Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon, an Ethereum-compatible sidechain scaling solution, gave his take on the rise of Layer 3 (L3) scaling structures in the Ethereum ecosystem. According to Boiron, L3s only take value away from Ethereum’s chain and concentrate it in their corresponding base L2, creating a security risk for the network. Polygon CEO Criticizes […]
Bitcoin News
‘Trading Through Gamification Can Represent the Future’ Says Banksters’ Alexandru Carbunariu
While centralized exchanges (cexs) are instrumental in helping new users grasp all things crypto, they nevertheless do not go “the extra mile in educating their audience properly,” Alexandru Carbunariu, the CMO at the edutech simulator Banksters, has asserted. According to Carbunariu, a Web3 advisor, properly educating newbies includes making the experience more interactive and fun. He added that Web3 platforms should take a leaf out of their Web2 counterparts’ playbook.
Trading Through Gamification Represents the Future
Expanding on the argument that education should be more fun, the CMO said he concurred with those who believe gamification to be the right way of encouraging more positive trading behavior. However, Carbunariu told Bitcoin.com News that while “trading through gamification may represent the future,” many of the current Web3 games may “have taken a wrong turn.”
When asked for his thoughts on the so-called trade-to-win strategy, the Banksters CMO insisted that such a model is better than play-to-earn (P2E) models because it engenders confidence. He suggested that such a model can be ideal for newcomers. Meanwhile, in written answers sent to Bitcoin.com News, Carbunariu also articulated why competition is necessary for Web3 platforms looking to get communities attached to their respective products.
Below are Alexandru Carbunariu‘s responses to all questions sent.
Bitcoin.com News (BCN): Centralized exchanges (cexs) are one of the gateways to all things crypto for new users and most of them have taken on the job of educating newcomers. In your opinion, what can they do better or differently to bring in more Web2 users via education?
Alexandru Carbunariu (AC): Speaking from experience, centralized exchanges don’t take the extra mile in educating their audience properly. A lot more things should be done in terms of education, to make it more fun, more rewarding as well as more interactive. We should check what Web2 asset platforms do and get inspired by their work. We rarely see that in Web3. However, we believe that with new regulations, specific training models will come up.
What needs to be done in order to attract Web2 users:
Create interactive training that will provide incentives (like we have seen Revolut doing).
Use normal KOLs [key opinion leaders] to present their products in a transparent [way] but also using normal non-technical language.
Try to introduce academy programs, where normal users can attend, therefore the knowledge will be much higher. Provide transparency when involving risks. Introduce alerts when the user is lost in the complex UX / UI of the platform.
BCN: Do you believe gamification is the right approach to encouraging positive crypto trading behavior with long-term benefits?
AC: Of course. Creating a more fun environment can be relaxing for the user, and if you don’t mix that with financial loss, it’s actually perfect. We are one of the first to build this type of concept. Our A/B tests, focus groups as well user validation were high, meaning that we were on the right track.
I believe that the Web3 games have taken a wrong turn, and the project owners have lost focus. Web3 should be the gateway to the future and it should provide new ways, apart from the traditional ones, in order to onboard as many users.
Trading through gamification can represent the future. First users need to understand it, then they will trade or invest with caution. If their first experience provides them with losses, then they are unlikely to come back. This is why Banksters has stepped in and is helping them to understand more about crypto, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and trading.
BCN: Can you describe what the trade-to-win model is all about and how this differs from play-to-earn?
AC: In the past 2-3 years we have seen the “P2E” as well as the “P&E” types. One thing they have in common is the fact that they have not identified a balance that will give them a much-needed token stability.
Our Trade2Win model lets the user:
First test the product
Learn about the product
Play around with it
And become a winner
This is the model that provides more confidence, and the rewards will come only at the end, meaning if you are a winner then the rewards will be won. This is a more or less “shadow” plan from the trading world, where you need to practice, learn, trade and then gain profits.
BCN: Trading is an umbrella term that encompasses various strategies based on an individual’s mindset, emotional volatility, and other factors. How does your platform help users figure out an optimal strategy for them through low-risk education?
