The GameFi champion and metaverse developer Animoca Brands has a billion-dollar fund in its plans, according to a report from Nikkei Asia on Nov. 30. Animoca Brands’ co-founder Yat Siu said in an interview that the fund could potentially have up to $2 billion dollars to allot to mid to late-stage startups with a metaverse focus. The fund and the exact amount available to developers have yet to be finalized. Cointelegraph reached out to Animoca Brands for a comment, to which the company confirmed that the fund is “in the works.” According to the interview with Siu there will be …

Think back to the communities you’ve been genuinely excited to be a part of throughout your life. It’s likely these were groups formed on the basis of shared interests, right? That’s because we feel a sense of belonging when we bond with others over any particular thing we feel a particular way about. For example, I love games, and I never get tired of exploring or fostering communities where I can meet other gamers. That’s how I know that the current GameFi space is no breeding ground for gamers like myself and my enthusiastic peers: It’s a breeding ground for …

Ether (ETH), which is the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, is popular among cryptocurrency investors because of its native ETH token. However, its native Solidity programming language and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) are instrumental in the adulation it receives from the developer community. In fact, the Ethereum blockchain continues to attract decentralized application (DApp) developers due to its flexibility, the vast range of developer tools available and the platform’s large user base. Forming the core of the blockchain’s architecture, the EVM is the program that executes its application code or smart contracts, as they are called, providing …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is growing fast. Total value locked, a measure of money managed by DeFi protocols, has grown from $10 billion to a little more than $40 billion over the last two years after peaking at $180 billion. The elephant in the room? More than $10 billion was lost to hacks and exploits in 2021 alone. Feeding that elephant: Today’s smart contract programming languages fail to provide adequate features to create and manage assets — also known as “tokens.” For DeFi to become mainstream, programming languages must provide asset-oriented features to make DeFi smart contract development more secure and …

The global decentralized finance (DeFi) market size was valued at $11.78 billion in 2021. This number is expected to increase as DeFi advances, yet it is still in its infancy. Therefore, a number of banks and traditional financial institutions still tend to be unaware of DeFi’s potential. While this may be, industry experts within the crypto sector are predicting that decentralized finance will overtake traditional financial institutions in the coming years. For instance, Mike Belshe, CEO and co-founder of BitGo — a digital asset custody provider — told Cointelegraph that he believes DeFi will replace institutions in the next three …

Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain announced it was once again “fully operational” after a more than 20-hour outage. In an Oct. 28 tweet, the THORChain team said the network was “back online and producing blocks” and had re-enabled trading. The network was halted on Oct. 27 after the team said a bug had caused “non-determinism between individual nodes.” “Turns out to be string manipulation: code was pushing a cosmos.Uint (instead of a uint64) into a string, which causes the string to get the point of the big int instead of the actual value, causing the memo string to be …

Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain was halted earlier today as the result of a bug causing “non-determinism between individual nodes." At around 8 pm UTC, the THORChain team initially tweeted that developers were aware of a chain outage and were working to find the root cause of the issue. Roughly four hours later, the team posted a further update noting that “consensus halts in a distributed state machine are from sources of non-determinism between individual nodes and prevent the ledger from becoming corrupted.” It stated that the next steps were to find the source of the non-determinism, release an …

Projects building on the Celo blockchain have collectively raised $77.3 million in support of various business initiatives, underscoring the growing adoption of the payments-focused developer network. Celo announced Thursday that projects impactMarket, Loam, Tatum, Circular Impact, Sanergy, Hyperlane, RedStone and Jia had secured the funding to further the adoption of Web3 business models. The biggest raise came from blockchain development platform and early Celo Foundation grant recipient Tatum, which secured $41.5 million. Hyperlane, an interchain communication protocol focused on interoperability, secured $18.5 million in seed funding led by venture firm Variant. Projects focused on regenerative finance (ReFi), including impactMarket, Loam …

Polygon (MATIC) price could double by the end of 2022 or early 2023 due to a mix of extremely bullish fundamental and technical indicators. Polygon wins high-profile clients MATIC rose by nearly 6.5% four days after Nubank, a Brazilian fintech company backed by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Softbank, confirmed that it selected Polygon's "Supernets technology" for its blockchain and digital token dubbed Nucoin. "Nubank plans to airdrop the digital token to its customers in the first half of 2023," the official announcement read, adding: "These tokens will be the basis for its customers' loyalty rewards program and will have …

Ripple Labs’ director of engineering Nik Bougalis is exiting the firm after nearly 10 years, becoming the latest of crypto's long-time serving executives to depart from the space. In an Oct. 22 tweet, Bougalis noted that: “my decade-long journey at Ripplehas been a fantastic (if exhausting and all-consuming) one. I got to work on a project that I love, towards a goal I believe in. But that journey will be coming to an end in a few weeks.” “All good things…” My decade-long journey at @Ripple has been a fantastic (if exhausting and all-consuming) one. I got to work on …

Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Polkadot, is stepping down as the CEO of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies. Parity is the development company behind the Polkadot ecosystem. In a statement released on Oct 21, Wood shared that he never desired the CEO role. Although he could act as one for an interim period, it was not a position where he saw himself finding “eternal happiness.” Wood shared: “Anyone who has worked with me knows where my heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer, and architect. Like many such people, I work best asynchronously.” He added: “A good CEO needs to …

In September 2021, enterprise blockchain and crypto solutions company Ripple launched the Ripple Creator Fund, a $250 million initiative committed to providing creators with the financial, creative, and technical support needed to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other tokenization projects on the XRP Ledger. On Tuesday, Ripple disclosed the second wave of creators to receive funding for their NFT projects through Ripple’s Creator Fund. This round of funding was awarded to independent creators focused on building functional use cases in gaming and metaverse, as well as music and media on the XRP Ledger. This round of recipients included companies like …