Will emojis become the Web3 version of a username? That’s what Nashville-based tech startup Yat believes and with 160,000 sold worth a combined $20 million, it seems plenty of ordinary people agree. A Yat is a string of between one and five emojis that can be used as your digital username, website URL and as a payment address for your digital wallet. It’s sort of a cross between a nonfungible token (NFT) and domain address — though not all Yats are tokenized. “Yat lets you use emojis as your universal username and identity on the internet,” the company wrote in …

Web3 development platform Alchemy announced a fresh round of $200 million funding, bringing up the company’s valuation to $10.2 billion, just above the decacorn threshold. The latest funding round was led by venture capital firm Lightspeed along with Silver Lake, an American global private equity firm. Alchemy’s funding also saw participation from previous major investors as well. As Cointelegraph previously reported in Oct 2021, Alchemy attained a $3.5 billion valuation following a $250 million Series C fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Since October, Alchemy reported a three-fold growth in the number of Web3 initiatives being built on their platform. …

Layer-2 scaling solution Polygon has raised $450 million in a funding round that was backed by some of blockchain’s biggest venture funds — offering further evidence that major investors are looking to support the future of Web3 development. The investment round was led by Sequoia Capital India with participation from more than 40 venture capital funds, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Tiger Global and Republic Capital. Billionaire investor Kevin O’Leary also participated in the raise. Polygon will use the funding to expand its scaling solutions, which includes Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge and Polygon Avail, and support mainstream adoption …

Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the first information distribution protocol that saw massive adoption across the internet is all set to take on Web3 with a decentralized information processing protocol called RSS3. In a technical whitepaper released on Monday, RSS3 laid out plans for taking its popular internet feed update to Web3. RSS3 would offer every entity an RSS3 file that will act as source data and be updated continuously. The source data file then can be used as an aggregation of all the cyber activities, which can then be used to build out social media, content networks, games and other …

Scalability is one of the main hindrances within decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and has created huge barriers to entry. Closely linked to this has been the issue of high gas fees, which continues to be a major pain point for newcomers to the Web3 space. When Web3 goes mainstream, these gas costs will become minimal. For the user, the experience will become completely gas-less like how it is on Web 2.0 applications. As a result of the lack of scalability and network congestion, gas fees have skyrocketed, further preventing users from performing various transactions on the blockchain. According to YCharts …

Li Jiang, COO at Harmony, believes that a bridge connecting all existing blockchains is key to onboard the first 1 billion users on Web 3. “We think that the future is multichain and cross-chain, that you should be able to move assets very easily from one chain to another, with good prices, with good rates and very fast.”, he told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview. Harmony is a Layer-1 blockchain protocol that aims at creating bridges with all major blockchains and becoming a “unifying Web 3 platform” by 2026. Jiang acknowledges that blockchain technology is not mature enough to onboard …

“Web3” may be one of the biggest buzzwords of 2022, but the idea of creating an entirely decentralized platform to host decentralized applications has long been a vision of the crypto community. While it’s notable that some blockchain companies began building out Web3 applications four or five years ago, the Web3 space has only started gaining traction recently. The recent growth of Web3 was highlighted in a new report from Electric Capital, a venture capital firm that has been investing in Web3 companies since 2018. The “Electric Capital 2021 Developer Report” analyzed data from nearly 500,000 code repositories and 160 …

Solana Labs and Web3Auth have announced a collaborative digital wallet initiative designed to eliminate the prerequisites for seed phrases in cryptocurrency interaction, and in turn, streamline a presently tedious and complex process to drive consumer adoption in the Web3 sphere. The Solana Torus Wallet is a non-custodial product that enables users to access all decentralized applications (DApps) and associated wallets within the Solana ecosystem. Upon creation of a cryptocurrency wallet, a user has required the record and remember a seed phrase; a random computer-generated list of words, typically twelve to twenty-four, which acts as the wallet holders master key to …

Dune Analytics, a leading data analytics platform, has announced a capital raise of $69,420,000, in addition to a $1 billion-dollar valuation, the latter of which means that the company attained "unicorn" status, which describes privately-held startups that have attained a valuation of $1 billion or more. The Series B raise was led by New-York based private equity firm Coatue, with additional participation from previous investors Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital, among others. The raise succeeds the company’s seed funding round of $2 million in September 2020 — of which Dragonfly Capital Partners was the lead investor — and its follow-up …

Google has started researching blockchain and how it may benefit Web 3.0 technology. According to a Tuesday statement from Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet — Google's parent company — the company is exploring integrating blockchain technologies into its flagship products and services. When asked how the firm views Web3, Pichai said there are several "areas of interest" for Alphabet, hinting at augmented reality and exploring how blockchain technology may be utilized to power computing and service layers like YouTube and Google Maps. He said: "Any time there is innovation, I find it exciting, and I think it is something …

Yield Guild Games (YGG) has raised $1.45 million to support people affected by December 16's Typhoon Odette in the Philippines, with nearly $1 million already dispersed to people in need. The funding was used to purchase essential goods like medicines, power generators, and canned food, which were turned over to the Philippine Army and Navy and non-profits to distribute among affected communities. There is still about $458,000 worth of crypto and tokens that have been donated to the relief fund but they have yet to be converted to fiat currency for deployment, according to a representative from YGG. Our Transparency …

Although the modern internet connects us like never before, one thing that younger generations have never truly experienced is the feeling of genuine privacy. Even older generations have forgotten what life was like before our every thought and action were tracked. Web3 envisions an open, trustless, permissionless internet where users can interact with each other peer-to-peer without giving up ownership control, privacy or relying on intermediaries. Underlying that vision, blockchains are one of the most important tools. They eliminate the need for trusted third parties and help to create a direct relationship between users and service providers, recording the rules …