Blockchain.com, a crypto wallet & exchange platform, announced today an early signup list for its forthcoming NFT marketplace As of now, those interested can signup for first access to the Blockchain.com NFT marketplace.
In a few weeks, the ability to buy, sell, and store NFTs will be integrated into the Blockchain.com Wallet. Furthermore, Blockchain.com also recently launched a new NFT Explorer to discover more about the most popular NFTs on the market.
“Over the last ten years, we’ve helped tens of millions of people access crypto by providing an easy way to buy, sell, swap, store, and earn crypto. We want to make accessing the NFT market as easy as accessing the crypto market. With the Blockchain.com NFT marketplace (in beta), you’ll be able to browse, buy, sell, and securely store NFTs without ever leaving your Blockchain.com Wallet.” – The Blockchain.com Team
By Catherine Shyu Sullivan, Senior Product Manager, Coinbase
The month of December normally consists of a scramble to find the perfect gifts for coworkers, hosts, friends, and family. You either brave the long lines in stores or navigate supply chain delays online, and frequently end up settling on another generic candle.
This holiday season, we’re introducing a new crypto gifting experience that allows you to send family and friends crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum along with a personalized digital card. The season of (crypto) giving is here.
The gift that keeps gifting
Crypto gifts educate, excite, and have the potential to increase in value (there’s also risk that they decrease in value). Plus, all crypto gifts come in a personalized digital card featuring up-and-coming, crypto-forward artwork.
Give a crypto gift right from the app or coinbase.com/gifting. Simply tap Send a gift from the menu on the left hand side — all you’ll need is the lucky recipient’s email address. You can gift 100+ crypto assets to recipients who already have a Coinbase account and can gift 5 assets (including Bitcoin and Ethereum) to recipients who are new to Coinbase. There is no fee to send a crypto gift.
Perfectly packaged with a digital card
Your gift is delivered in a digital card featuring a piece of unique artwork by an up-and-coming artist. Pick a piece, write a personalized note, and give the lucky recipient a taste of crypto culture.
“Andrius”-008 by Magdiel Lopez
Born in Havana Cuba, Magdiel Lopez spent his childhood inspired by the colorful culture. Lopez’s upbringing played an integral part in forming his sense of style, art and design, which can be seen in his works today.
“Andrius”-008 by Magdiel Lopez
Robot Invasion by David Krovblit
David Krovblit is a Canadian visual artist who now lives in California. He curates images that he considers lost in time — layering them to form whimsical collages rooted in pop culture.
Robot Invasion by David Krovblit
#1644 by Bored Ape Yacht Club
An iconic collection of NFTs. Each Bored Ape is unique and programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits, including expression, fashion accessories, clothing, and more. Note: your recipient will not receive a NFT, just a digital replica of the Bored Ape! Sign up for the waitlist of Coinbase NFT if you’d like to explore NFTs.
#1644 by Bored Ape Yacht Club
Snow Days by Rob Flowers
Rob Flowers is a UK based artist with humor at the heart of his work. It has been described as “trippy…. as if you ate too much candy floss and went on the waltzers at your town’s local fair.”
Snow Days by Rob Flowers
The future of gifting just got brighter. Try it this holiday season in the Coinbase app on iOS or Android or at coinbase.com/gifting.
*Excludes Japan
Give the gift of crypto this holiday season was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
By Aaron Henshaw, Head of Coinbase Cloud Engineering
It’s no secret that crypto is gaining mainstream appeal, with the global crypto market cap reaching an all-time high of $3 trillion for the first time, the total value locked in DeFi reaching $250 billion, and 16% of Americans investing in, trading, or otherwise using cryptocurrency in the past year. A growing number of the world’s largest companies are looking to integrate crypto into their applications. Recently, we’ve seen Stripe, Square, Reddit, the NBA and others introducing crypto into their product lines with no signs of this trend slowing down. They all have one thing in common: a need for infrastructure and tools to operate and participate in the ecosystem.
Coinbase Cloud is committed to empowering current and future builders of the cryptoeconomy. Part of this will be building a platform that allows developers to access a suite of primitives like trading, storing, blockchain data access, and staking services. Our vision is to unleash a wave of innovation by offering turnkey solutions, enabling the innovators of tomorrow to do what they do best: build.
Joining Forces
In January 2021, Coinbase welcomed Bison Trails to become the foundational team and platform of Coinbase Cloud. By joining forces, we could accelerate our combined mission of creating a platform for the next wave of blockchain developers and provide a space to learn, participate, and build for the future of crypto.
