Category: Cryptocurrency News

BeaRex has kicked off a new era for GameFi fans: the Play-and-Earn era (P&E). This approach takes into account the interests of all participants in the blockchain gaming ecosystem: those who want to play for money, as well as those who just play for fun. After all, the cheerful 2D runner was primarily created so that players could enjoy themselves in its universe, and if they can earn money from their skills and acquire resources in the process, all the better! In this article, we explain why making money in games is a revolutionary concept, what obstacles Play-to-Earn players currently face, and why BeaRex is absolutely the last word in blockchain gaming. The secret to the success of the world’s most popular games is having simple rules and the ability to play on mobile devices. BeaRex combines both of these in a game with a plot that echoes the famous Mario. The game’s main character is a bear who runs along an endless obstacle course, collects berries and other resources, and tries to escape from a dinosaur. The berries are needed to make smoothies, and what happens after the bear drinks it is really worth seeing! Depending on the ingredients, the world around him changes in the most unexpected way, and to predict the metamorphosis is quite impossible. The Main Ingredient of Success: Play-and-Earn GameFi, or monetized blockchain games, can prove to be a constant source of income for players. It has evolved into a surging technological trend over the past year, just as fresh and booming as decentralized finance (DeFi) was a couple of years ago. And this is no surprise, as GameFi combines three key ingredients — game mechanics, NFT, and DeFi — to attract millions of potential users. The GameFi phenomenon appeared at the junction of gaming and cryptocurrencies. DappRadar, which tracks blockchain industry activity, reported in November 2021 that games are responsible for about half of blockchain use cases. At the same time, about 2.5 million unique active wallets (UAW) are connected to decentralized applications (DApps) daily! The essence of Play-and-Earn boils down to the following: users receive tangible, and not purely virtual, money for developing within the game. This is a huge step forward for the entire gaming industry, since now ordinary players can reap profits by taking part in gameplay, and not just celebrity streamers. This significantly increases the number of people who want to play. And it’s precisely thanks to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies that all this has become possible. BeaRex Eliminates the High GameFi Entry Threshold Despite the abundance of incentives to enter GameFi, there are still restraining factors. The main obstacle is the cost of entry. In order to get on board, you need to shell out hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. It is clear that this isn’t affordable for everyone, especially considering that many of the players flocking to Play-to-Earn are from poorer countries. In fact, in some places, playing a P2E game can bring in more money than working! Many players with respectable incomes cannot afford the exorbitant start-up costs either, even if they know they’ll be able to earn back their investment in the future. Moreover, people usually want to try out a number of different games and aren’t ready to immediately slap down several thousand dollars to be able to play something once in a while that they may not even end up liking. BeaRex’s Solution: Combining Free-to-Play and Play-to-Earn Original It is precisely due to the demand for an easy and flexible way to enter GameFi that BeaRex has developed a new, more advanced version dubbed Play-and-Earn. P&E is a hybrid model that includes both Play2Earn and Free2Play capabilities. This combination allows gamers not only to earn money but also play for free while increasing their skills and having fun along the way. Players can try their hand at short tasks to earn ‘karma’ so that they can take on more profitable tasks and grow their income later. BeaRex solves the problems of GameFi participants’ two main groups: investors and players. Investors want to put money into GameFi but often don’t have the time to play. In fact, they may not be interested in gaming at all! Players have the opposite problem: they love games and want to play but often don’t have the money to buy expensive game NFTs. BeaRex offers a solution: a player who doesn’t want to play for some reason can pay an experienced player a fixed price in tokens to pass through the levels for them. Thus, the investor receives passive income, while the player can enter the game and start earning with the investor’s character without buying an expensive NFT, which they may not be able to afford. But that’s not all! BeaRex is first and foremost a universe