Elon Musk might be the new owner of the social media giant, Twitter Inc, but he sure isn’t getting off on the right footing.
The company has recently been sued through a class action lawsuit that seeks to prohibit the firm from laying off over 50% of its staff as planned.
Rumors of impending staff retrenchment have always been a major fear since the negotiations leading to the completion of the $44 billion company. According to several reports, Musk started firing the projected 3700 staff on Friday, a move that has drawn criticism from observers across the board.
The class action lawsuit was filed by Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who also took Elon Musk and his electric automaker offshoot, Tesla Inc to court back in June when 10% of the workforce was laid off at the time. Though Liss-Riordan lost the suit at the time, she is confident that Musk cannot continue to thump his feet on the law everywhere he goes.
“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt the make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” Shannon Liss-Riordan said in an interview.
Specifically, Elon Musk is being accused of breaking both California and Federal laws as the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) Act demands that large companies be expected to give a 60-day notification in the case of a layoff.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco demands that Musk and Twitter do the right thing while also preventing staff from signing documents that will make them give up their rights in civil litigation against the company.
As the renowned advocate of Dogecoin (DOGE), the prospect of the lawsuit as well as the rocky start to his tenure as owner of Twitter with ad customers pulling off the platform, the memecoin has derailed on its growth path, dropping by 4.37% to $0.1244, the only coin in the top 10 with a loss over the past 24 hours.
Circle, the Web3.0 unicorn that is in charge of the issuance and maintenance of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin, has revealed it has started building a new and robust reserve fund dubbed the Circle Reserve Funds.
According to Jeremy Fox-Geen, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, the new Circle Reserve Funds are lodged with BlackRock, further deepening its relationship with the world’s largest asset management firm.
The new reserve fund will be managed by BlackRock advisors and it will predominantly be dominated by cash and short-dated US Treasuries. As Jeremy noted, as the existing USDC Treasury matures, funds from the reserve treasury will be pulled to secure the replacement of the reserve to continually guarantee 1:1 access to users’ funds.
“The Circle Reserve Fund is only available to Circle. As our existing Treasury holdings mature, the proceeds will be used to purchase new Treasuries by the Circle Reserve Fund,” Jeremy wrote in the official announcement, “We began this process on November 3, 2022, and expect to be fully transitioned by the end of Q1 2023. The Fund is custodied at Bank of New York Mellon, which already serves as the custodian for the Treasuries that comprise the USDC reserve today.”
Stablecoin issuers are uniquely poised for extra scrutiny from regulators, market observers, and the ecosystem at large. While Circle has not been embroiled in any form of price manipulation or improved alternative asset backing for its stablecoin, its major competitor, Tether Holdings have had to respond to lawsuits and allegations directly claiming its trading and reserve asset’s impropriety.
Circle’s USDC is currently the world’s second-largest stablecoin after Tether and it has a market capitalization of $42.2 billion at the time of writing, riding on its growing utility. Per the plans to bolster its reserve, USDC will now be at a vantage point to truly live up to its name and remain stable across the board.
ImmuneFi, one of the most notable Web3 bug bounty protocols has announced the launch of a new Leaderboard feature for ethical hackers in Web3.
As announced by the outfit, the Leaderboard will pull 20 of the most versatile Whitehat hackers in the Web3 ecosystem and rank them in order of the critical bugs they report through the ImmuneFi platform.
“We’re proud to release the Immunefi Whitehat Leaderboard showing the top 20 whitehats in web3!” ImmuneFi shared the announcement via its Twitter page
Bug bounties have become a thing in the web3 ecosystem as protocols incentivize experienced hackers to help scour through their codes to see if there are vulnerabilities therein. As the industry evolved, ImmuneFi emerged, helping to organize Whitehat events in a way that was easy for both the protocols and the participants.
Whitehats are typically rewarded for their participation, and with this new feature, ImmuneFi said it will be giving the top hackers additional benefits.
