The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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DYdX Scrapped Promotion Amid “Liveness Check” Backlash: Thursday, the decentralized exchange dYdX implemented restrictions to prevent users from farming a new promotion following community concerns of possible “Sybil attacks” that have unfairly juiced rewards from other platforms by creating multiple blockchain addresses. However, the move sparked other concerns about dYdX’s centralization and ability to gatekeep users. One prominent trader on social media said they will never use dYdX again, with others raising questions about the decentralized nature of dYdX. Trade volume on dYdX has fallen by 35.07% over the past-24 hours, according to Nomics. Coinbase Mispricing Allowed Users in Georgia to Cash Out for 100 Times Rate: A bug on the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange apparently mispriced Georgia’s national currency, the lari (GEL), at $290 rather than $2.90. Users in the eastern European country exploited the bug to pocket thousands of dollars in profit. A Coinbase spokesperson said about 1,000 customers exploited the issue before the exchange could shut it down, leading to"a small non-material" loss. Meanwhile, the corporate owner of Brazil's largest crypto exchange, Mercado Bitcoin, laid off 15% of its workforce on Thursday in its second round of cutbacks. Crypto Developer Brothers Who Faked Most of Solana’s DeFi Ecosystem Left VC Firm After CoinDesk Exposé: Ian and Dylan Macalinao left the $100 million fund, Protagonist VC, they founded in part with profits they earned from running a series on Solana. CoinDesk reported in August how the brothers faked volumes on their stablecoin exchange called Saber and other decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols using secret identities. Their departure is a turnabout for the newcomer crypto VC that had outside accumulated capital and had a growing portfolio. . DeFi Platform Kyber Network Disclosed $265K Exploit and Vowed to Reimburse All Funds: The multi-chain DeFi platform discovered too late a vulnerability on its website that allowed exploiters to run away with approximately $265,000. This attack again highlights the wide range of ways DeFi users are vulnerable to attacks, following a long line of multimillion-dollar attacks. The attack hit two “whale” addresses and did not impact the project’s smart contracts, according to Kyber. – Xinyi Luo |
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Putting the news into perspective |
The Continued Unraveling of Mark Zuckerberg’s Malicious Metaverse What is best in life? Being right about another man’s failures. Watching his allies abandon him. And hearing the lamentations of his stockholders. Call me the world’s happiest cynic, then, because when I predicted the utter and catastrophic failure of Facebook’s rebranding as “Meta” starting less than a year ago, I genuinely didn’t think it would all unravel as quickly and ignominiously as it has. Horizon Worlds, Meta’s intended metaverse, went live in December and, my god, it has been downhill from there. The good news is that we’re getting a lot of free entertainment out of Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to be “the face” of this dead-end transition, and the past few weeks have seen some real highlights, culminating with a transcendently embarrassing appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week. Zuck and his marketing team are still seemingly in thrall to the Meta CEO’s former status as a Silicon Valley wunderkind, evidently blinding them to his nearly supernatural lack of personal appeal. The results are frequently, in a word, delicious for a hater like me. And while the sizzle comes in the form of incredible public relations embarrassments, after that comes the steak: Facebook’s pivot to Meta is crashing and burning as a material business proposition with astonishing rapidity. The past few weeks have been particularly brutal for Zuckerberg’s grand ambition to create a Second Life mod in which everyone is a double amputee. The current (far from first) wave of embarrassing flubs kicked off on August 17 when Zuckerberg posted a “selfie” from Meta’s Horizon World’s rollout in France. As pretty much everyone was happy to point out, it looked embarrassingly bad – not just like a game built to roughly 2007 levels of detail and immersion, but like one without the slightest spark of design creativity. Uncreative, passive, pointless This lack of creative juice can’t be overemphasized. There are genuine technological limits to the graphical fidelity and avatar-tracking that’s possible in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment, but Horizon Worlds could have done a lot better within those limits. Compare its aggressively bland corporate vibe to the spectacularly colorful Minecraft-inspired voxels of The Sandbox (which has an alpha season open right now, FYI). That comes down substantially to business models. Blockchain-backed metaverse projects like Sandbox and Decentraland are gratifyingly weird and quirky in part because they’re fairly chaotic organizations answering to a lot of stakeholders. But Zuckerberg has effectively total control of Met, and the emptiness inside of him is written across every pixel of his creation. Zuckerberg followed up with an even less-realistic simulation, when he last week appeared on an episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” as an uncanny mimic of Rogan’s martial-arts loving, red-meat fanbase. Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin has a definitive read on this one, but in a nutshell Zuckerberg made the case that virtual reality will make you more of an ass-kicking alpha, compared to the “beta” passivity of watching television. This is hilarious for at least three reasons. First, sitting inside staring at screens will never make you more vigorous – for god’s sake, touch grass. Second, Zuckerberg himself has already spread more hormone-sapping passivity in the world than maybe any other single person via Facebook and Instagram. And third, on a personal level, it’s hard to think of a less-convincing pitchman than the eternally affectless-to-miserable Zuck for any supposed shortcut to leading a more fulfilling human life. |
