Nifty news: Polyient marketplace, Ronaldinho drop, and a ‘staggering’ $4800 NFT sale …

July 30, 2021 Coin Telegraph

<div>Nifty news: Polyient marketplace, Ronaldinho drop, and a 'staggering' 00 NFT sale ...</div>

Polyient is launching an NFT marketplace with DeFi features, Ronaldinho has entered the NFT market and Vitalik Buterin has digitally signed an NFT for very little money.

Investment firm and development studio Polyient has unveiled an NFT marketplace with decentralized finance (DeFi) functionality.

The marketplace dubbed “PolyientX” is set for a beta release in August on Ethereum, with an official launch targeted for sometime in the Fall. The initial launch will feature NFTs from Ape In, a DeFi-enabled NFT collectibles game, and Rate Network, a decentralized NFT pricing, and rating protocol.

According to Polyient, users can stake their NFTs in a vault to earn rewards, describing it as “a unique fee share mechanism where users, not corporate stakeholders, are the beneficiaries of transaction activity on the platform.”

There’s also a new token launch method dubbed the “Initial Vault Sale” (IVS), which enables projects to leverage their supporters’ NFT assets “to mint and distribute utility and governance tokens, reward marketplace participation and build sustainable economies.”

Interested in migrating your NFT project to PolyientX? Apply for early accesshttps://t.co/OLE1nTmTDg
— PolyientX (@PolyientX) July 28, 2021

Blockchain-based Ronaldinho

Global soccer icon Ronaldinho is launching a new NFT collection in collaboration with creative studio INFLUXO.

The former Paris Saint-Germain, F.C Barcelona and AC Milan star joins a long list of star athletes to enter the NFT sector such as boxer Tyson Fury, NFL players Rob Gronkowski and Patrick Mahomes, and skateboarding icon Tony Hawk.

Are you ready for @influxo_NFT ? A pioneer of future digital collectibles https://t.co/9EYB3cCbG1 pic.twitter.com/onUDeqbxEn
— Ronaldinho Gaúcho (@10Ronaldinho) July 29, 2021

The NFTs are being sold in two different drops, the first drop features seven unique “masterpiece” NFTs that depict vivid paintings of key moments in Ronaldinho’s career.

The auctions will take minimum increment bids of $10,000, and the NFTs come with a private meetup and dinner with Ronaldinho in Dubai, a roundtrip ticket to get you there and a two-day stay at a five-star hotel. It is unclear if Ronaldinho will be cooking up a storm, or if the dinner will be at a restaurant.

The second drop of “sports legend card NFTs” includes a set of six collector cards which users can purchase for an unspecified price. They will be airdropped an additional card NFT that accompanies the series, and if they collect all six NFTs plus the airdropped token, they will be entered into a sweepstake for a chance to win the “Dubai experience” from the masterpiece NFTs.

The sale is being hosted on INFLUXO and the NFT drop date reads “coming soon.”

Animoca Brands acquires blowfish

Top NFT game and property developer Animoca Brands (F1 Delta Time, The Sandbox) has acquired Blowfish Studios, an indie game developer for around $6.6 million. The acquisition also includes payments of around $19.2 million on conditional employment and performance targets.

Animoca made the announcement on July 29, and noted that it will be working closely with Blowfish to “align efforts relating to blockchain integration, fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), play-to-earn capabilities, synergy opportunities, and product launches.”

Blowfish is a Sydney-based firm founded in 2010 by Benjamin Lee, a veteran of the computer software and 3D graphics industry, and Aaron Grove, an award-winning visual effects supervisor.

The firm has published several multi-platform games such as “Qbism, Siegecraft, Morphite, Projection: First Light, and Storm Boy.”

“Animoca Brands is incredibly thrilled to welcome Blowfish, a team that significantly expands our capacity in the cross-platform games space and that has a strong interest in and understanding of blockchain,” said Yat Siu, the co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands.

Vitalik signs up for Mark Cuban-backed NFT platform

NFT platform “AlchemyNFT” announced a $6 million funding round on July 29. It was backed by Crypto.com Capital, Framework Ventures, Mechanism and billionaire entrepreneur (and DeFi rug-pull victim) Mark Cuban.

The funds will go towards a new project dubbed “AutographNFT” that enables the signing of unique digital assets such as NFTs with social network IDs. According to the firm Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin was one of the first to digitally sign his autograph at the project's beta launch.

