News

Since Web 3.0 is built on cryptographic primitives and often features open source code, anyone can contribute to the project by reviewing code. This boosts security for users and turns transparency into a competitive advantage.

Web 3.0 also re-balances power dynamics between users and platforms, putting users in control of their data.

In Web 3.0, users can also own their platforms, often coordinated through tokens. As they benefit directly through the growth of the platforms, they have the incentive to provide critical services like moderation, for example.

Web 3.0 evolves the internet to take the good from its predecessor and improve upon it through aligning economics and incentives amongst all users — and thus avoid the negative effects of ad-supported models.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/08/web-3-0-can-repair-the-attention-driven-digital-economy/

Web 3 is a collection of technologies and ideas loosely organized around the blockchain that, at least according to proponents, promises to revolutionize commerce, how we organize, and perhaps even democracy itself. Others, however, assert that Web 3.0 is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. As happens with these things, the truth is likely somewhere in between, with the caveat that, as with Web 2.0, there is a lot of hot air, money and bad faith in the mix.

It can be easy to forget, but under democratic, capitalist systems, things like ownership are tied to things like the individual or the corporation, as well as private property laws.  The trouble with decentralized systems is the basic concept of owning something shifts, and our laws or the practical realities of physical things don’t line up easily with the breezy ideals of crypto.

When the car was invented, no one understood that it would lead to things like Costco or the suburbs. The effects and applications of technology can be unpredictable, and perhaps there is some truth in all the hype. But like Web 2.0 before it, the charlatans and the capitalists are working hard to popularize something with a great many downsides — and alarm bells, at the very least, are more than appropriate.

https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2021/11/20/alarm-bells-ring-at-possibility-of-getting-caught-in-web-30.html

DoraHacks, a decentralized global developer community and open-source incentive platform, has secured $8 million in strategic investment from Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and innovation incubator of Binance.

DoraHacks is a global hackathon organizer and one of the world’s most active web 3.0 developer communities. It provides web 3.0 native on-chain toolkits to help developers around the world raise funding for their startups.

In 2021 so far, more than 1,000 projects in the DoraHacks community have received over $12 million in grants and donations from worldwide supporters.

https://dailyhodl.com/2021/11/19/dorahacks-secures-8-million-by-binance-labs-to-build-a-more-open-source-blockchain-world/

New Frontier Paradigm founders Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang have raised $2.5 billion for their maiden VC fund, Paradigm One. It is the largest investment vehicle of its kind dedicated to the crypto and Web 3.0 space, according to the Financial Times.

They are active in backing DeFi protocols, Bitcoin mining, stablecoin protocols, and Layer 2 scaling solutions on Ethereum.

Their first fund amassed $400 million, which generated an IRR of over 200% in the first six months of 2021, according to the Financial Times. A couple of Paradigm’s successful exits include Coinbase and DeFi protocol Compound, as per Crunchbase.

According to Paradigm, less than 10% of the world’s population owns some crypto. And while the DeFi market has more than $250 billion in total value locked, it still pales in comparison to the size of the “traditional financial system,” Huang argues. Web 3.0 similarly has a long way to go before it reaches wide-scale adoption.

https://www.ft.com/content/49a2f155-29cf-40e6-a51c-fd12351ef2cc

The measure would require brokers to report transactions of digital assets to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), beginning in 2023. It also would require businesses to report cryptocurrency transactions of more than $10,000, which is the current threshold for cash transactions subject to IRS reporting requirements.

The IRS still issued guidance on cryptocurrency, first in 2014 and again in 2019. The IRS states that cryptocurrency or virtual currency is treated as property for Federal income tax purposes, so you have to report any gains or losses on the sale of your cryptocurrency as you would with the sale of stock.

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/taxes/infrastructure-bill-signed-into-law

Nym – a privacy web startup - aims to be the best fit for “bitcoin and Layer 2 solutions” and has plans to maybe even integrate its technology with protocols like Lightning Network, Nym CEO Harry Halpin said in an interview.

The three-year-old Switzerland-based company uses mixnet, where node operators are rewarded with tokens to mix internet traffic and make it harder for adversaries to get information at the highest level, including nation-state level mass surveillance like NSA.