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(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) A real business? But this is all just theater and window dressing, however gobsmackingly inane. The real question is how Meta’s Reality Labs is doing as a business. And the answer is … surprisingly, maybe, better than you think! But still pretty rotten once you scratch the surface. You see, it turns out that Meta actually sold a whole lot of its Oculus Quest 2 headsets over the 2021 holiday season, with app installs suggesting about 2 million new units activated over a two-week period. For comparison, a little over 20 million total Playstation 5 consoles and 15 million Xbox Series X units have sold in the past two years. But that comparison itself is a problem for Zuckerberg’s real goals: If the Quest or successor units are successful as video game consoles, they’re probably still a failure. You see, the units are almost certainly being sold at a big loss. This more or less affirms that the long-term business model is the same kind of data harvesting and ad monetization that Facebook and Instagram run on. That means Zuckerberg doesn’t actually want you using the headset for playing Superhot VR, he wants you in Horizon Worlds specifically, having the kind of data-rich social interactions that he can use to spy on your tastes, habits and network, then nudge you into clicking on advertisements. The problem is that Horizon Worlds is not just unimpressive graphically, but functionally clunky and basically pointless. Most crucially, there’s seemingly no equivalent to the stream of posts and updates that keep people coming back to the actually-successful Facebook and Instagram products. Broken simulation To be crystal clear, Horizon Worlds’ morally execrable agenda, which essentially amounts to commercialized mind control verging on psychological abuse, is the main reason it’s so fun to watch Zuckerberg flounder. This is a man who has harmed society, so celebrating his not-so-slow downfall is a completely guilt-free pleasure. But it’s even more delightful that serious business observers seem to believe he’s going to completely flub even this manipulative agenda. Equity markets utterly loathe Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse, and every word about it coming out of Zuckerberg’s mouth. Over the past six months – that is, even after its epic 26% one-day crash in February – Meta’s stock has underperformed both every other major tech stock except Netflix, and the overall market. Meta is down 21% for that span, versus a 4% drop for Apple (AAPL), a 15% drop for Amazon (AMZN), a 10% drop for the Dow Jones industrials and a 14% drop for the Nasdaq composite index. There are endless reasons for this, but one in particular deserves highlighting. As Kotaku’s reviewer observed, Horizon Worlds is currently packed with hall monitor-like “community guides” keeping watch on what’s going on. From a business perspective, that might be the scariest signal of all, highlighting the risk that Horizon Worlds will be even harder to moderate for offensive or dangerous content and behaviors than Facebook already is. If the “community guides” are a permanent necessity, as 15,000 content moderators still are at Facebook, the whole thing may yet prove fundamentally economically non-viable. Then there’s the ultimate sign of imminent doom – the June departure of former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg has always been the “adult in the room” at Facebook/Meta, the person who knew how to turn a mind-destroying Skinner Box into a profitable business. (Which is, yes, an embarrassing reality given that Zuckerberg is now nearly 40.) Sandberg’s departure signals a deep lack of faith by probably the single living human who knows the most about what’s actually going on over there. And that’s no simulation. – David Z. Morris |
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Join 2,000+ attendees from the NEAR and Web3 ecosystem along with hundreds of hackers in the stunning coastal city of Lisbon for NEARCON, “Building Beyond the Hype,” September 11-14. Part conference, part festival, and part IRL hackathon, for 3.5 days NEARCON will bring together authors, economists, artists, politicians, builders, multi-chain collaborators, and makers across many industries. NEARCON will be a welcoming, collaborative atmosphere for all. Promocode COINDESK for 35% off tickets! |
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Overheard on CoinDesk TV... |
"There's not enough money to go around." – Sasha Hodder, Founder of Hodder Law Firm, discussing the bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover" |
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The Ethereum Merge Is Almost Here. What Could Go Wrong? (Decrypt) ‘Unparalleled Luxury’: Nationals Still Pitching Exclusive ‘Terra Club’ (Blockworks) From rat poison to Beanie Babies, these celebs got bitcoin all wrong (Protos) ‘An Important Milestone’—Bitcoin And Crypto Giant Binance Reveals Ethereum Price Game-Changer Ahead Of Major Upgrade (Forbes) |
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Which institutes are most impacting the blockchain world? Tell us your thoughts in a five-minute survey. We're welcoming responses until Sept. 7. Take the survey here. |
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As NFTs Become More Popular, They Will Also Become More Valuable – Here’s How Investors Can Protect Them Reports about developments in the non-fungible token (NFT) space have overly focused on one aspect: the price. After all, with this emerging asset class, the main driver of interest so far is built purely on how much it’s worth, not so much why it’s worth that amount. Numbers give context to the story, which explains the obsession for many in following the highs and lows of the NFT market in dollar terms. One of the most high-profile instances of this, of course, is the spectacular collapse in value of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” a once-hyped NFT that initially fetched an eyebrow-raising price of $2.9 million, though it hasn’t seen anywhere near that level of investor interest since. Continue reading here *This is sponsored content from Cactus Custody. |
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