Yat Siu of Animoca Brands Yat is the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, which delivers digital property rights to the world’s gamers and internet users, thereby creating a new asset class, play-to-earn economies and a more equitable digital framework contributing to the building of the open Metaverse. “Although we are still at a relatively early stage of the blockchain adoption curve, we are well on the way to reaching the early majority category sometime in 2022. This is being led by NFT gaming and the GameFi movement. As more game developers get involved and higher-quality game projects become …

Yaniv Tal of The Graph Yaniv is a co-founder and CEO at Edge & Node, and co-founder of The Graph, a decentralized indexing protocol used by blockchains such as Ethereum. “Many people and institutions got started with DeFi in 2021, but we haven’t even started mass adoption yet. As more and more retail and payment systems start integrating with crypto, people will be able to keep their money in crypto, bypassing the traditional banking system, and benefit from high interest rates made possible by the productive use of protocol tokens.” These quotes have been edited and condensed. The views, thoughts …

On Dec. 15, Genius Yield, a decentralized automated market maker and liquidity management protocol built on the Cardano (ADA) blockchain, announced the launch of its initial stake pool offering, or ISPO. The fundraising will continue for six months until June 15, 2022. At the time of publication, more than 95.8 million ADA, worth approximately $118 million at the time of writing, have been delegated to the stake pools. In an ISPO, blockchain enthusiasts stake their cryptos in a protocol and receive tokens of the new project they fund as rewards. After a lockup period, investors can then reclaim their staked …

On Friday, Polygon (MATIC) and Alexis Ohanian's venture capital firm Seven Seven Six announced a $200 million initiative backing projects operating at the intersection of social media and Web 3.0. The initiative will focus on gaming applications and social media platforms built on Polygon's infrastructure. Alex Ohanian co-founded Reddit in 2005, left in 2010, and returned as executive chairman in 2014 to lead a turnaround before resigning in 2020. He has been a seed investor in several prominent tech and blockchain firms such as Coinbase, Instacart, Sky Mavis, the maker of Axie Infinity, and Patreon. As an Ethereum scaling solution, …

On Thursday, HSBC and IBM announced the successful test of an advanced token and digital wallet settlement between two central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, in a cloud environment. The experiment consisted of transactions between CBDCs, eBonds, and forex. IBM's Hyperledger Fabric and enterprise technology provider R3's Corda served as the basis of the distributed ledger facilitating the transactions. The project was overseen by central bank Banque de France as part of a series of tranche projects to implement a digital Euro. Previously the French and Swiss central banks reported positive results on a pilot run of the digital Swiss …

On Thursday, ConsenSys, a prominent developer of Ethereum (ETH) software, announced the launch of enterprise software ConsSys Rollups. The service, designed on the basis of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, is meant to protect specific transaction elements, such as account balances, sender and recipient wallet addresses, and transaction amounts to secure each user's privacy. Zero-knowledge proofs enable the validation of sensitive encrypted information, such as personal data, by nodes without revealing the data underneath. Such cryptographic techniques have gained enormous popularity in recent years, as users fear their crypto transactions are at-risk of being tracked by blockchain forensic firms such as a …

On Thursday, BitDAO, one of the world's largest decentralized autonomous organizations with over $2.5 billion assets under management, and its partner Mirana ventures announced the creation of EduDAO with eight of the world's top universities including University of California Berkeley, MIT, Harvard and Oxford University. EduDAO is financed by the BitDAO treasury, and will allocate $11 million in funding each year project grants, research, and standalone product development with $33 million in initial capital. The funds will go to academic research for next-generation blockchain and Web 3 technologies. EduDAO is financed by the BitDAO treasury, and will allocate $11 million …

On Wednesday, the Interchain Foundation, a Swiss non-profit serving as a steward of the Cosmos (ATOM) ecosystem, announced the launch of Gravity Bridge as built by decentralized internet service provider Althea. Gravity Bridge enables the transfer of ERC-20 tokens between Ethereum (ETH) and Cosmos blockchains. During its initial stages, Gravity Bridge will operate as a standalone chain before migrating to Cosmos Hub early next year. Key technical features include interchangeable token issuance across both chains and the support of Ethereum to Cosmos oracles. Simpier issued the following statement regarding the launch: In this interoperable ecosystem, Gravity Bridge’s place is a …

On Wednesday, crypto-fiat gateway payments provider Ramp announced it had raised a $52.7 million Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, NFX, Galaxy Digital, Seedcamp, Firstminute Capital, and angel investors. Ramp allows its partner brands to offer crypto-enabled services, claiming that it takes mere hours for developers to integrate their decentralized applications, or dApps, with its software. It has over 400 partners, including Axie Infinity, Mozilla, Opera Browser, Dapper Labs, Aave, Argent, Trust Wallet, and Zerion. The firm has regulatory approval in the U.S., U.K., and Poland. Current uses of Ramp include purchasing cryptocurrencies for storage in wallets directly …

The single largest Ethereum contract containing 8,641,954 Ether (ETH) worth $33.5 billion is sitting idle because it cannot be spent or sent. A Twitter user highlighted the Beacon chain contract claiming it to be the largest Ethereum contract with billions of dollars worth of ETH “trapped” inside it. BREAKING: 8,641,954 ETH ($32 billion) trapped in single largest Ethereum contract and unable to be sent or spent. Will require hard fork that hasn't been written or specified yet. Timing and terms of hard fork still unknown.https://t.co/xcXPwbS93v — Tomer Strolight | Not interested in your trades. (@TomerStrolight) December 14, 2021 The contract …

On Dec. 15, SEBA Bank, a licensed Swiss digital assets banking platform, launched a regulated digital token backed by physical gold and exchangeable for delivery. SEBA claimed that due to its regulatory-compliant nature and the low volatility of gold prices, the gold token could eventually be used as a stablecoin for on-chain transactions. In other words, the design of the gold token bears similarity to gold standards, where fiat currencies are backed by their exchangeability to physical gold in addition to faith entrusted in governments that issue them. In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold …

Mintable marketplace announced its partnership with Immutable X, a StarkWare-based layer 2 solution for NFTs on Ethereum, to make over 24 million NFTs on Immutable X available for sale on Mintable. This integration will enable users to deposit ETH and ERC-20 tokens with instant confirmation and no gas fees. According to Mintable’s Twitter thread, Mintable and Immutable X share a vision to scale NFT marketplaces by offering access to NFTs to the masses. 1/We're thrilled to partner up with @Immutable X - the 1st & leading Layer 2 for #NFTs on Ethereum! All NFTs on Immutable X are now available …