Original: https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-web3-and-what-is-its-role-in-nfts-learn
By: Kade Garrett
Posted: November 26, 2022, 8:46 am

Original: https://decrypt.co/115585/several-us-states-open-investigation-into-crypto-lender-genesis-report
By: Jason Nelson
Posted: November 25, 2022, 8:15 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/115584/dogecoin-gets-double-digit-black-friday-pump
By: Mathew Di Salvo
Posted: November 25, 2022, 8:08 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/25/jihan-wus-crypto-lender-matrixport-looks-to-raise-100m-at-15b-valuation/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Eliza Gkritsi
Posted: November 25, 2022, 6:44 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/25/crypto-exchange-huobi-denies-rumors-it-will-merge-with-poloniex/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Jamie Crawley
Posted: November 25, 2022, 6:01 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/115568/binance-launches-proof-reserve-system-for-bitcoin-ethereum-coming-near-future
By: Andrew Asmakov
Posted: November 25, 2022, 2:19 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/115558/binance-removes-trading-pairs-solana-based-exchange-serum-token
By: Will McCurdy
Posted: November 25, 2022, 12:38 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-a-blue-chip-nft
By: Euny Hong,Jason Nelson
Posted: November 25, 2022, 11:16 am

Original: https://decrypt.co/115486/infura-collect-metamask-users-ip-ethereum-addresses-after-privacy-policy-update
By: Will McCurdy
Posted: November 24, 2022, 11:45 am

Original: https://decrypt.co/resources/nft-real-life-use-cases
By: Kate Irwin
Posted: November 23, 2022, 6:31 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/115433/how-a-tiny-startup-beat-magic-eden-and-rarible-to-build-apecoins-nft-marketplace
By: Andrew Hayward
Posted: November 23, 2022, 5:01 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/115390/mango-market-hacker-loses-millions-in-failed-aave-scheme
By: Sander Lutz
Posted: November 23, 2022, 2:10 am

In an industry first, Input Output Global and the Scottish university will provide continuous tracking of digital assets by a methodology that has yet to be determined.

The University of Edinburgh and Input Output Global (IOG), the builder of the Cardano network, have teamed up to create a blockchain decentralization index, IOG announced on its blog. The new service is the first of its kind and will use a “research-based” methodology developed at the university. 

The Edinburgh Decentralization Index (EDI) has been in development for several months and was introduced in Edinburgh on Nov. 18, but it is not yet operational, according to IOG:

“The first step for the tracker is the creation of research papers detailing decentralization metrics and a considered methodology for compiling them into an index, created by researchers at the University of Edinburgh. It will then operate in the same way as other industry indexes.”

When launched, the EDI will provide live tracking of assets “underpinned by a continuously calculated and reviewed methodology.”

Related: Blockchain firms fund university research hubs to advance growth

There are currently no standards for the decentralization of digital assets. “What we’re currently missing is universally accepted industry standards which define to what extent projects are decentralized. The EDI will allow us to ensure that users have full transparency around what they are participating in,” IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson said in the blog post. Hoskinson was alluding to the fact that users currently have no way to judge to what extent digital assets are decentralized. 

Presentation of the Edinburgh Decentralization Index by @sol3gga et al.

It measures decentralization of blockchain networks beyond counting the number of validators and their power (weight) over the system (consensus protocol).

This is a major leap forward for our industry pic.twitter.com/SJBe5OGpF3

— Romain Pellerin (@rom1_pellerin) November 18, 2022

Although decentralization by itself is no guarantee of quality, the dismal performance of centralized crypto asset platforms in recent months has kindled new concern about it. “The establishment wants controlled crypto,” tweeted Balaji Srivasan, former executive at Coinbase and Andreesen Horowitz. “Had FTX won, they’d control through centralization. With FTX lost, they want control through regulation. At no point was the goal consumer protection.”

Kadena CEO Stuart Popejoy had a similar but more moderate outlook. “CeFi is a ‘necessary evil’ today, and maybe it will always have its role in crypto,” he tweeted. “The answer is to return to the roots of #blockchain: decentralization & transparency. And while DeFi might look like the obvious solution, it still can't replace CeFi, for reasons obvious and not-so-obvious. The core problem is scalability.”

In addition, decentralization is central to the determination of whether a crypto asset is a security, at least in the United States, where the question is central to the future development of regulation.

Original: https://cointelegraph.com/news/decentralization-index-from-cardano-builder-u-of-edinburgh-will-help-users-understand-assets
By: Derek Andersen
Posted: November 19, 2022, 4:00 pm

Though Dogecoin has seen a near 45% rally over the past month, its use cases remain limited, especially given that it can’t interact with smart contracts.

