Bitcoin Ordinals have emerged as a novel way to enhance the functionality and use of Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency. By leveraging Bitcoin’s blockchain in a new and innovative manner, Ordinals bring unique value propositions and helps to revitalize Bitcoin’s developer community. What Are Bitcoin Ordinals? In simple terms, Bitcoin Ordinals are digital collectibles created by […]
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Donald Trump Proposes Elimination of US Income Tax, Introduction of Tariffs
U.S. presidential candidate and former 45th President Donald Trump has been proposing the idea of eliminating the country’s income tax and substituting it with tariffs. Trump Discusses Tariff-Based Revenue System With Republican Lawmakers On June 13, Donald Trump met with Republican lawmakers in Washington and reportedly discussed abolishing income tax. According to sources from several […]
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An Introduction to Bitcoin Layer Two Solutions
Bitcoin, the pioneer of blockchain technology, has faced challenges as its adoption has grown. With its original design allowing only seven transactions per second, the network often struggles with scalability, leading to high fees and slower transaction times. To address these issues, Bitcoin layer two (L2) solutions have emerged. These projects aim to enhance the […]
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Metaplex Announces Introduction of Hybrid Defi Protocol for Solana
Metaplex, a Solana-based protocol that allows for the easy deployment of NFTs across applications, has introduced MPL-404, a hybrid decentralized finance standard. MPL-404 leans on SPL-404, a protocol that allows for the exchange of an NFT for a fixed number of tokens assigned by the designers of each artistic collection. Metaplex Aims to Extend Hybrid […]
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Solana’s Defi Landscape to Shift With Marginfi’s Introduction of YBX Stablecoin
The decentralized lending protocol built on the Solana blockchain, Marginfi, announced the upcoming launch of YBX, which is expected to be the first notable decentralized stablecoin on Solana, aiming to provide an alternative to the network’s heavy reliance on Circle’s centralized stablecoin usd coin (USDC). The stablecoin, backed by SOL-based liquid staking derivatives (LSDs), is […]
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Bitcoin Stamps Approach 50,000 Recorded on Blockchain Alongside Introduction of SRC20 Tokens
With nearly nine million Ordinal inscriptions, the trend that followed, called Bitcoin Stamps, is nearing a milestone of nearly 50,000 stamps recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. Additionally, similar to the BRC20 token economy, the Bitcoin Stamps concept has provided users with the ability to mint fungible tokens with a standard called SRC20.
Bitcoin Stamps Inch Closer to 50,000; SRC20 Tokens Enter the Picture
While there has been significant attention on Ordinal inscriptions and the BRC20 economy, the Bitcoin Stamps trend is still relatively unknown. As of May 23, 2023, there are currently 46,578 Bitcoin Stamps recorded on the BTC blockchain, approaching the 50,000 milestone. The current number of stamps can be viewed at stampchain.io and rarestamp.xyz.
Popular collections include the Pixel Gods, 3GGS, Eternai Rare, Stamp Punks, Stamp Wizards, Stamp Pepes, Stamp Pepes Not, and Classic Arcade. These collections have been available for a considerable period and are sold through rarestamp.xyz’s marketplace. A new concept has recently emerged alongside the Bitcoin Stamps trend, known as SRC20 tokens. Similar to BRC20s, this token concept enables users to mint fungible token supplies using the technology.
“SRC20 is a bleeding edge protocol on Bitcoin Stamps,” the website stampchain.io details. “We’re working hard to build indexing tools and form partnerships with marketplaces. However, it is early. You’re not going to see these tokens in your wallet just yet.”
Rarestamp.xyz offers an SRC20 minting page on its web portal, allowing users to issue a token supply, and assign a ticker symbol. Stampchain.io also offers an SRC20 minting tool. According to statistics, there are currently over 300 SRC20 stamps available today. Some of the SRC20 tokens include coins like “kevin,” “stamp,” “pepe,” “bobo,” “shib,” “punks,” and “rare.”
