Decentral Block Post

Artist name: Justin Aversano
Location: Los Angeles
Date minted first NFT: Feb. 15, 2021
Which blockchains? Ethereum

Bio:

Unintentionally, the healing process of losing his twin sister at birth sparked Justin Aversano’s career to become the poster child for NFT photography. His most famous collection, “Twin Flames,” has 5,900 ETH in total sales volume on OpenSea and multiple million-dollar sales, including one auctioned at Christie’s. 

A multidisciplinary artist with a great eye and passion for photography, Aversano’s journey into NFTs started with a trip to Peru to work with local shamans to try to get over an addiction and depression. It was on that trip that he started to heal and found a spark that would become the initial idea for his iconic collection. 

“I never questioned that I was an artist, but you know the feeling inside when you’re grappling with anger, depression, sadness and grief. I was looking to outgrow the grief and become whole. In San Pedro, there was a ceremony run by twins. It really opened my heart to connecting with my twin, who passed during my mom’s pregnancy. It felt like opening Pandora’s box. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, there’s something there, and I need to work on it.’” 

A few months removed from San Pedro, Aversano was at an exhibition and photographed a pair of twins who came to his art show. That night, he knew he was ready to take on this new project spotlighting twins. 

Top Stories This Week

SBF’s $250M bail guarantors should be made public, rules judge

The identities of two individuals who helped former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried with his $250 million bail bond could be revealed next month following a recent ruling by United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan. Bankman-Fried’s legal counsel has until Feb. 7 to contest the decision. As bankruptcy proceedings continue, FTX and affected parties have requested subpoenas for information and documents from close relatives of Bankman-Fried, claiming not all members of his inner circle have responded to requests for information. Other recent news includes Alameda Research suing bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital in an attempt to claw back $445.8 million in loan repayments made before FTX collapsed.

UK Treasury publishes crypto framework paper: Here’s what’s inside

The United Kingdom’s HM Treasury published a long-anticipated consultation paper for its upcoming crypto regulation. The document covers a broad range of topics, from algorithmic stablecoins to nonfungible tokens to initial coin offerings. The authority aims to level the playing field between crypto and traditional finance by incorporating digital assets into the U.K.’s Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Huawei moves to trademark its NFTs

According to a Jan. 28 report by Sina News, Chinese telecom giant Huawei has recently filed for eight trademarks related to its Huawei “YunYunBao” nonfungible tokens (NFT) series. The trademarks include digital collectibles in the scientific instruments, furniture, education, jewelry, advertising and telecom sectors. Last April, Huawei unveiled its YunYunBao NFTs, featuring characters inspired by its namesake cloud service. Huawei NFTs are minted on its proprietary Huawei Petal Chain, which the telecom giant says has over 1,000 nodes and can handle over 50,000 transactions per second. 

Toyota sponsors blockchain hackathon

In a Feb. 1 Medium post, Sota Watanabe, the founder of Japanese blockchain Astar Network, announced that Astar had received a sponsorship from Japanese automobile manufacturer Toyota for its latest Web3 hackathon. Astar is currently a parachain built on the Polkadot blockchain. 

According to Watanabe, over $100,000 in prizes will be distributed to projects that develop “intra-company DAO [Decentralized Autonomous Organization] support tools for this hackathon which Toyota employees may actually use in the future.” The hackathon will run from Feb. 14 to March 25.

“Needless to say, Toyota is the largest company in Japan and one of the world’s leading international companies,” Watanabe wrote. “We are very excited to be hosting the Web3 Hackathon on Astar with Toyota. During the event, we aim to develop the first PoC DAO tool for Toyota’s employees. If a good tool is produced, Toyota employees will interact daily with products on Astar Network.”

Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash predicted the Metaverse in 1992. This cult book has the amusingly-named Hiro Protagonist running around in an artificial cyber world, trying to stop a virus that wipes minds, aided by his hacker friend Y.T. Reality is a place to escape from, a neoliberal future wrecked by hyperinflation and inequality and run by corporations and gangsters and insane bureaucracy.

In many ways, the book is horribly prescient. (It’s also horribly written in places, more like an info dump than a novel.) The Metaverse was a place where people had digital avatars, where they hung out with friends, went shopping and attended concerts. It was full of ads, the infrastructure was owned by a billionaire, and a virus was wreaking havoc on society. It all sounds familiar.

It wasn’t COVID-19 of course. The Snow Crash virus caused the infected to lose the ability to think for themselves, and they start speaking in tongues.

