Date: 11/19/2021
“History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.” — Will Durant
Weekly News Report:
1. The iconic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is marching its way to the blockchain. The department store is releasing a series of parade-themed non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Nov. 25, Thanksgiving Day, with plans to donate the proceeds to charity. The collection of 9,500 NFTs will be sold through Sweet’s NFT marketplace, built atop the Polygon blockchain. While the NFTs will be free to mint, 10% of their resale profits will be donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
2. Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency trading platform, secured a 20-year contract deal worth $700 million with the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) to buy the naming rights to the Staples Center in Los Angeles, home to the Los Angeles Lakers. Staples Center will now be known as Crypto.com Arena after an agreement with its owner, AEG. The name change will take effect on Christmas Day when the Lakers host the Brooklyn Nets.
3. BTC and ETH were afterthoughts on Wednesday as a handful of alternative coins turned heads in digital-asset markets. The day’s big story was Crypto.com’s CRO token, which shot up some 26% to a new all-time high after the crypto exchange and credit-card issuer announced a naming-rights deal with the Staples Center. Avalanche, a smart-contracts blockchain set up to compete against Ethereum, was another winner as its AVAX token surged to a record high after a new partnership with accounting giant Deloitte was announced.
4. The group known as ConstitutionDAO was outbid by an unknown buyer who submitted a $43.17 million bid at Sotheby’s auction house on Thursday evening. When the gavel banged, a first edition copy of the Constitution, one of only 13 in existence, was in new hands. ConstitutionDAO had captivated mainstream attention as perhaps the best example of a crypto community flexing its real-world buying power.
5. Animoca Brands’ virtual property and gaming firm The Sandbox is opening up part of its metaverse to players for the first time via a multi-week play-to-earn (P2E) Alpha event. SAND prices have surged to a new all-time high as The Sandbox announces its highly anticipated play-to-earn metaverse event.
6. The Winklevoss twins’ crypto exchange, Gemini, will allocate capital from its $400-million funding round into building a “Gemini experience in different Metaverses.” Cameron emphasized to Forbes that unlike the centralized roadmap for the metaverse from firms “like Facebook or Fortnite,” Gemini is aiming for the decentralized route due to the belief that it offers greater upside for the user.
7. The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Criminal Investigation Unit (CI) unit seized $3.5 billion in cryptocurrency during fiscal 2021, which accounted for 93% of its criminal investigation seizures. The seizures included $1 billion in crypto tied to the darknet market Silk Road. That action is the largest crypto seizure ever by the U.S. government.
8. Currently, the Indian Government levies an 18% GST on transaction costs conducted on registered cryptocurrency exchanges. According to a report, the nation’s government plans to reclassify cryptocurrency exchanges as e-commerce platforms, which will reduce the Goods and Services Taxes (GST) paid on the fee per transaction, or per trade, to 1%.
9. With $121 billion in assets under management, Southeast Asia’s second-largest bank, OCBC Bank, is looking into a digital asset exchange to satisfy customer demand.
10. Blockchain technology has evolved enough to meet the critical demands of at “least certain segments in the banking and financial markets,” according to a research note by the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). The bank sees asset-backed securities (ABS) markets, including mortgage-backed securities (MBS), as having a high potential for disruption from the blockchain.
11. Orica launched Thursday at the Malta AI & Blockchain Summit, or AIBC Malta, and announced its collaboration with an NGO to drop NFTs on its platform and use those funds to build a school in Uganda.
12. Game7 is an upcoming $500 million blockchain ecosystem acceleration decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, with the goal of onboarding gamers worldwide to the blockchain ecosystem. It will be established by a diverse group of gaming and technology industry veterans and will help create a future where blockchain and gaming unites
13. The longtime ruler’s unhinged monetary policy follows a familiar pattern — and it’s pushing some Turks toward bitcoin. Erdogan’s Turkey is fast becoming a case study of bitcoin’s potential benefits for residents of countries with fragile currencies, or authoritarian leaders likely to pursue short-term political gain through inflationary policies.