AC: This is a very good question. To give a more of a straight answer: Yes and No. Basically, we can cover this through our so-called “Abilities” which can be compared with “Superpowers” a hero avatar has in the Web2 games. Abilities actually “copy” what is happening on the real market. There are abilities like:
Elon Musk Tweet
Vitalik’s Support
CZ’s Effect
Market Squeeze
Pump and Dump
Hype
Insider Trade
These are real-life trading events, and in many cases, traders or users don’t understand them. What Banksters did was to analyze all of the historical pricing for these events, develop a price algorithm then infuse them into these Abilities.
Now the user will understand what happens to their portfolio and how it will react when these Abilities are used. This actually provides no risk for the user as well as covers a new mindset, emotional volatility, and other factors.
BCN: Whether it’s crypto trading or something else, competition is often an integral part of that. How is Banksters encouraging competition among users?
AC: They are highly competitive! We often have tournaments and live streams which reward users with real USDT. It drives them to use the product and makes them happy with both the game but also the environment.
We strongly believe that competitions, challenges, tournaments and livestreams definitely help the community being attached to the product, while the team can gather transparent and vital feedback.
BCN: When discussing factors holding back large-scale adoption of crypto, lack of education and intuitive user interface (UI) often get the most attention. However, could it be that we have not had mass adoption because the crypto ecosystem is still struggling to find the product-market fit?
AC: Another good question. The answer is pretty simple. It’s about money. However, it’s more than that. For example:
Users:
A lot of people have lost their hard-earned money during the bear market while listening to the unprepared and uneducated key opinion leaders (KOLs) who often accept to promote projects with no filters.
Project Owners:
If one puts two years and ,000 in the right way, they could raise between 0,000 and a million dollars while having absolutely no experience in blockchain tech, development, management, marketing, or product growth. This, however, has changed and now a lot of Web2 specialists are entering the Web3 space and I believe the standard will go just higher.
Centralized Exchanges:
Providing crazy leverages, with no education, with no warning, and to top all that with FTX keeping their crypto wallet keys in a Google form.
At the end of the day, human nature had to kick in, meaning something terrible had to happen in order for something to be changed.
I think Web3 has gone through a reset in the past 2-3 years, and now, finally, we can see some highly professional projects with funding resources delivering innovative products. Such projects have higher odds of finding product-market fit and accelerating adoption.
What are your thoughts about this interview? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
‘Bitcoin Ordinals Are One of Many Ways to Represent Real-World Assets’ — Wakweli Co-Founder
While non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are generally believed to represent the link between an owner and an asset, without platforms acting as “digital notaries” there can be no effective way of stopping scammers from minting and selling plagiarized works, Shaban Shaame, the co-founder of Wakweli protocol has argued.
Tokenizing Real-World Assets
According to Shaame, the ease with which anyone (including scammers) is able to generate a certificate of authenticity for an NFT only further highlights the importance of having such an authenticating entity. In addition to using tools such as digital notaries, the co-founder of Wakweli — a Layer-1 protocol that issues certificates of authenticity for NFTs & real-world assets — said NFT users must learn to do their own research. NFT traders should always triple-check transactions they sign or the projects they join, Shaame added.
Also, in his written answers to questions sent from Bitcoin.com News, the co-founder also offered his thoughts on Bitcoin ordinals and why linking an asset to a “bitcoin fraction” like this may “present risks when making transactions with incompatible wallets.” He also touched on the tokenization of real-world assets and the future prospects of this phenomenon.
Below are all of Shaame’s answers to questions sent to him via Telegram.
Bitcoin.com News (BCN): Can you start by explaining to our readers what the tokenization of real-world assets is all about and the prospects of tokenized real-world assets on a blockchain?
Shaban Shaame (SS): Real-world assets are generally linked to a title of property of some kind, like the paper saying you own your house. The tokenization of real-world assets is the migration of a physical title of the property to a digital one, generally a non-fungible token (NFT). After tokenization, this digital token ideally represents property over the physical asset. This emerging mechanism has several complex parts, especially on how you enforce this digital link to the real world. For instance, is a shared ledger an acceptable support for a legally-binding title? Such questions have different answers depending on where you are in the world.
Once tokenized, new opportunities are enabled by this digital representation: it becomes easier to fragment assets into smaller parts or to transfer them fastly and at scale. For instance, when a building is tokenized, it becomes possible for thousands of people to share its ownership and to recurrently receive rent payments with digital currencies at a fraction of the cost. We also start to see tokenization projects around financial assets, equity shares, music, movies, ticketing, wine…Sky’s the limit, and we’ve only seen the beginning of it.