At this time, there is no available data on the market valuation of the SRC20 token economy, while the BRC20 economy is valued at 7 million. Furthermore, alongside BRC20s and SRC20s, the token standard DRC20 has been developed on the Dogecoin network. Stampchain.io says that a community member built a basic indexer for the coins but it cannot guarantee the accuracy of the tool.
What are your thoughts on the potential impact of Bitcoin Stamps and the emergence of SRC20 tokens on the blockchain? Share your insights and opinions in the comments section below.
A Brief Introduction to the Rapid Expansion of the Gaming Industry
Very few modern industries can claim a year-on-year growth rate of over 30%, especially with the global impacts of the pandemic, which stalled progress within many fields. However, one industry that’s seen incredible growth over the past 20 years and continues to do so is gaming – which currently has a total value of nearly 200 billion USD.
But, when you take a step back and realize that there are 3.2 billion gamers worldwide, 2.2 billion of which actively play through their mobile devices, it’s no surprise that this industry has such high revenues. The gaming industry is an impressive facet of technology, representing an intersection between world-class tech, consumer advertising, and a level of community engagement that is rarely seen in other industries.
But where exactly does the interest in the gaming industry come from? How has it grown, and why is it so successful? In this article, we’ll be delving into the history of the gaming industry, outlining past progress points and pointing towards current and future developments that keep this innovative industry afloat.
Let’s get right into it!
Background to the gaming industry
The original gaming experiences date back to the 60s, when the development of arcade-style games started to become popular. In those days, gaming was not particularly mainstream, with users having to physically travel to an arcade in order to play.
As the 70s arrived and personal computers were released, gaming became slightly more popular as people could access online games from the comfort of their own homes. From that point, gaming has meandered with the times, taking on the latest technologies and developing alongside them.
From increasingly complicated software, better graphics, and advanced online gaming systems, the gaming industry has now developed into something that has touched the majority of the planet. Gaming has evolved far beyond just one system, now being a form of entertainment that can be accessed from absolutely anywhere.
While major consoles like Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch still dominate, forms of gaming on mobile have also become very popular. In fact, gaming actually accounts for 43% of smartphone use, demonstrating the extent to which gaming has permeated into this medium.
What’s more ignited than this
Organizing esports tournament anywhere in the world for any mobile skill-based game in #ignitetournaments
Create a #play2earn tournament using our app and #igniteyourgames pic.twitter.com/lRSQMLlU9r
— Ignite Tournaments (@igniteyourgames) March 21, 2022
If anything has caused a rapid expansion to the gaming industry, it’s the arrival of the internet and the integration of these multiplayer services. Some of the biggest games of every single year revolve around online experience, with over 3 billion people around the globe logging on to battle against others.
To accommodate for this, platforms like Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace have allowed users to completely turn their gaming experiences online. For example, while a user used to have to go out to buy a new game, they can now directly buy it on one of these online marketplaces and then download it to their device.
Gaming has become incredibly accessible, with users from around the globe on a variety of devices turning towards this entertainment medium.
A career in gaming?
While gaming is often viewed as a way of entertaining oneself, modern adaptations and natural competitiveness have also given way to eSports tournaments. In-game tournaments where the best of the best face off against each other has become a billion-dollar market, reaching that impressive figure in 2021.
This market is only predicted to continue to expand, with reports expecting the market to reach 1.62 billion dollars by 2024. People come together from all over the world to face off within their favorite games. Alongside hefty pools of prize money, some of which can total several 0,000 at once, there is also lots of capital generated from advertising and sponsorships.
Just like sporting events, this industry has also generated enough buzz that people now follow tune-in to watch these tournaments. In 2021, 427 million people watched an eSports event, whether that be a single match or going to a tournament in person to see their favorites. Much like the industry’s total value, the number of viewers each year is equally growing, with games like Dota, League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Fortnite always bringing in huge audiences.
Watching others play has become so popular that entire platforms are now devoted to this, with applications like Twitch allowing users to tune into gamers streaming their gameplay. Twitch has had an incredible few years, moving from being valued at 0.1 billion USD in 2016 to 1.5 billion USD in 2019.
As gaming continues to develop, eSports has made this into a further level of entertainment, with gaming now bleeding into viewing. Just like physical sports, eSports has become a center for community, avid discussion, and world-class entertainment.