The AutographNFT platform enables NFT creators to seek out popular “Twitter-verified” figures and offer them money to autograph an NFT. The platform gives the signer the option to donate all or some of their “signing” proceeds to a charity such as “Save the Kids.”

According to the listing of “The Alchemist” NFT, Buterin was paid 0.1 ETH, worth around $243, to sign the NFT.

Publicist claims NFT sale of $4800 is a 'staggering' sum

Public relations media releases are often full of hyperbolic jargon and puffery that paints an all too pretty picture.

But we had to laugh at a July 28 PR announcement from Kinahan’s Whiskey Co. in which the sale of an NFT for $4800 was described as a “staggering” amount of money.

“The Kinahan’s branded 3D Formula Racing Car sold to an NFT collector for a staggering $4800 following Lewis Hamilton’s thrilling win at the British Grand Prix,” the announcement breathlessly said.

While this may be exciting news for the Irish Whiskey firm, they may not realize that NFTs of questionable value have sold for much higher prices. Cointelegraph reported in February that Lindsay Lohan sold an NFT for an even more earth-shattering $15,000 on Rarible. And there were rumors some guy called Beeple or Bongo or something flogged an NFT for $69 million.

“This NFT is the first of its kind in the whiskey industry. Notice that precious word, ‘first’. There are many models of a McLaren, but if you own the first one, you own a piece of history,” the announcement read.

Roundup

Cointelegraph reported on July 28 that multinational beverage giant Coca-Cola is entering the NFT market.

The firm will hold a three-day auction on OpenSea for NFTs depicting the famous beverage, and the proceeds will be used to raise money for Special Olympics International.

Earlier this week, tokenized cats once again caused chaos on the Ethereum network after a nonfungible token (NFT) project dubbed “Stoner Cats” created by actress Mila Kunis sold out in 35 minutes.

The project’s first drop had a total of 10,420 NFTs, and activity on Ethereum sent gas prices as high as 709 Gwei ($33.67) for a rapid transaction.

Mila Kunis’ ‘Stoner Cats’ NFT Sale Pulls in $8M — Animated Series Can Only Be Watched by NFT Holders

July 29, 2021 Bitcoin.com

Relief Fund Has a Difficult Time Cashing Out the $1B Worth of SHIB Vitalik Buterin Donated

July 28, 2021 Bitcoin.com

Buterin’s $1B SHIB donation tricky to cash out, says fund manager

July 28, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Buterin’s B SHIB donation tricky to cash out, says fund manager

Charity

Realizing Vitalik Buterin's $1 billion donation in Shiba Inu coins to the Covid Crypto Relief Fund in India has turned out to be a labyrinthine process for the fund's creator.

Just $20 million of the $1 billion in cryptocurrency that Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated to a Covid-19 relief fund in India has so far been cashed out and distributed to aid recipients. Figuring out why the process is not as frictionless as crypto users would hope is the focus of a recent interview with the fund's founder, Sandeep Nailwal.

Cointelegraph readers will recall that this May, Buterin’s decision to liquidate several of his memecoin positions and donate the proceeds to various charities had prompted panic and admiration in equal helpings.

Panic, firstly, among those traders who rushed to lock in their profits amid the price collapses that Buterin’s sell-offs inevitably triggered – specifically in the previously popular tokens Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Dogelon Mars (ELON), which each saw their prices drop by over 40%.

Even among traders, however, there was some recognition that the price dumps affecting these intensely hyped coins would provide some respite from rising transaction costs on the Ethereum network. Moreover, when it transpired that Buterin had donated the proceeds to several charities – Gitcoin, Give Well and India Covid Crypto Relief Fund – many in the community welcomed the move, particularly as India was in the throes of an unprecedented and deadly wave of Covid-19 infections.

However, a couple of months down the line, the founder of the India Covid Relief Fund has shared some of the difficulties involved in cashing out Buterin’s generous contribution. So far, just $20 million has been paid out, with a further $20 million planned for the near future.

The fund’s founder, Sandeep Nailwal – who also co-founded Polygon (formerly Matic) – told reporters that some of the delays are due to his caution and desire to ensure the funds reach grassroots organizations transparently to places they are most urgently needed. To this end, he plans to hire a reputable auditor to help oversee the process as it continues.

