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Shiba Inu is entering the world of Metaverse with Shiberse

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Following the NFT craze, crypto enthusiasts have recently turned their attention to the Metaverse. Shiba Inu is the latest network to declare similar ambitions, with several companies trying to jump on board.

Shiba Inu, unlike its main competitor, DOGE, continues to develop and expand its ecosystem. Shiba Inu’s “Shiberse” would be the company’s first release of the year. Shytoshi Kusama, Shib’s chief developer, has been teasing investors about the release for the past week, and now it’s official.

In a recent tweet, they confirmed the release of Shiberse. Shiba Inu has always done things a little differently. With a supply of 1 quadrillion coins, Ryoshi locked half of them in Uniswap and “burned” the other half to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin for safety.

SHIB was used in the most significant crypto donations in history to help halt the deadly spread of Covid-19 in India and subsequently burnt 40% of its total supply to a dead wallet, guaranteeing its long-term success and stability.

Shiba Inu’s entry and the growing popularity of Metaverse

The Metaverse is the next step in the evolution of social networking. Neal Stephenson’s dystopian cyberpunk novel Snow Crash is credited with coining the term metaverse. The novel, along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which envisions a virtual reality dataspace called the matrix, was published in 1992 and is regarded as a canon of the genre.
In general, the Metaverse will be a collaborative effort including more than one institution. It will be a networked platform for virtual and augmented reality that will be built by individuals all around the world and available to everyone.

Goldman Sachs, a global investment firm, estimates that the Metaverse might be worth $8 trillion. In a recent “Exchanges at Goldman Sachs” program titled “Understanding the Metaverse and Web 3.0,” Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan detailed the bank’s metaverse projection.

“We think this could be as much as an $8 trillion opportunity on the revenue and monetization side”

Eric Sheridan

Shiba’s entry into the Metaverse world is an excellent initiative on the company’s part that can ensure greater acceptance and demand for the SHIB coin. SHIB has been on a downward trend since the start of 2022, following a phenomenal 2021 in which Shiba Inu’s native token had an ROI of almost 1322447.01 percent at one point. On October 28, 2021, SHIB reached an all-time high of $0.00008845. As per the data by CoinMarketCap, SHIB is currently trading at $0.00002132 with a 24-hour trading volume of $924,075,914.

Elon Musk to eat a happy meal on TV if McDonald’s accepts Dogecoin

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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and a billionaire, has proposed to eat a McDonald’s kids meal live on television if the fast-food giant accepts Dogecoin (DOGE) as an official payment option.

In a tweet on Tuesday morning, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated:

“I will eat a Happy Meal on TV if McDonald’s accepts Dogecoin.”

Elon Musk

DOGE’s price surged 7% from $0.135 to $0.145 in the minutes following Musk’s tweet and is still at $0.146 at the time of writing. Markets have reacted far more strongly to previous tweets from Musk, with a recent statement about utilising it for Tesla product purchases prompting DOGE to rise over 25%. The current slump might be a factor, but the lesser surge implies Musk’s ability to influence markets is waning.

McDonald’s reply to Elon Musk: “Only if Tesla accepts grimacecoin”

The official Twitter handle of the fast-food restaurant replied to Elon that they would only accept dogecoin if Tesla accepted grimace coin. Grimace is a fictional character who appears in McDonald’s advertisements. He’s a plump, purple creature with short arms and legs.

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They also went out and tweeted recently, ” how are you doing people who run crypto Twitter accounts.”

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Musk, who was just voted Person of the Year by Time Magazine, has long been a backer of the meme cryptocurrency. In the crypto world, he is known as the Dogefather. He earlier stated that he owns dogecoin and believes that the meme coin is the crypto of the people.

Nayib Bukele’s response to McDonald’s

On January 23rd, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele joined the trend by tweeting a poorly photoshopped photo of himself wearing a McDonald’s-branded hat and nametag. His administration recently purchased the BTC dip, picking up an extra 410 Bitcoin for $36,000 apiece.