As the founders of Bison Trails, Joe Lallouz and I saw this as an opportunity to build something bigger than Bison Trails and more expansive for Coinbase. Coinbase’s commitment to being crypto-first undoubtedly contributed to a seamless transition for our team.
The successful transition was also made possible by the support of the Coinbase leadership team, which has been committed to bringing blockchain infrastructure to the masses, as well as making this a great place for founders like Joe and I to continue building and realizing the vision that we set out to accomplish.
As crypto becomes ubiquitous, the products and services of the Web3 era will need to be powered by reliable and secure infrastructure. Coinbase sees this opportunity and is deeply committed to both our success and the growth of the crypto ecosystem.
The Momentum
Crypto infrastructure has been the bread and butter of Bison Trails since its founding. Its infrastructure platform and products are now the foundation of the Coinbase Cloud platform and suite of developer offerings, to equip the next generation of builders with even more powerful solutions.
We power some of the world’s top custodians, exchanges, funds, dapps and token holders. We are building an industry-leading platform for anyone to participate in blockchains (e.g. Celo Validators Groups, Polkadot Validators, eth2 Validators, including helping power Coinbase’s eth2 staking). We also provide reliable infrastructure for read/write data access, empowering the developers of tomorrow to build innovative crypto products and services, scale across blockchains, gain insights into network trends, and more. This frees our customers from having to invest time and resources into developing the necessary engineering, protocol, DevOps, or security competencies to do so reliably in-house.
We are also taking network participation to the next level by engaging deeply with protocol teams. For example, we’ve worked with Solana Foundation and the NEAR council, and supported the Keanu merger, among others.
Let’s take a look at our progress so far:
$30B+ in assets on platform¹ staked across more than 25 protocols as of November 2021
60,000+ nodes across our Participate, Delegate, and Query & Transact products
Doubling the team size, including expanding our dedicated security team
30+ protocols supported for our read/write infrastructure product, Query & Transact. This includes adding support for global distribution across three cloud providers, and multi-user API key management with rate-limiting options to our customers.
Powering features and cross-platform integrations for highly scaled Coinbase products, such as custody integrations for Institutional and eth2 staking for Retail
These metrics are crucial. They measure our impact on the communities we support. Unlike passive custody, assets that are staked are actively used to secure the underlying protocols, making Coinbase Cloud the largest protector of stake-based protocols.
Given the role we play across 30+ protocols, we’ve invested in the security and operational excellence of both our platform and the broader ecosystem. For example, our double-signing protection capability for eth2 has greatly reduced the risk to our platform users of any equivocation or double signing events. It’s for these reasons that companies and ecosystem players like a16z, Current, and Turner Sports have chosen to work with Coinbase Cloud.
Trevor Marshall, CTO of Current, says “the secure, reliable infrastructure and network expertise Bison Trails (Coinbase Cloud) provides has been invaluable to making it possible for Current to be an early, active participant in Polkadot, Karura and Acala and build hybrid financial products that have the potential to improve the financial outcomes of even more people.”
Up Next
We are now preparing for the next phase. We see a future world where every developer, whether part of an early stage project or a leading financial institution, is in some way touching crypto networks. Coinbase Cloud will provide the tools and the platform they need to do that. Our mission is to empower the innovators and help accelerate the Web3 evolution. This is where the world of software is going and we’re excited to lead the herd.
¹The Bison Trails platform is non-custodial.
Nearly one year in: Leading the herd at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Although the first non-fungible token (NFT) was launched as early as 2015, the market fever around this exciting asset class did not kick off until 2020 when it broke all-time records. The value of NFTs sold in the third quarter of this year reached a record level of $10.7 billion, and the craze around them is no longer reserved exclusively for a narrow group of crypto and blockchain enthusiasts.
The NFT industry has embraced digital artists, celebrities, actors and large companies to look at and engage in this fast-growing industry as a way to maximize profits and build brand awareness. But, are NFTs suitable for everyone? Do they bring added value to retail investment platforms, foreign exchange (Forex) and contracts for difference (CFD) brokers?
Finance Magnates has x-rayed what stands behind the success of CryptoPunks, Bored Apes and other digital collectibles, and it has discussed the subject with industry experts asking if they see an opportunity for Forex and contracts for difference brokers to use NFTs as promotional or trading assets.
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) = An Opportunity for Your Brand?
Famous brands and large companies have quickly discovered that NFTs can be a great way to build popularity among new economy participants and take advantage of the booming trend. As experts point out, it can be a great product for advertising new products and building brand awareness.
