Stories by Ben Munster
What Is Stepn? The ‘Move-to-Earn’ NFT App That Pays You Crypto to Exercise
On February 19, 2023, the lifestyle app Stepn airdropped its rarest NFT sneaker yet, the Genesis Sneaker. Stepn is the evolution of two concepts that have been gaining traction for several years now: the augmented reality (AR) game and play-to-earn gaming. AR games typically feature a virtual world overlaid onto the real one. The concept properly took off in 2015 with Pokemon Go, which scattered virtual Pokemon across a real life map of the world and let users track and collect them via GPS. S...
South African Crypto Ads Must Now State Investments ‘May Result in Loss of Capital’
Companies, celebrities, and influencers who hawk crypto will soon have to warn potential buyers that the investments they peddle may lead to financial ruin—at least in one jurisdiction. On Monday, South Africa’s Advertising Regulatory Board released new guidelines obliging crypto advertisements to “expressly and clearly state that investing in crypto assets may result in the loss of capital as the value is variable and can go up as well as down.” The directive added that advertorials have to be...
Hot DAO Time Machine
Ever had a powerful and tragically unrealizable urge to go back in time and change things for the better? I have. Mine has been a life of abject, miserable failure, countless unforced errors, and if I could have just a second shot, as it were, maybe I would still be with her… So you can imagine my squeal of porcine delight when I came across a mysterious press release dispatched by one Alex Polischuk, a tech enthusiast based in Kyiv, advertising something that looked an awful lot like a solut...
Crypto Is Down Bad, But VCs Keep Pouring Money In
Given the contagion and chaos we have witnessed since Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX had a sudden multibillion-dollar coronary, you may be tempted to conclude the entire crypto industry is headed for the great Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the sky, and that nobody in their right mind could possibly still have faith in it. And yet, even in the frigid cold of Crypto Winter, venture capital continues to pour in for certain lucky builders. Analysts at Pitchbook report that crypto VC in...
Over 90% of FTX's Blockfolio Acquisition Was Made Using FTT Tokens: Report
According to Bloomberg, around 94% of the funds used to acquire the crypto trading app Blockfolio were denominated in FTT, the “exchange token” FTX created in 2019 that entitled its users to discounts on trading fees. FTX purchased a majority stake in Blockfolio in 2020 using what was described at the time as a mix of cash, crypto, and equity. Initial reports indicated the acquisition totaled $150 million. The co-founder and then-CEO of the app Ed Moncada said at the time that he was "thrilled...
EY ‘Did Not Initiate’ Transfers of $1.7M in Bitcoin Linked to Defunct QuadrigaCX
Accountancy firm Ernst & Young has denied moving funds mistakenly transferred three years ago to inaccessible cold wallets associated with QuadrigaCX, the infamous Canadian crypto exchange that lost $190 million in user funds before its CEO died under mysterious circumstances. On December 19, researcher ZachXBT flagged the movement of 104 Bitcoin ($1.7 million) split across five cold wallets, much of it to the privacy wallet Wasabi. This Bitcoin had been dormant for over three years since emplo...
Trump's NFT Rollout Went Exactly as You'd Expect
On Thursday, former U.S. President Donald Trump released a 45,000-piece series of $99-apiece NFTs following long-awaited hints that a “major announcement” would be forthcoming. Many people had assumed the announcement would relate to Trump’s recently declared 2024 presidential campaign, but here we are. The NFT "trading cards" feature digital renderings of Trump in a variety of kitschy getups, including cowboy dusters and astronaut suits, which Trump described as “scenes pertaining to my life...
New Coinbase Tool to Let Users Reclaim Stranded Ethereum Tokens
Tokens lost to the ether may soon be retrieved, says Coinbase. A new tool developed by Coinbase will allow users to recover ERC-20 tokens previously thought forever stranded, having been sent to incompatible public addresses associated with the exchange. ERC-20 tokens are the standard Ethereum token format and first grew to prominence during the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom of 2017. Many of these coins, however, aren’t supported by Coinbase. That means that incompatible ERC-20 tokens sent...
Crypto Derivatives Platform Paradigm Slashes Salaries to ‘Reduce Need for Layoffs’
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Paradigm, the crypto derivatives platform, has cut employees' salaries, not Paradigm the venture capital firm. Paradigm, a crypto derivatives platform, is cutting its employees’ salaries by 15%, citing dismal market conditions. “Post FTX's collapse, it is clear the contagion is deep and wide and like many of our clients and peers, we are not immune,” the company said in a statement posted to Twitter on Thursday. “Salary cuts reduce the n...
Crypto Marketers Search for a New Sales Pitch After FTX Crisis
The sudden multibillion-dollar collapse of the crypto exchange FTX has inflicted destitution and misery on great swaths of the crypto world. Retail investors are down bad. Flagship exchanges are on the brink of insolvency. Crypto critics are jubilant. Institutional support is in the toilet, and the toilet is in the landfill. What’s a crypto marketer to do? Many smaller businesses are putting PR on hold entirely in the hope that attention will eventually turn elsewhere. “We've been advising our...