Play2Earn
While gaming has continually been updating and changing over time, one of the most significant recent developments has been its combination with blockchain technologies. A genre of gaming has risen out of this, known as Play2Earn gaming, in which users can play their favorite games and earn money while doing so.
Unlike tournament gamers, you don’t have to be the best of the best to earn money through these systems. Instead, simply by completing objectives, quests, finishing games, or unlocking achievements, you’ll be able to generate in-game currency. The connection with the blockchain in the form of in-game cryptocurrency integrations ensures that players can then cash out this in-game money for their own local currency.
This even expands into in-game NFT items that have been integrated into certain games. These NFTs (non-fungible tokens) come in the form of different characters, skill sets, moves, powerups, or weapons that players can use when playing. By obtaining these NFTs in-game, they’re able to use them to get an advantage over their competition. But, alongside this, they are able to sell, trade, loan, or buy these NFTs within the games in order to generate an income.
The link between blockchain and gaming has now progressed even further with the arrival of Play2Earn tournaments. Ignite Tournaments is one of these said eSports tournament providers, allowing games from around the world to access their tournament ecosystem and gain cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Commenting on the rise of P2E tournaments, CEO of Ignite Tournaments, Krystal Yang comments that:
“Historically, the value stream in gaming has always been unidirectional, with gamers creating value that rewarded only the game publisher, who largely extracted value from users without providing any real rewards. P2E is an incredibly disruptive force that will revolutionize gaming as we know it. Now, gamers can be rewarded for ecosystem participation. Value is no longer simply extracted by the publisher. Rather, it is created and shared.”
— Krystal Yang, CEO/Co-Founder
With this most recent connection between the blockchain and gaming industries, we’ve seen just how far gaming can push the limits. With the ability to gain money for playing becoming even more common, this will serve as a motive for even more gamers that turn to this exciting entertainment medium.
Gaming Is For All
Perhaps one of the most impactful reasons for gaming’s success as an industry is due to the sheer scope it provides. Gaming is much more than just one genre of game or one style of playing; it encompasses almost anything you can think of. One only needs to look down the list of the most played games of 2021 to see an incredible variety of genres.
From first-person shooters and building games to story-driven experiences and online multiplayer, there is a demonstrative range of different styles that rise to the top. Going beyond this, every single year, 1000s of indie games are released that bring new art styles, new ideas, and new formats to the gaming industry.
Quite literally, no matter who you are, you’ll be able to find a gaming experience that you currently like. While one person may be attracted to fast spaced shoot-em-up games, another could want to play a story-driven game on their iPhone. The fact is, neither one of these is the right way to game, both counting as an authentic gaming experience.
Whoever you are, you’ll be able to find a game that accommodates what you’re looking for – be it wonder, magic, escapism, or something new. Even taking very generalized depictions of society and splitting it by gender, 45% of gamers identify as women in the USA and 55% as men. The close split between these numbers further demonstrates that gaming – and the appeal of gaming – isn’t tied to any inherent attributes.
This can equally be seen geographically, with gamers being found in every corner of the world, from Asia and Europe to Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
No matter what you’re looking for, the gaming industry and its incredible scope will have something that can accommodate you.
Final Thoughts
Long gone are the days when gaming was a small industry built upon developers working in their garages. Nowadays, this billion-dollar industry has expanded into an exciting behemoth. With new styles of gaming and unlimited possibilities, this industry has grown into something incredibly interesting to follow.
Gaming has grown so rapidly that it has now become a stable career path for those that excel, with online tournaments and accessible gaming ensuring that people can make money from the comfort of their own homes.
With the international scope, diverse audience, and regular developments, gaming is far more than just a pastime – it has become a worldwide sensation.
TRON Grand Hackathon 2022 takes off alongside the introduction of its new community forum
Last Thursday, TRON DAO and BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) announced the launch of the TRON Grand Hackathon 2022 and its first-ever TRONDAO Forum.
Registration for the Hackathon began appropriately on Valentine’s Day, February 14, just in time to spread the love for new entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers, to have the chance to add to the advancement of Web 3.0 and the blockchain industry.
