McKinsey experts predict that video entertainment, in all its forms, will become more immersive, gamified, and personalized
The remainder of the cryptocurrency project that 
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
What Will Gaming and Video Entertainment Be Like in 2030?
McKinsey & Company | Jacomo Corbo, Jonathan Dunn, Tom Svrcek, and Kristi Tausk | Jun 29, 2022
McKinsey experts predict that video entertainment, in all its forms, will become more immersive, gamified, and personalized
A decade from now, what we watch—as well as how and where we watch it—could be dramatically different. Four McKinsey experts imagine the future.
Kristi Tausk: In a horror film, right now you get scared by somebody jumping out on screen. But what if in the future, when you’re watching that movie, you can actually feel that person standing behind you? You’re in it; you’re in the movie with the actors and experiencing it with them more than we really do today.
See: Understanding The New V2P and P2V Metaverse Commerce Models
Tom Svrcek: You could imagine going to a movie theater and having a game console, where there’s ten minutes up front of a piece of filmed entertainment but then it turns into a gaming experience. And it’s not just in that theater; it’s across 20 different connected theaters. And then you can continue that game with that community when you get home to your game console or episodically over the next several months.
Jacomo Corbo: Think of levels of difficulty within a game that are automatically personalized and calibrated to your patterns of play in ways that will drive engagement but ultimately will make the experience more compelling and persuasive to you.
What companies should be doing today to prepare
Jonathan Dunn: Most of the storytellers that we’re talking about in the 2030 period will come from diverse geographic backgrounds, diverse economic backgrounds, diverse demographic backgrounds.
See: TikTok Founder to Launch New Blockchain Gaming Startup
The decision makers themselves must be diverse. You have to change the decision makers in your organization. Second, you have to believe that technology and analytics can help you identify the storytellers who the current system doesn’t identify. Third, you need to be comfortable—and even lead—with an accelerated pace of change. Those three things are what we tell leaders in the industry they have to do if they want to be part of what’s going to happen next.
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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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[Event Jul 19]: Liquid Avatar Technologies presents its 2022 Summer Showcase July 19, 2022, at 12 pm Eastern Time
Liquid Avatar Technologies | Cara Buckspan | Jul 17, 2022
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2022 / Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc. (CSE:LQID)(OTCQB:LQAVF)(FRA:4T51) ("Company"), a global blockchain and FinTech solutions company focused on digital identity, integrated avatars, and the Metaverse, announces its Liquid Avatar Technologies Summer Showcase 2022 on Tuesday, July 19, 2022, at 12 pm Eastern Time (GMT / UTC -4), where it will present and demonstrate its core program and product offerings to its stakeholders.
With over 150 people pre-registered, space is limited. Interested participants can register by copying to their browser or clicking on the link below:
https://share.hsforms.com/1nkQwAuT4Rq2EJI-jh6Na6Q4rqa5
During the presentation, the Company will provide an overview of its current programs and products, including:
- Digital Identity & Credentials
- Card and Engagement Programs
- NFTs, Avatars & Digital Products and Services
- Mixed Reality and the Metaverse
Participant questions will follow the Company presentation.
"We are excited to present our product and program progress and this event gives all our stakeholders the opportunity to see firsthand the progress we are making with our core offerings," said David Lucatch, CEO of Liquid Avatar Technologies, and Managing Director of Oasis Digital Studios Limited and Aftermath Islands Metaverse Limited. "Even with the current market volatility, we continue to progress, creating new and innovative solutions to the evolving privacy, safety and security regulations being adopted globally and delivering best of breed products and programs that integrate consumers and businesses as Web 3.0 adoption accelerates."
Details and updates about digital identity, avatars, NFT and other credentials and the metaverse.
You won't want to miss this!
Register for this free event --> Now
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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Startup Lines Nabs $4M to be Web3’s Communications Platform
Techcrunch | Connie Loizos | Jul 14, 2022
There’s no shortage of headlines about the onset of “crypto winter.” Amid a growing pile of bankruptcies, one of the buzziest startups in the business, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, announced a major layoff just today.
