Developers at Bluesky say their protocol allows for customizable social algorithms, but it remains unclear how much control users will actually have.
Bicycle will use its Ethereum NFT artwork to sell decks of Ape-branded cards, with plans to collaborate with other owners.
Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Web3, Decentralization, DAOs
Proof of Humanity: Aftermath Islands Metaverse Launches Blockchain-based Facial Recognition
VentureBeat | Dean Takahashi | Oct 19, 2022
Aftermath Islands Metaverse launched its Liquid Avatar app to replace usernames and passwords with proof of humanity.
- That means that you will be able to sign into its metaverse apps by using verified face recognition on your smartphone instead of using a normal login. If it sounds familiar, it’s not so different from Apple using FaceID on an iPhone to recognize your face and log you into your iPhone or your apps. BUT Barbados-based Aftermath Islands Metaverse, a controlled subsidiary of Liquid Avatar Technologies, is using blockchain-based verifiable credentials to prove who you are without requiring you to divulge sensitive government-issued identity or proof of a home address.
See: Liquid Avatar Releases Update to It’s Feature Rich Self-Sovereign Identity Mobile App
- The company has worked for six years on the technology to provide proof of humanity assurances and allow users to establish a digital footprint that shows they are a real person without having to provide other proof. It also eliminates the need for username and passwords, using biometric verification instead.
- Proof of Humanity is creating a verified database of unique registrants. When combined with solutions from Aftermath Island, these offerings open a wide range of new use cases in multiple domains across virtual and Metaverse experiences, as well as at the intersections of the real and online worlds. These include online gaming, cashing out funds from online wallets, and obtaining real-world services using digital footprint.
- Aftermath Islands Metaverse is an open-world, realistic graphic virtual world where users can buy, develop, trade, and sell virtual land, property, and items using in-game collectible non-fungible tokens (NFTs). From play-to-earn games to online experiences, collaboration, immersive entertainment, and more, Aftermath Islands wants to bring livestreaming, high-definition graphics, interactivity, real-world mechanics, and new services and experiences to players.
See: Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc. Launches First-Ever Payment Card and Loyalty Program for the Metaverse
David Lucatch, CEO Liquid Avatar Technologies and MD Aftermath Islands:
The goal is to get us ready for the metaverse by creating a high degree of trust or privacy in the Web3 world by establishing one-user, one-account verification. This system has the opportunity to play a much larger role in the emerging metaverse ecosystem supporting interoperability, reduction of fraud and instances of cyber bullying, and potentially creating more effective and efficient business interactions for marketing and engagement.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Jack Dorsey Announces Launching Bluesky, Decentralized Social Platform, Closed Beta Soon
Gizmodo | Kyle Barr | Oct 19, 2022
Developers at Bluesky say their protocol allows for customizable social algorithms, but it remains unclear how much control users will actually have.
- Bluesky, which was founded back in 2019, announced Tuesday they were launching the so-called Bluesky Social app “soon” and put out a call for people to join a closed beta. At the same time, the team shared details of its underlying AT Protocol, an independent “decentralized” framework for the social system which the team called a “federated network.”
- The company claims the ATP system will create a global ID for users that can exist between different platforms using the protocol model, relying on your usual blockchain cryptographic systems to provide security.
- The plan is to allow for “interoperability,” which means that different platforms can operate seamlessly on top of one another, such as Instagram running inside of TikTok
See: From Voting To Social Media: What Does The Future Hold For Digital Identity On The Blockchain
- Problem they want to solve: Social media companies regularly complain that the vast amount of data online requires that they use some kind of mechanism to parse and curate what their users see, but company-controlled algorithmic systems have only led to a greater partisan divide and the massive spread of disinformation in ever-deepening echo chambers.
- Bluesky claims its new “algorithmic choice” allows users to “have control over their experience.” What this supposedly means is that users can dictate how much of certain content they wish to receive and from where.
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Musk sent to Dosrey: In private texts Musk sent to Dorsey earlier this year, Dorsey told Musk that a new social media platform: “...must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn’t own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can’t have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn’t complicated work, it just has to be done right so it’s resilient to what has happened to twitter.”
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Draft of the WIP Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act Bill Leaked
Decrypt | Oct 19, 2022
Image: Unsplash/Harold Mendoza
Delphi Labs General Counsel Gabriel Shapiro has uploaded a draft copy of the hotly debated DCCPA, which he says has been “circulating secretly in D.C.”
- DCCPA: A copy of the still in-progress Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), which outlines how the Commodities Futures Trading Commission would regulate the crypto industry, was uploaded to GitHub today.