2022 continues to be a year of surprises, with one of the biggest so far being Elon Musk’s decision to acquire social media juggernaut Twitter for a whopping $44 billion. While the takeover has set into motion a whole host of debates — particularly those pertaining to Big Tech censorship — it has also called into question the future of Dogecoin (DOGE), a digital currency of which the billionaire has been a big proponent over the last couple of years.

To put things into perspective, just hours before Musk tweeted that “the bird is freed” on Oct. 27, the price of DOGE was hovering around $0.07. However, by Nov. 1, it had surged to $0.16, bringing the total market capitalization of the so-called memecoin to a sizable $21 billion. And while DOGE is currently trading close to $0.08, its 30-day profit ratio is greater than 40%.

It is also worth noting that every time Musk has tweeted in support of the digital asset, its value has skyrocketed quite dramatically. For example, throughout 2021, he continued to refer to DOGE as the “people’s crypto,” a message that sent the currency’s value flying by a whopping 4,000% over the course of the year.

Moreover, Tesla — an American multinational automotive and clean energy company helmed by Musk — started accepting DOGE as payment for its merchandise in January 2022, including its “Giga Texas” belt buckles and miniature vehicle replicas. Furthermore, Musk’s recently released joke fragrance, Burnt Hair, could also be purchased with DOGE.

A bleak future for DOGE?

To get a better idea of whether Musk’s Twitter takeover and constant support of DOGE stand to make an indelible mark on the digital currency’s financial future, Cointelegraph reached out to Lior Yaffe, co-founder of Switzerland-based blockchain software company Jelurida. Yaffe does not have too much faith in Dogecoin, judging from the poor decision-making displayed by Musk so far, adding:

“From paying too much for Twitter to causing companywide mayhem by firing many good employees and making terrible management decisions such as the blue check episode, I’m not optimistic about either Twitter or Dogecoin.”

Furthermore, he claimed he would be surprised if Musk can bring any real use cases to Dogecoin, noting that even if Musk intends to somehow integrate Twitter with crypto payments — which is a very difficult task — he doubts they will be able to achieve such a dream in the near future. “Even if they do manage to build a payment system around Twitter, there are much better blockchain solutions than Dogecoin to choose from with regards to security, privacy, smart contracts and scaling,” he stated.

Recent: Could Hong Kong really become China’s proxy in crypto?

Henry Liu, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BTSE, told Cointelegraph that after taking into consideration the current macroeconomic environment, he foresees the price of DOGE continuing to remain highly volatile, much in line with the crypto market.

“We expect DOGE to stay speculative in the short run, and there should be reduced liquidity and trading volumes across various platforms. If DOGE can be given new utility regarding its collaboration with Twitter, we may foresee a spike driven by social media communities,” he said.

Not everyone is so skeptical

Nikita Zuborev, chief analyst for cryptocurrency exchange BestChange, told Cointelegraph that while one cannot discount the fact that the growth of meme tokens often happens suddenly and unreasonably, Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter could potentially boost DOGE’s price, mainly because one cannot rule out the possibility of the asset being integrated into the firm’s social network ecosystem in the future. He added:

“If that happens, then the previously useless memecoin will turn into the platform’s central control token of sorts, reaching a massive audience in the process. Such a transformation will be able to bring the coin several use cases, something that many investors are betting on.”

To further strengthen his argument, Zuborev pointed to the upcoming launch of the SpaceX-backed Doge-1 lunar satellite, which is directly related to the brand of the coin. “These kinds of moves stand to provoke high demand in DOGE’s market and price growth,” he claimed. 

That being said, he did concede that as long as the asset’s primary selling point remains rooted in its meme-centric outlook, it would only be wise to add the currency to one’s portfolio just to diversify it. However, as a standalone investment, he does not give much merit to DOGE.

“Besides Dogecoin, Musk has repeatedly spoken quite positively about Bitcoin as well, a crypto that is far more stable and can be integrated into Twitter’s ecosystem easily. One can consider it as an alternative to DOGE, especially to capitalize on Musk’s continued market manipulations," he said.

DOGE’s utility is still minimal, and that’s a fact

Thanks to Musk’s affinity for Dogecoin and his recent takeover of Twitter, it stands to reason that speculation regarding the asset’s price will run amok, at least for some more time. That being said, the fact remains that Dogecoin as a crypto project is still quite limited in its operational utility, a sentiment echoed by Daniel Elsawey, co-founder and CEO of decentralized exchange TideFi.

Taking a more holistic view of the matter, he told Cointelegraph that cryptocurrencies in the digital asset space today fall into two distinct categories: those with smart contract capabilities and those without. In his opinion, the market as a whole is moving toward the tokenization of items in our day-to-day lives, and this is what stands to tip the adoption curve of digital assets toward one side or the other. He added:

“Given that DOGE cannot directly interact with smart contracts as part of its original design, I would say that unless it’s specifically used as an option for payment, the use cases associated will continue to remain speculative.”