Intersection of social messaging and Web3
However, plenty of founders and VCs are doubling down on the “intersection of social messaging and web3,” says renowned entrepreneur and investor Elad Gil:
Gil has already made an early bet, leading a $4 million seed round in Lines, a startup whose three co-founders studied philosophy at Harvard and whose CEO, Sahil Handa, boasts that the nascent company will become “web3’s messaging platform,” even while he and his former classmates are still developing its tech.
See: Research: Ownership of Top 10 Web3 DAOs is Surprisingly Concentrated
Who's backing: That it’s still a work in progress is apparently just fine with Lines’s backers, which also include renowned angel investors Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Gokul Rajaram. What they’re backing is a vision where every web3 native who wants to be is connected in some way to verifiable communications platform.
Lines value prop
- There’s a “rapidly increasing number of people using crypto pseudonyms to purchase digital currency, swap NFTs, vote on proposals, and manage treasuries,” explains Handa. “But whenever someone tries to communicate with another person in this network, there’s no way of knowing whether or not they are talking to the right person.”
- Lines meanwhile strives to enable users to send messages from wallet to wallet and to join group chats based on token ownership.
See: FitFi and Web3: Step App launches on ‘move2earn’ protocol
- Handa describes a communication layer that’s both ambivalent about underlying blockchains and crypto wallets, and that, as a result, empowers users in a wide variety of ways. They can find the owner of a particular NFT they’d like to buy, say, or discover like-minded individuals based on the tokens they’ve acquired, or reach out to potential new contributors of a DAO (a kind of “group chat with a bank account,” as DAOs have been called).
- But with DAOs, there is the need to coordinate with various members beyond just using Discord.” With NFTs and other collectibles, he adds, “I may want to be able to ping you to buy or sell or trade, so there are other incentives for a communication layer to be useful.”
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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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TikTok Founder to Launch New Blockchain Gaming Startup
Jul 14, 2022
Jason Fung, former CEO of TikTok's gaming unit, announced on July 5 that he had quit TikTok to launch Meta0, a blockchain video game startup. Fung left TikTok to offer video game producers new solutions as an IT executive with experience in the gaming industry.
The MetaO Project: A More Interoperability for the Blockchain Gaming Industry
The Meta0 project startup team comprises six people and two co-founders. Much like most tech companies turn to crowdfunding for capital, the startup has already completed the first round of funding, but the amount of investments remains unknown.
The Meta0 project aims to increase interoperability between existing blockchain networks so that programmers are not restricted to using just a few blockchains to implement their ideas. According to Fung, the lack of fully accessible blockchain infrastructure for developers is one of the most pervasive problems in the NFT gaming industry. Fung claims he left TikTok to address this issue.
See: What Does The Financialization of Games Mean? GameFi
Fung stated that the firm was hoping to generate money by issuing tokens and negotiating with venture capitalists and strategic investors like many other cryptocurrency firms. He did not specify the network on which the token was issued. The business is now developing a protocol enabling programmers "to transfer their NFTs between networks and expand their gaming edge across several blockchains." When discussing Web3 advances, some companies come to mind: Kardia Ventures, Animoca Brands, a16z, Binance, and Animoca Brands.
What are Blockchain Games?
A blockchain game is a video game that uses elements of blockchain technologies based on cryptography. It is also referred to as an NFT (non-fungible token) game or a crypto game. Most frequently, the blockchain components in these games involve using cryptocurrencies or NFTs, which players can buy, sell, or trade with other players. The game publisher takes a fee from each transaction as a monetization method.
Due to the technologies that let players earn bitcoin through gaming, a subset of these games is called "play-to-earn" games. While blockchain games have been around since 2017, the video game industry only started paying attention to them in 2021. This is due to the desire to explore their potential on the part of major AAA publishers and opposition from players, developers, and businesses in the gaming sector.