The hackathon focuses on allowing developers to experiment and leverage the TRON blockchain and the BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) to create a plethora of projects spanning DeFi (Decentralized Finance), blockchain gaming, Web3, Digital Art/Collectibles, and everything in-between.
TRONDAO Forum aims to empower the decentralized community to impact the governance and evolution of the TRON DAO, building the foundation of an interconnected cross-chain future for the entire blockchain economy.
“The future is not far from where decentralized storage, decentralized applications, digital assets, and cryptocurrency wallets are widespread. With the increasing use of decentralized, peer-to-peer, and secure networks, blockchain is becoming the backbone of Web 3.0 – the decentralized web,” said H.E. Justin Sun, Founder of TRON.
Developers are encouraged to participate in this exciting opportunity to design and implement DeFi, GameFi, NFT, and Web3 applications, and to engage with the community on TRONDAO Forum.
Since the decentralized web is all about putting the power in the hands of the people, the TRON Grand Hackathon 2022 and the TRONDAO Forum, are all about opportunities, interactions, and empowering the TRON DAO community to have a say in the digital world.
For submission requirements, eligibility, rules, criteria, and further details, please visit the TRON DAO Forum or see the Medium article.
An Introduction To Stellar And XLM: Mission, Control, And Consensus
This project is an enigma. On the one hand, Stellar is not for profit, it doesn’t have owners or shareholders, and strives to be somewhat decentralized. On the other, Stellar is a compliance-focused protocol, and its directors often meet with shadowy organizations like the World Economic Forum. According to their website, the protocol seeks “to unlock the world’s economic potential by making money more fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered.” Fine, but, at what cost?
Related Reading | Stellar To Power VISA’s New Partnership, XLM Begins Breakout
According to the legend, Stellar is a Ripple fork. However, as you’ll see below, that’s not exactly true. Founder of the infamous Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange and co-founder of Ripple, Jed McCaleb, launched Stellar in 2014. Stripe financed the initial operation. Joyce Kim, a lawyer, is his partner in the venture.
The native currency of the whole ecosystem is called Lumen or XLM.
Stellar’s Mission And Approach
Securities.io interviewed the recently appointed CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation, Denelle Dixon. “The vision is big: Stellar and SDF hope to unlock the world’s economic potential by making money more fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered,” she told them.
On its website, the organization justifies its existence. “The way the global financial establishment is structured today, people are born into an economy just like they’re born into a political system. Stellar is a way out: it lets people participate in a worldwide, stable, financial network regardless of where they live.”
The controversial aspect is Stellar’s approach. It’s completely opposed to the cryptocurrency ethos. The company wants to build a bridge between the traditional banking system and the cryptocurrency space, but by following the traditional banking system’s rusty rules. “The software has always been intended to enhance rather than undermine or replace the existing financial system.”
In other words, Stellar aims to provide a platform with which all financial actors can interact without any friction. All financial actors that are properly identified and approved by the legacy system, that is.
What Is The Stellar Consensus Protocol?
As a consensus mechanism, Stellar doesn’t use Proof-Of-Work or Proof-Of-Stake. It uses its own Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP.) For a formal definition, let’s quote the paper that Stellar presented at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.
“With SCP, each institution specifies other institutions with which to remain in agreement; through the global interconnectedness of the financial system, the whole network then agrees on atomic transactions spanning arbitrary institutions, with no solvency or exchange-rate risk from intermediary asset issuers or market makers.”
And, what does the Stellar Consensus Protocol accomplish exactly?
“SCP lets Stellar atomically commit irreversible transactions across arbitrary participants who don’t know about or trust each other. That in turn guarantees new entrants access to the same markets as established players, makes it secure to get the best available exchange rates even from untrusted market makers, and dramatically reduces payment latency.”
For the system to function, Stellar relies on Federated Byzantine Agreements. For a description of what those do, let’s quote Bit2meAcademy:
“For the FBAs to function properly, participants must wait for the majority to reach a consensus. In this way, participants know which transactions are most relevant before starting to settle them. So when the majority of the network takes a position, the network accepts the transaction and makes it unfeasible to roll it back for an attacker.
