COVID-19 brought many things to a halt, motorsports included. Although disruptive, the resulting digital reality boosted the sims racing experience, a reality driven by popular drivers now making an experience in virtual events. This list includes Formula 1’s Virtual Grand Prix, The Race: All-Star Series and eNASCAR featured on ESPN, FOX and other major TV broadcasters. Although this initial frenzy has since subsided with the reintroduction of live races, sim-racing has proven beneficial in scouting new talent and inspiring entirely new communities by blurring the line between the real and virtual world. With the world transitioning from pandemic to endemic, …

Much loved retail video game store chain GameStop (GME) is looking ahead to its long-awaited NFT marketplace and Web3 gaming unit after suffering a net loss of $147.5 million during Q4 2021 GameStop quietly built a barebones NFT website in mid-2021 but has significantly ramped up efforts this year after unveiling an NFT and Web3 gaming division in January along with penning a major partnership with Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution Immutable X the following month to build an NFT marketplace. As part of the Q4 results — ending on January 29 and published on March 17 — GameStop revealed that …

Analyzing the labor market is a passion of mine. In my past life, I worked as a labor market analyst for a Canadian think tank specializing in the IT sector. Tech employees always enjoyed higher demand, higher pay and lower jobless rates than workers in the rest of the economy. Although blockchain and crypto were virtually nonexistent during my tenure, these emerging technologies are now leading exponential growth for an industry evolving from Web2 to Web3. This week’s Crypto Biz newsletter highlights the growing demand for crypto professionals in the traditional finance and payment industries. We also survey the latest …

Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 solution Polygon (MATIC) is integrating the Simba Chain to scale and build new infrastructure for Web3, according to a new announcemen. While Polygon is known to be a scaling solution provider, the new partnership aims to build the next chapter for Web3 and expand the scope of services offered by the Polygon network. The first significant development between the two firms will be the launch of a white-label NFT marketplace. With the growing influence and popularity of Web3, major Web2 firms are looking to make the shift, but they got the cold feet due to the hassle …

The director of the Science and Technology Supervision Bureau of China’s Securities Regulatory Commission Yao Qian has called for a special focus on Web3, deeming it to be the future of the internet. Yao published an article titled "Web 3.0: A New Generation of Internet that is Approaching," talking about the significance of the evolving tech and how the world is at a crucial transition from Web2 to Web3. The article talked about the significance of forward-looking research and strategic infrastructure development. Yao predicted that Web3 will reconstruct the organizational form and business model of the Internet economy and is …

On Wednesday, Coinbase launched a new feature, dubbed "Coinbase Pay," that directly enables its clients to fund their Coinbase Wallets from a Chrome browser extension. According to its staff, Coinbase Pay intends to make it intuitive for anyone to participate in decentralized finance, or DeFi, swap tokens on decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, and purchase nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, in just a few clicks. Specifically, they wrote: "Before Coinbase Pay, users who wanted to add funds to their Coinbase Wallet from the browser extension needed to navigate to Coinbase.com, sign in to their account, copy-paste their wallet address, and manually transfer …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) first took the world by storm in 2020. Now, two years later, the world has grown to know several successful DeFi projects. Despite these successes, like any new field, several problems have also arisen. Consider Bitcoin (BTC), which introduced the world to cryptocurrencies and blockchain but could only be used for payments, and its successor, Ethereum (ETH), which opened the world up to additional technology use cases. Similarly, as DeFi 1.0 brought about earning opportunities and liquidity concerns with users switching between platforms to pursue better rewards, 2.0 protocols are looking to build stable value with more …

Monopolistic ISPs are overselling bandwidth while billions of people still don’t have internet access. Now, the world’s first layer-1 blockchain for bandwidth is introducing a solution to get the next billion people online. Cointelegraph talked to PKT lead developer Caleb James DeLisle about the problems with the internet industry and how to fix them. Tell us the story behind PKT. Why does a layer-1 blockchain have to do with bandwidth? The consumer broadband market is what I would call “rigged:” it’s overpriced and it’s underpriced at the same time. The way the companies in the industry do this is with …

Hashdex, a global crypto-focused asset manager, has revealed the launch of its Web3 Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) with a new announcement. As per a report by Cointelegraph Brazil, the new ETF will be available on B3, Brazil's main stock exchange, and will give investors a secure and diversified way to invest in Web3 and its underlying smart contract platforms. The new ETF's reserve period started Monday, March 14, 2022, and runs until Friday, March 25, 2022. Hashdex's co-founder and CEO Marcelo Sampaio said the company believes that Web3 represents the future of the internet and is a further indication of …

Mayor Steve Adler of Austin, Texas, has fully embraced the discovery of what blockchain technology and crypto payments can bring to his city by proposing two new initiatives. The first initiative aims to ensure that Texas’s fourth-largest city promotes the benefits of blockchain technologies and “promotes equity, diversity, accessibility, and inclusion” in the technological ecosystem. To that end, May Adler directed the City Manager to explore how the city can utilize Web3 and blockchain in 20 fields from smart contracts, supply chain management, and insurance to arts, media, fundraising, and identity verification. “The City Manager is directed to ensure the …

Web3 is hailed as a technology paradigm that is fueled by the creator economy and is in the future, or rather, the next evolution of the internet. As we draw evolutionary comparisons of the technology that underpinned everything from information consumption to content creation, Web2 contributed an unparalleled economic growth and represented a significant era in human evolution with new ways to work, consumer information and progress in human civilization. So with this enormous success of Web2, why is there a need for Web3? As we rethink the internet, which relies primarily on a few centralized entities that have devices, …

TommyD is an award-winning music producer from Britain who has worked with Kanye West, Jay Z, Adele, Beyonce, Janet Jackson, Emeli Sande and many more. He got into blockchain in 2016 and “fell in love with the tech concepts and the underlying philosophy of decentralization.” But he admitted he didn’t see the right interception of the tech and music industries at the time. It was when NFTs gained their momentum when he realized the true potential this technology could bring to artists. In 2021, he co-founded Token||Traxx, an NFT marketplace for musicians. Tommy, you’ve got an impressive experience in the …