Nym also offers privacy credential services to allow users to only allow access to part of their activity when required without revealing their identity.

“Encryption is becoming an incredibly important component of the internet today, and Nym provides privacy at the very bottom layer as a foundation for other private solutions to be built on top,” said Ali Yahya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

https://www.newsbtc.com/news/company/privacy-startup-nym-technology-raises-13-million-in-series-a-funding-round-led-by-andreessen-horowitz/

Only a small number of the managers we interviewed reported that they have exposure to crypto markets, with 10 per cent of the hedge fund managers and just four per cent of the private equity managers reporting crypto allocations.

"However, for those managers who are allocating funds to crypto, they have a variety of ways to achieve their exposure beyond investing in crypto currencies directly. This includes investing in crypto derivatives, listed funds, and investing in companies with exposure to crypto markets."

https://www.hedgeweek.com/2021/11/25/309728/one-four-hedge-fund-managers-increase-crypto-exposure-says-ey-survey

• The funding will support gaming studios and technology that integrate the Solana blockchain into video games on desktop and mobile platforms.
• The initiative has already resulted in its first investment with FTX and Lightspeed leading a $21 million funding round for gaming studio Faraway.
• “Gaming has a massive opportunity to bring the next billion users to Web 3,” Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed, said in a press release. “High-performance blockchains like Solana are now capable of delivering the kind of Web 2 experiences gamers expect while providing the advantages of decentralized Web 3 systems.”

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/11/05/ftx-lightspeed-solana-ventures-to-invest-100m-in-web3-gaming/

The fund will be focused primarily on developing metaverse gaming and cryptocurrency startup projects.

UniLayer’s venture-capital funds are used to invest in the next set of compelling businesses within the metaverse space that also have a Web 3.0 (decentralized blockchain)-based business model.

UniLayer is interested in projects within the metaverse space that lean toward the paradigm of decentralized autonomous organizations. The concept of user-governed platforms via shared ownership is the next level within the VR world.

https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/unilayer-capital-creates-10m-vc-fund-targeting-metaverse-web-30

This week Sam Altman, the CEO of the OpenAI artificial intelligence lab, posted a thread on Twitter talking about the investment possibilities of web 3.0. To this Elon Musk replied with a simple "Web 3.0 sounds like crap."

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/400733

Last week saw over $100 million in Metaverse land sales, as per DappRadar. Also, The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, and Somnium Space saw buying traffic of 6000 traders. Therein, Sandbox saw the most traction with more than $86 million in land sales.

Recently, English soccer club Manchester City announced a partnership with Sony to create a virtual world.

In a statement, it said, “Sony will conduct a PoC (proof of concept) with Manchester City, aiming to develop new forms of digital content and services that integrate the physical and virtual worlds…”

https://ambcrypto.com/ark-invests-cathie-wood-calls-metaverse-a-big-idea-that-will-infiltrate-every-sector/

Blockchain and digital asset investment firm Maven 11 Capital has closed a $120 million fund, its second crypto-focused fund. The fund will back infrastructure protocols, decentralized finance (DeFi) open-source protocols and Web 3 applications.

Venture Fund II differs from Maven 11′s first fund in being closed-ended, or issuing a fixed number of shares, and having a wider group of backers including wealthy individuals, crypto entrepreneurs, family offices and institutions. The new fund has already deployed investments into gaming-focused DAO Merit Circle, lending platform Maple Finance, layer 1 blockchain Anoma and DeFi dashboard Zapper, among others.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/12/02/crypto-investment-firm-maven-11-capital-closes-120m-fund/

"It's a big idea that will probably infiltrate - just like technology is, anyway - every sector in ways that we cannot even imagine right now," she told Sara Eisen in a CNBC Pro Talk.

Raj Gokal, co-founder of cryptocurrency network solana, tweeted last week: "I worry that the metaverse is overhyped (industry-wide). I haven't seen this much hype in mainstream media over an unreleased product or category of products, maybe ever."