“Obviously, at the time, we didn’t have social media,” Stephenson told The Washington Post, but added, “I was writing about just a long-standing human trait, which is this tendency for the mind to get hijacked by ideas.”

The metaverse can’t enslave you, yet, but the addictive nature of social media suggests it’s possible you might get hooked on a better virtual world, where your hotter-looking avatar interacts with people from all over the planet and has adventures that are not possible in reality.

Name: Tiffany Fong
Anonymous: No 
Twitter followers: 51.7K 
Known for: Breaking leaked info on Celsius and interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried after the FTX collapse 

Who is Tiffany Fong anyway? 

Tiffany Fong is 28 years old, has a background in marketing, and describes herself as a “reluctant crypto content creator” who developed a following after $100,000 worth of her crypto assets were locked up by bankrupt crypto lender Celsius. 

She’s posted more than 20 critical videos about the company since June 2022 and has been blocked by Celsius, founder Alex Mashinsky and his wife, Krissy.

“I had no plans to be an influencer or citizen journalist or anything. I just personally lost a bunch of money to Celsius Network, and I was just mad and wanted somewhere to vent.”

“So, I started posting on YouTube and Twitter about it after Celsius went down, and then it kind of snowballed into more,” she adds. Fong says she got into crypto back in 2010 as one of her relatives was mining Bitcoin. Scooping up a bunch of BTC and some other assets early on, Fong said she hodled and remained on the periphery of the space until the Celsius disaster.

We can’t blame Elon Musk for dreaming of moving to Mars — the human race has always been curious about finding a better life somewhere else. 

But not everyone in crypto is looking up to the stars to find new worlds; others stay on earth and attempt to build a new micronation, or a crypto community, here. There are dozens of projects in development — and a few actually operational — including Liberland, Satoshi Island and Puertopia/Sol attracting interest from the blockchain world.

Liberland

While many head out to sea to build their new communities, another option is to find land left over after conflicts. This is not as crazy as it sounds, and in the shifting territorial landscape after the breakup of the Yugoslavian empire, small pockets of land have turned up. Vít Jedlička, a Czech economist and Libertarian, founded Liberland on April 13, 2015 – on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday – on a small track of terra nullius (unclaimed land) on the banks of the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. At seven square kilometers, it is larger than Vatican City and Monaco and similar in size to Gibraltar.

The tiny nation is not yet habited despite boasting 785,000 citizens, all of whom currently reside abroad.

Jedlička wanted to form a new nation with low taxes and greater freedoms, and he found the land literally by Googling the term “terra nullius.”

Top Stories This Week

FTX creditor list shows airlines, charities and tech firms caught in collapse

The complete list of creditors owed money by the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX has been released, revealing a wide range of global companies. Among the potential creditors are airlines, hotels, charities, banks, venture capital companies, media outlets and crypto companies, along with United States and international government agencies. According to another headline regarding the FTX scandal, U.S. federal prosecutors allege that Sam Bankman-Fried invested $400 million in the venture capital firm Modulo Capital with money from the FTX’s customers. Investigators allege that Modulo was likely built with criminal proceeds or misappropriated funds. Lawyer costs in the case are estimated to reach hundreds of millions of dollars before the firm’s bankruptcy investigation is over.

BlockFi uncensored financials reportedly shows $1.2B FTX exposure

Bankrupt crypto lending firm BlockFi uploaded uncensored financials by mistake, revealing $1.2 billion in assets tied up with bankrupt exchange FTX and defunct trading firm Alameda Research. The unredacted filings show that, as of Jan. 14, BlockFi had $415.9 million worth of assets linked to FTX and a whopping $831.3 million in loans to Alameda. BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Nov. 28, citing the collapse of FTX just weeks earlier as the cause of its financial troubles.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Bithumb in turmoil 

On Jan. 25, Yonhap Infomax reported that South Korean authorities had requested an arrest warrant for Kang Jong-Hyun, chairman and owner of cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb, over embezzlement allegations. That same day, the Financial Investigation Second Division of the Seoul Southern District Prosecutor’s Office accused Jong-Hyun and two Bithumb executives of embezzlement, conducting fraudulent transactions and breach of trust. 

Authorities said that Kang played a key role in manipulating the stock prices of Bithumb affiliates Inbiogen and Bucket Studio through the issuance of convertible bonds.