“Whitehats who earn their spot through genius and hard work are eligible for further rewards, exclusive merch, paid trips, speaking opportunities, and more,” ImmuneFi affirmed.
ImmuneFi said the ranking for whitehats who submit bug reports through its platform will be based on three crucial factors including, the number of paid reports, the severity of paid reports, and total earnings.
While the new leaderboard feature may not be an extra motivation for Whitehats to intensify their activities in the space, it certainly creates room for respect amongst the most elite of solution providers to hacking problems in the industry.
The appreciation of Whitehats cannot be overemphasized, a move that was recently underscored by the ApeCoin DAO. The ApeCoin DAO recently passed a vote that will see 1 million APE tokens set aside as bug bounty on ImmuneFi to incentivize whitehats to pour through its forthcoming staking protocol in a bid to see if there is a weak leak that might cause fund drain in the near future.
Boson Protocol, a Web3.0-based commercial marketplace has announced the revamping of its outfit for physical goods which it called Redeemable NFTs.
Through this offshoot, users of the Boson Protocol can get a tokenized version of a physical object which they can redeem many years afterward.
As detailed on the Boson Protocol’s webpage, its redeemable NFTs tokenize the right to the physical items rather than the items themselves. The protocol serves a number of luxury goods most of which are bound to increase in valuation over time.
“We’ve got a number of projects where they’re tokenizing luxury wine and luxury whiskey,” explained co-founder Justin Banon. “Someone will get a redeemable NFT that they can hold or trade for five or 10 years while the whiskey matures,” he continued, adding that “those sorts of items would create a commodities market for luxury whiskey.”
Innovators are making impressive strides to push non-fungible tokens to the general public with relatable products and services. The Boson Protocol’s approach seeks to enhance items that have digital twins in the metaverse, empowering more participation across the board.
NFT-related innovations are becoming commonplace in the Web3 world of today with many seeing that offshoot of blockchain technology as being crucial for the emerging metaverse world.
From users to investors, the focus on NFTs is going mainstream, and venture capital firms are committing funds to help build the infrastructure in the NFT world. While tokenization is just becoming a thing, a number of startups are focusing their innovations on building the Real Estate version to democratize the ownership of these luxury items.
Riding on the emerging digital economy which has taken center stage in many economies including Dubai and other parts of Asia, tokenization of real-world assets typically exposes them to additional markets beyond the items’ locality for easy and smooth global tradeoffs.
Elon Musk might be the new owner of the social media giant, Twitter Inc, but he sure isn’t getting off on the right footing.
The company has recently been sued through a class action lawsuit that seeks to prohibit the firm from laying off over 50% of its staff as planned.
Rumors of impending staff retrenchment have always been a major fear since the negotiations leading to the completion of the $44 billion company. According to several reports, Musk started firing the projected 3700 staff on Friday, a move that has drawn criticism from observers across the board.
The class action lawsuit was filed by Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who also took Elon Musk and his electric automaker offshoot, Tesla Inc to court back in June when 10% of the workforce was laid off at the time. Though Liss-Riordan lost the suit at the time, she is confident that Musk cannot continue to thump his feet on the law everywhere he goes.
“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt the make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” Shannon Liss-Riordan said in an interview.
Specifically, Elon Musk is being accused of breaking both California and Federal laws as the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) Act demands that large companies be expected to give a 60-day notification in the case of a layoff.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco demands that Musk and Twitter do the right thing while also preventing staff from signing documents that will make them give up their rights in civil litigation against the company.
As the renowned advocate of Dogecoin (DOGE), the prospect of the lawsuit as well as the rocky start to his tenure as owner of Twitter with ad customers pulling off the platform, the memecoin has derailed on its growth path, dropping by 4.37% to $0.1244, the only coin in the top 10 with a loss over the past 24 hours.
I don’t know about you, but downloading a Web3 wallet and funding it for the first time was a nerve-wracking experience. Sending money without trusting some central authority with a familiar logo left me feeling unmoored; I refreshed my wallet a few times, waiting.