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/cathie-wood-metaverse-property-sales-ark-invest-outlook-crypto-gaming-2021-12

Former Citigroup Inc. executive Matt Zhang is launching a $1.5 billion venture focused on cryptocurrency-related investments and has hired Sam Peurifoy -- an ex-Goldman Sachs analyst known for his online gaming persona “Das Kapitalist” -- to lead a dedicated “play-to-earn” strategy.

The New York-based investment firm, named Hivemind Capital Partners, has received “a decent amount of interest” from qualified institutional investors including pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and family offices, Zhang, founder and managing partner, said in an interview. Hivemind expects to add another four to five partners in the next six to 12 months.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-29/citigroup-alum-matt-zhang-launches-1-5-billion-crypto-venture

GIANT Protocol is developing a Web 3.0 protocol to “decentralize and democratize access to the internet and financial services.”

The tokenized bandwidth platform will “allow anyone with a mobile phone to access the internet and earn rewards based on their connectivity.”

As mentioned in an update shared with CI, GIANT Protocol is in “an advanced stage of development with an experienced founding team and a well-established network in the telecom sector.”

Suruchi Gupta, Founder and CEO stated;

“The world needs a simple, intuitive and practical way to bring blockchain and web3 benefits to the masses. GIANT was set up to address this through the creation of a global telecommunications layer built on the blockchain that turns our phone numbers into wallets and mobile minutes and mobile data into real world value for users.”

https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2021/11/183516-giant-protocol-to-develop-web-3-0-protocol-to-decentralize-access-to-internet-financial-services/

Polkadot and Kusama

Every project that ends up on Polkadot first goes through Kusama (KSM), which is Polkadot’s pre-production platform. Kusama is a unique project that allows crypto developers to experiment with their applications before minting them on the main chain.

Ocean Protocol

Launched in 2017, the Ethereum-based Ocean Protocol is a trustless, decentralized data and AI-sharing service.

It wants to be the Uniswap of data. In other words, enable everyday people and businesses to access a marketplace of data and use it for their own benefit.

https://medium.com/yardcouch-com/web-3-0-how-to-invest-in-the-next-internet-revolution-343f31f2b69d

Riaz Karamali recently joined host Joel Simon on the Industry Insights podcast to discuss the issues and innovations driving the video game industry, including the emergence of the Metaverse and how non-fungible tokens, blockchain and Web 3.0 may underpin it.

How has the popularity of NFTs affected the video game industry?

It’s been transformational. CryptoKitties, one of the first NFT games, has actually been around since 2017. In it, people can breed their own, unique kitties and trade them. That is one concept that has taken off in different ways. The latest game that’s really doing well out there is called Axie Infinity, where people kind of breed these creatures—they’re basically monsters—which battle each other. It’s called the Pay to Play to Earn concept. There are folks who’ve basically left their jobs and are making their money from playing Axie Infinity. But pretty much any video game can incorporate NFTs. The neat thing about NFTs is that they can have an existence outside of the game, so even if the game is discontinued the NFT could still have some value or could be used in another game.

Can you spend a little time explaining what exactly the metaverse is, as well as elaborating on Web 3.0 and how it differs from its predecessor?

Web 3.0 is the decentralized future, where decentralized data lives across the different nodes on the blockchain. It would be very difficult to shut down or censor, it would be encrypted, and it would be easily monetized by the creators with open standards. People talk about the creator economy—this would really be a way for creators to be more connected to their fans and the users, and also for the users to be creators, and so it’s almost a utopian thing, the way some people talk about it. We’ll see how it develops.

What are the legal issues with NFTs?

There are securities issues. Right off the bat. The securities and commodities issues, the way some of the things are being marketed and sold, and you have to counsel your clients about that. But there are a lot of question marks, you know, because the regulators haven’t really spoken very well in that space.

Then there are IP issues in terms of, it’s very easy to grab something from the Internet and turn it into an NFT, but do you really have the right to do that? And we’ve got some great copyright lawyers who I go to to make sure that my clients are doing the right thing there.

