Youtube Seeks Web3 Director With Experience Trading Crypto, According to Recent Job Listing

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Nifty News: Anime-ca Brands, Steve Aoki’s NFTs more profitable than decade of studio albums

February 16, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Animoca is entering the Japanese market with a new subsidiary aimed at Japanese IP while Rarible NFT offerings will be available as part of a new VR experience.

Anime and Animoca Brands

Blockchain gaming and Metaverse company Animoca Brands has launched a strategic subsidiary in Japan after raising $10 million in seed funding.

The new subsidiary, named Animoca Brands KK, plans on expanding popular Japanese content into NFTs, the Metaverse, and fungible tokens through Web3 applications. The content includes anime such as My Hero Academia and Dragon Ball, games, art, sports, and others.

Funds for this latest expansion were raised in a $10 million seed round led by Japanese investment firm MCP Asset Management’s MCP IPX One Fund.

Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu told Cointelegraph that “this one is really big” because of the content being brought into the NFT space and the size of the firms now involved.

Siu also said in the official announcement from Feb. 15:

“Our Japanese division will focus on partnering with IP owners in Japan to enable them to offer new Web3 products and services in the open Metaverse.”

Animoca’s other major investments in NFTs and the Metaverse include The Sandbox (SAND), Axie Infinity (AXS), and Dapper Labs.

Rarible and Cyber create VR platform for NFTs

Virtual reality platform Cyber and NFT marketplace Rarible have teamed up to create a fully immersive virtual NFT marketplace.

The marketplace is compatible with the Oculus headset on mobile devices and gives collectors a way to browse collections in a 3D Metaverse setting. Using Cyber’s marketplace requires users to list their NFTs for sale on Rarible.

NFTs purchases directly in a 3D metaverse via @raribleprotocol ✅

visitors can now buy NFTs without ever leaving your gallery space — just list your NFTs on @rarible ️

fully immersive marketplace? we're just getting started ️ pic.twitter.com/k3Ofj5HfGD
— ᴏɴ ᴄʏʙᴇʀ (@oncyber_io) February 15, 2022

Rarible is the 19th biggest NFT marketplace with $47,000 in trading volume over the past 24 hours according to DappRadar.

DJ Steve Aoki’s NFT income surpasses music career

Azukita song performer Steve Aoki revealed that he makes more from trading NFTs than he has from 10 years of selling studio albums.

Aoki has been selling NFTs on the OpenSea NFT marketplace since March 2021, when his Steve Aoki collection dropped. Since then, the collection has enjoyed 547 ETH volume traded among 953 owners.

At a private Gala Music event on Feb. 10, Aoki said,

"If I was to really break down, OK in the 10 years I've been making music, six albums, and you culminate all those advances, what I did in one drop last year in NFTs I made more money."

Aoki’s collection demonstrates his keen sense of the NFT industry. He owns a Yat that serves as his personal URL and has collected several Bored Ape Yacht Clubs and Adidas Originals NFTs worth over $1 million. His latest foray in the NFT space is the Aok1verse Metaverse iteration.

Samsung S22 pre-sale offer includes NFT drop for Koreans

Samsung’s latest update to its S-series of smartphones hit the market with fanfare in South Korea, where early buyers were treated with several benefits including an exclusive NFT.

Presale buyers of the S22 phones and Tablet S8 will receive an NFT from Theta Labs, which has had a long-standing partnership with Samsung. Theta hopes the offer will drive users to its ThetaDrop NFT marketplace, where people must go to claim their NFT.

Presale orders for the S22 exceeded those for the S21 by three to four times, according to a report from Korean news agency Yonhap News.

Other Nifty News

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) may be diving into the Metaverse soon as the exchange has registered to trademark the NYSE name on several blockchains and crypto products. The application includes uses in virtual reality and augmented reality software, NFTs, and online marketplaces.

The CryptoPunks community is up in arms over allegations that Larva Labs sold dozens of CryptoPunks v1 on OpenSea before withdrawing recognition of their authenticity. The v1 collection had a smart contract exploit which was fixed by issuing a v2 collection.

Animoca Brands and Venture Accelerator Brinc Launch $30 Million Play-to-Earn Guild Fund

February 15, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Rise of Web3: Metaverse tokens surge as Meta’s share price plunges

February 4, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Animoca Brands

Decentralized Metaverse tokens have made steady gains this week, despite a dump in the stock price of Meta Platforms.

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, saw the largest single-day slide in market value for a U.S. company ever with a 26% fall in share prices on Thursday after the tech giant revealed disappointing earnings and a decline in daily active users.