After using it for a few months, I realized that this decentralized wallet was a very different beast from typical payment apps provided by banks or companies like Paypal. These wallets not only carried my crypto assets but also my login credentials and transaction history forming a proto-identity to use across the world of Web3.
It appears that Web3 wallets are more akin to vehicles, which allow people to traverse the new blockchain-based internet and, one day, the brown leather wallet in my back pocket will be as archaic as rotary dial phones. And quite right too: there are so many decentralized finance (DeFi) apps that it would be impossible for a person to create a separate account each time, not to mention the privacy issues.
Web3 wallets will function in novel ways too. They will fulfill the human need to create an identity around certain ideas and cultures by hosting a personal gallery of NFTs. Archeologists have shown that humans have always collected items to augment their social identities, from precious stones to funny hats and tattoos.
It’s very natural, then, that we are already seeing wallets being used as the digital equivalent of an NFT scrapbook containing the same kind of meaningful ephemera that humans have always used to create cultural identities. There are already platforms that let people clip media from around the internet and turn them into NFTs for their wallets. As this trend develops it will be possible to imagine that NFTs will become the metaverse equivalents of piercings, designer outfits, or personalized number plates.
And these new wallet-based identities will allow us to vary our online personas in a way current social media apps can only dream of. Because the wallet ID is just one string of alphanumeric characters, it’s possible to change its outer identity while the core functionality remains the same — like changing clothes on the same body.
This is all great for crypto nerds but what about your average person who sees no reason to swap their faded Red Hot Chilli Peppers tour t-shirt for some NFT collectible? And isn’t the process of learning to use DeFi too esoteric for widespread adoption?
Well, centralized exchanges (CEXs) have a solution: the centralized DeFi wallet. These wallets allow users to explore the fresh world of DeFi in the open and egalitarian way these apps were designed for but with features that mimic the old ways of doing transactions via a trusted third party.
Old habits die hard, as they say. Remember the strange experience of sending money without using a trusted authority? When using CEX wallets, people who are uncomfortable with the idea of self custody, or don’t want to take on the risk of smart contract hacks, can still access the world of Web3 but with their keys locked up in their favorite CEX.
Furthermore, the sheer number of DeFi apps is pretty overwhelming to the neophyte and even crypto enthusiasts can fall prey to a rugpull every now and then. The CEX wallets help mitigate these risks but auditing the apps their wallets can interact with, or providing clear warnings and educational material before allowing access to new or riskier protocols.
The launch of CEX wallets is good for the blockchain space as they provide an easy stepping stone in the onboarding process. Most people are not ready to download an app with a picture of a fox on it and YOLO a portion of their portfolio into an entirely new space.
People worldwide are already using digital wallets connected to their bank accounts. Indeed. A study from Juniper Research has “found that the total number of digital wallet users will exceed 5.2 billion globally in 2026, up from 3.4 billion in 2022.” The research predicts that digital wallet use will continue to thrive in developing countries, which are considered “cash heavy.”
This makes the gap between the current digital wallets and Web3 offerings is already very small. Every day it’s becoming easier for people to make the jump and realize the promises of Web3 for themselves.
Since blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are among the greatest technological innovations, their demand is expected to make the market value soar to $980.7 million by 2030, according to Spherical Insights & Consulting.
The market data intelligence company suggested that the global blockchain AI market is anticipated to record a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.06%. Per the report:
“Both combined are able to provide robust outcomes, and become highly beneficial to various applications such as financial security, supply chain logistics, creating diverse datasets and many others.”
Since digitization is emerging as a critical driver of transformational change across different industries, AI and blockchain can prompt high-efficiency levels, with the United States already setting the digitizing ball rolling.
Spherical Insights pointed out:
“The blockchain AI accelerates and also connects the ecosystem of artificially intelligent bots and software. The combination of both delivers universal registration, identity validation, bot audit, and compliance capabilities.”