Then there are KYC, which stands for Know Your Customer and AML (anti-money laundering) issues.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/nfts-web-3-0-and-the-technologies-1312160/

In a report titled “The Metaverse: Web 3.0 Virtual Cloud Economies,” crypto-asset manager Grayscale revealed its optimism for metaverse’s earning potential. The company said that metaverse's annual economy could soon balloon to more than $1 trillion.

“The market opportunity for bringing the Metaverse to life may be worth over $1 trillion in annual revenue and may compete with Web 2.0 companies worth ~$15 trillion in market value today,” Grayscale said. “This potential has attracted companies like Facebook to pivot towards the Metaverse, which may serve as a catalyst for other Web 2.0 tech giants and investors to follow.”

At the moment, the total market cap of leading Web 3.0 Metaverse crypto networks is estimated to be around $27.5 billion. At its current stage, it’s a far cry from Facebook’s $900 billion market cap, the gaming sector’s $2 trillion market cap, and the $14.8 trillion total market cap of Web 2.0 firms.

However, money is flowing into the space at an accelerated pace. “Capital investment into the sector has recently started to accelerate but compared to the $10 billion that companies like Facebook plan to invest, and the amounts that could follow from other companies and venture capitalists, the Metaverse is in its early innings,” the report added.

https://tokenpost.com/Metaverse-annual-revenue-could-soar-to-1-trillion-9370

During Bumble’s Q3 earnings call, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd said Bumble BFF, its platform for platonic friendships, could "become a leader in the Web 3.0 world."

Wolfe Herd said BFF was already "built on blockchain technology," and that it was designed to encourage its users to create their own communities. She believes that "in the near term" BFF will evolve and create "new engagement, participation, and creator models" for its users.

But over the "longer term," Wolfe Herd expects BFF to enable its members to "own their experience on Bumble" via the "communities they build, the virtual goods and experiences they acquire, or through new ways of owning their identity as they navigate the metaverse."

Those experiences haven't been developed yet, but Wolfe Herd said Bumble will relaunch BFF to showcase these new features in the near future.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/11/29/do-bumbles-metaverse-ambitions-make-any-sense/

Unity Software

Unity Software's content development platform enables developers to create a range of immersive and interactive 2D and 3D platform-agnostic games. The company's game engine is used to develop over 70% of the top mobile games and by 94 of the leading 100 game studios in the world. Additionally, Unity Software also powers other immersive 3D experiences in a range of industrial and commercial use cases such as training, robotics, and simulation.

Cloudflare

Although not strictly a metaverse stock, leading edge-based content delivery network (CDN) player Cloudflare has a significant role to play in creating the infrastructure needed to support a metaverse. The company makes it possible for data and computation to happen at localized data centers that are closer to the actual user, instead of at a centralized location. With edge computing resulting in higher speed, reliability, and security on the internet, all of which are critical to the evolution of the metaverse, Cloudflare can emerge as a major beneficiary of this evolving trend.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/12/03/2-top-metaverse-stocks-that-could-make-you-rich/

Metaverse virtual real estate is the new big winner in the crypto world, as leading virtual worlds recorded more than $100 million in NFT land sales in the past week, according to DappRadar data.

The Sandbox is leading the pack with both the highest number of traders and sales. The Sandbox also boasted the highest trading volume last week, taking in more than $86 million, while Decentraland followed in second place with more than $15 million traded for land plot NFTs.

“The rush to acquire land in the metaverse is driven by creatives who truly want to express themselves, and speculators who want to cash in. Unlike the ICO [initial coin offering] bubble in 2017, the metaverse has actual adoption and a thriving (albeit early) ecosystem” said Hayden Hughes, CEO of crypto social trading platform Alpha Impact.

https://www.yahoo.com/now/metaverse-virtual-real-estate-booming-221006563.html

Contemplating the metaverse, these are just a few of the legal issues that come to mind:

Personal Data, Privacy and Cybersecurity - If the metaverse fulfills the hype and develops into a 3D web-based hub for our day-to-day lives, the volume of data that will be collected will be exponentially greater than the reams of data already collected, and the threats to that data will expand as well.

