Imagine a fantasy MMO role playing game in which every character is an NFT that can be equipped with other NFTs. A nonfungible token can be a suit of armor or a magic sword that can be put on the character to use in the game, stored in a backpack (itself an NFT), or sold at an auction house. The backpack holds other NFTs the player collects while in the game: Magic potions that give more strength or speed, food to keep the character moving at full speed, rope that can be used to climb a building. Even a curse …

Support for the Algorand ecosystem appears to be growing, with digital asset manager Arrington Capital earmarking $100 million for projects building on the smart-contract platform. The massive Arrington Algorand Growth Fund, or AAGF, has been designed to accelerate additional development across all facets of the smart contract platform, the company announced Thursday. This includes applications spanning the DeFi, traditional finance, public sector and NFT marketplaces. AAGF will invest in an array of Algorand-focused projects, including native cryptocurrencies that drive new financial applications on the network. Arrington Capital was founded by TechCrunch and Crunchbase founder Michael Arrington. The company oversees more …

A privacy-enabled blockchain platform says its goal is to build a responsible data economy and usher in a new era for this technology. Oasis Protocol says it brings privacy and scalability to DeFi — ensuring that this new approach to finance can expand beyond early adopters to reach the mass market. Controlling privacy Support for confidential smart contracts is a key differentiator of the Oasis Network. The contracts play an important role in preserving privacy by allowing a trustless decentralized blockchain without having to make that smart contract’s data public. This leaves the network able to solve emerging problems in …

The era of unintelligible contracts written in legalese by lawyers in $2,000 suits with degrees from Ivy League schools is over. The contracts of the next century will be hybrid smart contracts, written in code by programmers wearing $20 hoodies and living in their NYC-shared apartment. What is a hybrid smart contract? Smart contracts are self-enforcing contracts, written in code and executed by the blockchain. These smart contracts are great at sending and receiving money, and doing simple calculations, but they cannot access off-chain data, perform complex calculations or generate random numbers on their own. Those limitations previously prohibited smart …

By 2027, more than half of the U.S. workforce will be freelancers. That means that 86.5 million Americans will be part of the gig economy at least part time, according to a recent study by Statista. That’s up from 67.6 million this year, and the pandemic has only accelerated this trend, as a recent study of the $1.2 trillion industry showed 12% of the U.S. workforce tried freelance work for the first time in the past 12 months. And all of those decentralized workers will need to find and work with clients, which is where HYVE comes in. A decentralized …

Zurich-based Dfinity Foundation has announced a fund worth CHF 200 million, or around $223 million, to support development on the Internet Computer — a blockchain-based decentralized network with wildly ambitious plans to one day “replace” much of the internet. The non-profit scientific research organization announced “The Developer Ecosystem Program” on May 26, and is now accepting applicants for development grants. These grants will operate separately from the $14.5 million Beacon Fund, which was announced in September 2020, and is a dedicated venture fund that backs developers creating open internet services on the platform. In a blog post announcing the new …

Popular TikTok viral “meme coin” SafeMoon could be vulnerable to malicious exploits by hackers on account of purported security vulnerabilities in its smart contract code. According to a smart contract audit by blockchain security firm HashEx, SafeMoon currently has 12 of such vulnerabilities with five being classified as ranging between being of a “critical” and “high-severity” nature. As part of its findings, the HashEx audit alleges that SafeMoon is vulnerable to a “Temporary ownership renounce” attack and a subsequent rug pull to the tune of $20 million. According to HashEx, the SafeMoon contract owner is an externally owned account, or …

Cardano has rewarded its investors with significant gains this year, with a growing number of holders joining the coveted millionaires’ club following the latest ADA price surge. Since the start of the year, the number of millionaire investors in ADA has increased more than 13-fold to 6,710 as of May 17, according to United Kingdom-based news agency Finbold. Using data from Coin Metrics, the agency determined that there were just 504 ADA addresses worth at least $1 million on Jan. 1. The number of active ADA addresses also grew by 417.81% between Jan. 1 and Apr. 28. ADA’s value has …

Decentralized finance on the Cardano blockchain is drawing closer to becoming a reality, with a token migration bridge soon to enter the testing phase. According to Francisco Landino, project manager at Input Output Hong Kong, or IOHK — the research and development arm responsible for Cardano — the platform’s ERC-20 migration tool is nearing testnet deployment. In a blog post published on Monday, Landino said that the ERC-20 converter tool will allow the migration of Ethereum-based tokens to the Cardano chain. The planned ERC-20 converter bridge will follow Cardano’s highly anticipated Alonzo hard fork, which is touted to bring smart …

Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young is continuing to invest heavily in blockchain, investing $100 million into engineering and developing distributed ledger technologies for a range of enterprise applications. On Monday, EY revealed its second-generation of Smart Contract & Token Review tools through its EY Blockchain Analyzer product suite, including a testing studio allowing simulated smart contract execution for complex decentralized finance applications. “The new iteration supports multiple new capabilities that are expected to be used in complex DeFi contract ecosystems,” EY announced, adding: “It offers a blend of compliance testing with traditional code review, and it supports customized …

The impressive 816% gain of Cardano's ADA coin in 2021 catapulted the smart contract platform's market capitalization to $61 billion. To fully grasp how far this third-generation protocol has gone, the absolute leader, Ether (ETH), held the same valuation just six months ago. As AD's price evolves, so do its derivatives markets, and the nearly $1 billion in futures open interest poses both an opportunity and a threat for the price. Cautious investors will now question whether the $200 billion in potential liquidations are around the corner, drawing similarities to the 23% crash that occurred on April 17. DeFi is …

Traders valued Internet Computer (ICP) at $630 in its debut on Coinbase on Monday. On Binance, however, the dollar bids for the token surged to as high as $3,093 as of Tuesday. Meanwhile, HitBTC reported ICP at a peak of roughly $407. The huge price differences across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges showed a berserk trading sentiment in the Internet Computer market, landing ICP in the list of top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, surpassing even veterans such as XRP, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Cardano (ADA), and reaching as high as the fourth spot. Major price corrections followed on profit-taking sentiment. Entering the …