BCN: On the surface, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are perceived as certificates of authentication. However, as you may have observed, intellectual property (IP) infringement remains a serious issue. Scammers can and are minting and selling plagiarized works and fake collections on different platforms or blockchains. Is there a way to prevent such scams and assure buyers that they are acquiring an authentic asset?
SS: The tricky part is that everyone can mint an NFT; so if anyone — including scammers — can create a certificate of authenticity, then nothing is. NFTs are a way to represent the link between an owner and an asset, but there is no real definition of what an asset is and what the link is in this scope. There is a missing piece in the digital space to clarify this: in the physical world, a notary would be there to make the link between your house and the paper representing it. As long as we don’t have this missing piece in the digital space — a digital notary — there will be no effective way to stop scammers. Wakweli — “the truth sayers” in Swahili — is this missing piece, an open notary that anyone can benefit from.
BCN: Since Web3 is evolving as a multi-chain ecosystem where users and assets can seamlessly move between different blockchains, can tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) be presented by a single token across the multi-chain cryptosphere? If yes, how does this work?
SS: The first step to answering this question would be to clarify the relationship between tokens and assets. A real-world asset may be represented by one token on one chain (1-1 relationship), but it could also be several tokens on several chains (like a multi-keyed safe). One of Wakweli’s objectives is to clarify this token-to-asset relationship so anyone [can] understand clearly what is linked to what. Anyone is able to get information about the representation of a certified asset by interrogating the Wakweli protocol directly or through third-party integration, such as on marketplaces.
BCN: Your protocol is said to use the so-called proof of democracy (PoD) consensus algorithm to certify the authenticity of any tokenized asset. Can you explain how it works as well as how this ensures that the same asset is not being represented by multiple tokens on multiple platforms?
SS: With the PoD, anyone can request verification for an asset on Wakweli. It is a community-based system where all actors have to lock actual value in certificates, from the requester to the certifier and its electors. Certificates are then controlled by the community who can issue challenge requests to try and get back this locked value if something’s wrong. This mechanism creates a general incentive for the community to tell the truth, generating a virtuous system that scales to protect the trillion market that digital assets will represent in 6 years. And once an asset is certified on one chain, it will be referenced on Wakweli meaning any new certificate request for the same asset on another chain will be declined.
BCN: The Bitcoin Ordinals NFTs have recorded more than 10 million inscriptions so far. Ordinals are said to have brought a whole range of use cases to the Bitcoin network including BRC-20 tokens, NFTs, and more. What’s your take on the Bitcoin network’s ability to handle large volumes of tokenized real-world assets?
SS: Bitcoin Ordinals are one of many ways to represent real-world assets, with their own pros and cons. It relies on Bitcoin, the mother of all blockchains, using tech that was so far never breached: this has great value. On the other hand, linking an asset to a bitcoin fraction like this presents risks when making transactions with incompatible wallets. The Proof-of-Work mechanism also has some pros and cons, like energy consumption with current mining difficulty. Alternatives like smart-contract-based representations or protocol-native tokens enable different features that may be a good fit for some use cases. It ultimately depends on what you are tokenizing and who is your targeted audience, but Bitcoin Ordinals are a big part of the picture.
BCN: With the growing use cases of NFTs, many users have been falling victim to NFT scams. Scammers are always seeking new ways to exploit people and their holdings. What tips would you like to share to help our readers stay safe and avoid scams?
SS: You probably heard that many times before: always do your own research. Triple-check transactions you sign and projects you join: are they authentic? Is the team behind them reliable? Is the IP legit? Actually, this is precisely why we built Wakweli: to provide a simple way to avoid scams at a glance with a green tick mark. With Wakweli, anyone can share their project review, make it easily accessible and valorize it.
What are your thoughts about this interview? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Could Crypto Adoption Represent a Compliance Opportunity for Banks?
2021 was when Bitcoin became a trillion-dollar asset class and appears to have become a tipping point for institutional interest in cryptocurrencies. A recent survey carried out by Nataxis Investment Managers found that 28% of institutions had already invested in crypto, while nearly a third plan to increase their cryptocurrency allocations.