Meta famously changed its name from Facebook in late 2021, to signal its plans to focus on the Metaverse, and its struggles have coincided with double-digit percentage gains for its decentralized competitors The Sandbox and Decentraland.

Meta reported $33.67 billion worth of total revenue for Q4 2021, compared to $28 billion the year prior. However, its net income decreased to $10.28 billion, down from $11.2 billion 12 months ago.

For the first time, Meta broke out a segment in its earnings report for its virtual and augmented reality research and development business, Reality Labs. It saw losses which topped over US$10 billion, up from US$6.6 billion in 2020. However it’s only in the early stages of laying the groundwork for Metaverse technology, including developing a haptic glove, allowing users to “touch” objects in the metaverse.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Animoca Brands chairman and co-founder Yat Siu, suggested that the sharp drop of Meta’s share price may represent a broader trend in which users are beginning to question the centralized Web2 model:

“It's a system that does not share any meaningful part of the ownership or value of the network, which will eventually lead to a decline as users look for better options.”

“As people are still likely to spend even more time online, the question is where and how? This is an early indicator that they are moving away from Web 2.0 and the logical conclusion on where to go for a growing number is Web 3,” he added.

Siu argued that Web2 companies like Meta and Apple are also “losing their best people” to Web3 companies and projects:

“Web 3 and the open Metaverse is more than just another product cycle, it's a movement, and it's hard to fight something like that as a single corporation.”

Crypto-backed metaverses

Decentraland, a Metaverse platform built on Ethereum, has seen the price of its token MANA increase by over 20% the past seven days, surging from a seven-day low of US$2.19 to recent support levels around the US$2.60 mark.

Likewise, SAND tokens for The Sandbox, one of Decentraland’s main Metaverse competitors, has seen a seven-day gain of 17.5%, entering the weekend at a low of US$3.31 before surging to a high of over US$4, now seeing support levels around US$3.60.

Apart from Meta, other factors are affecting prices for MANA and SAND this week. Decentraland released it’s 2022 Manifesto, announcing a prototype mobile app, improvements to its play experience, greater utility of NFTs, and protocol enhancements.

The Sandbox team announced a partnership with UniX Gaming, a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and a release of more “land” in its metaverse slated for February 10th.

Animoca Brands owns The Sandbox, and there were unconfirmed rumors earlier this week that Meta would be acquiring the Metaverse platform. However Siu promptly shut those rumors down on Feb. 3.

There is an unconfirmed rumor that Facebook is about to acquire @TheSandboxGame. It looks like regulation is coming sooner than later to this space... https://t.co/XiAelDoBac
— NFT Ethics (@NFTethics) February 2, 2022

Outside of Meta, other big tech companies including Apple and Microsoft are getting into the space. Entertainment giant Disney also seems to be gearing up for a move into the Metaverse with a recent job advertisement for a Business Development Manger seeks looking for someone to “help lead Disney's efforts in the NFT space”.

It’s not immediately clear if Disney’s efforts could relate to it’s planned headset-free augmented reality Metaverse project uncovered by patent filings.

Microsoft Reveals Activision Purchase for $68.7 Billion as an Approach to the Metaverse

January 20, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Blockchain Firm Animoca Brands Raises $358 Million to Enhance Web3 and the Metaverse

January 18, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Fan Controlled Football raises $40M to expand league with Bored Apes and Gutter Cats

January 14, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Fan Controlled Football raises M to expand league with Bored Apes and Gutter Cats

Animoca Brands

“One of the most powerful things that tokenization does is release the energy of fans into tangible forms of value and meaning, we see this effect in NFTs and also social tokens,” said Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu.

Alternative sports organization Fan Controlled Football (FCF) has raised $40 million in Series A funding from crypto and blockchain gaming firms to support the league’s expansion plans, including four new teams and an NFT project.

The FCF was founded in 2017 by Sohrob Farudi, Patrick Dees, Ray Austin and Grant Cohen and hosted its debut season inside a bubble environment in Atlanta amid the pandemic last year. The FCF features an indoor version of American football in a seven vs seven-player format, and the games are streamed live on Twitch.

The unique feature of the league is that the teams are governed by their fans, who have voting rights on anything ranging from player acquisitions, in-game plays, branding and team selection. For the upcoming season, NFTs will play a key role in the voting process for half of the teams.

The $40 million Series A funding round was led by NFT and crypto firms Animoca Brands and Delphi Digital. The funds will be used to expand the league from four to eight teams for the 2022 season, along with launching NFTs called “The Ballerz Collection.”

