Day: March 29, 2021

NFT Marketplace Nifty Gateway Plans to Go Carbon Neutral

by Decrypt

In brief

  • The Winklevoss-owned NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway said it plans to reduce its ecological footprint.

  • Nifty Gateway is built on Ethereum, which is currently very energy-intensive.

The white-hot NFT market has been facing backlash for its ecological footprint, and crypto companies are beginning to respond—some more gracefully than others.

Earlier today, the Winklevoss-owned NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway announced plans to go carbon neutral through dedicated carbon offsets at the end of each month. It’s also planning to introduce a new minting process that’s “99% more efficient.”

But the company’s note, authored by founders Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster, dismisses concerns around crypto art’s impact on the climate, even as it commits to going green:

“Because there is no blockchain to account for the carbon footprint of the traditional art world, which includes, inter alia, all of the private and commercial air travel to the Basels, Biennales, and countless other festivals around the world, not to mention the automobile traffic to gallery exhibitions, museums, and so forth, such criticism has not been leveled against the offline art world, despite the fact that its carbon footprint is orders of magnitude greater. Apparently, this is the price of transparency and accountability.”

The idea that Nifty Gateway is only being criticized because of Ethereum’s “transparency” around carbon emissions may strike you as a dodge; does the blame lie with the independent researchers who dug up the figures, or with the company producing them? And those emissions are estimated to be significant: a report from Memo Akten, a professor at UCSD, suggests that one artist’s collection of NFTs on Nifty Gateway produced 86 tons of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to “100+ transatlantic flights.”

Recent entrants into the NFT space, like Grimes, Rico Nasty, and Aphex Twin, have been criticized for their embrace of the energy-intensive technology.

Nifty Gateway recently hosted an auction called “The Carbon Drop,” which was accompanied by a 500 ton CO2 offset.

NFT auction houses Foundation and Zora have also worked to reduce their ecological impact, without the sneering press releases.

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Canada’s Purpose Bitcoin ETF Registers Zero Outflows, BTC Demand Present

by Btcmanager

The Bitcoin price is inching closer to $60k, racing past $58k and convincingly shaking off bears of last week. However, according to Lex Moskovski, the retail demand for the world’s most valuable coin is there if the status of one of the leading Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) and the first in Canada, Purpose Bitcoin ETF, guides.

Investor Confidence in Bitcoin

In a tweet on Mar 29, the CEO appeared confident, expecting buyers to build on today’s gains and push prices to new levels above $62k—Mar 2021 highs.


This time, the focus is on Bitcoin ETF as the primary trigger for the wave of demand, propelling prices to lofty targets towards $100k as some Bitcoin permabulls expect.

A Bitcoin ETF is a derivatives product that trails the performance of the underlying asset, BTC. It allows investors to get exposure to the coin through shares by an approved issuer. These shares are available for trading in traditional exchanges.

Will the SEC Approve a Bitcoin ETF?

In traditional circles, the product is one of the most widely used, allowing leverage and institutional exposure of the underlying asset.

While being a critical cog in the regulated space, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the main regulator, has been dragging its feet.

Despite over eight applications, the earliest being by the Winklevoss Twins in 2013, the commission has shot down all of them, citing the absence of robust monitoring tools, volatility, and widespread price manipulation.

However, in 2021, and accompanying the surge of Bitcoin prices to spot levels, more traditional heavyweights, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, are keen on offering a Bitcoin ETF.

Accordingly, the Bitcoin community is hopeful, convinced that the SEC would this time approve any of the over seven new applications and “open the floodgates.”

The U.S. Lags Canada and Brazil

Already, the SEC is lagging behind other countries, including Canada and Brazil. Canadian authorities have approved three Bitcoin ETFs.

Purpose Bitcoin ETF is trading at the Toronto Stock Exchange, managing over $1 billion of assets from investors—both retail and institutions. Amid the surging and understandable demand, there have been zero outflows.