Based on the technical complexity presented by blockchain and AI, experts anticipate that these cutting-edge technologies will have profound business implications soon. For instance, the AICoin project was aimed at enabling investors to harness the power of tokenization by combining the strengths of AI and blockchain.
Spherical Insights added:
“In this project, the developers developed artificial intelligence models that learn to identify and trade patterns that are hidden in the dozen or so most liquid cryptocurrency markets.”
The report also noted that this market can be a game-changer for business leaders, given that it can be deployed in investment management platforms, crowdsourced predictive models for hedge funds, and AI marketplaces.
Spherical Insights also highlighted that cloud-based blockchain AI solutions could play an instrumental role in SMEs because they enhance scalability and are highly applicable.
Meanwhile, Research and Markets disclosed that enhanced blockchain as a service (BaaS) adoption would boost the blockchain in the healthcare market, Blockchain.News reported.
Publishers are key to ensuring quality and advancing Web3 gaming along the adoption curve. It’s no secret that Web3 gaming marks the next paradigm shift for the gaming community.
Web3’s concept of an interoperable and decentralized gaming ecosystem with more value for players will eventually overhaul the gaming landscape. But how long will this trend take to go mainstream and ultimately reshape the market? In the same way that mobile gaming became a global phenomenon despite early doubters, new concepts and business models in gaming continually arise and prove themselves over time. It’s just a question of how we can speed up our progress along the adoption curve.
A new wave of talent from Web2 is flooding into the Web3 gaming industry. At the same time, interest is blooming beyond the grassroots level, with mainstream Web2 firms also starting to explore the area in earnest. While the growth in this sector is explosive, without the infrastructure to harness all of the creative energy that’s radiating, the ecosystem will struggle to reach full maturity in the near term or earn the buy-in of gamers themselves.
In these crucial next stages, where studios and developers are jostling for space and market share, the emergence of top-tier game publishers will become equally as important, if not more so. Game publishers play a vital role in ensuring the quality of games coming to market and, thereby, the credibility of the industry as a whole.
Streamlining go-to-market strategies and defining feasible business models will also be key if we want to build a more efficient ecosystem within Web3 gaming. These are also vital services publishers provide.
Game Developers vs Game Publishers
Major firms in the Web2 gaming industry generally belong to two camps: game developers and game publishers. The lines between the two often end up blurred. But generally speaking, developers are responsible for creating and executing a game, while game publishers streamline the end-to-end process of games actually going to market and getting in front of gamers.
We often see large companies, like EA or ActivisionBlizzard, blur the lines between these two roles, as they execute on both fronts. The same goes for mobile gaming giant Tencent, which also publishes its own games with a heavy discount by keeping everything in-house. As for the current state of Web3 gaming, the industry has an abundance of studios and developers creating new opportunities and forging creative new paths.
But so far, we’ve yet to see the same enthusiasm on the publishing side of the industry. For example, SkyMavis is the developer and studio behind major Web3 hit Axie Infinity, but is not a publisher of other games. And Web3 pioneer Animoca Brands, which owns a major stake in SkyMavis, is primarily a venture capital company. Again, not a publisher.
Game publishers enhance quality and scalability
Game publishers’ primary value add to the industry is to be a curator, sifting through the multitudes of projects to find the games that will be successful, thereby cementing the
industry’s credibility. But what we’re seeing with Web3 gaming right now is that more concern is given to novel ideas rather than AAA-quality execution, meaning speculative angels get more attention compared to actually good games. As a result, random shots in the dark are replacing strategic creativity. And that’s not conducive to moving Web3 gaming along the adoption curve.
Then consider the fact that, without publishers tidying up the space, Web3 faces scalability issues. Successful case studies aren’t effectively shared throughout the industry, leading to repetitive innovation that hinders efficient growth and progress. And without channels to provide proven go-to-market strategies, access to the market is, as a result, limited to clout and word of mouth. This again eats into ecosystem efficiency with repetitive and overlapping efforts.
