Cryptocurrency & Mining News - Page 19

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Germany's NFT collection is known as the "non-fungible animals" (NFA) project.

The NFA project is an effort by the WWF to raise awareness and funds for conservation efforts for ten endangered species. The number of artworks per species is limited to the number of each left in the wild, and funds from each artwork will go towards protecting that animal. The endangered animals featured are the Vaquita, Amur tiger, Baltic porpoise, Cross River gorilla, Giant Ibis, Giant panda, Mountain gorilla, Persian leopard, Riverine rabbit, and Saola.

The NFA's use the "green" Polygon blockchain, an Ethereum sidechain. According to the WWF-NFA website, Polygon uses proof-of-stake validation instead of proof-of-work to ensure low power consumption. A single transaction on the Polygon blockchain uses only "0.001kWh of electricity, and has the equivalent carbon emissions of 1 pint of tap water, charging 0.036 phones or boiling 0.014 cups of tea."

Russia's central bank has been pushing the government for an outright ban on cryptocurrencies, citing that digital dollars are a threat to Russia's financial system.

Despite the pleads from the Bank of Russia to ban cryptocurrencies, the Kremlin has seen an opportunity to make money by regulating the sector and has provided estimates for the total market value held by Russians. According to a report from Bloomberg, Russians currently hold more than 16.5 trillion rubles or $214 billion worth of cryptocurrencies in various forms, which is about 12% of the total value of global holdings, or around a third of Russia's stock index market capitalization.

The publication reports that two people working on the regulation proposals said that these estimates were conceived through an analysis of IP addresses from people that were visiting the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It should be noted that Russia is also the third-highest country for Bitcoin mining, and while the Bank of Russia urges the Kremlin to do a sweeping ban on cryptocurrencies, the Russian government seem to have obeyed the demands of Russia's President Vladamir Putin, who instructed authorities to create a regulatory process for the emerging currency.

An infamous streamer and YouTuber has been exposed for scamming his audience out of $500,000 through a cryptocurrency scheme.

The streamer and YouTuber is Paul "Ice Poseidon" Denino, who previously streamed on Twitch before the platform banned him back in 2017. Since then, Ice Poseidon has been streaming on YouTube, where he used his audience to secure investments into a cryptocurrency that he created called CxCoin, which Poseidon claimed would be a platform that streamers would be able to use to receive donations in cryptocurrencies.

The project received around $500,000 in donations, and according to Coffeezilla, a YouTuber that investigates other content creators for fraud, Ice Poseidon withdrew $300,000 out of the projects liquidity pool after stating that the invested funds were "locked" and that he wasn't able to pull the rug out from under the project "even if he wanted to". Coffeezilla interviewed Poseidon where he expressed little remorse for his actions, saying that he was "looking out" for himself and that it was everyone else's fault for "putting too much emotion into it".

Despite the mainstream hate of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), one of the world's largest festivals is fully adopting them by offering lifetime passes to all of its concerts.

Coachella Valley Music & Arts has partnered with FTX US to release a selection of NFTs that are built on the Solana blockchain. According to the announcement, Coachella will auction off 10 key NFT's that will serve as lifetime passes to all Coachella festivals. The keys also come with perks for the Coachella 2022, such as front row access, dinner made by a celebrity chef, or on-stage access at a Sahara Tent.

Additionally, Coachella is releasing two more collections of NFTs, one will include a 1,000-piece collection that will start at $180 apiece that will allow buyers to redeem a physical photo book from the festival and the other being a 10,000-piece digital collection that starts at $60 apiece. Coachella will be auctioning these NFTs on its own website as well as the FTX NFT marketplace.

The world's biggest Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace has broken its previous record for total monthly trading volume that was set back in August 2021.

The leading NFT marketplace, OpenSea, has reportedly broken its record for highest monthly trading volume as data obtained by Dune Analytics indicates that the NFT marketplace had more than $4.95 billion worth of Ethereum traded on its platform throughout January 2022. Additionally, the data indicates that $79 million in Polygon was also traded throughout the month, breaking its previous record of $76 million.