All four of the new teams are owned by figures tied to NFT projects with the Bored Apes and Gutter Cats teams being the latest to be announced following the unveiling of the Knights of Degen and Team 80KI (co-owned by DJ and NFT proponent Steve Aoki) in October.

The FCF is rolling out 8,888 Ballerz NFT avatars for each new team which fans can snap up to hodl and obtain voting rights for their team. The NFTs will differ in rarity and value, with the more expensive tokens offering greater benefits such as enhanced voting power, exclusive content and game tickets.

Any existing Bored Ape Yacht Club or Gutter Cat NFT hodlers will also receive a 50% discount on Ballerz NFT purchases if they buy tokens corresponding to those teams. The NFTs are slated to drop late this month, and the public minting cost per token will be 0.1776 Ether (ETH) or roughly $580.

Speaking with Cointelegraph , Animoca Brands chairman and co-founder Yat Siu emphasized that fan tokens can enable fans to directly participate in their favorite sports:

“One of the most powerful things that tokenization does is release the energy of fans into tangible forms of value and meaning, we see this effect in NFTs and also social tokens.”

“Fan Controlled Football is an evolution where the game is in the hands of the fan from the get-go and introducing blockchain technology will give it deeper meaning and purpose for all the fans that are playing FCF,” he added.

In an interview with Forbes on Jan. 12, FCF co-founder Farudi stated that the organization is “experimenting” with its format and will continue to do so to find out what works best for the fans and the league.

“We don’t know exactly what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. But we don’t have a player’s union. We don’t have 30 owners around the table telling us no. We have one agenda. Our agenda is to be successful. We’re going to experiment to the nth degree to figure out what works and what fans love,” he said.

Animoca Brands’ Lympo NFT platform hacked for $18.7 million

January 11, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Animoca Brands

The sports NFT minting platform suffered from a hot wallet security breach across several project wallets losing $18 million in its native LMT tokens.

Sports NFT minting platform and Animoca Brands subsidiary Lympo suffered from a hot wallet security breach and lost 165.2 million LMT tokens worth $18.7 million at the time of the hack.

A short Medium update from the Lympo team stated that on Jan. 10 hackers managed to gain access to Lympo’s operational hot wallet and “stole a total of approximately 165.2 million LMT from it.”

According to the post, ten different project wallets were compromised in the attack. It appears that most of the stolen tokens were sent to a single address, swapped for Ether (ETH) on Uniswap and Sushiswap, then sent elsewhere.

LMT price tumbled 92% to $0.0093 after hackers transferred then sold the loot from the project’s hot wallets.

A subsequent Jan. 11 tweet from the team stated that they were “working on stabilizing the situation and resuming all operations back to normal.” The team also stated that it had removed liquidity LMT from liquidity pools to “minimize disruption to token prices.”

#Lympo provides an update on the $LMT token slippage and hacking that occurred on January 10th at approximately 12:32 pm UTC. We're working on stabilizing the situation and resuming all operations back to normal.https://t.co/i07w5zoOwW @animocabrands
— Lympo.io - Crypto Community (@Lympo_io) January 10, 2022

Removing liquidity from pools that trade LMT means that traders will not be able to buy or sell any significant amount of the tokens without experiencing a dramatic loss of value on their trade.

Early on Jan. 11, the team urged traders to refrain from buying or selling any LMT tokens while they completed their investigation and determined the next best course of action.

As a subsidiary property of Animoca Brands, Lympo may benefit from intervention from the Animoca team. Animoca CEO Yat Siu told Cointelegraph, “We are working with Lympo to assist them on a recovery plan, but we don’t have any specific mechanisms.”

The second hot wallet hack this week

Centralized crypto exchange LCX also suffered from a security breach on one of its hot wallets, leading to the loss of nearly $7 million on Jan. 8. In this case, the hacker made off with stacks of eight different crypto assets.

LCX lost varying amounts of MKR, ENJ, LINK, QNT, SAND, ETH, LCX, and USDC. The majority of the funds were converted to ETH then sent to Tornado Cash, a privacy tool designed to hide the source and destination of ETH.

The LCX team released an update on Jan. 10 assuring users that they would be compensated for the losses incurred and that no personal data was compromised during the attack. The team wrote:

“LCX will use our own funds to cover the incident and compensate affected users. There will be no impact on user balances at LCX.”

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Animoca Brands

Anime and Animoca Brands

Rarible and Cyber create VR platform for NFTs

DJ Steve Aoki’s NFT income surpasses music career

Samsung S22 pre-sale offer includes NFT drop for Koreans

Other Nifty News

Crypto-backed metaverses

The second hot wallet hack this week

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