Nifty News: Kobe Bryant NFTs, tokenized baseball stadiums, and more…

August 24, 2021 Coin Telegraph

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Fame Lady Squad is relaunching after its male creators were outed, the MLB issues tokenized stadiums, and rare Kobe Bryant photos are up for auction.

The return of Fame Lady Squad

The Fame Lady Squad (FLS), a nonfungible token (NFT) avatar project purporting to have been created by an all-female team, is set to re-launch today with a new team after it was uncovered that three Russian men were behind the project earlier this month.

SO EXCITING!! pic.twitter.com/V1LKgIU34c
— Cadboros (@cadboros) August 23, 2021

The project’s NFTs depict cartoon female avatars, with the tokens having generated $1.9 million worth of total sales since launching on OpenSea Marketplace in mid-July.

The FLS website previously listed three team members named Cindy, Kelda and Andrea who all had female avatars.

On Aug. 10, Fedor Linnik, the co-creator of NFT project Neural Pepe, tweeted that he had collected “enough proof” to connect three men to the project on Aug. 10, specifically outing the pseudonymous developer “D Mefi” as one of FLS’ creators.

I'm the person who started all the fuss @FameLadySquad and @queenship_ project. I have enough proof to state that FLS was created by 3 males who are also behind a whole bunch of abandoned NFT projects.

And their "signature" convinces me Queenship is also their product. Thread/
— Fedor Linnik (@FedorLinnik) August 10, 2021

Following the accusations, Russian developer Max Rand also confessed to working on the project via Twitter on the same day. The FLS Twitter account also confirmed the news but failed to name the third member of the team.

After facing public backlash, the FLS founders reportedly conducted a poll on Twitter asking the community if they should hand over the project’s smart contract to a new owner — to which more than three-quarters of respondents voted in favor.

FLS stated they have handed the smart contract over to the well-known NFT proponent, “digitalartchick.” Digitalartchick has since passed the project onto a team of women including NFT collector Ashley Smith and NFT advisor Daniel Davis.

Yeah, let's all please have a *HUGE* round of applause for @digitalartchick. There would be no #ladyrelaunch without her fierce ways. Thanks girl. pic.twitter.com/QofiHmpnnZ
— Fame Lady Squad (@fame_ladies) August 24, 2021

The FLS website is offline at the time of writing.

MLB to hit NFTs out of the park?

As part of its partnership with NFT sports collectible platform Candy Digital, Major League Baseball is issuing NFTs dedicated to 30 MLB stadiums.

The latest drop went live on Aug. 23 and depicts a digital illustration of the PNC Stadium which is home to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The collection includes an open edition up for sale until Aug 28, and a one-of-one up for auction that is set to close on the same day.

The one-of-one currently has a top bid of $3,050 and the highest bidder will receive two tickets to an MLB game at the stadium, a player meet and greet, the first pitch at a game, a framed print, and a stadium.

The MLB partnered with Galaxy Digital-backed Candy Digital in June, and this is the third drop of the MLB stadium series so far. The duo has also launched collections dedicated to baseball legend Lou Gehrig, and 2020 world champions the LA Dodgers.

Kobe Bryant NFTs

An NFT auction dedicated to the late NBA legend Kobe Bryant is set to go live on the marketplace Cryptograph tomorrow.

The collection spans eight one-of-one NFTs depicting pictures of Bryant captured by Hollywood photographer Davis Factor in the 1990s. According to Cryptograph, all the revenues from the sales will go towards The Mamba & Mambacita Sports Foundation.

The foundation is a non-profit that is dedicated to helping “underserved athletes and young women in sports.” The organization was founded in honor of Byrant and his daughter Gigi after they passed away in January last year.

*Kobe Bryant x Davis Factor NFT: Cryptograph*

AI-generated avatars fetch big prices

The developers behind EtherRocks — tokenized pet rocks that have fetched as much as $610,000 each amid the recent NFT bubble — have launched a new nonfungible avatar project featuring synthetic human faces that have been generated using artificial intelligence.

Nftsprites comprises a series of 100 unique synthetic faces, with holders seeking prices of between 16.5 Ether ($55,100) and 100 Ether ($334,000) for secondary sales. The NFT feature uncanny animations in which the synthetic faces move and appear to mouth speech.

Twitter user “Larry0x,” a smart contract developer at Delphi Digital, dismissively described the Nftsprites as “the lowest-effort NFT project” he has encountered, asserting that the synthetic faces were freely taken from another website.

if true, then this is the lowest-effort NFT project I’ve seen. you literally just go to https://t.co/exiJbXvL6H and right click-save. a new NFT!
— THE_LARRY (@larry0x) August 24, 2021

Roundup

Cointelegraph reported on Aug. 20 that in response to the current crisis in Afghanistan, consulting firm Visualize Value launched a series of NFT “care packages”, which are aimed at being sold at the estimated cost of covering a single family’s emergency needs for a month.

Credit card giant Visa also made headlines this week after it purchased a CryptoPunk for $150,000.

Helping Afghanistan: Organizations currently accepting crypto donations

August 20, 2021 Coin Telegraph

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Basic needs for refugees, medical care on the ground, and visa assistance — some crypto users are sending tokens to nonprofits and others to help the Afghan people.

With thousands of Afghans currently being accepted as refugees in different countries following the Taliban’s takeover of many highly populated areas, many nonprofit organizations are accepting donations in cryptocurrency.

Thousands if not millions of Afghans are attempting to or are in the process of fleeing their home in fear of what the Taliban may do now they are largely in control of the country. Organizations helping refugees and those on the ground have put the word out: they need funds to support Afghans arriving on foreign soil with often little more than the clothes on their backs.