“With NFTs, brands can create a buzz about a new product, create scarce and exclusive collectible assets to tell the brand story, or even support causes through token sales. Consumers today like to see brands driving sustainability efforts, which can be seen in the rise of ESG investments. So, brands might look to attract this demographic with NFTs,” Charlotte Day, Director of the Contentworks Agency, said.
As the pandemic months have shown, retail investors aimed trading stands not so far from gamification, and experts have repeatedly commented on the gamification of the industry (commission-free trading platforms gaining huge popularity, such as Robinhood).
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According to Philip Gunwhy, the Chief Marketing Officer for the NFT ecosystem, Blockasset, “traditional finance (or TradFi) moves slower than crypto, but it is inevitable that more and more brokers will enter the space in the future.” “It was only in 2020 that many institutions started to look at Bitcoin for the first time. That is still more or less the case today, save for those who are looking into Ethereum. Although NFTs have been around for around five years now, they have only really caught on in 2021. As the space matures, we can see many traditional brokers looking to break in: there is already evidence of that now, with crypto-native firms like Three Arrows Capital dropping millions of dollars on blue chips like Fidenza and Ringers,” Gunwhy commented.
CFDs for NFT-oriented Stocks?
One of the most attractive ways for CFD brokers to tap into this rapidly building market is by offering clients access to NFT-oriented stocks. This is the simplest and easiest method to implement initially. The list of companies related to the non-fungible tokens is long and among the most popular ones you can find: Cloudflare (NET), Mattel (MAT), Dolphin Entertainment (DLPN), Takung Art (TKAT), PLBY Group (PLBY), Funko (FNKO) and, of course, Twitter (TWTR).
Cloudflare’s stock price increased 350% last year, and in 2021 it has gained another 156%. In the case of Mattel, the appreciation is not as high but is also attractive for investors, amounting to over 50% since the beginning of 2020. Moreover, investors are very interested in Funko shares, which have grown by 65% YTD. Such rates of return will undoubtedly be of interest to current and new potential clients.
To get the full article and the bigger picture on NFT phenomena, get our latest Quarterly Intelligence Report.
XY Finance has built an efficient and user-friendly cross-chain swap for DeFi & Metaverse and single-token liquidity provision service through X Swap and Y Pool. Of them, X Swap caters to users’ cross-chain needs between multiple chains, and the newly launched Y Pool can reimburse swapping fees and token rewards for liquidity providers.
With the coexistence of multiple chains and the boom of DeFi+NFT+GameFi, cross-chain exchange aggregators have become an essential and critical infrastructure in the entire cryptocurrency market, and the search for more efficient and convenient cross-chain exchange never stops.
XY Finance, a cross-chain swap aggregator for DeFi & Metaverse, aims to provide users with efficient cross-chain swapping services at the best price. It recently closed a $12 million round of funding from Circle (Circle Internet Financial), Infinity Ventures Crypto, Mechanism Capital, Morningstar Ventures, YGG (Yield Guild Games), and Animoca Brands. We are honored to see investors across core pillars in the industry: exchanges, venture funds, research firms, GameFi DAOs, and game developers, such as MEXC Global, TRON Foundation, gCC (gumi Cryptos Capital), Lemniscap, Evernew Capital, PANONY, Axia8, Looksrare.vc and more.
In addition to institutional investors, XY Finance gets backing from individual investors, such as Ben Chan (VP Engineering at Chainlink Labs), Kevin Tai (Co-Founder of Linear Finance), Tom Schmidt (Investment Partner at Dragonfly Capital), and Tempo (CEO of Perpetual Protocol), etc.
XY Finance’s advantage comes from the combination of two components, i.e., X Swap and Y Pool, which is also the operating model of XY Finance. Of them, X Swap will provide cross-chain transfer and swapping services for users, and Y Pool is used to incentivize users to provide liquidity. In return, liquidity providers can receive both swapping fees and governance token rewards. Currently, X Swap already supports cross-chain swap on Ethereum, BSC, Polygon and Fantom. The newly launched Y Pool has opened up liquidity provision services to users.
Simply put, X Swap will find the optimal cross-chain and transaction path for users, supporting cross-chain swaps between any assets, and allowing users to either swap assets on one specific chain or transfer/swap across two chains. For example, if you want to swap UNI on Ethereum to BUSD on BSC, you will first swap UNI to bridgeable assets (such as USDT, USDC etc.) on Ethereum, and migrate to BSC through Y Pool or bridge partners ( AnySwap, O3 Swap, and Multichain.xyz) before you finally convert to BUSD.