Back in August, 2021, the NFT space exploded, and with it came an explosion in trading volume on marketplaces. OpenSea's previous monthly trading volume record hit $3.4 billion in August, and recently the platform also had its single best day for Ethereum NFT trading, with a staggering $233 million traded in a 24 hour period. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

Michael Saylor, the CEO of software company MicroStrategy recently interviewed former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey.

During the interview, Saylor asked Dorsey how Bitcoin could assist corporations and everyday people in solving some fundamental problems, to which Dorsey says that the internet having a native currency opens many doors for "internet companies, technology companies, but more importantly for everyday people, activists, people who have questions in the world, curiosity, and recognizing that the currency systems just aren't working for them".

Dorsey, who left Twitter last year to focus on Bitcoin, mentioned Facebook, who recently re-branded to "Meta", shouldn't have been focussing its efforts on creating its own cryptocurrency and instead should have been "making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world."

Scams have been plaguing the NFT space for quite some time now, and with so many new projects coming out it's difficult to determine which ones will hold their value and which ones won't.

An example of a project "not holding its value", or purely being a scam is The Big Daddy Ape Club, an obvious rip-off project of the immensely popular/expensive Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that have been purchased and promoted by a variety of celebrities and athletes. Individuals that invested into The Big Daddy Ape Club were scammed as the NFTs were never minted by the creator, who ended up walking out with approximately $1.13 million.

The individuals behind The Big Daddy Ape Club secured "verification" from the a decentralized-identity-verification company called Civic, based in San Francisco, which may now result in investors coming after Civic for providing "verification" on a project that was a scam. Additionally, new policies are being created by insurers to protect NFTs and digital assets, however, insurers first advise that investors take the necessary steps in doing their own due diligence in researching the project to find out if its legitimate.

The world's largest NFT marketplace has said on Twitter that 80% of the NFTs created with its free tool are scams.

OpenSea took to Twitter to announce that it has decided to roll back the recent decision to add a 50 item limit to the free NFT minting tool after the community voiced its disapproval of the restriction. OpenSea stated that "we hear you and we're sorry", and then continued to offer an explanation for why the decision was made in the first place. In follow-up tweets, the NFT marketplace writes that every decision it makes is with its creators in mind, but it has recently observed the free NFT minting tool exponentially being misused.

"Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam." OpenSea goes on to write that the company "didn't make this decision lightly" and operated on feedback obtained "from the entire community", but admits it "should have previewed this with you before rolling it out." The NFT marketplace finishes up by writing its currently working on new ways to prevent these scam NFTs created by bad actors are deterred away from the platform.

President Joe Biden has recently announced that cryptocurrencies and NFTs are in his metaphorical iron sights as the president moves to implement regulation for digital assets.

Reports are surfacing about the Biden administration currently preparing an executive action that will task federal regulatory agencies with implementing regulation on digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs and other forms of digital assets as a "matter of national security". Barron's reports that a person familiar with the White House's plan said, "This is designed to look holistically at digital assets and develop a set of policies that give coherency to what the government is trying to do in this space."

Federal agencies such as the State Department, Treasury Department, National Economic Council, Council of Economic Advisers, Security and Exchange Commission, White House National Security Council, and more would be involved in the regulatory effort. Additionally, the report states that the White House won't be issuing recommendations to federal agencies as it will act as a policy coordinator. Regulators will be given three to six months to create proposals for the regulation of digital assets, which the White House will then vet.

Your day starts out by preparing for a raid on a dangerous facility where you're about to bust the doors down on an illegal marijuana farm, but then the doors get kicked down and all you can hear is the buzzing of a bunch of computers running instead.

That's what happened when the Spanish National Police discovered massive amounts of electricity being used, but the facility was illegally hooked up to the electricity grid. Once authorities were there, they discovered it wasn't a weed farm but a crypto farm instead.

Spanish National Police explained (through machine translation): "Police investigations began on a possible indoor marijuana plantation that could be located in some stables located in Santiponce. After carrying out the first inquiries, the agents realized that the existing indications did not correspond to the cultivation of marijuana, but rather that these facilities could be hosting a cryptocurrency farm of which there are hardly any records in Spain".