created for the pure enjoyment of playing the game. The main philosophy of the project is that everyone should be able to play, and when players are ready to make money, they can buy NFT Bears and switch to Play-to-Earn mode. Four BeaRex Game Modes Play-for-Fun: A completely free mode in which you can train and enjoy the game on a smartphone. All game progress can be saved and used in Play-to-Earn mode later. In order to start earning, the player must buy an NFT bear. Investor Mode: This is ideal for people who want to earn money from P2E but don’t know how to play or don’t want to. With the help of the order board, you can rent your Bear out to a more experienced player who will play it to pass through levels, collect gaming resources, and earn profits, which can be split between you. Play-and-Earn: This regime is for gamers who want to play the game and pass through its levels with their own bear. Everything is simple here: all the profits of your hard labor are completely yours to keep. Order Execution Mode: This is for players that have their own bear but see the benefit of taking a more powerful animal from an investor to earn more. The greater the player’s skill, the cooler and more profitable the tasks they can take on. Animated Series and the BeaRex Metaverse BeaRex is not just a game, but also an animated series! Work on an animated series based on the game has already begun. The first episode will be released at the end of 2022, and the entire first season will be available in 2023. The series will follow the adventures of bears from the very first NFT collection, which will be sold in mid-July of this year. Owners of the bears portrayed in the cartoon will receive royalties from series rentals. BeaRex Beta Launch BeaRex has already launched a beta version in an Instagram mask. A bright and absolutely mind-blowing universe awaits you here: collect berries, prepare smoothies, and save the world from dinosaurs, while earning money along the way or just playing for fun. There is currently a special offer for all game participants on Instagram: play the game in an Insta mask and earn 500 TRIP tokens. And all players will participate in a $5,000 NFT draw. Good luck in the game!   Image: Original

Would it be easier to perform a 51% attack on a PoS chain? Is it easier to own a PoS chain? I saw a post from another sub talking about how PoS chains can be bought out by a government just by printing enough fiat to purchase all of the tokens on the chain. Ethereum…
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In February 2022, the Ukrainian government ran a crypto donation campaign to support victims of the Russian invasion. When the nation tried to reward those who had contributed to the fundraiser by sending crypto wallet holders complimentary NFTs, a slew of scammers took advantage of the government’s generosity, causing the operation to cease.   Rug pull scams like this, where cyber criminals drain money from unsuspecting investors, aren’t uncommon in the crypto space, unfortunately. Shortly following the Ukraine rug pull, in March this year, hackers discovered a weakness in the Ronin blockchain used by popular play-to-earn platform Axie Infinity. In the security breach, the scammers ended up stealing $165 million from Axie’s parent company, Sky Mavis.   In addition to rug pull scams, cryptocurrency exchanges can be compromised through poor security or fraud. This is what happened in 2014 when the Mt. Gox exchange collapsed in a years-long attack by hackers. By the time the breach was detected, a loss of between $300 million and $480 million of users’ funds had occurred. Since the attack, it has been estimated that $1.5 billion in cryptocurrencies have been stolen from exchanges.   Blockchain’s utility isn’t limited to just cryptocurrency, though. The shared and immutable ledger’s ability to provide transparency and security allows it to be applied to numerous other sectors, including real estate, supply chains and gambling.   Although the technology has taken the world by storm over the last few years, issues like the inability to hold scammers accountable for rug pull scams have plagued the industry, preventing it from being adopted into the mainstream. Additionally, large demand on blockchains that slow their transaction speed requires improvements to the technology’s ability to scale, a problem that many blockchains have so far struggled to achieve.   Newcomer to the blockchain space, Zetrix, has found a solution to address issues relating to transparency and security in the blockchain. It can facilitate smart contracts and deliver privacy, plus its cryptographic infrastructure can be introduced to multiple industries, creating a more transparent and efficient process. Zetrix’s network also has incredible scaling ability, being able to withstand 10,000 transactions per second.   