Social media giant Facebook is launching the Novi crypto wallet today in the United States and Guatemala. The initial rollout only allows users to trade the Paxos Dollar (USDP) stablecoin, which is secured by Coinbase. An announcement on the Coinbase Blog says, “Novi users’ funds will be held within Coinbase Custody Trust Company, a qualified […]
The post Facebook Chooses Coinbase As Custody Partner for New Digital Wallet Rollout appeared first on The Daily Hodl.
The social media giant still intends to launch Novi along with its Diem payment network once regulatory approval is granted.
Social media giant Facebook has tapped Coinbase and Paxos for its forthcoming Novi digital wallet project, which kicked off its pilot testing phase in the United States and Guatemala on Tuesday.
Beginning Oct. 19, a small cohort of users in both countries will be able to download the Novi digital wallet app on iPhone or Android devices and add money to their accounts with a debit card. From there, they will be able to send and receive money using Pax Dollar (USDP), a dollar-backed stablecoin issued by blockchain trust company Paxos.
Facebook selected USDP in its pilot program because of its proven track record and “important regulatory and consumer protection attributes.” Because USDP reserves are fully backed by cash, Novi users will have the ability to withdraw their money in their local currency.
Customer funds will be custodied with Coinbase, which manages $180 billion in assets.
A spokesperson for Facebook told Cointelegraph the pilot phase will allow Facebook to evaluate the wallet’s core functions and showcase operational capabilities, specifically around customer service and compliance. Novi is also being designed for interoperability with other digital wallets.
The spokesperson also stated that the company has not abandoned support for the Diem network, a permissionless payment system that is still awaiting the green light from Washington. “We intend to launch Novi with Diem once it receives regulatory approval and goes live,” they said.
Related: One currency to rule them all: Facebook’s Diem has global ambitions
Despite significant lobbying powers in Washington, Facebook has run into obstacles convincing senior policymakers to approve Diem. The proposed payment network has gone through several design iterations since 2019, but concerns around money laundering and stablecoins have slowed the approval process. As Cointelegraph reported in September, policymakers have been encouraged by some of the design changes.
The price of bitcoin had crossed the $60K zone at 1:30 a.m. (EST) early Friday morning. The leading crypto asset’s latest price jump has made it so bitcoin’s overall market valuation of $1.119 trillion has surpassed Facebook’s market capitalization. The digital asset is also nearing the entire net worth of all the silver in the […]
The first auction on Sotheby’s Metaverse will go live on Oct. 18, with the auction featuring prominent collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, MoonCats and CryptoKitties.
Prestigious auction house Sotheby’s has launched a new Metaverse themed NFT platform.
The platform is dubbed “Sotheby’s Metaverse” and was announced alongside the “Natively Digital 1.2: The Collectors” (ND1.2) auction that will run between Oct. 18 and Oct. 26. The auction consists of 53 lots of tokenized art from the vaults of 19 curators.
Welcome to Sotheby's Metaverse. https://t.co/hZvYIkO3xx pic.twitter.com/9Wl9fUwibe
— Sotheby's Metaverse (@Sothebysverse) October 14, 2021
The list of curators includes some top collectors in the NFT space such as PleasrDAO, Pranksy and 888 along with crypto-friendly stars such as DJ Steve Aoki and self-described “Boss-Babe” Paris Hilton.
“These collectors are people with deep histories and relationships in the digital art and media space, many of whom have been collecting long before NFTs became a common term and have helped build the ecosystem from the ground up,” the exhibition notes state.
The platform is accepting payments in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC), along with credit card payments and wire transfers. Sotheby’s Metaverse is powered by Mojito, an NFT studio and blockchain tech platform that develops and operates NFT marketplaces for brands and IP holders.
The ND1.2 collection features NFTs prominent projects such as Yuga Labs (Bored Ape Yacht Club), Dapper Labs (CryptoKitties), Art Blocks (Chromie Squiggle) and Ponderware (MoonCats).
Sotheby’s was founded in London during the mid-1700s, and has since grown into a multinational giant that has expanded into 80 locations across 40 countries. The firm hosted its first NFT auction in April, partnering with the digital artist known as “Pak” to sell $16.8 million worth of tokenized art.
In June the auction house sold CryptoPunk #7523 —also known as “COVID Alien” — for a record $11.8 million, and last month it hosted an auction with Yuga Labs for a collection of 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that generated $24 million.
Sotheby’s is no stranger to the early iterat metaverse either. In June the firm opened a virtual gallery in Decentraland which depicted the auction house's New Bond Street Gallery in London.