Bithumb is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea. Its previous chairman, Lee Jung-Hoon, was found not guilty last month of a $70 million fraud charge related to his activities at Bithumb. Park Mo, Bithumb’s former largest shareholder, died on Dec. 30 while under investigation for allegedly embezzling funds from Bithumb and related companies. The firm is also currently probed by the National Tax Service over tax compliance incidents. 

Binance’s 2022 annual report

In its annual report released on Jan. 19, cryptocurrency exchange Binance revealed that the firm received more than 47,000 law enforcement inquiries throughout the year. The exchange said such requests were processed “at a record time” and that it was the first among blockchain firms to join the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, a nonprofit cybercrime fighting unit based in Pittsburg. 

Buying DAO tokens? That’s no longer risk-free: Courts might consider you a partner in the business and judge you liable for millions in hacked funds. Another legal trap may be found simply working for a DAO — and implementing community decisions that turn out to be illegal in some far-flung jurisdiction.

With many DAO communities waking up to the reality that they need some sort of legal structure or “legal personality” in order to act in the real world, solutions from mimicking corporate structures to anonymously run foundations are being floated by lawyers around the world.

Nothing in this article should be construed as legal advice — and not just because the law isn’t clear about any of it.

Code is law?

In 2021, Magazine interviewed Griff Green, whose heroic actions to thwart The DAO hack on the morning of June 17, 2016, helped save a good proportion of the 14% of Ether in existence at the time. By identifying how the exploit worked, his team of hackers worked to “steal” faster than the malicious actor, thus limiting the amount taken by the individual who discovered the error in The DAO’s code. But who did this ETH belong to? 

Did it belong to the 11,000 investors who had contributed Ether toward the project in the previous month? If so, what claim did they have, considering that these “investors” had handed their money to an organization without leaders or jurisdiction, governed entirely by smart contracts that operated according to the votes of investors?

Artist name: Amber Vittoria
Location: Los Angeles
Date minted first NFT: March 1, 2021
Which blockchains? Ethereum, Tezos

Bio:

Before she even turned 30, Amber Vittoria had made a significant splash in the traditional art world with gigs with Gucci, Google, Adidas, Victoria’s Secret, Apple, L’Oréal Paris, Meta, Snapchat, VaynerMedia and The New York Times,

Hailing from New York City but now living in Los Angeles, Vittoria studied graphic design at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts.

“I think I always knew I wanted to be a fine artist and work for myself at one point but knew that graphic design would help me get there,” she says. 

Vittoria is also the author of a recent book about poetry, painting and womanhood called These Are My Big Girl Pants, and her various creative talents saw her cited on Forbes 30 Under 30 — Art & Style in 2020. 

Although he’s had a variety of jobs in the industry, including a stint as Arcane Asset’s chief investment officer, Eric Wall is probably best known for shitposting and arguing with people on Crypto Twitter.

“Just like any other person, I’m scrolling my Twitter feed, and then you see people saying dumb shit that is incorrect, and that is based on a lie. And then I just argue with that person, and then those arguments lead to long-form Medium articles,” he says with just a faint trace of a Swedish accent.

“I’m just trying to correct ‘incorrectness’ in the space.”

He’s been working on a super-secret project ever since he left Arcane early last year, so he doesn’t have an official title apart from “blockchain researcher” and board member for Ethereum scaling solution the StarkNet Foundation.

After arguing with people for years for free, more recently, Wall has been attempting to make money from challenging antagonists to a bet and has also (semi-literally) begun collecting the skulls of his enemies. “That has been paying off in tungsten cubes and actual money,” he says.

Top Stories This Week

Crypto lender Genesis files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

FTX contagions continue to spread through the crypto industry, with Genesis Capital filing for bankruptcy protection in New York, estimating liabilities in the range of $1 billion to $10 billion, and assets at the same level. The company plans a “dual track process,” which will pursue “sale, capital raise, and/or an equitization transaction” and enable the business “to emerge under new ownership.” Genesis’ derivatives, spot trading, broker-dealer and custody businesses are not included in the proceedings, according to the company. In an effort to maintain liquidity, Genesis parent company Digital Currency Group suspended dividend withdrawals.