Blockchain Games Have a Growth Potential
Even though the collapse of the cryptocurrency market has significantly reduced interest in blockchain games, the sector still has a highly active community that is eager to find a new project or a discovery in cryptocurrency prices to invest in their preferred video games again.
However, NFT and blockchain games exploded in 2021, and this year the crypto gaming industry had already registered over $2.5 billion by the first quarter of 2022. It should be noted that the larger gaming industry is a behemoth in comparison to the more specialized crypto gaming industry. Additionally, play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, CryptoBlades, Plant vs. Undead, and Mir4 quickly gained enormous popularity, even developing into many families' main source of income in places like the Philippines, Argentina, and Venezuela.
In other words, crypto games helped increase their adoption by retail users worldwide, in addition to attracting funding from large institutional players. The explosion of cryptocurrency games and decentralized applications caused even Metamask, one of the ecosystem's most well-known wallets, to experience large surges in the number of new accounts. Fung intends to move forward with establishing a Blockchain infrastructure business that can link several metaverses.
Unfortunately, the industry has had its fair share of scams, making investors and players wary of spending money on new projects. A recent study by Bonusfinder Canada found that over a third of sports bettors believe that the trend is not going to last.
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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Report: Targeted Update on Implementation of FATF’s Standards on Virtual Assets and VASPs
FATF | Jun 30, 2022
Paris, 30 June 2022 – FATF has produced a targeted update on implementation of its Standards on virtual assets (VAs) and virtual asset service providers (VASPs), with a focus on FATF’s Travel Rule. This report comes three years after FATF extended its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) measures to VAs and VASPs to prevent criminal and terrorist misuse of the sector.
See: Coinbase Implements KYC Travel Rule in the Netherlands
The report builds on the FATF’s previous two reviews on implementation by providing a short update on the latest country compliance with FATF’s Recommendation 15 and its Interpretative Note (R.15/INR.15). The report places a specific focus on FATF’s Travel Rule to respond to FATF’s June 2021 findings that countries and private sector face particular challenges in this area. Further, the report includes relevant emerging risks and market developments, including on Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and unhosted wallets.
The report finds a continued need for many countries to strengthen understanding of ML/TF risks of the VA and VASP sector, and to rapidly implement FATF’s R.15/INR.15 to mitigate such risks. In particular, FATF’s Travel Rule requires VASPs and other financial institutions to share relevant originator and beneficiary information alongside virtual asset transactions, therefore helping to prevent criminal and terrorist misuse. The report finds that jurisdictions have made only limited progress over the last year in implementing this requirement. Of the 98 jurisdictions that responded to FATF’s March 2022 survey, only 29 jurisdictions have passed relevant Travel Rule laws, and a small subset of these jurisdictions have started enforcement. This demonstrates an urgent need for jurisdictions to accelerate implementation and enforcement to mitigate criminal and terrorist misuse of virtual assets.
See: Updated FATF Virtual Asset and VASP Guidance includes DeFi for crypto service providers
FATF’s report highlights that there are now technological solutions available to facilitate Travel Rule compliance in practice, but private sector need to continue to increase interoperability between solutions and across jurisdictions, and to work towards full compliance.
On market developments and emerging ML/TF threats, the report highlights the continued need for the FATF to monitor the growth of, and illicit financing risks associated with, DeFi and NFTs markets and unhosted wallets.
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Download the 28 page PDF report --> here
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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Understanding The New V2P and P2V Metaverse Commerce Models
Forbes | | Jul 5, 2022
Physical and Virtual
Look at any Target or Walmart store on a Saturday and watch as customers perfectly dominate the essence of physical-to-physical commerce. In fact, just the experience of being in a physical location leads most customers to make purchases far beyond their shopping lists. That’s the reason why brands spend millions of dollars on physical retail locations because they feel confident they can elevate and capitalize on the on-site shopping experience and the “serendipity” that happens in the store. Whether it’s waiting in a queue to enter the Louis Vuitton Maison Vendôme store in Paris or going down an in-store slide during a Showfields shopping adventure in New York, the world of physical retail has become more experiential and glitzy. It is one of the drivers of BIG retail.
