in transactions pours in for NFTs, enthusiasts say NFTs will soon expand beyond trading art, music, video clips and memes.

 One startup lets people use their NFTs as collateral for loans.Silicon Valley investors say the money-making possibilities in the NFT world are limitless."At the time the iPhone was created, nobody would've thought that one of the killer apps was going to be hailing a ride," said Haun with Andreessen Horowitz.

What are the risks?

There's always a chance that a tech frenzy is a passing fad or stoking a speculative bubble. If you spent a pretty penny on an NFT and enthusiasm and values suddenly plummet, you could be in for a big loss. But NFT backers say the system's built-in scarcity should keep values up, as long as the surge of interest persists.

Be cautious about works that appear to be created by famous artists. NFTs resembling pieces by the artist Banksy have netted $900,000, but they have turned out to be fakes.

Then there is the environmental impact of NFTs that has attracted real scrutiny. The computing power required to operate the underlining blockchain system of NFTs is immense.

By some estimates, one crypto transaction could gobble up more power than the average U.S. households uses in a single day. One artist estimated that generating six NFT pieces consumed more electricity than his entire physical studio did in 2 years.

"The energy production infrastructure is out of our sight," wrote Brussels-based artist Joanie Lemercier.

"And we often have the feeling that electricity is abundant, limitless and we disregard its impact."

Bidding on the genesis tweet is heating up.

On Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called attention to a tokenized version of his first tweet on the non-fungible token (NFT) platform Valuables. Even though the 2006 tweet was minted in December 2020, Dorsey’s Friday tweet has ignited a bidding war, reflecting today’s frothy market for crypto collectibles.

As of early Saturday afternoon, the high bid was $2.5 million, made by Sina Estavi, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as CEO of Malaysia-based (and TRON-affiliated) Bridge Oracle. Estavi has been vying for the historic tweet with Justin Sun, the founder of TRON and the CEO of BitTorrent.

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Valuables is an Ethereum-based platform created by the social network Cent that allows users of Twitter to authenticate their tweets for sale to others (think of them as digitally signed copies). The tokenized tweets are only sold when the author of the tweet accepts a bid.

Anyone can offer to buy a tweet on the platform. For example, the first bid for the tweet in question was $1 from @TheGaloisCxn on Dec. 15, 2020.

This is the tweet that Estavi apparently now thinks is worth $2.5 million:Dorsey is a well-known fan of bitcoin, making multiple forays into the space. Cash App, from his other company, Square, is a major venue for retail investors to purchase the cryptocurrency.

Dorsey also invested in Lightning Labs, a second layer on the Bitcoin network, seen as a scaling solution.

This is Dorsey’s first time showing interest in Ethereum. Many people around the tech industry suggested that the recent boom in NFTs may partially explain Square’s announcement Thursday that it would acquire the music streaming site Tidal (prior to that announcement, Dorsey announced a collaboration with rapper Jay-Z to expand the use of bitcoin (BTC, +0.61%) in Africa).

The fight over the first-ever tweet on an Ethereum-based platform should only add fuel to that fire.

Hayes would be allowed to continue living in Singapore under the agreement his counsel is currently negotiating with federal prosecutors.

Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes might surrender to U.S. officials on April 6, a federal prosecutor said last month.(CoinDesk archives)

Arthur Hayes, the founder and former CEO of crypto trading platform BitMEX, could surrender to U.S. authorities next month, according to a federal prosecutor. 

Jessica Greenwood, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told a federal judge in a court transcript dated Feb. 16 that her team had been in talks with Hayes’ lawyers about surrendering to U.S. law enforcement officials. Greenwood also said she’d been in touch with BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo and its first employee Gregory Dwyer.

The three were charged in October 2020 with violating the Bank Secrecy Act and conspiracy to violate the act. A fourth defendant, Samuel Reed, was arrested last year and subsequently released on bond. A Vanity Fair profile on Hayes and the BitMEX saga was published on Feb. 4.Subscribe to Money Reimagined, our newsletter on financial disruption.By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms & conditions and privacy policy.

Hayes is currently in Singapore, Greenwood told District Judge John Koeltl, of the Southern District of New York, according to the transcript.

“We have discussed with counsel how to arrange for a voluntary surrender, and he has proposed appearing within the United States in Hawaii and having his initial appearance there and then,” she said in the transcript. 

Greenwood said Hayes could continue to reside abroad, traveling to Hawaii for virtual appearances during the initial stages of the legal process. He would travel to New York if and when the case proceeds to the trial phase.

“That is the proposed bail package that we would be presenting for your Honor,” she said, according to the transcript. “It would include agreement by the government that he be permitted to continue to reside abroad and that he would be traveling to the United States, if necessary, for court appearances and meetings with counsel.”

Fugitive BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes Reemerges to Weigh in on GameStop SagaBitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has resurfaced on social media with a blog post opining on his takeaways from the GameStop trading frenzy.

Does the fugitive executive just miss the spotlight? "The Hash" panel weighs in. CORRECTION: The introduction to the segment incorrectly states that Hayes was charged with fraud. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Hayes for violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

Delo is planning to surrender in New York, Greenwood said in the court transcript, though he needs assistance entering the U.S. due to an ongoing travel ban for travelers from the United Kingdom, where he resides.