- FTX and Coinbase support: The DCCPA was introduced by Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and John Boozman (R-AR) in August. Since then, Coinbase and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have been openly supportive of it. It’s also gained some traction because it offers an alternative to what has been described as regulation-by-enforcement strategy from the SEC.
- On Wednesday, Sam Bankman-Fried shared a link to a 3,700-word blog post outlining his thoughts on how the digital asset industry should be regulated. In it, he writes that DeFi is “ one of the trickier things” to account for in a regulatory framework.
See: California State Assembly Passes Crypto Regulation Bill That is Criticized by Industry Stakeholders
- Centralized vs Decentralized: But both Coinbase and FTX, centralized entities, have drawn criticism for supporting a bill that has been interpreted as a threat to the decentralized protocols in the industry, such as those that power decentralized exchanges like Uniswap.
- Jake Chervinsky, head of policy at the Blockchain Association summed up the testimony he gave during a September 15 hearing, on Twitter. At the time, he said that the language in the bill would treat all of the crypto industry like centralized entities. But that would make it difficult for DeFi protocols, “no more than code,” to comply with regulations.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Old School Playing Card Brand, Bicycle, Will Sell Bored Ape NFT Playing Cards
Decrypt | Andrew Hayward | Oct 18, 2022
Bicycle will use its Ethereum NFT artwork to sell decks of Ape-branded cards, with plans to collaborate with other owners.
- Status or IP: The Bored Ape Yacht Club has attracted an array of celebrity and brand owners over the last year and a half. Some use the NFT artwork as a status symbol, while others tap the IP to create and sell their own products. The latest such brand to claim ownership is a unique one indeed: a physical playing card brand established in the 1880s.
- Collaboration and creativity: Bicycle Playing Cards, the long-running brand now under parent company Cartamundi, announced today that it purchased a Bored Ape NFT and that it plans to create and sell physical playing cards using the artwork. The brand also aims to work with other Ape owners to potentially create additional NFT-themed decks.
See: A16Z Launches 6 New NFT Licenses Under ‘Can’t Be Evil’ Principle
Permissive rights: As with many other Bored Ape-themed products, holders of the Ethereum NFTs are automatically granted permissive rights to create derivative artwork and products and even sell them to the public.
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- Other branding examples: Bored Ape holders have used their owned artwork to create things like fast food restaurants, virtual bands, alcohol and marijuana packaging, toys, apparel, and more. Rappers Snoop Dogg and Eminem even used their artwork to create 3D avatars that performed their collaborative song at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards.
Cartamundi Global VP of Brand Commercialization Masha Ievseieva:
It's communities like the Bored Ape Yacht Club that are shaping the future of the internet and the future of Web3. The holders that are part of the community, they are pioneering and are the most innovative in the space.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Was Satoshi right?
Tristram Waye for Bitvo | Oct 13, 2022
Going back to the source is an important exercise
- The value of revisiting source documents is underrated. One of the challenges of the modern world is also one of its essential services, curation. Over time a source document becomes overshadowed by narratives and interpretation. The narratives are then curated into a covering on top of the original thought, writing, or source. And eventually, the narratives can shape the source into something that wasn’t intended to be.
- Bitcoin Whitepaper: If you haven’t read the Bitcoin whitepaper recently, the one thing that stands out is clarity. It is punctuated by laser focus and brevity. The writing is crystal clear. It does an excellent job of communicating the complexities of the Bitcoin concept in simple easy to understand language.
- Looking back, we can’t completely imagine the context when the Bitcoin whitepaper appeared for the first time. There were some other e-currency examples that had come before, but this one was the one that stuck. It’s kind of like the way many guitar players talk about hearing Eddie Van Halen for the first time. When they heard that first record, they knew it was special. And in that moment, they knew exactly what they wanted to do.
See: Podcast: Bitcoin Privacy Interview with Matt Odell
- Describing Bitcoin in 2010: Throughout 2009 and 2010, we can see Satoshi engaged in a discussion around what Bitcoin was and what it does. The whitepaper may have been elegant, but once things got moving, early adopters and key developers got involved. Then it started to take on a life of its own. In a February 11, 2009 post, Satoshi describes Bitcoin. The emphasis here was around the concept of money and the relationship with trust. Then he goes on to discuss the double spend problem, solution, and the network.
- At the end of this post, he says that Bitcoin “…takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle.” This observation was timely and prescient because we are watching this nature in the battle over free speech across social media, the press, and payments, going on today.
- What stands out when compared to today?
- The statement about non-reversible payments is interesting. While it eliminates the role of the middlemen in mediation, it may require the presence of some form of escrow to eliminate fraud. He discusses escrow in the whitepaper shortly after and in other posts that follow.
- The peer-to-peer network that tackles the double spending problem is inferred to be the answer. And it accomplishes this process with computational proof and chronological order of transactions.