In addition, Zetrix uses DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) to secure the blockchain by ensuring representation of transactions within it. DPoS is designed for implementing tech-based democracy using elections and voting processes to protect from centralization. The Zetrix DPoS mechanism is implemented through smart contracts with a dynamic upgrade mechanism that adjusts to the difficulty level of validating node access as Zetrix’s network expands, which means no matter how vast the network grows, the privacy and security of its users will remain intact. As an added measure, the consensus mechanism allows transactions to be validated before being added to the blockchain, and all validators are voted in via a contract.   In a groundbreaking new report by the Institute of Industrial Internet & IoT, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), the blockchain confirmed that it can complete transactions using a significantly low amount of energy compared to other blockchains. Specifically, it only requires 21 super nodes and 100 common nodes to complete a transaction, compared to Bitcoin, which uses 2.2 million super nodes, and Ethereum’s Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain which uses 2.3 million super nodes.   Zetrix’s mission is to connect countries and their governments, businesses, and people to a global blockchain-based economy. The platform wants to make native blockchain and cross-chain solutions accessible and effortless by bringing rapid-deployment solutions to the market with meaningful benefits and real-world impact for countries, businesses, and users.   By building a future ecosystem of Ubiquitous Trust Networks, the next-generation layer-1 public blockchain infrastructure allows value to be transferred freely on and across blockchains, just as information moves freely across the internet. As a result, by harnessing digital assets, decentralised applications can be developed and deployed rapidly on its network.   Blockchain technology has been rapidly adopted by many industries over the past decade, but mainstream adoption still remains a challenge due to the prevalent issues faced including issues with security, transparency, and scalability. Newcomers to the space like Zetrix are proving that these issues can once and for all be addressed, providing a much-needed step forward for this revolutionary technology.      

The facility owner Dynamics Mining publicly took to Twitter to share the letter terminating its hosting agreement with Compass Mining, saying it had unpaid bills.

  It has been more than a year since the NFT boom in 2021. According to NFTGO, the market cap of NFTs peaked at $36.8 billion in March 2022. As the market later cooled, the trading volume and market cap of NFTs started to shrink. This crypto novelty expanded its influence beyond the crypto community and fostered a huge market, which also gave rise to the combination of NFTs and DeFi. The market has witnessed the appearance of NFT lending platforms, NFT aggregators, and NFT derivatives markets, which constitutes the second debut of DeFi Lego enabled by NFTs. However, one wonders whether these products were built to meet real market demands and if they have created a false proposition that lacks any value for market participation. Today, we will dive into whether NFT-fi is a feasible trend and if it will earn market recognition. Figure 1: Market Cap & Volume of NFTs | Source: nftgo.com | As of June 1, 2022 There are many NFT liquidity solutions and NFT structured products in today’s market: 1. NFT fragmentation: FT tokens (such as ERC20 tokens) that are issued by dividing the ownership of valuable NFTs. NFT fragmentation projects include Fractional.art, NFTX, etc. 2. NFT lending markets: Holders can borrow short-term loans by collateralizing their NFTs without selling them. Prominent NFT lending markets include BendDAO, NFTfi, and Drops DAO. 3. NFT leasing: Holders earn rents by leasing NFTs to users in need. NFT leasing projects include Double, reNFT, etc. 4. NFT aggregators: These aggregators, such as Gem.xyz, bring together the transaction data of multiple NFT exchanges, obtain the best NFT transaction price in one stop, and provide users with increased liquidity and more options. 