Related: The Metaverse, play-to-earn and the new economic model of gaming
The structure was built in Decentraland’s Voltaire Art District, and featured Sotheby’s London Commissionaire, Hans Lomulder who greeted guests at the door, with the gallery displaying the COVID Alien CryptoPunk and Robert Alice’s intelligent NFT (iNFT).
The virtual metaverse has been grabbing the headlines of late, due in part to Facebook’s recent push to establish itself in the sector. Cointelegraph reported on Sept. 28 that Facebook is allocating $50 million to a two-year fund to back the firm’s target of building its own metaverse.
“The metaverse won’t be built overnight by a single company. We’ll collaborate with policymakers, experts and industry partners to bring this to life,” Facebook said as part of its funding announcement.
The engineers will provide technical advice to Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies.
Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), a leading venture capital firm operating in the crypto sector, has nabbed two of the leading engineers working on Facebook’s digital currency project for its digital asset fund.
According to an Oct. 11 report from CNBC, Nassim Eddequiouaq and Riyaz Faizullabhoy have jumped ship from Facebook to A16z after spending two years working on the social media giant’s Novi digital wallet (formerly Calibra).
Faizullabhoy will serve as CTO while Eddequiouaq will take on the role of CIO at A16z’s crypto division. Faizullabhoy stated:
“Andreessen Horowitz has shown an impressive dedication to advancing the entire crypto ecosystem over the past decade, and we jumped at the chance to join their premier team and provide technical support to their rapidly-expanding portfolio.”
A16z founder, Marc Andreessen, has sat on Facebook’s board since 2008 — one year prior to the launch of Andreessen Horowitz.
Anthony Albanese, the COO of A16z, described the firm’s new talent as having a greater “opportunity to impact the crypto ecosystem on a very broad scale” through their new roles.
“They’re going to be advising our portfolio companies and protocols to help them make sure that they have the most secure and sophisticated systems around,” said Albanese, adding that their previous roles at Facebook were much more “specific.”
Eddequiouaq and Faizullabhoy also worked at crypto custody firm Anchorage before joining Facebook’s Novi project.
The pair are not the first engineers to have abandoned Facebook’s digital currency project, with Novi head of strategy Morgan Beller joining VC firm NFX in September 2020 and co-creator Kevin Weil heading to satellite imagery company Planet Labs in March of this year.
Related: Andreessen Horowitz launches biggest-ever crypto venture fund at $2.2B
While Andreessen Horowitz is viewed as a leading crypto venture firm due to its successful and early investments into the likes of Coinbase, Compound, and OpenSea, the firm has recently attracted controversy regarding how its governance voting rights for top decentralized exchange Uniswap have been disbursed.
While A16z’s votes have been divested to university law schools including the Harvard Law Blockchain and Fintech Initiative (BFI), the Harvard BFI launched a governance proposal in May advocating for the creation of a decentralized finance lobbying group dubbed the DeFi Education Fund (DEF). The proposal recommended transferring $20 million worth of UNI to the group to fund its operations, with the group assuring that it would gradually sell the tokens over the course of four to five years.
However, less than two weeks after the proposal passed and the tokens were transferred to the DEF at the start of June, the DEF suddenly announced it had liquidated $10 million worth of UNI to the shock of the DeFi community, attracting criticism of both the DEF and A16z.
Messenger and WhatsApp are known for aggregating user data and selling it for profit to advertisers. This company brings an encrypted messenger to protect the data.
Oxen is a privacy-focused platform built on top of a proof-of-stake (PoS) network. It has also built a secure and anonymous messaging platform Session.
The company’s chief technical officer Kee Jefferys talked to Cointelegraph about its platform, its technology and how important privacy and data protection are for the end-user.
1. Hello! Tell us about Oxen and Session.
OXEN is a private, stakeable cryptocurrency. The Oxen token (OXEN) has brought a lot of innovation to the CryptoNote space (CN), including instant transactions and a large-scale PoS system. However, the real magic is the service node network. It’s powering a whole range of decentralized privacy applications — all incentivized by OXEN.
So far, our shining star is Session.
Session is an encrypted messenger that takes an uncompromising stance on preserving user privacy. No phone numbers, email addresses, or any identifying information are needed to sign up for Session. The messenger lets people benefit from the best bits of blockchain without needing to run a node, hold any cryptocurrency, or even being familiar with what blockchain is. Because of that, it’s already getting mainstream adoption, and Session currently has over 200,000 active users. The app is available for free on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux.