Lastly, given that the crypto industry is still in its relative infancy, it continues to remain heavily dependent on Bitcoin (BTC), tracing its price movements quite heavily. Moreover, volatility continues to pervade the market due to the recent downfall of crypto exchange FTX, something that will have a direct effect on the price of most cryptocurrencies in the near to mid-term. “Dogecoin is no different in this respect. There is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the asset,” Elsawey concluded.

Recent: Banks still show interest in digital assets and DeFi amid market chaos

As we head into a future driven by a high degree of economic turbulence — across a myriad of financial sectors — it will be interesting to see how the future of Dogecoin plays out moving forward, especially as projects with limited use cases continue to be wiped out from the market seemingly with each passing day.

Original: https://cointelegraph.com/news/is-doge-really-worth-the-hype-even-after-musk-s-twitter-buyout
By: Shiraz Jagati
Posted: November 19, 2022, 3:36 pm

Soulbound tokens (SBTs) refer to digital identity tokens that represent the characteristics or reputation of a person or entity.

By creating an alternative financial system with extraordinary flexibility and innovation in less than ten years, Web3 has astounded the globe. Economic and cryptographic primitives such as smart contracts and consensus mechanisms have helped to create an open-source system to conduct and authorize financial transactions.

However, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem cannot support straightforward contracts like an apartment lease because it lacks a native Web3 identity. This article aims to demonstrate how even modest advances toward social identity representation with soulbound tokens could circumvent these constraints and reroute Web3 to an authentic, more transformational path. 

What are soulbound tokens (SBTs)?

Projects and use cases focusing on social identities and communities rather than just money are required for blockchains to be at the core of collaborative and fascinating ecosystems. To address this issue, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, along with Puja Ohlhaver, strategy counsel at FlashBots, and E. Glen Weyl, political economist and social technologist, introduced the concept of soulbound tokens in a paper titled “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.”

According to the authors, soulbound tokens provide the basis for a decentralized society (DeSoc), which is a co-determined sociality in which communities and souls come together bottom-up as emergent features of one another to co-create plural network goods and bits of intelligence at various scales. A soulbound token is a publicly verifiable and non-transferable nonfungible token (NFT) that represents an individual’s credentials, affiliations and commitments. So, what is a non-transferable token?

Non-transferable tokens refer to NFTs that can help track reputation and are added to addresses but cannot be sold. But what does “Souls” refer to in soulbound NFTs? The wallets or accounts to which SBTs or non-transferable tokens are permanently bound are called Souls. For instance, a Soul can represent an individual’s employment history, which can be self-certified similar to information in one’s curriculum vitae.  

But, when SBTs possessed by one Soul can be issued — or attested — by other Souls who are counterparties (e.g., individuals or organizations) to these relationships, that is when the mechanism’s true power is revealed. For instance, the Ethereum Foundation might be a Soul that awards SBTs to those who attended an Ethereum conference. According to the paper, the concept of “plural network groups” refers to interactions and communications within the networks and are the most critical drivers of economic growth.

How do soulbound tokens work?

Soulbound tokens may assist Web3 networks in using non-transferable tokens as reputation indicators rather than relying upon money-centric frameworks to achieve the same. For instance, the lender currently verifies the borrower’s bank account balances, credit scores and repayment history to offer an undercollateralized loan. 

However, with SBTs representing one’s credentials, reputation will act as collateral to get an undercollateralized loan. Now, if you recall the fundamental concept of NFTs, they represent property or assets with some monetary value. But, how to verify someone’s reputation in a blockchain-based trustless system?

To understand this concept and the working of SBTs in the Web3 space, let’s take an example of a decentralized autonomous organization’s (DAO) voting system. Most DAO governance models assign voting power based on the number of tokens held by a member. 

Nonetheless, DAOs issuing SBTs could prioritize reputation over tokens owned by a member. The reputation can be verified via users’ interactions with the community. For instance, trophies earned from Kusama’s Governance Rewards program for every on-chain referendum member votes in can be used to represent their reputation. 

That said, trophies serve as a visual representation of a member’s on-chain activity in Kusama and Polkadot DAOs, which may now be sufficient security for an undercollateralized loan. Additionally, a reputation-based voting system may defend DAOs against Sybil attacks.

A Sybil attack involves one or more bad actors taking control of the majority of the governance tokens to redirect the project’s direction in their favor. Soulbound tokens being publicly verifiable, can protect DAOs from falling into the trap of bad actors. For instance, souls holding respectable SBTs may be assigned majority voting power to protect the integrity of decentralized autonomous organizations.

However, do soulbound tokens exist? There are a few examples of how soulbound tokens can be utilized in the Web3 world, which is described in the below section. But. when will soulbound tokens be available? Binance Account Bound (BAB) will be the first SBT issued on the BNB chain by Binance. The BAB token will not have any monetary value and cannot be transferred.