Although the operation seems complicated at first glance, X Swap only requires the user to initiate a transaction on the first chain, and the subsequent swap and cross-chain processes are automatically executed by the protocol, thus greatly simplifying the user’s transaction operation process.
Currently, X Swap mainly uses liquidity from DEXs such as Uniswap, SushiSwap and 1inch, while the newly launched Y Pool will allow users to provide liquidity directly on XY Finance, so that they can also earn swapping fees and XY token rewards.
The biggest advantage of Y Pool is that one pool can manage the liquidity of the same asset on multiple chains. For example, the USDT Y Pool pool can receive USDT assets from various chains such as ERC-20 USDT, BEP-20 USDT, Polygon USDT, etc., which are used to provide liquidity for X Swap. In addition, in order to balance the liquidity in the Y Pool, XY Finance proposes a rebalancing incentive mechanism that will reward users with XY Tokens for helping to rebalance assets on different chains.
Regarding XY Finance’s tokenomics in the Y Pool, in addition to the XY liquidity bonus, the founding team also allocates 80% of the swapping fees from X Swap to liquidity providers and another 20% to the DAO vault. Besides, of the fees allocated to the DAO vault and royalty income from the GalaXY Kats (an XY Finance’s NFT + GameFi project), 60% of them are used to repurchase XY Tokens from the secondary market, and 50% of the repurchased XY Tokens will be burned. This helps XY to form a virtuous cycle.
XY Finance’s native token, XY, will be offered on each chain supported by the protocol. There will be a total of 100 million tokens, of which 35% will be used for liquidity mining funds and GameFi rewards, 15% will be allocated to the team and advisors, 24% will be allocated to seed, private and strategic investors, 15% will be used for marketing and bounties, 6% will be used for public sales and 5% will be used for insurance, XY Finance will conduct an IDO on the Copper platform on December 9.
XY tokenomics
After locking XY in the staking pool, XYers can gain governance power to propose, vote, or change system parameters in real time, as well as start new Y Pools, etc. In addition, a portion of the swap fee will be allocated to XY Finance and the XY DAO as a security fund.
Regarding XY Finance’s future development plans, the agreement also plans to support Cronos, Ronin, Avalanche, Arbitrum and launch NFT Satellite, an NFT liquidity aggregator, by the end of this year; it will support more networks such as Flow, Solana and Polkadot in the first quarter of next year; more importantly, XY Finance will also support the NFT marketplace and launch the NFT wrapper and “NFT Sweeper”, and later launch the limit order swaps.
XY Finance Roadmap
Overall, XY Finance has built an efficient and user-friendly cross-chain swap aggregator and single-token liquidity provision model through X Swap and Y Pool, which not only satisfies users’ cross-chain needs across multiple chains but also helps liquidity providers earn revenue. The mutually reinforcing between the repurchase and burn mechanism and its NFT project GalaXY Kats will lend more strengths to the project. Let’s wait and see if XY Finance will be the dark horse in the cross-chain swap sector.
Melbourne, Australia, December 2nd, 2021 — The world’s first inclusive and ethical DeFi ecosystem platform MRHB DeFi has received a strategic investment from Sinofy Group, a tech consulting management firm headquartered in Shanghai. Sinofy supports revolutionary tech companies to help them gain prominence in the world’s most digitally connected regions — China and Southeast Asia.
A Partnership that goes beyond financial investment
The investment includes a strategic partnership which sees MRHB DeFi join hands with Sinofy to fulfil the former’s vision of bringing an ethical, community-first focus to the world of decentralized finance. Sinofy Co-founder and angel investor Amirsan Roberto has taken the partnership a step further and joined the halal DeFi ecosystem startup as the Head of Investments and Partnerships.
“Joining as Head of investments and Partnerships is a reflection of my commitment to and conviction in Marhaba’s vision,” explains Amirsan Roberto. “This is the first step we are taking in establishing our group venture fund and we are honored to have MRHB DeFi as our first institutional investment.”
“We welcome Amir and Sinofy Group as part of the Marhaba family of partners and investors,” says Naquib Mohammed, CEO and founder of MRHB DeFi. “Since our early beginnings, Sinofy has actively supported our marketing efforts and aligning Marhaba with Sinofy’s deep regional expertise will bring us more visibility across Asia and beyond.”
A Technical and Intellectual Collaboration
Indeed the partnership will also see the parties collaborating on Sinofy East European Division’s upcoming We_Challenge 2021 Hackathon in Ukraine. With a gathering of 1,500 participants, 50 global media partners, 20 IT communities and 10 strategic partners, the hackathon is gearing up to be one of the most anticipated developer conventions in the region.