2. What’s wrong with messaging giants like Messenger and WhatsApp?
Messenger and WhatsApp are both owned by Facebook, a company known for aggregating user data to be sold for profit to advertising companies at the expense of the end user’s privacy, putting very little energy into maximizing privacy and security for users.
So here’s what we know about Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp:
WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the most popular messaging applications in the world, which technically means that encrypted messaging applications are the most popular form of communication. However, there is uncertainty about WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption implementation because their closed source code makes it impossible to verify the quality of their encryption.
In addition to this, the centralized servers used by WhatsApp give them a central point of failure. Apps like Session that are built on a decentralized network can be more resilient to attacks and have less downtime.
3. How does Session plan to get ahead in this competitive space?
A primary focus early on for Session was to reach out to journalists, activists and NGOs to test the app and provide feedback.
Now, the encrypted platform is used all the way from Boston to Baghdad by well over 200,000 people across more than 200 countries. Activists, journalists and human rights defenders rely on Session to be able to communicate safely and effectively and continue doing their pivotal work. Users are able to have conversations with their friends and family without worrying whether their conversation is secure.
4. Why is anonymity in messaging so important?
Anonymity is privacy, and privacy, according to the United Nations, is a human right everyone should be entitled to — see Article 12 of the UN’s Declaration on Human Rights.
Around the world, people are persecuted for their opinions, beliefs and conversations. And even if it’s not your job, anyone posting on social media these days can be a whistleblower, activist, or revolutionary. That opens a lot of people up to being targeted and makes anonymity a huge issue for every single person on the internet.
5. How many people currently use Session?
Session has been downloaded over 500,000 times and currently has over 200,000 monthly active users, according to recent estimations. Due to the decentralized nature of Session, we’re unable to see the exact number of users we have. Apps like WhatsApp and Telegram have access to more accurate information regarding user numbers and activity.
6. What are the premium paid features that Session is planning to offer?
We strongly believe that the app’s core functionality — a hardcore private messenger — should remain free. Secure messaging is an incredibly difficult challenge to solve, and the monetization features we add should improve the app’s user experience and not restrict it behind a paywall.
That said, some of the paid features that Session may offer in the future:
All decentralized core components of Session are free. Some additional features and services that would consume OPTF resources to provide or put additional strain on the Oxen network will be included among Session’s premium features.
Session’s monetization strategy includes premium features that can be used to buy back and burn OXEN from the open market, adding additional deflationary pressure to the OXEN cryptocurrency.
7. Is it possible to migrate from other platforms to Session?
Community groups from other apps can easily shift from, let’s say, the centralized Telegram to decentralized Session. However, there is no means of porting users directly from Telegram to Session.
The platform’s open groups facilitate real-time group chats with an unlimited number of users, while the closed group feature where users can chat with up to 100 people with the same metadata protections as Session’s one-on-one conversations.
8. What are Session’s plans for the coming 12 months?
Our main objectives for the next 12 months are to increase the number of users and improve the monetization model. We’re planning to add user-generated sticker packs, increase file size limits, remote device wiping, local message editing and more.
The biggest upgrade on the horizon is Lokinet integration, which will bring lower latency communication and better, non-Apple/Google-like push notifications as well as onion-routed voice and video calls.
Disclaimer. Cointelegraph does not endorse any content or product on this page. While we aim at providing you all important information that we could obtain, readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company and carry full responsibility for their decisions, nor this article can be considered as an investment advice.
Crypto advocates remind socially accountable and helpful media platforms are possible with decentralization.
Facebook’s conglomerate of social applications including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and its virtual reality headset Oculus, all suffered a major power outage on Monday, switching the platforms offline for a total of six hours to the effect of billions of users and businesses across the world.
The incident was first reported at approximately 3:16 pm UTC on Oct. 4 when a surge of complaints emerged from users worldwide claiming that they were unable to access their favorite social networking platforms.
A Cloudflare post-analysis of the crisis concluded that Facebook “had stopped announcing the routes to their DNS prefixes,” which meant that the platforms “DNS servers were unavailable.”
Though a small number of individual claims circulated a suspected hack or manipulation after the recent whistleblower story, evidence to conclude these theories was not officially reported.
In an official blog post released Tuesday, Facebook detailed their suspicions for the cause of the outage:
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.”
In the wake of the March 2019 outage, which lasted for twenty-four hours, Facebook equally cited an issue with a “server configuration change.”
In yesterday’s statement, the social media giant continued on to say:
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
As Facebook's behemoth stumbled in the public plaza, the crypto communities' roar for open, decentralized social networks echoed around the neighboring town of Twitter.
A decentralized standard for social media is an initiative that Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey is passionate about pursuing as stated in a 2019 tweet, and once again earlier this year.