Investors are confident of Bitcoin prospects. They are now piling on the digital asset, seeking exposure.

As BTCManager reports, Grayscale—known for their GBTC shares-plans to issue Bitcoin ETFs subject to SEC’s approval.

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Uniswap Trading Volume Exploded by 450% to $7 Billion. Here’s Why

by Decrypt

Trading volume on decentralized exchange Uniswap has jumped 450% over the last 24 hours. Total volume, per statistics on Uniswap.info, is $7.17 billion, compared to $1.6 billion yesterday. The previous daily record was $2.19 billion on October 26, 2020.

The token responsible for most of today’s volume is DELTA. In the last 24 hours, it’s done $6.13 billion in trading, or 85% of the total volume, despite only $16.4 million in liquidity.

The new record, alas, won’t stand. Uniswap creator Hayden Adams wrote on Twitter that the statistics DELTA has accumulated will not count toward the DEX’s global volume because of a quirk of Delta’s protocol. After that change, real trading volume is at around $1.05 billion, a fairly normal day for Uniswap.

Delta may not ring a bell because it’s new. Its token, which resides atop the Ethereum blockchain, just launched yesterday. To get it without staking, you have to use Uniswap. 

Delta calls itself “an on-chain options layer which utilizes a combination of liquidity standards to reduce premiums and offer competitive options prices.” More simply, options trading becomes expensive and volatile when there’s a lack of liquidity; Delta says it wants to fix this.

Its methods for doing so are far from intuitive for new initiates to DeFi, the catch-all phrase for decentralized financial systems that allow people to trade, earn interest, borrow, and lend cryptocurrencies without using banks or brokers.

Essentially, Delta introduces a vesting schedule for liquidity: “When Delta is transferred, a token vesting schedule is activated,” the Delta Financial team wrote in an explainer on February 9. “10% of the total token balance is sent to the user while 90% is initially locked and released linearly, over a 2 week period.”

But the large volumes that Uniswap is seeing are the result of Delta’s liquidity rebasing system, an algorithmic way of raising the price to mint tokens over time. The way that system is designed makes it look somewhat like wash trading—swapping tokens back and forth to drive up the volume and price of a token—though it is not because the trading isn’t resulting in the transactions cancelling each other out. Instead, Delta is toying with Uniswap’s liquidity pools to ostensibly keep liquidity solid and make the price less volatile. (Delta has not yet responded to a Decrypt request for comment on its protocol.)

Decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap comprise one corner of the DeFi space. DEXs differ from centralized exchanges (such as Coinbase and Binance) by eliminating the need for users to give up custody of their tokens. Whereas centralized exchanges store tokens to help facilitate exchanges, decentralized exchanges allow people to trade directly between one another. 

They also allow just about anyone to start trading their own tokens—even if it throws their numbers off for a day.

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What Happens When Walmart Buys $1 Billion Of Bitcoin?

by Bitcoin Magazine

Let me make this clear: Walmart has not announced a purchase of $1 billion worth of bitcoin. But it will and let me tell you what’s going to happen when it does.

MicroStrategy, Square and Coinbase are multimillion-dollar companies traded on NASDAQ with big bitcoin bags, but the everyday American could care less. Ask your average Joe how he feels about Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy purchasing of 91,326 bitcoins and you’ll probably get a “What is Bitcorn?” and “Michael who?”

Walmart, on the other hand, is a different story because it’s the epitome of working class America. Built off the back of America’s mom and pop, it is now the world’s largest company by revenue raking in $548 billion in 2020. When Walmart adds $1 billion of bitcoin to its balance sheet, you’ll have that same average Joe’s full attention. It will create the ultimate exposure for Bitcoin to blue collar Americans and trigger a global monetary paradigm shift that is long overdue.