It will serve as a digital verification solution for Binance customers that have completed Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. Additionally, third-party protocols can utilize BAB SBTs to facilitate DAO governance voting and airdrop, among other use cases. 

 

READ ALSO

What is KYC, and why do crypto exchanges require it?

by Cointelegraph

3 months ago

How can soulbound tokens be used?

In everyday life, there are many use cases of SBTs in Web3, as explained below:

NFT ownership

Artists can get rid of dishonest individuals selling NFT collections under the guise of famous artists by linking soulbound tokens to their artistic profile. SBTs would allow buyers to trace the social provenance, whereas blockchain inclusion enables them to track when a specific work was created. 

For instance, a tradeable NFT could be issued by an artist from their Soul to help buyers recognize an artist’s work by the number of soulbound tokens it contains, establishing the legitimacy of the nonfungible token. As a result, Souls would develop a publicly-verified, on-chain method for staking and develop a reputation around the provenance and rarity of an item.

Job vacancies

Soulbound tokens representing a candidate’s educational credentials like degree and professional certificates and previous work history can be used as proof of skill to meet the human resource needs of an organization.

Gaming

A user’s Web3 activity can be tracked using SBTs, which can be converted into non-transferable reputation tokens inside game avatars that can only be leveled up in this method. This means being a good Web3 citizen: You can level up instead of playing the game, giving your avatar non-transferable skills and experience.

 

READ ALSO

A beginner's guide to the GameFi ecosystem

by Cointelegraph

5 months ago

Verification of borrowers’ credit history

Traditional credit reports may also be represented by SBTs, giving lenders access to a borrower’s whole credit profile. And, the SBT may be replaced by payment documentation or deleted once the loan has been repaid. As a result, people cannot hide their ongoing obligations.

Souldrops

Web3 has been mainly dependent on token sales or airdrops to entice new communities, but both methods provide mediocre results. As an alternative, Souldrops can be issued using SBTs, for instance, to developers with 5 out of the last 10 conference attendance soulbound tokens serving as a proof of attendance protocol (POAP). People can use POAPs, a special NFT, to demonstrate that they attended a live or recorded event.

What are the benefits of soulbound tokens?

One of the advantages of using soulbound tokens for credential verification purposes is that since information is permanently replicated on the blockchain, no one can falsify it. Moreover, any awards and certificates earned by an individual can be publicly verifiable via SBTs. Furthermore, since authenticity cannot be purchased through soulbound tokens, it fosters confidence among tokenholders and the general public.

Additionally, protocols will be able to check borrowers’ credit histories and evaluate their credit scores to determine how much they can borrow, thanks to soulbound NFTs. Moreover, SBTs restrict Web3 projects from becoming a cash bag by making digital representations non-tradable. That said, an individual cannot buy NFTs; instead, they need to put effort into earning them.

Are there any risks associated with soulbound tokens?

Along with lucrative advantages, soulbound tokens have some cons, too. For example, the current wallet mix may not be ideal for SBTs due to the lack of community recovery methods. As a result, community recovery wallets need a wide variety of soulbound tokens dispersed throughout several communities to recover lost Souls.

A solution to the above lies in a community recovery strategy, in which a Soul’s private keys can be obtained if consent by a qualified majority of one of the communities (that the Soul belongs to) is received..

However, some people or organizations might recognize interests that conflict with their own ideology, which could theoretically lead to harassment, violence or even trolling, indicating a privacy concern as an individual’s personal information is exposed.

Theoretically, SBT-based credit systems could lead to dystopian ecosystems (where freedom and independent thought is restricted) like China’s social credit system, where specific social groupings are automatically excluded owing to the presence of specific soulbound tokens.

SBTs vs. NFTs

Nonfungible tokens can be bought and sold via NFT marketplaces, whereas soulbound tokens are non-transferable NFTs because they’re bound to the Soul. A summary of the differences between SBTs and NFTs is listed in the table below:

Although NFTs cannot be altered or duplicated, they are easily transferable, which could be a problem if they are utilized by someone with access authorization without first being granted to a holder. Therefore, soulbound tokens are tied to a particular Soul address and can be verified via on-chain credentials, restricting anyone from modifying them.

The future of soulbound tokens

The concept of soulbound tokens, despite being interesting, is quite new and cannot replace the NFT ecosystem. Instead, it can serve as an alternative way of identity control, allowing DAOs, for instance, to better engage with their community members.

However, it remains to be seen if both SBTs and NFTs will co-exist until DeSoc becomes a reality in the Web3 space or if SBTs alone can serve as digital identity tokens in the decentralized world. 

Original: https://cointelegraph.com/news/what-are-soulbound-tokens-sbts-and-how-do-they-work
By: Jagjit Singh
Posted: November 19, 2022, 1:00 pm