Musk has used his 71.5 M audience on Twitter to show his support to DOGE and other meme coins. According to Tesla’s CEO, Dogecoin is the finest cryptocurrency for transactions. On the other hand, he believes Bitcoin is better suited as a store of value. Furthermore, Elon addressed that Tesla began taking dogecoin payments for select products in a recent tweet.

Why did Ethereum rebrand ‘Eth2’ as the Consensus layer?

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The Ethereum Foundation has now renamed the terms Eth1′ and ‘Eth2 to Execution layer and Consensus layer respectively. Announcing the same, the team behind ethereum.org published a blog on January 24 2022 detailing the change in the terminologies and the reasons behind it while maintaining the roadmap to scale the blockchain in a decentralized way remains unchanged.

As per the blog, the ‘execution layer’ previously called Eth 1.0 is the Proof-of-Work consensus model that is today called Ethereum. On the other hand, the Proof-of-Stake Beacon Chain, which is slated to take over consensus processes after the merging of the two blockchains, will henceforth be known as the ‘consensus layer.’

The crucial step in this regard will be the next merge, where the existing Proof-of-Work chain will unite with the Proof-of-Stake Chain. It is scheduled tentatively for June 2022. But why the name change?

Here’s why Ethereum decided to phase out the term Eth2

As per the blog, one of the major problems with the Eth2 branding is that it creates confusion among new users of Ethereum. ‘They intuitively think that Eth1 comes first and Eth2 comes after. Or that Eth1 ceases to exist once Eth2 exists. Neither of these is true, ‘ the post stated. And removing Eth2 terminology would help future users from navigating this ‘confusing mental model.’

Next, it claims that Eth 2.0 has turned into an inaccurate representation of Ethereum’s roadmap and the new names provide an accurate picture that allows content to reach a broader audience.

Another crucial reason behind the decision to scrap the old names is to eliminate this scam vector where attempts were made by malicious actors to use the Eth2 misnomer to fool users by asking them to swap their ETH for ‘ETH2’ tokens or telling them they must somehow migrate their ETH before the Eth2 upgrade etc.

Further, the team aims to provide clarity to those staking operators who have represented ETH staked on the Beacon Chain with the ‘ETH2’ ticker. On whether the update has any effect on the Ethereum roadmap, the post stated,

“It doesn’t! It’s important to understand that this renaming represents a change in naming only. The features on Ethereum’s current roadmap (i.e. the merge, sharding) and future features will still happen on the same timeline.”

Vitalik Buterin Reveals How He Burned Over $7 billion in Shiba Inu

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Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum blockchain’s co-founder, recently revealed how he burned $6.7 billion in Shiba Inu.
Buterin stated in a recent interview with the UpOnly Podcast that unknown devs donated him 505 trillion SHIB tokens in May 2021, which were worth $8 billion at the time.

The developers did this, according to Buterin, because they assumed delivering the tokens to him would essentially burn them, reducing supply and rising demand. Buterin donated SHIB and other crypto donations to different organizations throughout that month, including 50 trillion SHIB ($1.2 billion at the time) to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund.

Vitalik narrates the hazzles he went through

He mentioned in the podcast that it was scary and fun at the same time. He said the frightening part was that it was more money than he ever had. He added that he had to follow a complicated technical procedure to get rid of it because initially, the funds were all in a cold wallet.

He had paper backups in the form of two separate numbers, where if you add the two numbers, you will get the private key. One of the two papers was with his family in Canada, where he had to call them up and ask them to read it out to him.

He input the numbers into a $300 PC he bought at Target to finalize the transaction. He also created an Ethereum transaction to transmit ETH from the wallet. He then downloaded a QR code generator application and scanned the transaction’s QR code with his phone, copied it to his PC, and pasted it into etherscan.io. He then began the process of burning the tokens.

Vitalik expresses his views on the future of Ethereum

In addition, Vitalik stated that Ethereum is still aiming for a transaction fee of $0.05 and that rollups and sharding are the best ways to scale without losing security or decentralization. “Within a few years,” he expects transaction costs to fall below $0.05. He also mentioned that the ZK-rollup Ethereum Virtual Machine is progressing nicely and that within a couple of years, Ethereum fees will be back under 5 cents.