As Walmart’s tentacles reach into 24 countries, a Bitcoin tidal wave will blast through its world of ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retail operations. Walmart sources products from more than 100 countries, bringing globalization to Middle America. Instead of having to deal with complex currency conversions with global suppliers, Walmart will accept bitcoin, which will negate the headache of dealing with dozens of fiat currencies. This will simplify accounting and streamline operations. With no middleman bankers pirating off of transactions, the only thing separating Walmart from its global partners will be oceans (if the miners don’t boil them first).

Once Walmart dips its toe in the proverbial Number Go Up pond, the obvious next step is to roll out accepting bitcoin in its 11,000-plus locations. We’re talking a full node at every checkout. Let’s assume a simple 10 percent discount (on top of Walmart’s already everyday low prices) is offered to customers who choose to pay in bitcoin. For our average Joe who’s living paycheck to paycheck, 10 percent off is a game changer. Legions of couponing soccer moms will discover how to pay in bitcoin and soon find out that holding anything but BTC is a losing game. At this point, Walmart is purchasing bitcoin at the corporate level and dollar-cost averaging via customer purchases.

When Walmart’s employees see bitcoin being offered as a discounted form of payment, they will no doubt begin to demand “Pay Me In Bitcoin.” This means that every pay period, as paychecks clear, there will be a new motherfucking floor set. Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math. Let’s assume that all 2.2 million Walmart employees are on minimum wage and they’re working about 30 hours per week. Right now, the federal min wage is $7.25 per hour.

$7.25 per hour x 30h hours per week x 2.2 million employees = $478.5 million paid per week.

Now, let’s assume employees have the option to put 10 percent of that paycheck into bitcoin. That would be $47.85 million per week being paid out in bitcoin. That’s $2.48 billion a year being paid out in bitcoin. That’s around 45,090 BTC (with BTC at $55,000) a year. That’s calculating the most conservative numbers of minimum-wage employees at one U.S. company. Millions of Americans who have watched their savings melt away like an ice cube will see how Bitcoin gives them the ability to turn dirty fiat vapor into clean, hard, unmeltable money. Walmart will put bitcoin into the wallets of every American. Once Americans see their Bitcoin number go up and their fiat number go down, they will think to themselves “in retrospect it was inevitable.”

The hyperbitcoinization that will happen inside the Walmart corporation cannot be contained and it will overflow into the society of the Walton family. As an Arkansan, I can tell you that no other family has more influence over the State of Arkansas than the Waltons, who are the majority shareholders of Walmart (okay, maybe the Clintons, but I don’t want to get murdered). The Walton’s are notorious boosters of the University of Arkansas. The family gave $195 million to the school in 2020 alone. It’s only a matter of time before a more-than-generous and continuous stream of bitcoin donations start to flow to the university’s endowment. The ripple effect of a university having such a large stake in the Bitcoin game will be a vortex for similar universities in adding BTC to their balance sheets. Adoption of Bitcoin is the only chance universities will have at keeping their heads above water. They will have the choice to sink or swim, to adapt or drown in the polluted sea of fiat education.

By Walmart putting cash reserves in bitcoin, pricing goods and services in bitcoin and paying its employees in bitcoin, the Austrian economic vision of the best money winning will unfold. Walmart will single-handedly deliver a circular Bitcoin economy. The corporation will create a wake for the average Joe to drift into the Bitcoin standard, throttling the world one step closer to hyperbitcoinization. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when and how much longer the $380 billion Walmart corporation wants to have fun staying poor. 

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Expect More Crypto Startups to Get Bought Up by Big Tech: PwC

by Decrypt

In brief

  • Crypto fundraising crashed last year due to the pandemic.

  • But a PwC report said it overall increased from 2019 to 2020.

  • The amount of cash plugged into crypto projects hit over $3 billion, the report said.

It turns out that 2020 wasn’t so bad for crypto startups after all.

