By Aditya Humnabadkar and Jayesh Singh
gm guys!
It was a very red week for crypto, with most leading cryptocurrencies depreciating over the seven days as heavyweights like Bitcoin and Ethereum posted double-digit percentage losses by the weekend.
Let’s walk through the stories of this week.
This week in the cryptic land🤔
Decline in crypto scams this year📉
What’s poppin’ — A recent Chainalysis report has stated that there has been a 15% reduction in crypto crime, compared to a 36% decline in legitimate transactions. Overall, the total scam revenue has been 66% lower than the end of July 2021 which corresponds to a declining crypto market. Despite the recent Solana and Nomad token hacks, factors such as general awareness and stronger security measures have been cited as potential reasons for the reduction in crypto crime.
Bottomline — With countries like South Korea banning crypto exchanges and Canada pension fund losing its crypto funds from Celsius investment, reports like these restore people's faith in crypto.
Verve Estate’s mega metaverse plans🏗️, Ramsay and MTV’s virtual plunge
There is a lot to keep an eye on as far as metaverse projects are concerned.
Dubai's Verve Estate has introduced a hyper-realistic metaverse environment which aims to contribute to the Dubai Metaverse strategy. The project would provide solutions for clients for planning, creation and developing of secure web3/metaverse strategies.
After its partnership with Minecraft, MTV is launching a VMA experience on Roblox where players can visit to play games, party and have a good virtual time.
Now you can be yelled at for making bad food virtually by none other than the infamous chef Gordon Ramsay. ITV studio's popular cooking show Hell's Kitchen has partnered with The Sandbox metaverse to create a virtual kitchen experience where you create new dishes, win competitions and collect recipes.
Crypto-transparency & Russian isolation👀
The war between Russia and Ukraine continues involving cryptocurrency with Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister announcing that $54 million of the country’s crypto donations have been spent $54 million of the country’s crypto donations have been spent on drones, armoured vests, computer hardware and software. The government is also transparent about its total crypto funds spent which is quite rare in these times when crypto is infamously used for money laundering purposes.
Japan's SBI holdings, in the light of Russian sanctions, have shut down its bitcoin mining operations in Siberia. The firm has stated the uncertainty of mining prospects in Russia after the Ukraine invasion and the overall slump in crypto prices have been two of the main reasons.
How’s India holdin’ up?
AR Rahman enters the Metaverse
Oscar-winning music director, singer and songwriter, AR Rahman has announced the launch of his metaverse project. The project Katraar, while undisclosed so far, can be followed on its website.
Many Indian celebrities have forayed into the metaverse, lately. Previously, singer Daler Mehndi bought a piece of land in the virtual metaverse, naming it Balle Balle Land. In November 2021, veteran actor Kamal Haasan partnered with Fantico to exclusively launch his digital avatars and NFTs.
Are you the ‘Student Entrepreneur of the Year 2022’?
India houses over 69,000 registered startups with over 100 of them in the prestigious unicorn club. AWS and Campus Fund have been partnering to further inflate the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world.
In the past 2 editions, the 22 student-led startups, who presented in the Grand Finale of the previous two editions, have collectively gone on to raise more than $7 million of funding.
Venture deals this wee
What else are we nibbling on?
Gnosis Safe token will airdrop 500 million Ethereum tokens to wallets.
Solana’s Stepn launches NFT collab with Atlético de Madrid.
Project of the week
OnMeta
One of the biggest challenges in web3 has been its inaccessibility. Say, you wanted to buy an NFT ticket to a web3 conference. Chances are that you’ll have to make the payment using cryptos. A tricky affair if you don’t have any, or if you are just looking to enter the space.
OnMeta will let you use a debit card or UPI to buy them and bag your NFT ticket to the conference. Bengaluru-based Onmeta is driving this seamless exchange between fiat money and crypto currency, thus bridging the gap between the two worlds.
Their ‘On-ramp’ service allows economic value to flow from fiat money (government-issued currency) into crypto assets. Simply put, it lets users buy crypto currency using fiat money. The crypto currency can then be used to earn NFT assets such as tickets, music, video, and art.
That’s it for this week folks. We’ll see you next week with more interesting content. We’ve also been revamping our structure, so, you can expect to enjoy richer content in the forthcoming weeks.👋
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