On the podcast, they also conversed about Vitalik’s life outside crypto, his family, and his future plans outside of Ethereum.

Facebook and Instagram Reportedly Working on Allowing Users to Create, Display, Sell NFTs

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According to The Financial Times, social media giant Metawas considering allowing users to build, promote, and trade NFTs on Facebook and Instagram.

If the corporation launches such tools, it will be the most visible demonstration of significant support for NFTs so far, helping to cement the controversial assets’ place in the digital world.

According to the Financial Times, the plans are “early stage and may still change.” According to the journal, staff at Facebook and Instagram are “preparing” a feature that would allow users to show NFTs as profile pics and work on a prototype that will allow users to mint more NFTs. Others at Meta are said to be talking about “launching a platform for users to purchase and trade NFTs.”

What are NFTs?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digitalized tokens unique in the blockchain network. What an individual is willing to pay for determines its worth. As a result, demand drives pricing.

NFTs, on the other side, are one-of-a-kind and rare; thus, no two are the same. Picture Pokémon cards, rare coins, or a pair of limited-edition Jordans: NFTs create scarcity in otherwise infinitely available assets, complete with a certificate of authenticity. Digital artwork that may be acquired and sold with NFTs includes GIFs, tweets, virtual trade cards, photos of physical objects, and photographs of tangible items are examples of digital artwork that may be purchased and sold using NFTs.

Exactly how far along these plans are is impossible to say, but it’s not the first show of interest in NFTs we’ve seen from Meta’s leaders. Last December, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri stated the firm is “currently exploring NFTs and how we can make them more accessible to a larger audience,” while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the metaverse would need to enable “ownership of digital goods or NFTs” in October.

Because the tech giants are jumping on the NFT bandwagon, this could create an enormous opportunity and marketspace for artists to showcase their unique NFT collection. They need to provide a more secure platform because many obvious scams show that any photoshop experts can replicate any famous NFTs and lure buyers into their scam.


Solana releases new mainnet version 1.8.14; more upgrades are soon to follow

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Solana officially admits to a ‘performance degradation’ after being hit by a series of network instability recently for two or three days. In a report released by Solana status via Twitter, it said that the Solana mainnet beta is experiencing high levels of network congestion and that the current issue faced by validators is due to excessive duplicate transactions.

In an effort to mitigate the issue, the report states that Engineers have just released the 1.8.14 version. According to the report, the upcoming releases are aimed at improving the state of the network, with more improvements expected to debut in the next 8-12 weeks. Many of these features are currently live on Testnet, where they are being rigorously tested, the report added.

In a series of tweets, the report explains that the previous version 1.8.12 was specifically aimed at improving issues of program cache exhaustion, which are largely responsible for the recent performance degradations.

Asserting that developers have made a significant amount of progress on this, but the work is still not completed. Pointing out that the last 24 hours are a testimony to the fact that the systems still need to be improved in order to meet the demands of users and support the more complex transactions on the network.

Solana network woes continue to haunt

Solana despite being trumpeted as the potential alternative to Ethereum has suffered network outages in the recent past. The first such incident of this kind was reported on September 14, 2021, when the blockchain slowed down owing to a resource exhaustion problem, according to the Solana Status account.

The blockchain suffered yet another outage on December 4, when the Mainnet Beta network stopped producing blocks that prevented new transactions from being confirmed, and engineers had to restart it to resume working.

Again on January 4th, 2022, there were reports about a DDoS attack via spam transactions on the Solana network. However, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana debunked those reports, stating that “there was some congestion due to mismetered transitions, and some users experienced their txs timing out and had to retry.”

Then on January 6, 16:11 UTC, the Solana network experienced performance degradation affecting the throughput of the system and causing it to drop certain transactions.

Crypto.com plans to double-down on its investments, appoints its new GP

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Crypto.com Capital, the venture arm of Crypto.com has announced its plan to expand its investment fund as it appoints former TechCrunch journalist Jon Russell as the fund’s General Partner [GP]. Revealing the same in the blog dated 17 January 2022, the investment firm added that Russell comes with 10 years experience as a technology journalist, which includes stints with leading online news firm TechCrunch and subscription media startup The Ken.