Is It Wrong for DeFi Projects to Track Data?
As if there weren’t enough misery in the crypto markets at the moment, DeFi enthusiasts are now in an uproar over revelations that Uniswap, the popular decentralized exchange (DEX), tracks public user data. True, the exchange doesn’t track personal, private data like names or IP addresses, but according to newly-uploaded terms and conditions documents, pretty much anything publicly viewable online is aggregated and harvested. And it's not alone; earlier this week, Metamask, the popular Ethereum...
Crypto.com CEO Says 'Business as Usual' After Revelations of 'Accidental' $400M Transfer
Another high-profile crypto exchange known for lavish spending during last year's bull market is in trouble as users question the health of its finances—and make the irresistible parallel to the recently imploded FTX exchange. But Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says not to worry: all is solvent and above board. “Our platform is performing business as usual,” Marszalek said in an AMA posted to Twitter on Sunday. “People are depositing, people are withdrawing, people are trading, there’s pretty m...
Crypto.com Accidentally Sent $400M in Ethereum to Wrong Address, CEO Calls Concerns ‘FUD’
After the shocking collapse of FTX, other centralized crypto exchanges are under the microscope, and Crypto.com customers are concerned after CEO Kris Marszalek acknowledged that his exchange accidentally sent 320,000 ETH, around $400 million at the time, to a public address registered at a competitor exchange. Blockchain records on Etherscan show that on October 21, Crypto.com sent the sum, around 80% of its total ETH reserves, to rival exchange Gate.io—just before Gate.io provided “proof of r...
How to Get Money Out of FTX (But Only If You’re Filthy Rich)
In the wake of the complete collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, along with its founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s multi-billion dollar fortune, it appears further financial chicanery is afoot. Withdrawals and internal balance transfers in the non-American iterations of the exchange have been frozen since the exchange’s collapse earlier this week, leaving billions of dollars in customer funds stranded and irretrievable. On Thursday, however, FTX announced it had resumed limited withdrawals for clien...
SkyBridge's Scaramucci to SBF: 'Tell the Truth'
Anthony Scaramucci, the one-time Trump spokesman whose investment firm earlier this year sold a 30% stake to recently devastated crypto exchange FTX, has suggested that his friend, former billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, speak with regulators immediately about what happened. "I would implore Sam and his family to tell the truth to their investors—to get to the bottom of it,” Scarmucci told CNBC’s Squawk Box in a televised interview on Friday. Bankman-Friend, he added, ought to stop tw...
Ethereum-Based Prediction Market Shows Red Wave in US Midterms
Do you want a sense of who’s up and down in the U.S. midterms but are tired of pollsters and Twitter pundits? Take a look at Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market that lets users trade shares in each possible outcome—and is giving massive odds to the Republicans sweeping the Senate. Polymarket has attracted a staggering $1.5 million worth of bets in the dollar-denominated stablecoin USDC on the delicately titled market, “Which party will control the U.S. Senate after the 2022 election?”...
Here's Another New Book for Bitcoin Skeptics
I expected a fairly lazy and hysterical recounting of the many ills of crypto when I began reading Popping the Crypto Bubble. The ambitious crypto-skeptical book was co-authored earlier this year by financial fraud writer Darren Tseng, fintech consultant Jan Akalin, and software engineer Stephen Diehl—notably, the organizers of September’s historical “no-coiner” conference. Diehl is the most notorious of this trio. He regales his 58,000-strong Twitter audience with a daily deluge of epigrammat...
What Is a Generative Art NFT? Inside the Algorithmic Art Revolution
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) took the world by storm in 2020, generating billions of dollars in profit for artists and collectors alike. Much of the work sold, at the start, was standard fare: digital renditions of Old Masters, eccentric photography, paintings done via iPad. Soon, a new breed of digital artists began to experiment with the form and produce art that was more closely bound to the digital world in which it was sold. Some artists peddled complex VR art “experiences,” others designed a...
What Is zkEVM? An Innovation That Could Boost Ethereum Transaction Speeds
For years, critics of Ethereum have lamented how slow it is. The core protocol can handle only 10-15 transactions per second, and fees frequently become unsustainable during times of high user activity. Developers have tried a number of solutions, among them sidechains, which shift transactions to a second layer where they are processed at speed and then referred back to the main chain. Often these sidechains batch transactions together and beam all them back to the core protocol at once, “roll...
What You Can Do With Your Old Ethereum Mining Rigs
Picture this: You are an Ethereum miner, and for almost ten years your nine-to-five has been the same: wake to the sound of industrial wheezing in your backyard, scarf down a quick breakfast of heavily contaminated Cinnamon Crunch, take an asthmatic jog ‘round the polluted freshwater lake, then head back to the garage where the machines are kept, and where you tend to their inscrutable whims—lest they decline to compensate you with precious ETH. Having carried on like this for years, you have b...
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