The significance of this shift shouldn’t be underestimated. After all, banks have had several years to prepare for the possibility that crypto could be the next big asset class, but few of them chose to take the bet. Why? Because the regulatory concerns were simply too great when weighed against the overall value proposition of crypto.
So, it’s telling that the trillion-dollar year for Bitcoin seems to have swung the pendulum in the other direction. The regulatory environment hasn’t changed significantly, but the opportunity is now much greater than in previous years. It means that institutions are prepared to address regulatory challenges head-on, which explains why some of the biggest financial firms are investing so heavily in crypto compliance.
News recently emerged that blockchain investigations firm TRM Labs raised million in Series B funding, with American Express, Visa, Citi, and PayPal all participating. It comes only months after rival player Mastercard acquired crypto analytics firm CipherTrace earlier this year. Visa also recently announced it was setting up an advisory division to support financial firms making a move into digital assets.
The investments indicate the extent to which firms in the financial services sector are willing to go to ensure that they can continue to meet their compliance obligations.
An Onerous Burden
The scale of the compliance burden for banks is already astonishing. A 2020 global survey found that banks spend more than five percent of their total revenues on compliance and are fighting a losing battle in their attempts to reduce costs. Although technology offers some capabilities, such as automation, a large part of the challenge comes from the continued prevalence of paper-based administration.
For example, the average bank onboarding process takes around thirty days. Even when the process depends on electronic copies, customers are still required to submit documents like passports, utility bills, or income statements traditionally issued in paper format.
Furthermore, the process is heavily dependent on human checking, and behavioral experts have previously pointed out that this dependence on individuals is an often-overlooked weak point in the process. Worryingly, nearly 10% of banks also have no process for ensuring that client records remain up to date, meaning they risk another kind of non-compliance with data protection laws like the EU GDPR.
Blockchain-based Identity – With an NFT Twist
Given the challenges, it’s hardly surprising that banks are prepared to invest in on-chain solutions that would help them to better identify illicit users and funds. One project developing a cutting-edge protocol for NFT-based identity issuance could be extremely promising in reducing onboarding time while decreasing firms’ data management obligations.
PhotoChromic operates a blockchain platform that allows people to securely own and verify their identity and personal information. However, unlike many of its competitor projects in the digital identity space, PhotoChromic encapsulates biometric data, government-issued ID documents, and unique personal attributes into a non-fungible token (NFT).
PhotoChromic also uses an innovation called generative art, which takes an image of the person’s face and applies an algorithm to generate an image used on the digital identity. It may be representative of the person’s visage, but if they choose to remain pseudonymous, they can generate any kind of image. However, the resulting generative art will be algorithmically linked to their original picture.
Transforming the Onboarding Process
The net result is an easily-scannable image that can attest to an individual’s identity in real-time. The person can choose to whom they reveal which information, and they always maintain custody over their own identity and documentation. However, from the perspective of financial institutions, such a solution could offer significant potential to transform the onboarding process. The NFT identity is unique and impossible to falsify or copy. It’s very simple to authenticate and could even be checked by machines without requiring human verification.
Some of the biggest opportunities are in the potential to remove the need to keep copies of customers’ identity documents. The customer themselves retains full ownership over all of their personal data via the NFT – the KYC process becomes a mere scanning exercise, similar to a rail conductor checking a train ticket before boarding. As a result, financial institutions can significantly reduce their compliance burden with data protection regulations.
Furthermore, the ability to easily verify users and their asset ownership offer banks and financial institutions a vast amount of freedom to operate in the cryptocurrency space. It means they can consider new digital asset services and features, secure in the knowledge that they aren’t creating additional risks of money laundering or onboarding illicit users to their business.
The opportunity for integrating digital assets and all the value in these burgeoning markets is attractive enough. However, the ongoing innovation and development in the blockchain space, offering new ways for banks to combat rising compliance costs, could be an even bigger value creator for the financial sector in the long term.
Former Charlie Shrem Attorney to Represent Arrested Ethereum Dev
n Trial attorney Brian Klein erstwhile lawyer for Charlie Shrem and Erik Voorhees will defend arrested blockchain developer Virgil Griffithn
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