The $200 million funds were launched back in March 2021 to invest in promising early-stage startups that have the potential to bring the digital asset ecosystem to one billion users. As per the blog post, Crypto.com Capital has over 10 million users through products such as a Visa debit card, trading exchange, and NFT platform.

The fund is spearheaded by Crypto.com co-founder Bobby Bao and it targets seed and Series A deals in categories including the metaverse, blockchain gaming, NFTs, and DeFi. As stated in the blog, it has completed over 20 deals and its portfolio of companies consists of the likes of Efinity, Genies, DeBank, Alethea AI, YGG SEA, and Matter Labs. Speaking on the occasion, Bobby Bao said,

Crypto.com Capital is not even one year old, but already we work hand-in-hand with dozens of world-class founders and we want to find more. Adding Jon to the team is a statement of intent to double down and grow the web3 ecosystem.  

Crypto.com is the most ambitious company- Jon Russell

Its new General Partner, Jon Russell termed Crypto.com to be ‘the most ambitious company in web3. He further went on to add that the firm’s capital fund brings a very ‘unique advantage to help the world’s best web3 founders and startups to realize their potential.’

Having said that, It’s not uncommon for crypto firms to move into venture capital. Recently Bahamian trading platform FTX launched a new venture unit, called FTX Ventures, and hired Amy Wu, the former exec at Lightspeed, to lead the fund. In 2021, more than 1,700 venture capital deals enable many crypto startups, projects, and protocols to reap over $25 billion in funds. Several prominent venture firms like Paradigm and a16z had also launched new multi-billion venture funds last year.

Cardano-based Metaverse Project Pavia Takes Off: Sundaeswap Announces Launch Date

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Cardano’s gaming project Pavia officially debuted, as metaverse-related interest surged once again. For starters, Pavia is a gaming NFT Metaverse that aims to challenge the dominance of larger rivals in the crypto metaverse realms such as Sandbox Crypto and Decentraland. The Pavia project was incorporated in September 2021. In October 2021, it announced the first sale of LAND parcels by random allocation.

As per the press release, Pavia.io, has a total of some some 100k Land parcels, each being minted as a unique NFT with coordinates. At the time of writing, the project had sold nearly 60% of these Land parcels from October to November 2021. A final is scheduled for Q1 2022.

The pandemic saw a surge in developments towards an overall Metaverse and predictions reveal a potential valuation of $800 Billion by 2024. With projects launching on multiple blockchains, Pavia with its first-mover advantage may well be the people’s choice of the Cardano chain.

This is not the first time a metaverse project is taking shape in the layer-1 blockchain. Back in December 2021, a decentralized cloud computing solution, Cudos announced a joint partnership with Cornucopias. The blockchain gaming metaverse aimed to expand the Cardano Infrastructure by creating a unique method to build dynamic non-fungible tokens [NFT] through the Cudos Network.

As seen in all metaverse projects Pavia too has its native currency, PAVIA, of which 25% was airdropped to Pavia NFT landholders. The token along with other native assets is being actively traded on Cardano’s first DEX MuesliSwap. That being said, the ADA community has more reasons to cheer.

Cardano’s SundaeSwap DEX announced launch date

Cardano’s native decentralized exchange [DEX] and automated liquidity provision protocol SundaeSwap have released the dates for the launch in its blog post published on 16th January 2022. As per the post, the DEX is slated to go live as a fully-functional beta on Thursday, January 20, 2022. Apart from that, projects will be allowed to create pools starting from coming Tuesday, January 18.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson,delighted by the announcement, took to Twitter to congratulate the DEX team and dropped hints of upcoming DApps on the layer-1 platform later this quarter.

