Crypto Roundup: someone just bought a yacht in the metaverse for US $ 650,000

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These are the crypto stories that caught our attention this week.

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Nicholas Sokic, Financial Post staff Visitors in front of an immersive art installation titled “Machine Hallucinations – Space: Metaverse” by media artist Refik Anadol, which will be converted to NFT and auctioned online at Sotheby’s, at the Digital Art Fair in Hong Kong, China, September 30, 2021. Photo by Tyrone Siu / Reuters Archives Article content Metaverse yacht sells for $ 650,000

Paying for frills in online worlds has come a long way.

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In 2006, game maker Bethesda caused a stir by offering purely cosmetic horse armor as a US $ 2.50 add-on to its Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game.

This week it was revealed that a luxury yacht called the Metaflower which only exists in the virtual game The Sandbox was purchased for US $ 650,000, making it the most expensive NFT ever sold in this area. of the metaverse.

The yacht, which has no real equivalent, was purchased for 149 Ether and features a DJ booth, two helipads, a hot tub, and other virtual amenities. Its listing also states that it “provides access to the Fantasy Marina and is designed to be the crown jewel of the sandbox.”

The anonymous buyer joined the NFT OpenSea Marketplace in October and only has the yacht in their NFT collection at the time of writing.

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The Metaflower was created by Republic Realm, an independent developer, for the Fantasy Collection NFT line in the sandbox world. Other luxury items available for purchase include islands, jet skis, and speedboats.

Selling expensive items in virtual worlds has become a real phenomenon. In November, a digital plot of land in virtual world Decentraland sold for $ 2.43 million, and another for $ 2.3 million in Axie Infinity.

The central bank is not sweating on crypto yet

Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Paul Beaudry does not believe cryptocurrencies pose a risk to the stability of the Canadian financial system.

Beaudry made the comments at the Ontario Securities Commission’s annual Dialogue conference on Tuesday.

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When asked if cryptocurrencies pose a risk, the deputy governor replied that the central bank doesn’t think crypto “grows in a way that creates a type of systemic risk” for the financial system. – at least not yet.

The reason for this attitude, he said, is that cryptocurrencies do not play a big role in actual payments and operate “quite a distance” from the system. That said, Beaudry added that the bank was monitoring developments “very closely”, especially with regard to the rise in stable coins.

In May, Canada’s central bank warned of the risk of Bitcoin as an asset, which it noted was a barrier to its adoption for payments.

“Price volatility resulting from speculative demand remains a significant barrier to the wide acceptance of crypto assets as a means of payment,” the bank wrote in its review of the financial system.

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The bank’s fall survey of financial industry experts found that 97 percent of those polled are somewhat confident that the financial system could withstand a significant shock and remain resilient, regardless of its origin. .

Thiel-backed crypto exchange begins operations

Bullish, a crypto exchange backed by Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel that serves institutional investors, began operating in Gibraltar on Tuesday for some clients. The exchange was created in May with more than US $ 10 billion in cash as a subsidiary of Block.one, a blockchain software company. Besides Thiel, its backers include global investment bank Nomura, hedge fund managers Alan Howard and Louis Bacon, and Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li.

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The exchange is making $ 3 billion of its assets available to cash pools and will integrate Block.one’s open source blockchain software called EOSIO.

By the end of 2021 or the first quarter of 2022, Bullish is expected to go public on the NYSE through a merger with specialist acquisition firm Far Peak Acquisition Corp. The operation is valued at $ 9 billion.

Currently, Bullish is only available to non-US residents and has yet to release a list of its international customers.

The Iron Fish blockchain is built on confidentiality

Despite their early association with black markets, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin aren’t really anonymous. Enter Iron Fish, a decentralized blockchain network that aims to create cryptocurrency with transactions that have the same level of privacy as a $ 20 bill.

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Ahead of its test launch this week, the company raised $ 27.7 million in a Series A round led by venture capital firm Andreesson Horowitz.

Other investors on the round included Sequoia, Electric Capital, MetaStable, Arrington XRP, Terra Do Kwon co-founder, Thesis CEO Matt Luongo, and Anchorage co-founder Nathan McCauley.

The company plans to use the capital to nearly double its team, build cash flow to award grants to businesses leveraging the platform, and pay legal fees to ensure the process is as compliant as possible, according to Forbes.

The San Francisco-based network and its six employees launched a first testnet – an alternative blockchain intended for experimentation – in April. He says he has attracted nearly 2,000 self-identified minors since. Their roadmap begins with a proof-of-work blockchain and native cryptocurrency, called iron, with plans to expand to stablecoins and more assets.

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Iron Fish was founded in 2018 by Elena Nadolinski, 29, a former software engineer at Microsoft and Airbnb, who says her experiences growing in Russia shaped her goals with Iron Fish.

“The reason I’m working on Iron Fish is that right now we’re moving in a direction where payments are completely transparent,” Nadolinski told Forbes. “If you are a state that is happy with surveillance, you want the future. And for us, it’s a bit of a scary future.

Research firm Fortune Business Insights predicts that technology that masks identities will grow into a $ 17.75 billion industry by 2028, and analysis site ResearchAndMarkets.com estimates the related VPN industry to reach 107 billion dollars. dollars by 2027.

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Content of the article The man who stole all the NFTs and a crowdfunding offer to buy the constitution is right next door. Google metaverse says most cloud account hackers try to mine bitcoin

Google released its very first “Threat Horizons” report on Tuesday, intended to raise awareness of security weaknesses in its platform. The company revealed that most of the actions taken on compromised Google Cloud accounts involved “malicious actors” using them to mine the cryptocurrency.

“Of 50 recently compromised GCP instances, 86% of compromised Google Cloud instances were used for cryptocurrency mining, a for-profit activity that consumes cloud resources,” the report said. Mining itself results in high CPU and GPU power usage. He also mentions alternative cryptocurrencies such as Chia, which uses storage space as a mining resource.

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The main cause of these compromised accounts is simply poor security. 48% of cases were due to actors accessing an internet-based cloud who did not have a password or a weak password for user accounts and application programming interface (API ). By comparison, 26% were attributed to vulnerabilities in third-party software.

Most of the instances studied downloaded cryptocurrency mining software within 22 seconds of being compromised, and 40% of unsecured instances were compromised within eight hours of deployment, indicating that players are following. unsecured Google accounts.

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