Technology Infrastructure: The metaverse will be a robust computing-intensive experience, highlighting the importance of strong contractual agreements concerning cloud computing, IoT, web hosting, and APIs, as well as software licenses and hardware agreements, and technology service agreements with developers, providers and platform operators involved in the metaverse stack.

Open Source – Open source, already ubiquitous, promises to play a huge role in metaverse development by allowing developers to improve on what has come before. Whether or not the obligations of common open source licenses will be triggered will depend on the technical details of implementation. It is also possible that new open source licenses will be created to contemplate development for the metaverse.

Quantum Computing – With raw, unchecked quantum computing power, the metaverse may be subject to manipulation and misuse. Regulation of quantum computing, as applied to the metaverse and elsewhere, may be needed.

Antitrust: Collbaroation amongst competitors may invoke antitrust concerns. Also, to the extent that larger technology companies may be perceived as leveraging their position to assert unfair control in any virtual world, there may be additional concerns.

Intellectual Property Issues: A host of IP issues will certainly arise, including infringement, licensing (and breaches thereof), IP protection and anti-piracy efforts, patent issues, joint ownership concerns, safe harbors, potential formation of patent cross-licensing organizations (which also may invoke antitrust concerns), trademark and advertising issues, and entertaining new brand licensing opportunities.

Content Moderation. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) has been the target of bipartisan criticism for several years now, yet it remains in effect despite its application in some distasteful ways. How will the CDA be applied to the metaverse, where the exchange of third party content is likely to be even more robust than what we see today on social media?

Blockchain, DAOs, Smart Contract and Digital Assets: A decentralized metaverse with its own discrete economy would feature the creation, sale and holding of sovereign digital assets (and their free use, display and exchange using blockchain-based payment networks within the metaverse). This would presumably give NFTs a role beyond mere digital collectibles and investment opportunities as well as a role for other forms of digital currency. How else will our avatars be able to build a new virtual wardrobe for what is to come?

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/coming-metaverse-there-may-be-excitement-there-certainly-will-be-legal-issues

Nvidia

Nvidia is the leading supplier of graphics processing units (GPUs) and sells its chips to a range of customers in gaming, data centers, self-driving cars, and graphics artists. The company has the necessary graphics technology to help content creators render 3D environments, but it's now also expanding into software.

Unity Software

One top software provider that could benefit enormously from the growth of the metaverse is Unity Software. Unity provides software solutions that are used to create, run, and monetize real-time 2D and 3D content across mobile devices, PCs, game consoles, and virtual reality devices.

Roblox

If you are looking for a pure-play option to invest in the metaverse, Roblox is your best bet. It has 47 million daily active users that come to its platform to play games, but management sees potential for the metaverse to appeal to a broad audience beyond those interested in gaming.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/12/02/3-top-stocks-to-invest-in-the-metaverse/

For tech companies, entering the metaverse is proving to be a great move: Many investors are specifically looking to see which companies are taking an early plunge into the new virtual space that everyone's talking about.

An ETF launched Fount Investment Co. Ltd. on the day that Meta changed its name now has more than $8 million in net assets.

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/investors-are-growing-increasingly-excited-about-the-metaverse-heres-why

The continued shift of game developer monetization is a key dynamic within this growth trend. Players are increasingly moving away from paying to play premium games towards free games, which developers monetize by selling players in-game items to enhance gameplay or social status within these virtual worlds.

A new paradigm allows users to own their digital assets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), trade them with others in the game, and carry them to other digital experiences, creating an entirely new free-market internet-native economy that can be monetized in the physical world.

Metaverse virtual economies.

• Payment Networks: Web 3.0 metaverse economies can use their own digital currency, like MANA, or the currency of the layer one base crypto cloud economy platform they’re built on, such as Ethereum (ETH) or Solana (SOL).
• Decentralized Finance: Decentralized exchanges allow users to trade in- game items while lending platforms allow users to take out loans on their virtual land.
• NFT Sovereign Goods: Players can purchase NFTs from other creators and bring them into other virtual worlds to be put on display or sold.
• Decentralized Governance: Legal frameworks take back control of the digital economies from centralized corporations and allow a global network of Web 3.0 metaverse users to decide the rules of their collectively owned virtual space.
• Decentralized Cloud: File storage solutions such as Filecoin give Web 3.0 metaverse worlds a decentralized infrastructure solution to store data while services like Livepeer give virtual worlds decentralized video transcoding infrastructure.
• Self-Sovereign Identity: Internet-native social reputation coin (“creator coins”) data from other platforms may be transferred into the Metaverse and used for identity or credit scoring.