What’s missing here is publishers’ accumulation and dissemination of lessons learnt and market know-how, which will be critical to maturing the industry at scale.
Rather, the Web3 gaming industry’s current focus is on providing content discovery above all else. Many platforms aim to be the Steam of Web3. But we less often hear from firms aiming to be Web3’s biggest publisher, and that’s because it takes extensive expertise and experience to achieve.
Yet Web3 game developers and studios need strategic guidance to zoom out and see what the real market opportunities are. This helps to drive the creation of a wider range of games, thanks to strategic support for smaller developers and studios wanting to enter the field. It also helps studios of all sizes reach more markets and gamers on a global scale efficiently and strategically.
Publishers are vital for the maturity of the Web3 gaming ecosystem
Despite the current crypto bear market, Web3 gaming momentum continues to gather pace. And what the industry needs most is top-tier publishers to speed up the sector’s progress along the adoption curve. Developers require comprehensive solutions to support the designing, launching and scaling of blockchain games. Players want quality games made easily accessible. And publishers provide those vital services to improve efficiency and quality across the ecosystem. Let’s hope we see more Web3 gaming publishers emerging in the near future.
About Joseph Derflinger
Joseph has been in the video game industry for more than 10 years, with senior positions at Perfect World, GREE International, Tencent, and NetEase. With rich experience in developing
many well-known AAA games globally, Joseph aims to transform the Web3 gaming industry with state-of-the-art gaming design and technology. He is CEO and founder of Web3 game studio and publisher Red Door Digital.
Since blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are among the greatest technological innovations, their demand is expected to make the market value soar to $980.7 million by 2030, according to Spherical Insights & Consulting.
The market data intelligence company suggested that the global blockchain AI market is anticipated to record a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.06%. Per the report:
“Both combined are able to provide robust outcomes, and become highly beneficial to various applications such as financial security, supply chain logistics, creating diverse datasets and many others.”
Since digitization is emerging as a critical driver of transformational change across different industries, AI and blockchain can prompt high-efficiency levels, with the United States already setting the digitizing ball rolling.
Spherical Insights pointed out:
“The blockchain AI accelerates and also connects the ecosystem of artificially intelligent bots and software. The combination of both delivers universal registration, identity validation, bot audit, and compliance capabilities.”
Based on the technical complexity presented by blockchain and AI, experts anticipate that these cutting-edge technologies will have profound business implications soon. For instance, the AICoin project was aimed at enabling investors to harness the power of tokenization by combining the strengths of AI and blockchain.
Spherical Insights added:
“In this project, the developers developed artificial intelligence models that learn to identify and trade patterns that are hidden in the dozen or so most liquid cryptocurrency markets.”
The report also noted that this market can be a game-changer for business leaders, given that it can be deployed in investment management platforms, crowdsourced predictive models for hedge funds, and AI marketplaces.
Spherical Insights also highlighted that cloud-based blockchain AI solutions could play an instrumental role in SMEs because they enhance scalability and are highly applicable.
Meanwhile, Research and Markets disclosed that enhanced blockchain as a service (BaaS) adoption would boost the blockchain in the healthcare market, Blockchain.News reported.
Publishers are key to ensuring quality and advancing Web3 gaming along the adoption curve. It’s no secret that Web3 gaming marks the next paradigm shift for the gaming community.
Web3’s concept of an interoperable and decentralized gaming ecosystem with more value for players will eventually overhaul the gaming landscape. But how long will this trend take to go mainstream and ultimately reshape the market? In the same way that mobile gaming became a global phenomenon despite early doubters, new concepts and business models in gaming continually arise and prove themselves over time. It’s just a question of how we can speed up our progress along the adoption curve.
