Cardano’s daggy dad turns DJ Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has teamed up with legendary electronic dance music (EDM) DJ Paul Oakenfold to launch a tokenized album on Cardano. Oakenfold is a three-time Grammy Award nominee and his career in the music industry spans back to the early 1980s. His upcoming album dubbed “Zombie Lobster” was announced during the Cardano summit on Wednesday. Every aspect of the album will be tokenized on the Cardano blockchain, including cover art, tracks, sleeve notes and remixes. The album is part of a release from an NFT project named “Starship Universe,” which is operated by …

Altcoins continue to book notable gains on Sept. 16 as a slew of celebrity endorsements, major investments and the growing popularity of cross-chain bridges catch investors' attention. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the biggest gainers over the past 24 hours were Audius (AUDIO), Avalanche (AVAX) and Celer Network (CELR). Superstars invest in Audius The Audius platform is a decentralized music-sharing and streaming protocol that aims to cut out the middleman from the music industry and allow fans, subscribers and creators to interact with each other directly. According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro, market conditions for …

Blockchain-based music streaming platform Audius announced Thursday that it had launched full Solana NFT integration, allowing its more than six million users to begin featuring digital collectibles from the Solana library. The integration will occur through Phantom, Solana’s multichain wallet and browser extension. The new features will be available to Audius’ silver tier profiles, accounts holding more than 100 of the platform’s native AUDIO tokens. Roneil Rumburg, Audius’ co-founder and CEO, said the partnership gives Solana its first “NFT discovery layer,” adding that: “Tooling from Metaplex and the Audius integration with Phantom made it possible to ship Solana support while …

Three-time NBA champion Stephen Curry has snapped up a Bored Ape Yacht Club nonfungible token (NFT) for 55 Ether (ETH) worth around $206,000 at the time of publication. The Golden State Warriors star purchased an NFT depicting an ape with blue fur wearing a plaid suit on Saturday. Curry’s wallet on OpenSea shows a collection of 20 NFTs, including a 5.69-ETH ($21,000) purchase of Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT on Saturday as well. To the surprise of other collectors, Curry has since been active in the Bored Ape discord group and even changed his Twitter profile picture to display his …

Mass media holding company iHeartMedia is planning to distribute free nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, in partnership with sustainable NFT platform OneOf — a campaign that could introduce more music lovers to digital collectibles. The campaign is intended to promote the 2021 iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas, which will take place Sept. 17 to 18. Beginning on Tuesday, users can claim one free NFT “poker chip” on the OneOf platform. Up to 1 million tokens are claimable through Sept. 14. Users who collect an entire set are eligible to receive a limited edition NFT by artist Cory Van Lew. As …

Electronic dance music producer and DJ Justin Blau, better known by his stage name 3LAU, has officially announced the launch of a blockchain-based music investment platform Royal. The announcement comes in conjunction with the platform raising $16 million in a seed funding round led by crypto-focused investment firm Paradigm and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Forbes reported on Aug. 26. Founded by 3LAU and his college friend JD Ross, Royal is a new platform aiming to enable fractional music ownership through Royal’s own version of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, referred to as limited digital assets. The venture intends to democratize access …

The Untold Festival, scheduled to be held in Romania next month, has partnered with the Elrond network to allow concert goers to pay for their tickets in cryptocurrency. In a Tuesday announcement, Untold said that tickets for its 2021 festival could be purchased using Elrond eGold (EGLD). The festival reported that it would be allowed to have an unlimited number of attendees despite the ongoing pandemic (the number of daily reported COVID-19 cases in Romania has been under 1,000 since June.) Following the rollout of the ticket purchases with EGLD for Untold, Elrond CEO Beniamin Mincu said the project would …

Music-sharing protocol Audius became one of the first streaming platforms to partner with TikTok, allowing users to directly share tracks to the popular app. In a Monday announcement, Audius said it had partnered with TikTok in the creation of a new feature called TikTok Sounds. According to a Rolling Stone interview with Audius co-founder and chief product officer Forrest Browning, the integration will allow users to export songs created with the protocol to TikTok with one click, in an effort to streamline the process. Though Audius claims it seeks to leverage blockchain technology to reward content creators as well as …

American musician and composer Holly Herndon seems to be capitalizing on the principle of deep-fake technology by allowing fans to use a digital version of herself to create original artwork they can then sell. According to a Thursday announcement from Herndon on Twitter, users who want to make their own deepfakes using the musician’s unique voice and image will have the opportunity to sell their minted creations using nonfungible token, or NFT, marketplace Zora. Herndon said fans can submit their digital copies to be approved by the project’s DAO and would receive 50% of any auction profits. The project said …

On Friday of last week, I got a press release from Grace at a music and public relations firm called 23, and Grace wanted to know if I was interested in running a feature on a series of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. I almost instinctively replied “I am not, as I am actually exhausted reading these pitches about the half-baked efforts of minor celebrities to get a fat payday thanks to rich cryptopreneurs with more Ether (ETH) than sense,” and then I’d usually rant, and rant, and move on. Except I’m not really that rude to well-intentioned PR people who …

The revolution will not be televised — it will be minted. Earlier this year, we saw the meteoric rise (and fall) of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, in mainstream media and popular culture. We all heard about them, but was the hype real? Top businessmen and media moguls, such as Mark Cuban and Gary Vee, still strongly advocate NFT use and the role smart contracts will play in the near future, while each week new NFT exchanges and drops continue to roll out. Jay-Z’s Twitter profile picture is an NFT CryptoPunk. With or without the buzz, one of the most powerful …

For millennia, the world of art has remained unchanged for the most part. The tradition has always revolved around artists selling their work to museums, galleries, or individual collectors. In return, the artist would get a market value for their work which was often kept in private vaults and only displayed to the public ever so often. With the advent of NFTs, many artists are now able to take their work and offer it up for sale as a digital collectible. Through these blockchain-enabled digital assets, the artist cannot only maintain ownership of a piece of the art they produce …