Daily Digest 12/21
Insight on the biggest stories of the day. “Neither this post nor any other on cryptofal.com should be taken as financial advice. It is not.”
NFT gaming generated $2.32B in Q3 — BGA report
Blockchain is making its way into many different sectors and the video game industry is one of the biggest exploring the possibilities. Play-to-earn games are increasing in popularity as people want to take advantage of the possible next Axie Infinity as well as make passive income.
In the third quarter of this year Blockchain / NFT games accumulated $2.32 billion in revenue. Metaverses also took a jump with virtual land sales hitting $42.6 million and overall VR apps like Decentraland and Sandbox hit an all-time high of $4.6 billion at the end of November.
Facebook is also making its push into the metaverse by changing its name to Meta which really started the wave of money flowing into similar projects. There are so many possibilities for metaverses that makes it disruptive to current gaming platforms and even social aspects.
Crypto exchange Kraken acquires non-custodial staking platform Staked
Kraken is one of the most popularly used crypto exchanges in the United States right next to Coinbase. The exchange announced earlier today that they would be purchasing blockchain infrastructure company Staked for an undisclosed amount.
In the same announcement, they described the deal as “one of the largest crypto industry acquisitions to date”. Users of Staked will also now have access to Krakens wide variety of yield products.
Staking is a huge part of some projects that utilize a Proof-of-Stake consensus since it is a way of securing the network and validating transactions. PoS is also a greener blockchain alternative to Bitcoins Proof-of-Work. It is also a good way to earn passive income as users are rewarded periodically for staking their tokens.
This is not the first company that Kraken has acquired as they have also bought Interchange, Bit Trade, and Cryptowatch since 2017. Kraken is also planning to go public on the stock market by the end of 2022.
'You don't own Web 3.0,' says Jack Dorsey, criticizing its centralized nature
Known Bitcoin maxi and founder of both Twitter and Block, Jack Dorsey, has taken to his Twitter account to voice some of his frustrations with Web 3.0.
Web 3.0 is the decentralized peer-to-peer web where a lot of blockchain-based companies are focusing their attention. This will be an extension of the current web 2 that we currently use which is controlled by big data such as Amazon and Google. Dorsey does not think that Web 3 will be any better.
Elon Musk also jumped in saying that Web 3 has not lived up to the hype. Dorsey noted that Venture capital firms own a controlling stake in these blockchains and force them to comply with regulations that go against the focus of crypto.
A report by PitchBook shows that fintech firms received $88.3 billion in funding from VCs in the first 3 quarters of 2021.
When there is a large number of tokens coming back onto exchanges that can mean that either investors are looking to sell or they’re looking to buy. Since today’s price action has been mostly positive it looks like they are deciding to buy but it does seem a bit mixed.
With $25 million dollars worth of USDC coming on some may be scooping more BTC and ETH. The $75 million in Tether coming off exchange could be a sign that people are possibly selling their BTC and ETH that they put on exchange as we see in the chart.
More and more tokens are being pulled off-exchange throughout the year which could be an issue for exchanges going forward but it is still something to look at.