In other words, the Stellar Consensus Protocol tends towards centralization and just ignores most of the problems that Proof-Of-Work solves. It does use significantly less energy, though.
XLM price chart for 09/04/2021 on Bitfinex | Source: XLM/USD on TradingView.com
Key Characteristics Of The Stellar Blockchain
- Almost all of the Stellar validators are corporate entities of some sort. Or are maintained by the Stellar Development Foundation. However, “anyone can install the Stellar software and join the consensus process.”
- Each Stellar Lumen account must have a minimum of XLM in them. This minimum balance protects the network from spam accounts.
- The Stellar Lumen’s mission is to pay for gas to conduct operations inside the Stellar ecosystem.
- The Stellar ecosystem was not designed for direct payments. The idea is to provide a platform that serves as an intermediary in currency exchange.
- The system “doesn’t privilege any particular currency.”
- The code is open source and auditable by anyone.
- “The Foundation helps maintain Stellar’s codebase, supports the technical and business communities around Stellar,” great! “And is a speaking partner to regulators and institutions,” ow.
- Stellar recently signed a partnership with “crypto-asset risk management solutions” firm Elliptic. That means, “Elliptic’s monitoring, compliance, and analysis software now incorporates support for XLM, the native asset of Stellar.” Ow.
- With the recent protocol 13 update, Stellar allows “fine-grained control of asset authorization.” This means the issuer of an asset can deauthorize accounts and don’t let them use the asset. This means, more control and permissions.
- The Lumens had an inflation rate of 1% per year. In September 2019, Stellar removed inflation of Lumens. Also, the Stellar Development Foundation burned 55B of their Lumens.
So, Is Stellar a Ripple Fork?
In its FAQ, the organization goes back to its origins:
“The old Stellar network launched in July 2014. The node software (stellard) was a modified fork of the Ripple node software (rippled). The ledger was completely new and contained no history from Ripple’s network.”
Related Reading | Stellar To Introduce AMM Functionality, What This Means For Its Ecosystem
So, the software was originally based on Ripple’s, but the ledger was brand new. Nevertheless, in 2015, when they released the Stellar Consensus Protocol, they re-wrote the software from scratch. From that point onwards, Stellar doesn’t share any code with Ripple.
Featured Image by Nicole Avagliano on Unsplash – Charts by TradingView
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An Introduction To Solana: Innovations, Characteristics, And Criticism
Will Solana be the one? The race to be the prime smart-contract-enabled blockchain is heating up. Many projects are chasing Ethereum’s tail, offering faster and cheaper transactions plus technological innovations. What does Solana offer? An internal clock. An incredibly higher number of transactions. Fees so low that are almost non-existent. The possibility to scale to global adoption in their layer 1.
Related Reading | Solana to Launch Stake Pools, This Is How It Will Enable Rewards For SOL Holders
Will this be enough to capture the market? Is Solana the mythical Ethereum-killer that everyone is looking for? Keep reading and get enough info to make your own mind. We’ll summarize the good, the bad, and the ugly in digestible bullet points and short text.
What Is Proof Of History And How Does It Work?
Contrary to what the name suggests, proof of history is not a consensus mechanism. Solana uses Proof-Of-Stake to validate its blocks. “The core Solana innovation is Proof of History (POH), a globally-available, permissionless source of time in the network that works before consensus,” says the following video’s information box.
To drive the point home, let’s also quote Techcrunch:
Enter Yakovenko’s big idea, which he calls “proof of history,” wherein the Solana blockchain has developed a kind of synchronized clock that, in essence, assigns a timestamp for each transaction and disables the ability for miners and bots to decide the order of which transactions get recorded onto the blockchain. Yakovenko says doing so allows for greater security and “censorship resistance.”
Solana’s creator is Anatoly Yakovenko, a San Francisco engineer “who spent more than a dozen years as an engineer working on wireless protocols at Qualcomm.” He wasn’t interested in cryptocurrencies until he figured out a way to improve the system. In traditional blockchains, the blocks don’t carry a timestamp, and that leads to inefficiencies. Yakovenko figured out a way to include it in the SHA-256 (Secure Hashing Algorithm 256) hash function, and the rest is history… Proof of history.
