Visa is the latest major company jumping into the NFT craze.
The payments processor said Monday it bought a “CryptoPunk,” one of thousands of NFT-based digital avatars, for nearly $150,000 in ethereum.
An NFT — which stands for non-fungible token — is a unique digital asset designed to represent ownership of a virtual item. Unlike bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, NFTs can’t be exchanged like-for-like with another NFTs.
Proponents say this makes NFTs scarce, driving up their value. NFTs have often been compared to physical collectible items like rare trading cards and works of art.
“We think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, said in a blogpost Monday.
“To help our clients and partners participate, we need a firsthand understanding of the infrastructure requirements for a global brand to purchase, store, and leverage an NFT.”
Sheffield said CryptoPunks have become a “cultural icon for the crypto community.”
“With our CryptoPunk purchase, we’re jumping in feet first,” he said. “This is just the beginning of our work in this space.”
Anchorage, a federally-chartered digital asset bank, facilitated the purchase, Visa said.
Big firms join NFT craze
Several big firms have been experimenting with NFTs lately.
Christie’s has auctioned off several NFTs, some worth millions of dollars. The auction house set records in March when an image created by the digital artist Beeple sold for $69 million.
Meanwhile, a number of media publications, including CNN, The New York Times and Fortune magazine, have sold NFTs of their own.
But some critics are skeptical of NFTs. While such tokens represent a digital certificate of ownership, buyers don’t own the underlying item, and internet users can still view the associated media online. Some people have even stolen other artists’ work and gone on to sell them as NFTs.
“The purchaser of Beeple’s $69 million NFT artwork, ‘Everydays – The First 5000 Days’, owns the unique token,” Adam Rendle, partner at law firm Taylor Wessing, said in a blogpost.
“They do not, however, own copyright or any other intellectual property rights in the digital artwork itself. They cannot distribute or otherwise commercialise the represented asset.”
WIRED has challenged computer scientist and Hidden Door cofounder and CEO Hilary Mason to explain machine learning to 5 different people; a child, teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert.
Decentralized Autonomous Organisation. Quite a mouthful, which is why most people just say ‘DAO’.
But what are they? What do they do? And why should you care?
Very, very good questions.
In a nutshell, DAOs provide the framework for OPEN COLLABORATION. Which, it turns out, can be incredibly productive. How productive you ask? Well, that’s what we’re here for you silly goose!
So what’s the story behind Decentralized Finance? How has all of this started? What happened in DeFi in 2020? And where are we going in the future? You’ll find answers to these questions in this video.
Although there is no one agreed-upon date when decentralized finance was born, there were a few important events that made DeFi possible.
The first of them was the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Despite whether Bitcoin should be classified as DeFi or not, its inception was the key enabler for the whole cryptocurrency industry which decentralized finance is part of.
Although sending Bitcoin around the world is cool – finance doesn’t stop there. Every robust financial system needs a set of other important services such as lending, borrowing, trading, funding or derivatives.
Ethereum, with its Turing-complete programming language Solidity and the ERC20 standard for creating new tokens, quickly became a go-to smart contract platform to build on.
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku lauded a recent nuclear fusion experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“This is a giant step toward the holy grail of energy research,” said Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College and City University of New York. “To hit break-even, to extract more energy than you put in, and this could eventually become a game-changer.”
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced a key achievement in nuclear fusion that it had, back on Aug. 8, been able to produce 1.3 megajoules of energy at its National Ignition Facility, albeit very briefly. Kaku told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that the achievement was a giant step towards clean energy.
“A fusion reactor is carbon neutral, it does not create carbon dioxide, it does not create copious quantities of nuclear waste that you find in fission plants with uranium, it does not meltdown,” said the author of “The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything.” “The fuel is seawater, hydrogen from seawater could be the basic fuel.”
Fusion, the lesser-known and opposite reaction to nuclear fission is when two atoms slam together to form a heavier atom and release energy. It is the way the sun makes energy.
Kaku explained some of the drawbacks to nuclear fusion and why it’s not currently an easily accessible source of energy.
“It turns out that when you heat hydrogen to tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of the sun, things become unstable, and that’s why this reaction took place over a hundred trillionth of a second, just a snap of the finger, so in other words, we want to have a continuous stream of energy, not bursts of energy, like we found here,” Kaku said.
With an investment of $500 billion, Saudi Arabia is touting this 100-mile-long linear city (“The Line”) as the most sustainable urban complex in the world. And one with some cutting edge renewable technologies … like generating fresh water in a desert. But will it work? Let’s explore if Neom is the future of sustainable cities.
Tesla just announced its first humanoid robot, which it’s calling Tesla Bot. Boston Dynamics has been working on its own humanoid robot for more than 10 years. Watch how both bots compare.
Tokenization allows a purchaser to buy things without sharing sensitive data, such as credit card info. Tokenization is more secure since private data is not shared.