Hearts & Homes for Refugees, a New-York based grassroots nonprofit, is currently calling for donations to assist the roughly 20,000 Afghans still in the country waiting for U.S. authorities to process special immigrant visas. The group hopes to raise enough funds to relocate Afghan families to Westchester County, and currently accepts Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), ZCash (ZEC), Gemini dollar (GUSD), BAL, Yearn.Finance (YFI), Polygon (MATIC), Synthetix (SNX) and Bancor (BNT) through its integration with the Giving Block.

Now more than ever we need help supporting new arrivals from Afghanistan w/ #crypto donations. Help nonprofits like Hearts & Homes where it matters & when it matters most!

Please show your support for this campaign by donating at our @TheGivingBlock page: https://t.co/IdRGN9LiyV https://t.co/2Tn4SM1Kg6
— Hearts and Homes for Refugees (@HHRefugees) August 16, 2021

CARE, an organization with offices across the world that advocates for women and girls, has said 393,000 Afghans have been displaced during the Taliban takeover and are in need of emergency aid. Jack Butcher, the founder of consulting firm Visualize Value, has launched a series of nonfungible token, or NFT, “care packages,” each of which is aimed to be sold to match the organization’s estimated cost covering a single family’s emergency needs for a month.

Each edition of this NFT covers one Afghan family’s emergency needs for a month.

If you can't help financially, please consider a RT.

↓ https://t.co/psxeBGBIhC pic.twitter.com/ocEI1RMwYW
— @jackbutcher (@jackbutcher) August 16, 2021

Butcher said the 0.028 ETH proceeds of each NFT sale — totaling $124,576 as of Aug. 19 — have gone directly to CARE to help Afghans. At the time of publication, 195 of the individual NFTs are still available for purchase. Crypto users also have the option of purchasing 10 at a time for 0.28 ETH, or roughly $914, to help 10 families through late September.

Some organizations with operations on the ground in Afghanistan are also still in contact using social media and asking for help. Code to Inspire, a school aiming to educate Afghan girls on coding and robotics, is accepting crypto contributions via the Giving Block. Founder Fareshteh Forough reported today that students were “still coding at home."

The situation in Afghanistan is still developing, but there have already been reports of assault, murder, and human rights violations as the Taliban expand their foothold. However, it's important for well intentioned crypto users to be mindful about who they donate to; some fear that scammers may use the media attention to their advantage by stealing donations intended for Afghans.

From cypherpunk to state contracts: the changing face of blockchain

May 12, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Afghanistan

Three blockchain executives discuss their work with governments in fraught political contexts, and the questions it raises about blockchain’s claim to the libertarian banner.

Blockchain continues to occupy an unusual space in the contemporary tech sphere, with concepts such as “decentralization,” “transparency” and “immutability” continuing to slide between a purely technical meaning and a more overtly politicized one.

Certain blockchain advocates — at least, those still steeped in the libertarian ethos that survives the technology's roots in the cypherpunk movement — continue to question the technology's implementation for projects like government defense contracts, as well as its wider absorption into the traditional financial banking systems it was originally designed to circumvent.

Earlier this week, Cointelegraph reached out to several executives at the Fantom Foundation to reflect on the choices and approaches taken by blockchain companies who work in governmental and institutional contexts that raise fundamental questions about blockchain’s status from a socio-political perspective.

Fantom had recently announced a new public-private partnership with the Tajik Ministry of Industry of New Technologies that will see the rollout of a range of blockchain-based solutions across nationwide IT infrastructure. The partnership forms part of Fantom's wider business strategy across Central and South Asia.

In respect to the incumbent Tajik government, citizens have long called attention to the abuses of President Rahmon's dictatorial regime, which emerged out of a brutal civil war in the mid-1990smid 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. State monopoly over media, the systemic repression of political dissent and banning of the main opposition party, and the absence of civic and democratic freedoms has forced many Tajiks to seek political asylum abroad.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Fantom’s chief government relations officer Barek Sekandari said that Fantom's choice to collaborate with various regimes, despite their politics, is due to the company's priority to provide the populations of countries in underdeveloped economies with the same level of technological modernization as exists across the Global North.

Sekandari argued that for Fantom:

"Our goal is not to help these so-called regimes or whatever to to be more repressive [...] our goal is to solve [...] real-world problems [...] There are a lot of people suffering because of the state finance and health system, supply chain management, the educational system, the paper money system. These are the problems that the general public is facing on a daily basis. It's not the government as a whole, if you put it that way."

As noted, there are many blockchain companies who choose, for example, to pursue contracts with federal military agencies at the core of the Global North, the United States, where innovative technologies are already widespread and broadly accessible.

Sekandari further emphasized that Fantom is not only working with the Tajik ministry but also coordinating its work with international organizations working in the region, such as the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations, among others.

Fantom’s previous engagements in Central Asia and South Asia have also included the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Pakistan Punjab Prisons Department to formalize the beginning of blockchain-based software implementations.

As with Tajikistan, Fantom's choice to work with the authorities is a fraught one: under the premiership of Imran Khan since 2018, the government has come under criticism for its brutal repression of grassroots movements among students, farmers and teachers against the austerity prescriptions of a 2019 IMF loan conditional on a structural adjustment program.

Responding to Cointelegraph's questions about Fantom's choice to work with the prison systems management of the Pakistani state, Fantom's director of Asia operations, Samuel Harcourt, said the company would still hold that improving transparency and data integrity remains an important thing, regardless of the institutional context.

As part of a different project in the region, the Fantom also continues to collaborate with Afghanistan’s Ministry of Health, including work on a blockchain-based product to prevent the circulation of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Fantom's CEO Michael Kong told Cointelegraph he believes the benefits of a blockchain system are particularly evident here, in light of the fact that 40% of drugs in Afghanistan are counterfeit, with most citizens therefore unable to trust the quality of what they procure at local pharmacies.

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