MRHB DeFi will be coming on as an Official Sponsor at the event, with CTO Deniz Daikilic providing a keynote address as well as engaging in a panel discussion that includes CEO Naquib Mohammed and Head of Investments & Partnerships Amirsan Roberto.
The Focus on Community and Ethics
MRHB DeFi recently closed its Pre-Public Sale 2, an open, community-focussed offering to provide pre-IDO access and pricing to its loyal community members. The rousing success of the sale is further validation of the massive interest for DeFi services rooted in ethics and inclusion.
MRHB DeFi was founded with a vision of providing excluded and crypto-cautious communities greater access to the growing opportunities and utilities of the cryptoverse. The project is underpinned by offering faith-based DeFi services which adhere to the ethical investment and financing principles rooted in Islamic Finance, many values upheld by the halal platform also align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Business practices deemed ethical include those that avoid interest, usury, social exploitation as well as support sustainability, asset or utility backed financing, transparency and equitable risk-reward sharing. These principles have universal appeal far beyond the faith conscious community.
With the Islamic Finance market sized at around USD 3 trillion of assets, bringing even a small portion of Shariah-sensitive liquidity into DeFi will represent a major boost to the total value of the DeFi sector worldwide.
Sinofy Group has now joined the host of strategic investors in MRHB DeFi who are on board to bring DeFi innovation to the Islamic finance industry. To date, investors include Sheesha Finance, Blockchain Australia, Mozaic, Contango Digital Assets, NewTribe Capital, Acreditus Partners, EMGS Group, MKD Capital and a grant from Polygon Technology.
About MRHB DeFi
MRHB DeFi is a halal, decentralized finance platform built to embody the true spirit of an “Ethical and Inclusive DeFi” by following faith-based financial and business principles, where all excluded communities can benefit from the full empowerment potential of DeFi.
The diverse team comprises researchers, technocrats, influencers, Islamic fintech experts & business entrepreneurs, who came together to ensure that MRHB DeFi prevails in a manner that will impact society as a whole, essentially bridging the gap between the faith-conscious communities and the blockchain world.
Sinofy Group is an end-to-end tech consulting management firm headquartered in Shanghai, offering a range of services across blockchain, fintech, cybersecurity, robotics, medtech, gaming, AI/ML and AR/VR industries.
The company deals with customized solutions built to “Sinofy, Fund, and Empower” tech companies in the world`s most digitally connected region — China and Southeast Asia. To date, they have worked with innovative tech brands seeking to expand their digital reach and penetrate into new markets. Their vast global network brings a world-class blend of expertise and support.
Ethereum trimmed gains from the $4,800 resistance against the US Dollar. ETH is down 5% and it might decline further if there is a break below $4,350.
Ethereum failed to clear the $4,800 resistance and started a fresh decline.
The price is now trading near $4,500 and the 100 hourly simple moving average.
There was a break below a key bullish trend line with support near $4,600 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD (data feed via Kraken).
The pair could decline further below $4,500 if there is a close below the 100 hourly SMA.
Ethereum Price Trims Gains
Ethereum struggled to clear the $4,800 resistance zone and started a fresh decline. ETH broke the key $4,650 support to enter a bearish zone.
Besides, there was a break below a key bullish trend line with support near $4,600 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. The pair even traded below the $4,550 support zone. It is now trading near $4,500 and the 100 hourly simple moving average.
A low is formed near $4,455 and is currently consolidating losses. An initial resistance on the upside is near the $4,540 level. It is near the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $4,783 high to $4,455 low.
The first major resistance is near the $4,580 level. The next major resistance is near the $4,620 level. It coincides with the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $4,783 high to $4,455 low.
Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com
A close above the $4,600 and $4,620 levels could start a fresh increase in the near term. In the stated case, the price might rise towards the $4,750 level. Any more gains could lift the price towards the $4,800 zone in the near term.
More Losses in ETH?
If ethereum fails to start a fresh increase above the $4,600 level, it could start a downside correction. An initial support on the downside is near the $4,500 level.
The first key support is now forming near the $4,450 level. A downside break below the $4,450 support zone could push the price further lower. The main breakdown support is $4,350, below which the price could decline heavily.
Technical Indicators
Hourly MACD – The MACD for ETH/USD is gaining pace in the bearish zone.
Hourly RSI – The RSI for ETH/USD is now well below the 50 level.
