Tarantino to Proceed with “Pulp Fiction” NFTs Despite Miramax Suit

Key Takeaways

  • Quentin Tarantino and Secret Network have announced that “Pulp Fiction” NFTs will be auctioned this month.
  • The auction will proceed despite the fact that the project was hit by a lawsuit from distributor Miramax in November.
  • Miramax’s legal representatives issued a statement today stating that Tarantino’s legal team has not won the lawsuit.




Share this article


Quentin Tarantino has announced that he will proceed with the sale of a series of “Pulp Fiction” NFTs this month. Miramax has responded by clarifying that its lawsuit is not over, nor has Tarantino won any concessions.

Auction Will Begin In Mid-January

SCRT Labs and Secret Network, which will power the NFT auction, announced the news in a Jan. 5 press release.

Each NFT features a scene from Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” screenplay along with audio commentary from the director. Unlike many NFTs, the content of these tokens can only be decrypted by the buyer, and will only be made public if the buyer chooses to share the content.

The auction is set to take place between Jan. 17 and Jan. 31, with NFTs for seven scenes being sold during those dates.



When the NFT series was first announced in November, the project was hit by a lawsuit from “Pulp Fiction” distributor Miramax. The film company claimed that the NFTs constituted intellectual property violations and a breach of contract on Tarantino’s part.

Secret Network did not directly address progress on that lawsuit in its press release, but asserted that Tarantino owns the “exclusive rights to publish his ‘Pulp Fiction’ screenplay.”

It added that the tokenized version of the screenplay on auction is Tarantino’s “original, handwritten copy,” which the director has kept private in the decades following the film’s 1994 release.

Lawsuit Is Not Over Yet

Despite the decision to go forward with the auction, it appears that the lawsuit with Miramax is far from over.


Miramax’s representatives told various sites today that Tarantino’s legal team has not won the lawsuit and that legal action is still pending. Bart Williams, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP and attorney for Miramax in their lawsuit against Tarantino, released the following statement earlier today:

Any claim that Tarantino has ‘defeated’ this lawsuit is verifiably false as Miramax’s claims and the litigation remains pending. There’s been no attempt to dismiss any of Miramax’s claims by Tarantino’s team, nor have they filed any counter claims or motions against Miramax, and since Miramax filed its lawsuit, the promotional website and Twitter account for the proposed sale have scaled back the unauthorized use of imagery from Miramax films (including Pulp Fiction). For anyone to presume Tarantino victorious at this time by merely filing his response to the complaint is inaccurate, misleading and premature to say the least.

The conflict between Tarantino and Miramax represents an important moment for the non-fungible token industry, as NFTs are often used to manage rights and ownership of creative works. Though past conflicts around IP theft have occurred, the mainstream nature of the “Pulp Fiction” conflict could have a wider impact.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.

Share this article


Source

Tagged : / / /

Coinbase Chief Brian Armstrong Purchased Luxury $133M Estate in LA

Cryptocurrency executives are tapping the real-estate market. The latest one to do so is none other than Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, who just bought a lavish Bel-Air property from Japanese entrepreneur Hideki Tomita that was previously owned by Seagram Heiress Ellen Bronfman.

Brian Armstrong’s Costly Affair in LA

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Armstrong purchased a massive $133 million Los Angeles estate. The deal was closed in December last year, and several reports claim that it was one of the costliest “single-family home” sales ever completed in the Los Angeles area. The Coinbase exec’s luxury estate was bought from a company linked to Hideki Tomita, the Japanese founder of Dip Corporation.

Designed by internationally acclaimed English architect John Pawson, the nearly-five-acre property was never officially on the market. Instead, it was a private affair. Even the buyer wasn’t known up until very recently. Interestingly, the Japanese entrepreneur had originally bought the real estate for $85 million four years ago.

The original owners were Seagram heiress Ellen Bronfman Hauptman, a daughter of billionaire Charles Bronfman, and her investor husband, Andrew Hauptman. Hence, it was a big score for Tomita.

Besides, the estate includes a 19,000-square-foot main and a guest mansion that spans 6,600-square-foot in addition to a tennis court, two pools, a motor court as well as other amenities such as a home theater and a gym.

