Historic week for Crypto, NFTs, & Blockchain

There are many recording artists and record label executives paying close attention to the NFT frenzy. The versatile Canadian musician actioned off a few days ago 10 pieces of art in the form on Non-Fungible Tokens. The auction generated $5.8M in 20 minutes. Other artists such as Halsey, Shawn Mendez and Steve Aoki have been tokenizing their music and/or their art and rising millions in the process. Kings of Leon will be the first band to release an entire album as an NFT. The band’s revolutionary tokens will unlock special perks like limited-edition vinyl and front row seats to future concerts. This leads us to believe that this is just beginning of an avalanche of musicians and record labels who will start tokenizing anything that they have ever published. It will be very interesting to see which tracks, covers, vides, and perhaps snippets of concerts hold value and which ones will not gather any attention.

A blockchain company bought a $95,000 Banksy artwork, burned it and broadcast it live on Twitter — all part of a process of turning the work into a virtual asset called a non-fungible token, or NFT.

Injective Protocol, the company behind the stunt, bought the screenprint "Morons (White)" from New York's Taglialatella Gallery, then burned it Monday evening. This whole event which took place at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn, was broadcasted live on the twitter account.

Moments later, Injective Protocol employees created a digital representation of the art using blockchain technology on the OpenSea, which recently gained notoriety after Mark Cuban used it to issue his own NFT.

While digital art has recently become popular, this event is the first major instance in which a physical artwork was turned into a unique digital asset.

"We view this burning event as an expression of art itself. We specifically chose a Banksy piece since he has previously shredded one of his own artworks at an auction."

The original print, a black-and-white depiction of an art auction with a mocking message to would-be art buyers, carried Banksy's signature and was authenticated by Pest Control, the only organization authorized to certify Banksy's art. The print was one of an edition of 500.

Crypto has been spreading like wildfire in many nations where inflation and government financial control have always been of a big concern. Venezuela has an inflation rate of 3000% in 2020, the paper bills are basically trash. Zimbabwe, as you have probably seen, used to have bills in circulation worth “100 Trillion Zimbabwe Dollars” but could not buy much, at one point Zimbabwe’s inflation was over 70 billion per cent. Colombia’s financial system does not share the problems as the two nations aforementioned, but its citizens are always searching more democratic and decentralized alternatives.

Colombia is one of the main users of Crypto and this has led to the Bank of Bogota, founded in 1870, to create a pilot program for its clients to be able to trade crypto currencies and utilize it as a store of value or to pay for goods and services with their mobile platform. If this pilot is successful we will see many other banks from different nations follow this example.

It has been a crazy ride for all cryptocurrencies. Less than a year ago, Bitcoin (BTC) was trading at less than $3k. I personally never thought that it was gonna break $20k before the end of 2021. But here we are, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap is flirting with $60k and there are no signs of stopping its growth as more institutional money is being invested into cryptos. Large corporations like Microstrategy, Tesla, and Paypal among others are throwing cash at Bitcoin inflating the place in the process and motivating many other companies to start doing the same. This may be just the beginning of corporate mass adoption which can definitely push crypto prices over 100% year over year.

With the rise of NFTs and many other blockchain protocols being built on the Ethereum network, its cryptocurrency, Ether has many hodlers millionaires. Ether is up 1740% since last year and blockchain adoption is widening. AWS, Amazon web and cloud services are now offering a blockchain service where clients can built their own private or public blockchain on top of the Ethereum protocol. For some of use that have been in the industry for over half a decade, this seems natural, but in reality this is just the beginning of the world embracing the WEB3.0

I came across crypto domains early in the week and was very curious about what the difference is between these and the regular .com and other domains we know. This is what i found: Zilliqa Naming Service is an open source blockchain project for domain name registration that also has the ability to point to Zilliqa wallets and smart contracts. Zilliqa Naming Service is opening up the top-level domain namespace with highly anticipated domains. .CRYPTO is the domain for sharing crypto currency.

Users will be able to register .CRYPTO domain names for their website, email, blog, etc. but will require browser extensions and DNS settings to resolve. We are optimistic that blockchain domains like .CRYPTO domain will inspire a new age of possibly for the Internet where domain owners have full ownership over their domain names.

If you are interested in NFTs and need the bible of it, well here it is…

https://opensea.io/blog/guides/non-fungible-tokens/

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So long…