The market opportunity for bringing the Metaverse to life may be worth over $1 trillion in annual revenue and may compete with Web 2.0 companies worth ~$15 trillion in market value today

https://grayscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Grayscale_Metaverse_Report_Nov2021.pdf

Digital asset investment giant Grayscale is launching a new product offering exposure to one of the hottest digital assets today, Solana.

The Solana Trust will be the 16th offering in Grayscale’s expanding product line that caters to institutional and high-net worth investors.

“In many investors' minds, there's a continued appetite to invest in Solana,” says Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein. “In some sense, it is a more cost-effective blockchain [than Ethereum], and today we are seeing over 500 decentralized apps and about 1.2 million monthly active users on the network. When you kind of take a step back, and you see how quickly it has been able to ramp up, it's certainly pretty impressive.”

“What's been interesting about Solana is that it gives users the ability to learn, experiment, and build. They generally have more budget to experiment on the protocol than some other more established blockchains like Ethereum, because of lower transaction fees.”

Grayscale will require a $25,000 minimum investment, charging its standard 2.5% management fee. On the other hand, New York-based Osprey Funds offers a similar product, launched this past September, with a $10,000 minimum. It is waiving its 2.5% fee until at least January 2023.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2021/11/30/grayscale-investments-launches-trust-with-exposure-to-ethereum-competitor-solana/?sh=285f3ca2bbe4

What's the purpose of digital land?

On-screen, virtual plots of land look rather dull and unappealing. However, contrary to the details when shopping for homes, digital plots of land aren't as limiting as real-life implications of homeownership. Although purchasing digital land isn't such an extensive and cumbersome process, the benefits of owning digital land are very similar to owning property. Owners can unlock a potential passive revenue stream.

Does digital land have earning potential?

Digital land, especially in blockchain games like Axie Infinity, opens up possibilities where in-game mechanisms like harvesting and growing resources can provide monetary value. Since these plots of digital land give players the ability to collect and gather resources in exchange for potential monetary value, or earn passively simply by owning it, crypto natives are looking into digital land as a viable and lucrative investment for the long term.

https://marketrealist.com/p/is-digital-land-worth-the-investment/

SoftBank Group Corp. is investing $150 million in a South Korean metaverse platform that has amassed a large following of young female users by selling high-fashion items for 3-D avatars, according to the companies involved in the deal.

Naver Corp.’s Zepeto, which users access via a mobile app, is Asia’s busiest metaverse platform with about 2 million active users a day. People scan a photo and can build digital likenesses of themselves, then hang out in virtual worlds. Users can voice chat with each other and roam through virtual spaces such as a haunted house, a school classroom or a garden wedding.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-bets-on-asian-metaverse-platform-selling-digital-gucci-dior-11638270000

In October, Tokens.com, a blockchain technology company focused on NFTs and metaverse real estate, acquired 50 percent of Metaverse Group, one of the world’s first virtual real estate companies, for about $1.7 million. Metaverse Group is based in Toronto but has virtual headquarters in a world called Decentraland in Crypto Valley, which is the metaverse’s answer to Silicon Valley. Decentraland also has districts for gambling, shopping, fashion and the arts.

Since that acquisition, Tokens.com has broken digital ground on a tower in Decentraland. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Burberry and other luxury brands have already entered the metaverse via NFTs, a move that makes company executives optimistic that the Tokens.com tower will soon generate revenue from leases and advertising for brands like these.

Michael Gord, a co-founder of the Metaverse Group, said skeptics should look at the trends catalyzed by the pandemic. “As more people participate, it’s where you’re going with friends, where you’re having experiences like conferences and concerts,” he said. “It’s inevitable that the metaverse will be the No. 1 social network in the world.”