Bitzlato and its founder face enforcement actions from US authorities

United States authorities have taken enforcement actions against crypto firm Bitzlato, seizing the company’s website and labeling the business as a “primary money laundering concern” connected to Russian illicit finance. As part of the case, FBI officials arrested Russian national Anatoly Legkodymov in Miami. The criminal complaint claims the firm was a “crucial financial resource” for the Hydra darknet marketplace, allowing users to launder funds, including those from ransomware attacks.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Samsung’s new Bitcoin ETF

On Jan. 13, Samsung Asset Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the namesake South Korean conglomerate, successfully listed the Samsung Bitcoin Futures Active ETF on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to local news outlet Edaily, the ETF debuted under the ticker 3135:HK and seeks to replicate the performance of spot Bitcoin by investing in Bitcoin futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

The ETF will also simplify the procedures for investors seeking exposure to regulated Bitcoin products in the Asia-Pacific time zone. Park Seong-jin, head of Samsung Asset Management’s Hong Kong office, commented: 

“Hong Kong is the only market in Asia where Bitcoin futures ETFs are listed and traded in the institutional market. It will be a new option for investors who are interested in Bitcoin as a competitive product that reflects their experience in risk management and risk management.”

North Korean hackers launder 41K ETH

As revealed by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT on Jan. 16, hackers linked to the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group moved close to 41,000 Ether ($63.5 million) from the Harmony bridge hack to Railgun, a platform that uses zero-knowledge technology to obfuscate blockchain transactions.

When he’s not working on hastening humanity’s rush toward the Singularity by creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI), Ben Goertzel plays in a jazz-rock band called Jam Galaxy fronted by a robot named Desdemona.

It’s one of his many side projects, which naturally led him to try and tokenize the music business by reaching out to members of Pearl Jam and Heart. Goertzel is also working on longevity research by crowdsourcing human health data with token rewards via an app called Rejuve.ai. That information is then pooled with animal and insect study data and analyzed with an AI to determine which parts of the genomes can make us live longer and then stimulated using gene therapies. “We’ve had some quite striking breakthrough-level discoveries,” he says. Oh, and just before our hour-long interview winds up, he casually mentions as an aside that he’s also creating a stablecoin for his decentralized AI marketplace, Singularity.net, that’s pegged to a synthetic index of environmental progress — because pegging it to U.S. dollars would be “lame.” 

“Progress on the environment is very stable. It never goes anywhere,” he points out.

“And to manipulate this, you have to actually solve global warming.”

It’s the exact sort of political comment meets high-tech know-how you might expect from Goertzel, who looks and sounds like a hippie scientist who stumbled into a time machine in 1971 and emerged fully formed in 2023. But don’t be fooled by the animal print hat, long hair and Electric Kool-Aid acid trip drawl: He’s a brilliant scientist with a grasp of the future light years ahead of most and who’s grappling with some of the biggest concepts humanity has ever considered. What is consciousness? How do we create artificial life, and what happens if it doesn’t like us, goes rogue, and guns everybody down like in Terminator 2?

Name: Mason Versluis — aka “Crypto Mason”

Anonymous: No

Twitter followers: 146.2K

Known for:  Garnering over 1 million followers on social media before he could legally drink in the United States

Who is this guy anyway?

Mason Versluis may only be 22 years old, but he’s already a full-time crypto influencer thanks to his wise old father introducing him to the world of XRP and Ripple before his 17th birthday.

2022 was the year the wheels fell off the metaverse bandwagon, which had been the most hyped narrative as the year began. By far the worst-performing sector in blockchain, the average drawdown was 89%.

Even Facebook’s grand plans to dominate the metaverse are in disarray; it’s losing more than $1 billion a month, while the flagship “Horizon Worlds” attracts fewer than 200,000 users per month.

But amid all the gloom, there are still miles of runway left from unprecedented fundraising and signs from The Sandbox, play-to-earn games and niche metaverse platforms that 2023 will be much more productive.

Sébastien Borget, chief operations officer and co-founder of The Sandbox, has been on the road a lot lately visiting the company’s new offices. He speaks from Argentina when we talk just before Christmas about the performance of metaverse platforms in 2022. 

Many pundits say it’s been a mixed year at best for adoption, pointing to DappRadar statistics that appeared to indicate daily average visitors to The Sandbox were as low as 500, with just 50 people wandering about Decentraland. However, both companies actively pushed back on these stats, claiming the figures only reflected the number of daily users who made a transaction — not the number of daily visitors overall.

Top Stories This Week

Sam Bankman-Fried: ‘I didn’t steal funds, and I certainly didn’t stash billions away.’