5. NFT derivatives: NFT derivatives include NFT options like Putty, as well as NFT perpetual futures contracts such as NFTprep. These projects are early attempts to bring together NFTs and DeFi. In particular, NFT fragmentation projects and NFT aggregators address the problems of poor NFT liquidity and high market threshold. NFT lending markets and NFT leasing projects also focus on improving NFT liquidity and capital utilization. Meanwhile, NFT derivatives are more complex structured products built to improve capital utilization. However, these projects have not been able to achieve large-scale adoption because they face limitations in terms of the underlying NFT logic and the development space. Next, we will explore the real demands and false propositions of NFTs. Real Demands 1. The capital utilization of NFTs needs to be improved, allowing holders to collateralize their NFTs for partial liquidity when running out of cash. 2. The liquidity problem of NFTs should be addressed, enabling holders to quickly buy/sell the NFTs they own. False Propositions Did the capital utilization of NFTs go higher? The problem of NFTs’ capital utilization can be seen in two aspects: 1) Users need to quickly buy and sell NFTs, and the transaction frequency should not be affected by the poor liquidity of NFTs; 2) Users should be able to quickly exchange their NFTs for liquidity and obtain cash for other purposes. When it comes to FT tokens, capital utilization can be improved through staking, leverage, etc. However, in the NFT market, there are only a few ways through which users can improve their capital utilization. In addition, combining finance with NFT significantly increases the learning cost. Right now, most NFT holders still rely on the “buy low and sell high” strategy. Moreover, most such holders are not the target user of NFT lending projects because only blue-chip NFTs with sound liquidity and value consensus are accepted. In terms of the overall market scale, most users are absorbed by secondary markets and aggregators with low operating thresholds, and they have not achieved any major improvement in capital utilization. As shown in Figure 2, the number of new addresses of Genie and Gem, two NFT aggregators, has been on a steady rise, with increasingly frequent daily transactions. However, as the trading volume and transaction frequency of the two have been hit by the sluggish market conditions of NFTs, Genie and Gem have yet to reach their maximum potential for improving the capital utilization of NFTs. Figure 2: New Addresses and Transactions of NFT Aggregators | Source: Dune @sohwak Let’s turn to the capital utilization of mainstream lending projects. BendDAO is a lending market based on the liquidity pool model where holders can borrow ETH from the pool after collateralizing their blue-chip NFTs. Due to recent market fluctuations, a large amount of ETH deposit in BendDAO’s liquidity pool has been withdrawn, which resulted in decreased ETH supply. Yet, the ETH loans have remained at around 19,000 ETH, while the MA14 supply stands at 46,000. As such, we can make the rough estimate that BendDAO’s capital utilization is about 41%. Figure 3: Bend ETH Utilization | Source: Dune@cgq0123 Note: MA14 refers to the moving average in 14 days, while MA7 indicates the moving average in 7 days NFTfi is a lending market following the P2P model. The amount, interest rate, and duration of loans on NFTfi are jointly determined by liquidity providers and NFT lenders, which is more flexible in terms of the loan rate. The number of monthly loans offered via NFTfi increased from 21 in May 2020 to 2,000+ in May 2022, and the maximum monthly loan amount reached $27.52 million (March 2022), but this figure only accounted for 1% of the market cap of blue-chip NFTs (as reported by NSN-BlueCHIP 10). Figure 4: NFTfi Monthly Loan Volume by Count/Value | Source: Dune@gideontay JPEG’d is also a P2P model lending protocol, and it now only provides collateralized lending for Cryptopunks, EtherRocks, BAYC, and MAYC. After staking NFT, holders will receive PUSD, a stablecoin, provided by the protocol from the pool. Additionally, JPEG’d also features a 32% capital utilization limit on lending. Of course, there are also other early-stage NFT derivatives platforms, but they have not introduced any mature products, so we could not analyze their capital utilization. Despite that, it is foreseeable that such NFT derivatives will come with higher learning costs as they are products designed for professional traders with greater risk appetite. As such, their growth potential is limited in today’s NFT market. Asset Pricing and Liquidation Risks？ The pricing of NFTs has been so frequently discussed that it has now become a cliché. People are concerned with the issue because the price swings of NFTs will expose NFT lending or derivatives to liquidation risks. As the NFT prices fell over the recent period, BendDAO has started several liquidation auctions. Although most of the lending protocols out there have adopted over-collateralization, in the face of wild price swings, many NFTs would be liquidated and sold in marketplaces. This, coupled with the poor liquidity of NFTs, might lead to panic selling, which would create downward price spirals, ultimately turning the loans into bad debts. The pricing of NFTs is subject to multiple factors. Plus, it is also easily manipulated. For example, big holders could maliciously raise the floor price and then liquidate the NFTs on purpose, and an NFT could take a price plunge due to hacking or smart contract loopholes. Moreover, NFT pricing could also be affected by many intangible factors. For instance, the price of an NFT could soar if a famous person suddenly buys it in large amounts or if it releases a new airdrop plan. As most lenders cannot accurately estimate the intrinsic value of their NFTs, they are vulnerable to liquidation if they borrowed loans or applied leverage. This is also one of the reasons why NFT lending and derivatives have not gained mass adoption: Blue-chip NFT holders are worried that they might suffer losses in the above scenarios, which is why they are reluctant to collateralize their NFTs. Do blue-chip NFT holders really need NFT loans? All NFT lending markets focus on blue-chip NFTs, but most blue-chip NFT holders are not in great need of loans. To begin with, such holders care more about their ownership of the NFTs, just like billionaires would not use their collectibles as collateral for loans. Secondly, NFT loans come with unknown risks, and many blue-chip NFT holders refuse to apply for such loans after weighing the risks against the benefits. Thirdly, applying for NFT loans comes with high learning costs, and not every user can understand the principle behind such loans. Let’s compare the user base of the major NFT lending projects. As of June 15, there are about 2.4 million holders in the NFT market, of which 27,833 hold blue-chip NFTs (a user will be regarded as a blue-chip NFT holder as long as he owns at least one such NFT), according to NFTGO. There are 771 borrowers on BendDAO, 1,038 on NFTfi, and 51 on Arcade. As users must first deposit/collateralize their NFTs before applying for a loan, we can regard all these borrowers as blue-chip NFT holders. It is therefore clear that most blue-chip NFT holders are not users of NFT lending markets. Figure 5: Bend ETH Borrowers & Depositors | Source: Dune@cgq0123 Could NFT-fi projects retain users with the same old incentive? Lending or derivatives projects also bear the task of improving the protocol’s liquidity. Most such projects offer native tokens as the incentive for recruiting NFT holders and depositors as they go live. In this regard, these projects resemble DeFi liquidity mining platforms that attract speculators with high APYs. However, the problem is that they would not be able to maintain such liquidity if the APYs went down. Attracting users with token incentives is still the same old approach. Though this strategy could create a large user base at the very beginning, no one knows whether the protocol could retain users. For example, when the project was first launched, BendDAO airdropped BEND tokens to users who had deposited blue-chip NFTs and ETH. It also uses BEND as a subsidy when paying interests. However, the interest rate went down when the BEND price dropped, which slowed down the growth rate of new users. As such, attracting users with high APYs is only the first step. To retain new users, they must further explore the lending mechanisms, address the oracle pricing issue, and mitigate the liquidation risks. Projects should develop more flexible products while expanding the scope of NFT lending. Last but not least, they could also provide risk reviews, lower the learning cost, and offer more satisfying user experiences. Conclusion The evolution from NFT to NFT-fi is a process in which a market grows from its infancy to a more mature stage. However, it is also inevitably a process that’s full of doubts, traps, and problems. As NFT-fi projects seek to meet real demands, they will also have to face doubts that they are stating false propositions. Today’s NFT market is like a newborn child who needs to grow up and stick through challenges. Although NFT-fi might be a great attempt, there is still a long way to go, and NFT-fi projects have to keep exploring their underlying logic to earn market recognition.

Paolo Ardoino alleged some hedge funds are trying to create pressure “in the billions” to “harm Tether liquidity” so that they can eventually buy back tokens at a much lower price.

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Cryptoys, an NFT-based startup, announced it has raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by a16z. The company, which seeks to mix NFTs with the world of gaming and virtual toys, will create what it calls a “cryptoyverse,” in which it will also implement play-to-earn features and issue its own tokens. Cryptoys […]

The crypto lender issued a no-liquidation account to an unnamed whale on the condition that the account would never go negative, but that plan has backfired.