Despite a rough start to the year, the number of crypto fundraising deals rose by 33% compared to 2019, reaching over $3 billion in venture capital, according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). What’s more, researchers at the Big Four accounting firm see 2021 shaping up to be the year more giant tech firms, such as PayPal, start going on bigger shopping sprees for crypto firms that provide “ancillary” services.

Venture capital fundraising all but crashed in the first half of 2020—thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it wrought—but if PwC’s report is anything to go by, it has made quite the recovery. 

When the pandemic started really hurting the economy, VC funding for crypto projects fell dramatically by 50%. But it picked up again, thanks largely to institutional investors and a spectacular bull run and, according to PwC, the average fundraising amount rose by 68% from 2019. 

On top of that, the total value of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in crypto more than doubled last year to $1.1 billion from 2019. M&A is when companies and assets are consolidated through various types of financial transactions. 

The biggest crypto M&A last year was when data analytics site CoinMarketCap was snapped up by Binance for $400 million. 

Most deal activity is happening in the Americas, PwC said, but it is shifting away from that trend and more activity is now taking place in Europe and Asia. The average deal size in 2019 was $19.2 million; in 2020 it was $52.7 million according to the report. 

PwC noted that it expects that the number of M&A deals to increase even more this year. What this means is that big players in the world of tech and finance will likely seek to buy up smaller crypto firms. Earlier this month, for example, PayPal confirmed its acquisition of crypto security firm Curv for nearly $200 million.

“We expect to see more institutional players consider entering in the crypto industry through investments or acquiring companies as part of their buy or build analysis in 2021,” the report said. 

It added that the “crypto industry is continuing on its institutionalization journey.” This is thanks to media interest in digital assets such as central bank digital currencies (centralized cryptocurrencies controlled by governments), decentralized finance (DeFi—financial tools built on Ethereum), and the craze around non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to the report. 

The findings by PwC come at a time when more institutional players are entering the game. In 2020 and in early part of this year, the price of Bitcoin has continued to rise largely because mainstream companies, such as Square and Tesla, are now investing in the asset.

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MLB team will HODL Bitcoin received from suite sales, says president

by Cointelegraph

Dave Kaval, president of Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics, says the ball club will be HODLing any Bitcoin that fans pay for luxury seats at the team ballpark in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

In an interview with Bloomberg on Friday, Kaval said no baseball fans had yet taken advantage of the opportunity to buy a full season, six-person suite for the home season for 1 Bitcoin (BTC) since the deal was first announced on March 15. Though the A’s club president said he was still hopeful “two or three” people will buy tickets for the ten suites available, he also clarified that any crypto received from purchases wouldn’t be converted into fiat right away.

“We’re gonna hold it,” said Kaval. “We’re believers in [Bitcoin] and hopefully it continues to go up and maybe we can find some big free agents with some of the proceeds.”

The BTC price dipped to $51,000 since the initial sales announcement, meaning crypto users who purchased the suite at just the right time could have saved more than $13,000 compared to the regular full season fiat price of $64,800. The price of the crypto asset has since returned to more than $57,000.

Kaval said part of the reason for the change to selling the tickets in crypto was the baseball club offering “something unique and different.” Though he said the A’s would not be accepting other tokens like Ether (ETH) or Dogecoin (DOGE) this week, there is the possibility of doing so in the future.

“We’re focused on just Bitcoin for now, but I think if it catches on, and we get interest, we are open.”

Bitcoin sales for the suites will still be accepted before April 1, when the Oakland A’s first game is scheduled against the Houston Astros. Though the status of the game may still be subject to change depending on COVID-19 cases in the state, at the time of publication, roughly 9,400 baseball fans are expected to be allowed at the A’s RingCentral Coliseum on Thursday — less than 20% of the 63,132 people when the venue is at full capacity.

Many Major League Baseball players have also become involved in the non-fungible token market. Last month, former MLB player-turned artist Micah Johnson sold $1 million worth of tokenized art in just one minute on Nifty Gateway.