We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it @bluesky: https://t.co/51or6OuNNv
— jack⚡️ (@jack) January 14, 2021
Seemingly in response to Dorsey's endeavors, CEO of DeFi lending protocol Aave, Stani Kulechov expressed ambitious plans to launch a Twitter rival built on Ethereum later this year, claiming: "Since Jack is going to build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should build Twitter on Ethereum."
Ironically, via a tweet!
Over the past few years, the influx of moral concerns surrounding privacy breaches, data gathering, censorship and fake news has fuelled the conversion for a renovation of the social media platforms that have come to dominate our democracy.
The prevalence and severity of such issues have even begun to deter conscious users away from centralized behemoths Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, in favor of more liberating alternatives.
The rapid emergence of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, specifically its native features of decentralization, transparency and community reward, has empowered the rise of these next-generation initiatives.
Representing Web 3.0, the platforms of tomorrow promise to cultivate a fairer, more inclusive model of digital interaction, realigning the values of the social space to encourage free expression, user welfare and self-governance.
Subsocial is an open platform for decentralized social networks and marketplaces built on the Polkadot and IPFS stack. It aims to provide users with full data sovereignty, which means liberation over their sensitive data, content and revenue streams to facilitate the development of fair, open and independent communities.
By utilizing core features such as spaces and posts, users can adopt a DIY approach to creating their own decentralized versions of the most popular social applications we use today, such as Medium, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Patreon and more.
Conscious of the well-documented flaws of their predecessors, users of Subsocial are granted full creative license throughout their experience, benefiting from “personalized news feed and notifications, transparent reputation, full-text searching, rich content formats, without sacrificing SEO.”
As the project's light paper states, the network is more than just a "blogging platform with crypto payments." It is "social finance where social media meets DeFi."
Related: Bitcoin moves past $49K as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go down
Cointelegraph spoke to two active participants in the decentralized ecosystem striving to build alternative, Web 3.0.-powered models to the current tech experience.
Founder of decentralized search engine Presearch, Colin Pape spoke of the importance of ownership in the social sphere:
“Web 3.0 needs to build beyond the issues that cause this outage: centralization. Adopting instead the decentralized approach that puts the power back into the hands of the users and incentivizes them to help maintain a digital world that is safer, more secure, and most importantly, online when you need it to be.”
CEO of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Anatha, Ed DeLeon spoke of the potential impact DAO's could make in this sector:
“Socially owned social networks seem like one of the most obvious moves we can make to prevent this from happening again. The technological tools required to build socially accountable, socially owned, and socially helpful media platforms are already available, most notably Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
During the outage, many Crypto Twitter users called for the need for a decentralized social network built on blockchain.
Major social media and communication platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went offline Monday as the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies surged.
As data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro shows, the Bitcoin (BTC) price moved above $49,000 after falling to a daily low of $47,166, an increase of roughly 4.5% in less than two hours. Similarly, the price of Ether (ETH) rose 3.5% over the same period to reach $3,411 at the time of publication.
The sudden price volatility comes as major social media platform Facebook, photo and video sharing app Instagram, and messenger app WhatsApp — both owned by Facebook — went down at approximately 11:16 AM EST on Oct. 4. According to Facebook's communications team, who communicated through Twitter, the company was “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
At roughly the same time on March 13, 2019, all three platforms reported a major outage that asted more than 24 hours. At the time, Facebook attributed the problems to a “server configuration change.”
The interruptions may impact community engagement around crypto and blockchain projects, but Discord, Twitter, YouTube, and many other platforms are still functioning normally. Many Crypto Twitter users are already using the incident to highlight the need for a decentralized social network built on blockchain.
“If they built Facebook on a blockchain, it would never go down,” said Allen Farrington, who regularly writes about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on his Medium blog.
The outage also follows former Facebook employee Frances Haugen turning over to journalists and others thousands of documents that imply that the company was not doing what it claimed in regards to removing hate speech and posts encouraging violence from the platform, among other things. Facebook’s stock fell by more than 5% on Monday to reach $324.90 at the time of publication.
Related: How the Bitcoin model can solve the social media dilemma
Twitter is already working on its own decentralized social media initiative. CEO Jack Dorsey first announced in December 2019 that the platform would be funding a dedicated team to develop a decentralized standard for social media, and recently hired a crypto developer to lead the group. At the time, Dorsey said the aim was to shift away from content hosting and removal to recommendation algorithms directing users’ attention and avoid content that sparks controversy and outrage rather than healthy and informative conversations.
This story is developing and may be updated.