ADVERTISEMENT



Fun fact: Armstrong’s latest abode happens to be the only Pawson-designed house in LA.

The Man Behind Coinbase

The 38-year-old founder of Coinbase helped the exchange go public last year, making it the first platform dedicated entirely to cryptocurrency to foray into the US stock exchange. After April’s direct listing, Armstrong has seen a considerable leap in terms of his net worth. According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the exec’s net worth currently stands at $9.6 billion.

With his latest purchase, Armstrong joins the list of his contemporaries, such as Binance’s Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao, who purchased his first home in Dubai in October last year.

Featured Image Courtesy of Fortune

SPECIAL OFFER (Sponsored)


Binance Free $100 (Exclusive): Use this link to register and receive $100 free and 10% off fees on Binance Futures first month (terms).

PrimeXBT Special Offer: Use this link to register & enter POTATO50 code to get 25% off trading fees.

You Might Also Like:







Source

Tagged : / / / / /

3 reasons why Cosmos (ATOM) price is near a new all-time high

Blockchain network interoperability is shaping up to be one of the main themes for the cryptocurrency ecosystem in 2022. New users are continuing to onboard into the growing world of crypto while both new and established projects search for the chain that will best serve the needs of their protocol and community. 

One project that has 2022 off to a bullish start thanks to its focus on facilitating the communication between separate networks is Cosmos (ATOM). This project bills itself as “the internet of blockchains” and seeks to facilitate the development of an interconnected decentralized economy.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $25.06 on Dec. 30, the price of ATOM has rallied 75% to hit a daily high at $43.98 on Jan. 4 as its 24-hour trading volume spiked to $2.54 billion.

ATOM/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView

Three reasons for the surging price of ATOM include the launch of a cross-chain bridge which makes the protocol Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible and an upcoming Theta upgrade which will rapidly expand the ecosystem of connected chains and applications.

Cosmos nears EVM compatibility

The most significant development that has provided a boost to ATOM is the rollout of Evmos, an EVM-compatible protocol that will allows assets and projects that operate on the Ethereum (ETH) network to migrate over to the Cosmos ecosystem.

Up to this point, there had not been a way for Ethereum-based projects to interact with the Cosmos ecosystem. This significantly limited the number of projects and tokens that could interact with DeFi and NFT projects in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Gravity Bridge, which launched on Dec. 15, is another project dedicated to facilitating the bridging of assets between Ethereum and Cosmos and currently it operates as a standalone chain. Plans to migrate to the Cosmos Hub in early 2022 are currently underway.

Preparing for the Theta upgrade

A second development that has put wind in the sails of Cosmos is the protocol’s upcoming Theta upgrade which is scheduled for March 31.

Some of the new features included in the upgrade include the addition of meta-transactions, where transactions can be submitted by separate accounts that receive tips and the introduction of inter-chain accounts which allow users to manage accounts across multiple blockchains. Another feature is liquid staking, a system where users utilize the value of staked assets in other parts of the Cosmos ecosystem.

The Theta upgrade also includes NFT modules, which enable the simple management of NFT identifiers, their owners and associated data.

Related: ROSE gains 54% in a week as Oasis Network ecosystem expands

Expanding ecosystems are typically bullish

A third reason for the bullish momentum of ATOM is ecosystem’s expansion to 28 live, interconnected chains that total more than $68 billion in total value.

Some of the more established chains that have joined the Cosmos ecosystem include the Binance Smart Chain, Terra (LUNA) and Crypto.com (CRO), while the biggest projects using Cosmos’ software development kit (SDK) include Osmosis (OSMO), Secret (SCRT), Oasis Network (ROSE) and Kava (KAVA).

As the bridge protocols linking Cosmos with other EVM-compatible networks are established, the number of chains connected to the Cosmos Hub is likely to increase. This will bring an increase in the total value of the ecosystem along with it.

VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for ATOM on Dec. 29, prior to the recent price rise.

The VORTECS™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historical and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. ATOM price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score for ATOM began to pick up on Dec. 28 and climbed to a high of 81 just as the price began to increase 67% over the next six days.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.