A new wave of talent from Web2 is flooding into the Web3 gaming industry. At the same time, interest is blooming beyond the grassroots level, with mainstream Web2 firms also starting to explore the area in earnest. While the growth in this sector is explosive, without the infrastructure to harness all of the creative energy that’s radiating, the ecosystem will struggle to reach full maturity in the near term or earn the buy-in of gamers themselves.
In these crucial next stages, where studios and developers are jostling for space and market share, the emergence of top-tier game publishers will become equally as important, if not more so. Game publishers play a vital role in ensuring the quality of games coming to market and, thereby, the credibility of the industry as a whole.
Streamlining go-to-market strategies and defining feasible business models will also be key if we want to build a more efficient ecosystem within Web3 gaming. These are also vital services publishers provide.
Game Developers vs Game Publishers
Major firms in the Web2 gaming industry generally belong to two camps: game developers and game publishers. The lines between the two often end up blurred. But generally speaking, developers are responsible for creating and executing a game, while game publishers streamline the end-to-end process of games actually going to market and getting in front of gamers.
We often see large companies, like EA or ActivisionBlizzard, blur the lines between these two roles, as they execute on both fronts. The same goes for mobile gaming giant Tencent, which also publishes its own games with a heavy discount by keeping everything in-house. As for the current state of Web3 gaming, the industry has an abundance of studios and developers creating new opportunities and forging creative new paths.
But so far, we’ve yet to see the same enthusiasm on the publishing side of the industry. For example, SkyMavis is the developer and studio behind major Web3 hit Axie Infinity, but is not a publisher of other games. And Web3 pioneer Animoca Brands, which owns a major stake in SkyMavis, is primarily a venture capital company. Again, not a publisher.
Game publishers enhance quality and scalability
Game publishers’ primary value add to the industry is to be a curator, sifting through the multitudes of projects to find the games that will be successful, thereby cementing the
industry’s credibility. But what we’re seeing with Web3 gaming right now is that more concern is given to novel ideas rather than AAA-quality execution, meaning speculative angels get more attention compared to actually good games. As a result, random shots in the dark are replacing strategic creativity. And that’s not conducive to moving Web3 gaming along the adoption curve.
Then consider the fact that, without publishers tidying up the space, Web3 faces scalability issues. Successful case studies aren’t effectively shared throughout the industry, leading to repetitive innovation that hinders efficient growth and progress. And without channels to provide proven go-to-market strategies, access to the market is, as a result, limited to clout and word of mouth. This again eats into ecosystem efficiency with repetitive and overlapping efforts.
What’s missing here is publishers’ accumulation and dissemination of lessons learnt and market know-how, which will be critical to maturing the industry at scale.
Rather, the Web3 gaming industry’s current focus is on providing content discovery above all else. Many platforms aim to be the Steam of Web3. But we less often hear from firms aiming to be Web3’s biggest publisher, and that’s because it takes extensive expertise and experience to achieve.
Yet Web3 game developers and studios need strategic guidance to zoom out and see what the real market opportunities are. This helps to drive the creation of a wider range of games, thanks to strategic support for smaller developers and studios wanting to enter the field. It also helps studios of all sizes reach more markets and gamers on a global scale efficiently and strategically.
Publishers are vital for the maturity of the Web3 gaming ecosystem
Despite the current crypto bear market, Web3 gaming momentum continues to gather pace. And what the industry needs most is top-tier publishers to speed up the sector’s progress along the adoption curve. Developers require comprehensive solutions to support the designing, launching and scaling of blockchain games. Players want quality games made easily accessible. And publishers provide those vital services to improve efficiency and quality across the ecosystem. Let’s hope we see more Web3 gaming publishers emerging in the near future.
About Joseph Derflinger
Joseph has been in the video game industry for more than 10 years, with senior positions at Perfect World, GREE International, Tencent, and NetEase. With rich experience in developing
many well-known AAA games globally, Joseph aims to transform the Web3 gaming industry with state-of-the-art gaming design and technology. He is CEO and founder of Web3 game studio and publisher Red Door Digital.
