Interview with Marguerite deCourcelle (aka Coin Artist) and Cooper Turley in full length, from “Social Tokens: plague or paradigm shift?

In this week’s episode I interview Ameen Soleimani, one of the most prolific builders in Ethereum. He’s the CEO of SpankChain, a blockchain-based adult entertainment platform, the co-creator of MolochDAO, a DAO to fund Ethereum projects, and the co-founder of Reflexer Labs, which created RAI, a purely ether-backed stablecoin. We talk about the need of a purely…

Amazon Managed Blockchain, an AWS offering, now fully supports Ethereum. This means that companies will be able to spin up a node “in minutes” as the release says. Customers will be able to offload infrastructure issues of “data reliability due to out-of-sync nodes, data storage scaling challenges, and time-sensitive Ethereum software upgrades,” to AWS. This…

Aavegotchi, a DeFi game revolving around digital “fren” avatars similar to Tamagotchi, sold out of their first drop of 10,000 NFTs in under one minute. Including additional sales of “wearable” and “consumable” NFTs that players can use on their Aavegotchi, collectors bought $5.5M worth of tokens. The Aavegtochi NFTs came in the form of “Portals,”…

Accelerators supporting startups that focus on or utilize non-fungible tokens, here described as NFT startups, include both newly established Web 3 accelerators as well as historical players in the accelerator space. In addition, many of these accelerators are associated with venture funds that have invested in NFT startups. Accelerators are a well-developed funding and development…

DeFi is regaining its footing in March after a market-wide plunge at the end of February. The DeFi Index Pulse is up 14% this week after dropping more than 20% in the last week of last month. Total value locked (TVL) too, is on the rise in March after a weeklong 20% tumble  to $36B…

InsurAce, the Singapore-based insurance protocol, raised $3M in a token-based funding round led by Alameda Research and HashKey Capital. Investors from the project’s $1M seed round, DeFiance Capital, ParaFi Capital, Hashed and Signum Capital, also participated. The round was completed with institutional investors, including, IOSG Ventures, ImToken Ventures, LongHash Ventures, HashGlobal, Tembusu Partners, Factorial Ventures,…

The DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) has added Sushiswap’s Sushi token to its set of assets.  DPI now includes 12 tokens, with Sushi comprising 8% of the index’s total value. The only three project’s with tokens representing higher allocations are Uniswap, Aave, and Synthetix, with 30, 19, and 13% respectively. The projects launched within a month…

Enjin, the blockchain software company that co-created the ERC-1155 token standard, will be launching two scaling solutions intended to remove gas fees and provide cross-chain support for NFTs. JumpNet will be a “high-speed bridge network” that allows users to mint, distribute, and trade ERC-1155 NFTs (and ERC-20 tokens) without any gas cost or transaction fees.…

Ubisoft, the video game company behind major franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry,  has entered the NFT arena with its newest mobile game, One Shot League. This marks the first time that a major gaming studio has developed a video game revolving around NFTs.  One Shot League is a collaboration between Ubisoft and Sorare,…