Other Innovations That The Solana Blockchain Offers
This section will be the only technical part of the article, we promise. To start, we’re going to quote EVALUAPE’s analysis. They’re “a platform for demonstration and evaluation of blockchain projects.”
VDF, Verifiable Delay Function:
A function used to generate PoH. It is a collision resistant hash function. In short, this is a function that takes a bunch of data inputs and spits out an output in fixed size. The main advantage of the function is its security.
Avalanche Communication:
Simply speaking, since the hash value in every timestamp is calculated by the previous hash value, a long range of hash value can be broke into small partitions to be verified separately by the nodes. Each node only needs to verify a partition of hash value, and then concatenate and restore to a long hash value.
And for the next two, we’ll quote Decrypt’s analysis of the Solana platform.
Tower Consensus, a variant of Proof-Of-Stake that:
Enables distributed networks to reach consensus despite attacks from malicious nodes, known as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT).
Solana’s implementation of PBFT enforces a global source of time across the blockchain through a second novel protocol known as Proof of History (PoH).
Sealevel:
This allows for a parallel smart contracts runtime that optimizes resources and ensures that Solana can scale horizontally across GPUs and SSDs, which should help the platform scale to meet demands.
Gulf Stream:
Solana also completely nixes the mempool system used by other platforms, and instead forwards transactions to validators even before the previous batch of transactions is finalized. This helps to maximize confirmation speed and boost the number of transactions that can be handled both concurrently and in parallel.
Key Characteristics Of The Solana Blockchain
- Technically, it’s still in beta. Their MainNet is up and running, though,
- Low barrier of entry to become a validator. There’s no minimum stake to start validating, but the possibility of being selected is directly tied to the size of your stake.
- It’s even faster than legacy financial systems AND centralized cryptocurrency exchanges.
- Over 100 projects were building on Solana by the end of 2020. Now, there are more than 250. The growth is exponential.
- At the time of writing, their official stats report 905 validators and 1331 nodes. The Avg. fee per transaction is .00025.
- They currently report 1,375 transactions per second.
- The project supports smart contracts in any programing language.
Powerful Allies And Co-Signs
- It’s the “official chain” for USDC. And USDC is the second-largest stablecoin in the world.
- Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda Research. Their Serum DEX runs on Solana, as well as their projects Maps.me and borrowing/lending DeFi protocol Oxygen.
Related Reading | Why Solana and Polkadot Have Been The Least Impacted By The Crypto Crash
Solana, Criticism And Scandals
- Even though they have ample documentation freely available, the project doesn’t have a clearly defined roadmap.
- Their official tokenomics clearly say “Subject to change.”
- They sold around 36% of the SOL tokens to private investors. In 4 rounds, they raised around M. The controversy here is that only slightly more than 1% was sold to retail.
- There’s not enough information about the functions of the Solana Foundation. And they hold more than 10% of the SOL token. And manage a community reserve of a whopping 38%.
- Someone detected a mysterious wallet with 11,365,067 SOL. They ended up being an undisclosed loan from the Solana Foundation to a market-making firm for liquidity provisioning in Binance. Those tokens were eventually burned, but wow.
- In December, for six hours, “Solana’s Mainnet Beta network halted new block confirmations, which resulted in a temporary outage.” The reason was “A validator booted up two instances of their machine and it started transmitting multiple different blocks for the same slot, eventually creating 3 different unconfirmed minority partitions of the network. ” Their excuse was that Solana is still in beta, which is fair.
SOL price chart for 08/15/2021 on FTX | Source: SOL/USD on TradingView.com
A Quote To Close This
About Solana’s objectives, Anatoly Yakovenko told Techcrunch:
“Everything that we do to make this thing faster and faster results in this better censorship resistance and therefore better markets,” he said yesterday. “And price discovery is what I imagine is the killer use case for decentralized public networks. Can we be the world’s price discovery engine? That’s an interesting question to ask.”
Featured Image by Zack Dowdy on Unsplash – Charts by TradingView
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