- All economic systems have both incentives and disincentives, including the Bitcoin software. Users (miners) are incentivized to participate and secure the network. But the network structure also disincentivizes abuse. In our current financial system, the incentives and disincentives are increasingly less clear. For every disincentive enforcement, a fine represents a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent. This leaves the entire system open to abuse because the incentives for abuse appear to scale and pay off nicely.
See: The Growing Relevance Of Bitcoin In Real Estate
- Then finally, we see the new vision of what privacy is. This is a model where identities are hidden, but transactions are public rather than everything kept private.
- In August 2010, we can see Satoshi is seemingly aware of one of the pitfalls ahead. In this post, he clearly describes Bitcoin as being more like a collectible or a commodity. In other words, it’s not like a stock, which appears to show some understanding of a future Howey Test issue.
- In one post, he says how micropayments will be impractical. Then the following day, he lays out the case as if a precursor for the thinking behind the Lightning Network.
- The discussion includes assumptions about the scaling potential based on bandwidth and storage changes over time. That they would grow while becoming cheaper at the same time. This has turned out to be an accurate assumption, but whether it will continue isn’t clear.
- Logo: It is also interesting that he is instrumental in developing the logo for Bitcoin. This logo was a brilliant marketing exercise. Remember, an electronic coin is defined in the whitepaper as a series of digital signatures, but the logo gives us something more familiar.
- Evolution: From there, the Bitcoin narrative has evolved to become a hedge, digital gold, the new reserve currency of the world, the only real form of money, and the only cryptocurrency. The narrative depends on the ideological camp you belong to. More importantly, it was the catalyst for more than twenty thousand crypto, token, altcoin, and infrastructure projects across the globe.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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CNN Shutting Down NFT Project ‘Vault’ | Faces Accusations of an NFT Rug Pull
PC Gamer | | Oct 12, 2022
Image: CNN
CNN says its Vault NFT program, which launched more than a year ago, was only a "six week experiment," and now it's closing.
- CNN's foray into the world of NFTs has come to an untimely end with an announcement that Vault (opens in new tab), which promised to let users "collect NFTs of historic CNN moments and artistic representations," is closing.
- Vault was launched in June 2021 as a repository for "digital collectibles"—NFTs—drawn from CNN's archives. The plan was to begin with six weekly drops including "key historical moments organized around specific themes including early CNN exclusives, world history, and Presidential Elections," followed by future drops featuring a wider range of topics.
- "Tokenholders will be able to showcase and display their Moments on a user page in the Vault," the Vault website states. "Some limited edition sets will include a premium video display case that will render a physical representation of the Moment on a screen."
- Naturally, there was also a promise of money to be made: CNN said Vault would "experiment with a variety of selling formats including both open editions and limited editions."
See: A16Z Launches 6 New NFT Licenses Under ‘Can’t Be Evil’ Principle
- It's not going much better on the Vault Discord (opens in new tab), where complaints of a rug pull and demands for refunds (and occasional threats of legal action) are common. Partial refunds apparently will be offered: Details will be announced later but Vault Discord admin Jason said in a message that they will be offered as either Flow or stablecoins valued at approximately 20% of the original mint price for each NFT owned. That hasn't gone over especially well either.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Google Cloud to Let Users Pay With Crypto via Coinbase
CNBC | Jordan Novet | Oct 11, 2022
Google said Tuesday that it will rely on Coinbase to start letting some customers pay for cloud services with cryptocurrencies early in 2023, while Coinbase said it would draw on Google’s cloud infrastructure.
- Coinbase shares rose as much as 8.4% in Tuesday’s trading session, although the stock is still down over 70% for the year.
- Coinbase, which generates a majority of its revenue from retail transactions, will move data-related applications to Google from the market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud, which Coinbase has relied on for years, said Jim Migdal, Coinbase’s vice president of business development.
- Coinbase Commerce supports 10 currencies, such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Ethereum and Litecoin and will earn a percentage of transactions that go through it
See:
Google Cloud is expanding it’s blockchain business and hiring
Google’s Fusing Street View with AI to Create Metaverse like ‘Immersive View’
- Google is also exploring how it can use Coinbase Prime, a service that securely stores organizations’ cryptocurrencies and allows them to execute trades. Zavery said Google will experiment and “see how we can participate” with managing cryptocurrency assets.
- Blockchain technologies such as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, have become a bigger focus for Google’s cloud division. Previously, Google’s cloud chief, Thomas Kurian, has pushed for growth in major industries such as media and retail. This year it announced the formation of teams to drum up blockchain business and build tools that third-party developers can draw on to run blockchain applications.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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