The real world and the online world merge into one hybrid universe, where the fungible and the nonfungible intersect at multiple points, said Justin Banon, a co-founder and the chief executive of Boson Protocol, which enables the sale of physical products in the metaverse as NFTs. Real estate in the metaverse will house the commerce that will drive this transformation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/business/metaverse-real-estate.html

• According to data provided by the blockchain analysis company – Elliptic – investors have lost $12 billion to criminals targeting decentralized finance platforms since the beginning of 2021. More than $10 billion of that amount accounts for cases of fraud and theft on DeFi products.
• “The DeFi ecosystem is an incredibly exciting and fast-moving space, with financial services innovation happening at light speed. This is attracting large amounts of capital to projects that are not always robust or well-tested. Criminal actors have seen the opportunity to exploit this.” - Tom Robinson – Chief Scientist at Elliptic
• Participants in the ecosystem remain unprotected by any legal authorities in case of criminal activities.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/19/over-10-billion-lost-to-defi-scams-and-thefts-in-2021.html

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler hasn’t called for banning cryptocurrencies in the U.S., but the relationship between regulators and the “Wild West” of the crypto landscape has predominantly been antagonistic. However, as DeFi has matured, and proven its staying power, U.S. regulators' views seem to have matured as well.

In recent remarks, Gensler has called for striking a balance between preserving the innovations stemming from DeFi’s ascent and protecting investors against financial stability concerns.

Crypto markets must be conducive to productive speculation while ensuring stability and hedging opportunities. The more than $4.14 billion locked in DeFi derivativesand the parabolic rise of yield farming, among other factors, substantially demonstrates the demand for speculative products in crypto.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencewintermeyer/2021/11/17/defi-matures-as-innovative-crypto-based-futures-issuance-and-trading-rises/?sh=6237847697cc

WonderFi is Canada-based, publicly traded company focusing on investing in the DeFi space.

On Oct. 26, the company announced that it closed a private placement deal worth $26 million. A week later, the company got board authorization to use $10 million of these funds to buy up DeFi-related cryptocurrency asset.

Options include a crypto-linked ETF, such as Purpose Bitcoin ETF or a company like Tokens.com.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/1-top-publicly-traded-option-133000179.html

Alameda Research, one of the biggest crypto market trading firms, is sidestepping banks to borrow up to $1bn of new money from peers as it seeks to expand its activities, in the first syndicated debt deal in decentralised finance markets.

Alameda will tap into a pool of stablecoin funds deposited by five investors for a $25m syndicated loan, which will take place on a blockchain infrastructure provided by marketplace Maple Finance

DeFi markets have grown 1,700 per cent in the past year to reach $247bn of total value locked into preprogrammed smart contracts, according to new research from data company Elliptic. Trading volumes on decentralised exchanges have seen similar growth with more than $300bn worth of transactions taking place each month.

https://www.ft.com/content/308a473c-47be-4175-a0c3-b1661bf94ebc?signupConfirmation=success

DeFI Market

• According to Chainalysis's latest report into global cryptocurrency adoption, North Americans sent $276 million to decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms between July 2020 and June 2021. DeFi transactions made up 37% of North America's transaction volume, and the U.S. topped the chart for global DeFi adoption.
• The Chainalysis report showed that large transactions -- ones over $10 million -- made up 60% of all DeFi transactions in the second quarter of 2021. It says that DeFi is "disproportionately popular" among bigger investors, although some retail investors in the U.S. are also getting in on the DeFi game.

How To Make Money In DeFi

1. Lend/Earn: Essentially, crypto investors can deposit assets on the platform and earn higher rates of interest than they would with a traditional savings account. The way the platform generates those high returns is by lending the assets out and paying investors part of the interest.
2. Decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, are another popular DeFi application. Unlike a centralized exchange, where the platform sits in the middle of the trade to make it happen, DEXs let people trade directly with each other.
3. Liquidity pools are another way to earn passive income on your assets. It's a little bit like having a storeroom in the back of a supermarket, ready to meet customer demand.

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/cryptocurrency/articles/experienced-traders-are-reaping-defi-rewards-find-out-how-you-can-too/