In a “pre-mortem overview” of FTX’s bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried denied allegations of improper use of customer funds stored with the crypto exchange, attributing responsibility for the company’s dramatic fall to the market crash of 2022 and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s PR campaign against FTX. In Bankman-Fried’s view, a run on the bank turned illiquidity issues into insolvency. Among the latest developments in the bankruptcy proceedings, a bipartisan group of United States senators criticized one of the law firms involved in the case on the grounds of a conflict of interest, and called on the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to appoint an independent examiner into FTX’s activities. Also in the week’s headlines, FTX attorney Andy Dietderich said the company has recovered $5 billion in cash and liquid cryptocurrencies.

Gemini and Genesis charged by SEC with selling unregistered securities

Crypto firms Genesis Global Capital and Gemini were charged by the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with offering unregistered securities through Gemini’s Earn program. Genesis and Gemini partnered on the product in 2020, offering customers the chance to loan crypto with the promise of later repayment with interest. The SEC stated that the Gemini Earn program constitutes an offer and sale of securities, and should have been registered with the commission. Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of Gemini, said the SEC’s action was “totally counterproductive,” and noted that Gemini had been discussing the Earn program with the regulator “for more than 17 months.”.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Huobi’s disgruntled employees

According to local media reports, cryptocurrency exchange Huobi Global has terminated all year-end employee bonuses and benefits, as well as axed its entire core development staff located in mainland China. The laid-off staff will be instead switched to “advisory contracts” that do not receive protection under Chinese labor laws. Employees also claim that their leftover paid vacation days and sick leave days for 2022 were set to zero without prior notification. 

Moreover, executives allegedly imposed a messaging ban on all major Huobi employee chat groups. In response, employees reported formed a 400-member strong “rights maintenance group” and have since sought the advice of counsel in the labor dispute. One employee reportedly wrote: 

“I love my company and my job; at the same time, I support all decisions that benefit the company, and I know that with economies recessionary everywhere in the globe, Huobi management staff must tighten their belts, and I can understand the lack of year-end bonuses. That said, I cannot accept the unreasonable swap of employment contracts. I will fight this to the end.”

However, it appears that employees still received the short end of the stick. On Jan. 6, Cointelegraph reported that Huobi laid off 20% of its workforce while denying insolvency rumors. But at the time of publication, sources say that the exchange is operating at a loss of $10 million per month.

Having taught and studied token economics at the University of Nicosia, I’ve found that students often have some decidedly muddled beliefs about how what tokens are and how business and token economies work.

Unlike microeconomics and macroeconomics — which are based on decades of research, debate and inquiry that have produced some commonly accepted principles — tokenomics is a much newer field of study full of people without economics experience.

There are many self-professed “experts” who provide advice that sounds fine and is often even sensible in theory but that fails in practice.

When designing a token economy, what you really want to focus on is:

Deflationary tokens

Take, for instance, the idea held dear by many that deflationary tokens have an absolute advantage. “Deflationary” means an ever decreasing supply of tokens, which in theory increases the purchasing power and value of each remaining token. “Inflationary” means the opposite: an ever increasing supply which, in theory, reduces the value of each token.

Toronto embraced digital assets sooner than most and is home to more crypto projects than anywhere else in Canada.

Contents

Overview
Crypto culture in Toronto
Where can I spend crypto in Toronto?
Crypto projects and companies in Toronto
Toronto’s crypto controversies
Toronto crypto education and community
Notable crypto figures from Toronto

Overview

The city lies at the center of the so-called Golden Horseshoe, a large urban area around the shore of Lake Erie that 9.76 million people — about a quarter of all Canadians — call home. Consistently rated among the world’s most livable cities, Toronto, much like Vancouver on the west coast, is notable for its ethno-cultural diversity brought on by waves of immigration. It’s within a short flight of the capital Ottawa, as well as Montreal to the north and New York to the south. Toronto is seen as the country’s financial and cultural capital.

Playing home to notable battles between indigenous peoples in the late 1600s, French traders from the mid-1700s and the British later that century, Toronto has seen a lot. In 1834, around the time of a failed rebellion against the British, it was incorporated as Toronto, which was a First Nations name, and the city became a destination for slaves escaping the American South. In the late 1800s, the city became a railway hub. Today, it is served by Pearson International Airport.

As a global hub of business and culture, Toronto resembles a northern version of New York, to the extent that many movies set in New York are filmed in the city due to their similar appearance. Winter weather can be formidable, with freezing rain in 1999 requiring the army to be called in for road clearing. The city is well-known as the birthplace of Ethereum and today hosts a majority of Canada’s blockchain companies.