Read more: BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes Leaves Role After US ChargesDwyer is currently in Bermuda and has no plans to voluntarily surrender, but federal prosecutors have begun extradition proceedings, according to Greenwood, though she noted that Dwyer’s legal team does not plan to oppose these proceedings.

“We are trying to achieve compensation for victims of various nefarious acts that took place on that exchange for years. We are confident that justice will prevail,” said Pavel Pogodin, an attorney representing former BitMEX users suing the platform.

Pogodin was the first to surface the potential surrender dates on Twitter on Wednesday.

100x Group, the parent firm to BitMEX, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York did not immediately return requests for comment. 

UPDATE (March 3, 2021, 23:40 UTC): Updated with additional context; corrects that Gregory Dwyer is not a cofounder of BitMEX but was its first employee.

Coinbase on Thursday released its documents for going public through a direct listing.In the filing, the trading platform cites Satoshi Nakamoto's identity as a risk factor.The creator's cache of bitcoins could wreak havoc on the market if Nakamoto sold their collection.Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.
Coinbase on Thursday released documents for its public debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange via a direct listing.In the filing, the digital trading platform cited as a risk factor Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto — the pseudonym used by the person or group of people who created bitcoin.

If the identity of the creator was revealed, it could cause bitcoin prices to deteriorate, according to the filing. The filing also referenced Nakamoto's personal stash of bitcoins, which totals over 1 million. As of February, one bitcoin was worth about $50,000.

Nakamoto could negatively affect Coinbase, the company said, and destabilize the entire crypto market if the creator decided to transfer his bitcoins, which are valued at over $30 billion.

The creator was the first entity to ever mine for bitcoins, and Nakamoto's stake in the digital currency accounts for nearly 5% of the entire bitcoin market, as there are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined.

Bitcoin's value has largely been driven by its deflationary tendencies. If 1.1 million bitcoins were released into the market, the digital currency's price would almost surely fall.

Similarly, Bitcoin has been praised for its decentralized nature. The currency is not beholden to any institutions or individuals. If Nakamoto was unmasked, that would place the currency under a single entity, which could discourage traders that bought into the currency for its decentralization.

Coinbase's success is largely tied to Bitcoin's riseIn a nod to the Bitcoin creator, Coinbase listed Nakamoto as one of the recipients of its public filing. Coinbase — which is valued at over $100 billion — can attribute much of its success to Bitcoin and its creator, who in 2009 developed it as the first decentralized digital currency.

In the years since, Bitcoin has largely dominated the cryptocurrency world, rising over 400% in the past year alone to easily remain the largest digital coin by market cap.

Coinbase is poised to continue to benefit from the cryptocurrency's rise. The trading platform is the largest in the US and has over 20 million users.

The company's founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong, referenced the invention of Bitcoin in his letter that was included in the public filing."When I first read the Bitcoin whitepaper back in 2010, I realized this computer science breakthrough might be the key to unlock this vision of the future," Armstrong said.

 "Cryptocurrency could provide the core tenets of economic freedom to anyone: property rights, sound money, free trade, and the ability to work how and where they want.

"Nakamoto's name first came to public attention after the white paper was released. The paper outlined the principles of a decentralized peer-to-peer digital payment system. In 2011, the creator moved on from the system but has remained a figure of public interest.

There has been much speculation over the years on the creator's identity. Names like the Bitcoin developer Nick Szabo, the entrepreneur Craig Wright, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have been put forward as potential creators of the currency.

While it is unknown whether Nakamoto will ever choose to transfer their cache of bitcoins, it seems unlikely the creator will ever reveal their identity.By maintaining anonymity, Nakamoto could avoid legal consequences.

The untraceable nature of bitcoin has also led to its use for illegal goods and services on the dark web. In January, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for more restrictions on digital currencies like bitcoin because of their use in illegal financing.

The unveiling would also violate one of bitcoin's founding principles that was outlined in its white paper. If a creator was unmasked, it would pose a threat to the decentralized nature of the currency — a tenet Nakamoto put at the center of his plans for Bitcoin.

MoneyGram is facing a lawsuit for allegedly misleading investors about the cryptocurrency XRP (-2.9%), which it has been utilizing in money transfers for some time.

On Tuesday, Rosen Law Firm announced it has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of those who bought MoneyGram securities between June 17, 2019, and Feb. 22 of this year.

The law firm believes these investors may now be entitled to compensation after MoneyGram partner Ripple got in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December.

The SEC alleged Ripple’s sales of XRP were in fact an ongoing $1.3 billion sale of unregistered securities. The case is still in the pretrial discovery phase.

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Rosen alleged that MoneyGram had “made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: XRP, the cryptocurrency that MoneyGram was utilizing as part of its Ripple partnership, was viewed as an unregistered and therefore unlawful security by the SEC.”

Read more: MoneyGram Takes Wait-and-See Approach as SEC Sues Partner Ripple

If the SEC enforces securities laws against Ripple, “MoneyGram would be likely to lose the lucrative stream of market development fees that was critical to its financial results throughout the Class Period,” the Rosen law firm states.

 Further, “As a result, [MoneyGram’s] public statements were materially false and/or misleading at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.”

Ripple has been paying MoneyGram to use XRP in its settlement services since 2019. The money sender has reaped $61.5 million in these “market development fees” in the time since.

On Feb. 22, MoneyGram said it was stepping back from its partnership with Ripple, citing the legal uncertainty around XRP.