Moreover, due to the price crashes Buterin’s liquidations triggered, the initial $1 billion in value that the 50 trillion Shiba Inu coins represented at the time of their sale soon dwindled by around 50%. Nailwal has estimated their eventual total value is likely to be around $400 million.

Disbursing the funds has also come up against a mountain of red tape, with the requirement to comply with India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act as the tokens are converted into dollars and then rupees. Roughly 80% have reportedly been converted thus far.

As they slowly come through, the crypto funds are reportedly being distributed to food distributors nationwide and an organization working on establishing mini-intensive care wards for Covid-19 patients in rural India.

As he continues with this cumbersome process, Naiwal also voiced his fears about the prospect of a third wave of infections in the country, which has already reported an official death toll of over 400,000. Recent reports, however, suggest the real figure could be as high as 4 million.

Prior to memecoins, Buterin had also sent 100 ETH and 100 MKR to Naiwal’s fund, valued at $220,000 and $400,000 at the time respectively.

NFT animation ‘Stoner Cats’ preps for launch following delay

July 27, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Business

After a false start yesterday, the Stoner Cats team say they're now ready for take two.

A cat-themed animated series, featuring prominent entertainers and personalities from the crypto space, is reportedly back on schedule after an unexpected delay.

Stoner Cats is an NFT series launched by actress Mila Kunis in partnership with CryptoKitties co-founder Mack Flavelle, CryptoPoops NFT creator Jonathan Howard, and others through their recent endeavor Big Head Club. The project is scheduled to launch at 5:00 PM EST today after a false start prevented the tokens from dropping on Monday. The project's NFTs, which feature characters from the show, will allow holders to watch episodes as they're produced and, at some future point, may also allow some form of governance over the studio's production decisions.

"We are ready for the launch tonight and excited,” Flavelle told Cointelegraph, before going on to acknowledge the difficulties experienced during yesterday's not-quite-launch:

"People's time is the most valuable thing they have and we took their time. So I totally understand their frustration."

Yesterday, Flavelle told disgruntled cat fans on Discord that “we f--ked it up” after the team found a bug in the underlying art layers which could have affected the project's NFTs. The group's Twitter account said it was “working on some tech issues” before eventually announcing the sale would be pushed to Tuesday.

Many crypto users were seemingly frustrated at the delay, with some in Europe and Asia reporting they had stayed up late due to the time zone difference for the project that “failed to mint.”

Despite the issues, the project continues to attract a lot of attention due to the involvement of major celebrities including Mila Kunis, Jane Fonda, Ashton Kutcher, Seth MacFarlane, and Chris Rock. All cast members will reportedly be paid in Ether (ETH), including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who said he would donate his pay for the project to the SENS Foundation — a non-profit organization researching the applications of regenerative medicine to aging.

“I think people are starting to understand it’s not about access to the first piece of content,” said Kutcher in a discussion with Howard today. “It’s about access to the ongoing content that will be created as a result of this.”

The actor added:

“Anybody who’s holding the NFT fundamentally has their own theater. They are the owner of the ticket kiosk for the future.”

There will be 10,420 initial cat NFTs available at a price of 0.35 ETH — roughly $784 at the time of publication. The price of Ether jumped to more than $2,400 yesterday but has since dropped to the $2,200s.

The first episode of Stoner Cats — titled "Stoned Awakening" — is set to premiere on July 29, and will be available to participants of today's sale.

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Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher has uploaded a video featuring Vitalik Buterin explaining Ethereum from his lounge room.

Actor and venture capitalist, Ashton Kutcher, has published a video to Twitter featuring himself, his wife Mila Kunis, and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, to explain the project to newcomers

For the first minute, the video shows Kutcher quizzing Kunis on basic terms relating to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in a living area of their home.

After Kunis offers simple one-sentence definitions to explain “crypto,” “blockchain,” and “decentralization,” Kutcher asks for a description of Ethereum. The camera then pans to the right, moving past Kunis to reveal Buterin seated at a table.

Welcome to kutcher kitchen talks EP 1 #KryptoWithKunis #StonerCats #nft #eth ⁦@stonercatstv⁩ ⁦@VitalikButerin⁩ https://t.co/uuejuNJZp9 pic.twitter.com/qd5QUqRn3z
— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) July 21, 2021

Buterin launches into a lengthy explanation of Ethereum’s fundamental components, articulating how the smart contract protocol differs from “single-purpose” chains, citing Bitcoin as an example of such.