Shiba Inu reacts to CoinMarketCap issues

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CoinMarketCap listed three fake Shiba Inu contract addresses on their website in a quite recent update. The SHIB token team took to Twitter to announce that the three contract addresses listed on CoinMarketCap, namely Binance Smart Chain, Solana, and Terra, are all fake and that interaction with these contracts must be avoided if not the user will be at risk of irreversibly losing their funds.

The SHIB token defense team expressed their disappointment in their tweet. Supposedly, the CoinMarketCap team had refused to communicate with the SHIB team concerning the updates on the token page. Allegedly, CoinMarketCap had willingly allowed these malignant troupe to deface the ‘dogecoin killer’ token. The meme coin team explicitly showed displeasure over the lack of professionalism rendered by the crypto asset price tracking website.

Wormhole addresses for Shiba Inu

In response to the squabble, CoinMarketCap interpreted that the contract addresses are indeed wormhole addresses for the SHIB. They explained that these addresses were used to aid cross-chain transactions of wrapped versions of the altcoin.

At the moment, the reason for the listing of the alternative addresses is uncertain, but such delinquency is adversely harmful not only to the altcoin but the entire crypto society.

At the time of writing, the three wormhole addresses were still visible on CoinMarketCap, in the dropdown segment next to the SHIB token’s official ETH contract address.

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Shiba Inu reacts to CoinMarketCap issues 4

Despite the warnings given by the Shiba Inu team, there seems to be an array of transactions on each of these fake contract addresses’ chains. This indicates that quite a few investors have already sent money to these addresses, which is alarming.

In a lighter perspective, Shiba Inu has risen as the most viewed cryptocurrency of the previous year, 2021, according to CoinMarketCap. It has been enumerated by the cryptocurrency price-tracking website that there have been more than 188 million views, for the meme token, over the last 12 months. The more astonishing fact happens to be, Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest and most sought-after cryptocurrency had only 145 million views at the same time, which makes it the second most viewed crypto asset.

Shiba Inu remains to be eminently frivolous despite its rising idolization among holders. At the time of writing, Shiba Inu was priced at $0.00003142 with a daily drop of 1.79%.

Tesla Takes DOGE Payments Mainstream as Musk Builds Hype

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It is now official that Tesla accepts Dogecoin (DOGE) payments for some of its merchandise. Not very long ago did Elon Musk tweet about his company accepting the famous meme coin, after which things were kept very low-key. Now, the cat is out of the bag.

Earlier this week Twitter user had confirmed the payment mode, among other modes of payment, on his Twitter handle. Although there was a huge tide of speculation, the token’s followers awaited an official confirmation from the company itself. Today, Elon Musk and Billy Markus, the founder of Dogecoin (DOGE) took to Twitter to announce that the American-based company is now accepting the meme token as payments. Musk’s tweet read,

“Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin”

Tesla’s Electric cars not in exchange for Dogecoin

There was a bunch of merchandise listed in exchange for DOGE, but the electric cars weren’t one of them. Nonetheless, people were allowed to purchase Cyberquad bikes for kids, Giga Texas Belt Buckle, and Cyberwhistles with the altcoin.

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Tesla Takes DOGE Payments Mainstream as Musk Builds Hype 7
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Tesla Takes DOGE Payments Mainstream as Musk Builds Hype 8

The company put out a support page exclusively for Dogecoin inquiries. The page guides buyers on how to purchase with the altcoin. The Dogecoin network will be charging network fees every time a payment is made using the token.

The company has ensured to bring to the notice of the purchasers that any merchandise bought with DOGE as payment cannot be canceled once the order is placed. There is also a strict no-return policy in place when a product is bought using Dogecoin. To sum it up, the company has presented a draconian policy regarding all purchases through the altcoin and called it a ‘final sale’ with no return, no cancellation, and no exchange of products.

Furthermore, it has been made very clear that Tesla only accepts Dogecoin. The company asserts that it cannot receive or detect any other cryptocurrency. A disclaimer regarding the use of any other form of digital asset has been clarified on the support page.

With this news like a gust of wind, Dogecoin (DOGE) price seems to be soaring high. At the time of writing, Dogecoin (DOGE) was priced at $0.1965 with a an escalation of 13.26% over the last 24 hours.