Decentral Block Post

Although non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are most commonly known in the form of digital art, they exist in many other forms and represent much more than just art. 

In the creative industry, NFTs have been used by musicians such as Kings of Leon to release their latest album. In the sports industry, NFTs are created to record the highlights of major sporting events such as the NBA. In the consumer product industry, Nike, Gucci and many others are selling their digital branded products in the form of NFTs. A lot more real-world applications of NFTs are still to be explored and one of them is the digital publishing industry.

The game-changing implications of publishing and promoting books with NFTs have already been discussed extensively by many. For example, the Alliance of Independent Authors are helping indie authors to promote their latest books using NFTs. Other associated items for the fans club such as character cards are also made into NFTs. Tezos Farmation, a project built on Tezos network, even uses the complete text of George Orwell’s Animal Farm book and slices it up into 10,000 pieces to use as titles for the NFTs.

NFTs created from existing books are normally bound to copyrights. However, in the case of Tezos Farmation, the copyright had already expired. The text from the book can be used by any party for free. This triggers a very interesting question - how can NFTs preserve copyrights and royalties for books with expired copyrights?

The NFT application in the publishing industry is so far mostly focused on books that still have royalties and within their copyrights lifespan. But there are authors whose work lives on long past both their mortal existence and that of their copyrights; can NFTs provide their estates a means to extend the life of the book and its royalties?

Bitcoin (BTC) meandered into the weekly close on July 3 after weekend trading produced a brief wick below $18,800.

Bollinger bands signal volatility due

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView followed BTC/USD as it stuck to $19,000 rigidly for a third day running.

The pair had gone light on volatility overall at the weekend, but at the time of writing was still on track for the first weekly close below its prior halving cycle’s all-time high since December 2020.

The previous weekend’s action had produced a late surge which saved bulls from a close below $20,000.

Momentum remained weak throughout the following week’s Wall Street trading, however, and traders were unconvinced about the potential for a significant relief bounce.

Bitcoin (BTC) has been moving in the opposite direction of the U.S. dollar since the beginning of 2022 — and now that inverse relationship is more extreme than ever.

Bitcoin and the dollar go in opposite ways

Notably, the weekly correlation coefficient between BTC and the dollar dropped to 0.77 below zero in the week ending July 3, its lowest in seventeen months.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin's correlation with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite reached 0.78 above zero in the same weekly session, data from TradingView shows.

That is primarily because of these markets' year-to-date performances amid the fears of recession, led by the Federal Reserve's benchmark rate hikes to curb rising inflation. Bitcoin, for example, has lost over 60% in 2022, while Nasdaq's returns in the same period stand around minus 29.72%.

On the other hand, the dollar has excelled, with its U.S. dollar index (DXY), a metric that measures its strength against a basket of top foreign currencies, hovering around its January 2003 highs of 105.78.

It’s not a great day to be in crypto. Perhaps you’ve seen an article (or 20) about this. Perhaps you’ve been on Twitter, where our detractors are cackling gleefully over every headline, each one more harbinger-of-doom-esque than the next. To be fair, things are going badly. Crashed, collapsed, erased, plunged, obliterated and imploded are the operative verbs in most coverage, and they’re not being used incorrectly or in an exaggerated manner. There’s no putting a positive spin on a week where $400 billion in value just evaporated. Even for the most furiously determined buy-the-dippers and diamond-handed believers who feed off detractors and never say die, it’s dire out there.

I’m not interested in making a case for buying the dip or for dipping out forever and getting into, say, stockpiling gold bars in an underground bunker. But I do see this feral, angry, rabid bear market we find ourselves careening through as an opportunity for some much-needed course correction. I’ve argued before that the crypto space at large has lost the plot, forsaking the borderline revolutionary potential of decentralized finance for an inescapable horde of stupid-looking monkeys. I’m not the only person in crypto who feels this way, let alone the most prominent. Vitalik Buterin made similar points in his widely-read profile in the March 2022 issue of Time magazine.

Comeuppances and consequences

Twitter is never a great sample audience, but given the sorry state of crypto’s public reputation, it’s not unfathomable or even unexpected that this crash is being met with derision and schadenfreude by people outside the space. From rampant scams to ugly nonfungible tokens (NFT) to carbon-spewing mining, we’ve given the outside world plenty of reason to not only be skeptical of crypto. Many people still think we’re a bunch of tasteless bros duking it out on an unregulated stock market imitation whose comeuppance has arrived. Even before this crash, some writers and publications openly speculated that a crypto bubble burst would push a group of mostly male, newly broken, and deeply disillusioned people toward fascism and away from democratic values and, by extension, society.

Related: In defense of crypto: Why digital currencies deserve a better reputation

Whether or not you agree with that point — and I certainly don’t — it speaks to the dire state of crypto’s public image. Something has gone horribly awry when journalists at reasonably well-read political publications, however biased, are making even remotely compelling arguments for a crypto-to-fascism pipeline.