See: CB Insights: Metaverse stack and companies making it a reality
But when we start to think about a brand’s physical footprint in virtual economies, we seem to falter. Does this footprint have a “toe hold” in the virtual world? I say a resounding yes! As I continue to advise and work with brands in this new space, it is evident from my perspective that new commerce models are evolving, but they have not been done at scale. Even while the Metaverse is in a nascent state, these models will have a significant impact on customers' choices and purchasing decisions. My advice to you is to buckle up, because we’re about to head into the future of commerce!
The dawn of the internet introduced new marketplaces for exchanges starting with social media apps and eCommerce. In the dawn of the metaverse and the coming era of web3, commerce will evolve and with this evolution, new models will emerge.
Is the market ready for the Metaverse?
A recent survey conducted by Zipline (one of the world’s largest delivery drone companies) suggests that 85% of Gen-Z respondents, 75% of millennials and 69% of Gen-Xers responded that they would be interested in hybrid shopping experiences, which include using mixed reality in retail stores and for online shopping.
Zipline cofounder and CEO Melissa Wong:
The key is to engage consumers with entertaining and accessible digital content that lowers the barriers to entry and meets Metaverse users where they already exist. This might be in a popular game or in a physical store where people mingle in the flesh.
Making it a reality
Current shopping models are Physical-to-Physical, Digital-to-Physical, and Virtual-to-Virtual. But what about going the next step and making the sale from Virtual-to-Physical and Physical-to-Virtual? When your customers are in the Metaverse, it’s virtual first. However, what happens when they want to purchase something physical in-game or in-world? Or when they are at a physical location, whether a store or a music festival and something they acquire at the location can unlock something else for them in the virtual world?
See: Metaverse Continuum: Digital experiences and interconnected future
In the Metaverse, there is an emerging business model focused on providing new products to digital twins of the customer, which would be the person’s unique avatar. This is called Direct-to-Avatar (D2A), a term that Ryan Gill, CEO of Crucible, and I first explored back in July 2020 in a highly cited article. D2A bypasses traditional marketing by focusing on in-game personas to sell virtual goods, physical items, or real-world experiences. D2A may sound counterintuitive, but it is becoming a fast-growing market segment with an increased sense of connection to purchase digital goods that may or may not come with real-world counterparts. D2A can be leveraged by brands to sell V2V, P2V, and V2P.
With D2A becoming a new model for D2C, this in itself signals a new frontier for B2B and B2C paradigms which will be impacted not only by gaming but also by AR and voice.
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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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Meta’s money transfer service pilot, Novi, is shutting down this September
Fortune | Olga Kharif | Jul 1, 2022
The remainder of the cryptocurrency project that Meta Platforms Inc.’s Founder Mark Zuckerberg took a beating over from Congress is officially shutting down.
- Meta’s Novi pilot—a money-transfer service using the company’s own cryptocurrency digital wallet—will end on Sept. 1, the service said on its website, a link to which it texted to its users.
- Meta launched Novi pilot in October of last year amid scaled back ambitions to dominate the crypto remittances space. Instead of a new Diem token Meta once backed, Novi ended up using Paxos Trust Co.’s USDP stablecoin to allow wallet users from parts of the U.S. and Guatemala to conduct transactions.
Starting July 21, users will no longer be able to add money to their accounts [advising users to withdraw their balance] as soon as possible. Users won’t be able to access their transaction history or other data after the pilot ends.
See: Meta to Start Testing NFTs on Instagram (Facebook and Other Apps To Follow)
Leverage Novi's technology
The company does plan to use Novi’s technology in future products, such as in its metaverse project, a company spokesperson said in an email. While scaling back this effort, Meta has been expanding its test to support nonfungible tokens—typically art like cute monkeys or penguins—on its sites.
We are already leveraging the years spent on building capabilities for Meta overall on blockchain and introducing new products, such as digital collectibles. You can expect to see more from us in the web3 space because we are very optimistic about the value these technologies can bring to people and businesses in the metaverse.
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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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