“Ethereum is a general-purpose blockchain [...] an open platform that allows people to build their own applications on top, and anything built on top of Ethereum is protected and secured [...] by an entire network of thousands of computers around the world,” Buterin says.

“Because [Ethereum] supports a programming language, developers have this unlimited creativity in what kinds of things that they actually create on Ethereum. So you can use Ethereum to create cryptocurrencies, or NFTs, or many other kinds of things.”

Kutcher responded: “Yeah, that makes sense.”

The links and hashtags accompanying the video suggest it was created to promote Kunis’ “Stoner Cats” series of nonfungible tokens. People who buy a Stoner Cats NFT also receive access to stream episodes of Kunis’ animated series by the same name. It bills itself as “The first NFT animated series.”

Kutcher is no stranger to NFTs, having tokenized a notepad scribbling in August 2020, with the physical original being incinerated before the token was put up for auction.

His venture capital firm, A-Grade Investments, has also backed top firms in the crypto space, including payment processor BitPay in 2013 and blockchain security company BitGo in 2014.

Ethereum must innovate beyond just DApps for DeFi degens: Vitalik Buterin

July 22, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

As second layer scaling matures for Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin urges the community to grow beyond the confines of DeFi.

During his keynote at the EthCC conference in Paris, Ethereum co-founder and lead developer Vitalik Buterin implored the Ethereum community to innovate beyond the confines of decentralized finance.

Describing non-financial utilities as “the most interesting part of the vision of general-purpose blockchains,” Buterin lamented that financial applications currently “dominate the Ethereum space.”

“Being defined by DeFi is better than being defined by nothing. But it needs to go further.”

Buterin outlines several non-financial applications for Ethereum, including decentralized social media, identity verification and attestation, and retroactive public goods funding.

“Moving beyond DeFi is not about being against DeFi. I actually think [...] the most interesting Ethereum applications are going to combine elements of finance and non-finance,” said Buterin.

“Maybe a few years from now we’ll have a lot of really exciting things [...] that are just providing all kind of very diverse and real value to all kinds of people, not just within the Ethereum ecosystem, but also going far beyond it as well,” he added.

Buterin has already begun work on public goods funding. In a July 21 blog post co-authored by Buterin, layer-two scaling solution, Optimism, pledged to fund open source development through a retroactive rewards protocol, with Optimism committing all profits generated through sequencing to the initiative.

Why DeFi?

Buterin attributes the Ethereum community’s preoccupation with DeFi to two main factors.

Firstly, Vitalik asserted that “finance is just the area where centralized technology sucks the most,” concluding that finance offers a larger domain for decentralization than other centralized industries:

“I can send you a centralized email and you will get it within one second. And sure, maybe various intelligence agencies will read it, but at least you could read it and at least you can read it one second from now. International bank wires do not work that way.”

Buterin also emphasized the prevalence of high fees in pushing the sector toward financial applications, noting:

“The degens can pay for it, the apes can pay for it, the orangutans can pay for it. But if we start talking about a decentralized social media, where every tweet becomes an NFT, then that can’t work if you have $5.22 transaction fees.”

However, Buterin offered that the challenge of high transaction fees “is now being solved” by Ethereum’s growing ecosystem of layer-two networks.

With work to mitigate transaction costs on Ethereum currently underway, Buterin asserts that now is the time to begin exploring how Ethereum can be used to tackle other issues, stating: “the Ethereum ecosystem has to expand beyond just making tokens that help with trading other tokens.”

“If you just take this narrow thing that is DeFi, and you keep pushing it to infinity [...] you’re just gonna get tokens that give you profit from yield farming other currencies that are financial derivatives between other yield farming tokens,” he said.

Despite noting that financial derivatives offer some value to the sector, Buterin warned of the systemic risk associated with complex derivative products, concluding: “Let’s not just do DeFi.”

“These things are valuable up to layer-one and layer-two, [...] but once you get to layer-six, you’re actually increasing the financial instability and the risk this whole thing is going to collapse.”

Ethereum “Has to Expand” Beyond DeFi: Vitalik Buterin

July 21, 2021 The Crypto Briefing

Vitalik Buterin