Real-Life Workers in Decentraland's Virtual Casino

What you need to know today in crypto and beyond

March 19, 2021

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Top Shelf

Today's must-reads

'SERIOUS BUG': Millions worth of Filecoin's FIL token were "double deposited" on Binance due to a "serious bug" in the software exchanges use to interact with the Filecoin network. While it's not a true "double-spend," the problem with duplicating digital money Bitcoin was created to prevent, there may be other instances where this Filecoin error has popped up. The Protocol Labs team knows of the error and is working on a solution.

CLOCKING IN: A virtual casino in Decentraland has hired 20 part-time greeters and a full-time manager. Decentral Games' Tominoya Casino is not the first virtual world to house real-life employees – Reuters hired a Second Life reporter in 2008, for instance – though it is an example of how self-sovereign technologies like cryptocurrencies are enabling hyperreal experiences in virtual spaces.

GLOBAL GROUNDS: China has been piloting digital currency trading platforms in what appears to be a test for taking its "digital yuan" global. The nation is also setting up a legal framework for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) with global financial regulators. "For the digital yuan to achieve global adoption, China would thus need to work with trading partners or regional financial hubs to have a platform where the digital yuan is technically, legally and financially interoperable with other countries' digital currencies," CoinDesk's David Pan writes.

NFT MANIA: WISeKey, a cybersecurity company based in Zug, Switzerland, saw its smallish-cap stock surge 80% after announcing it's developing a non-fungible token (NFT) app. Tony Hawk tokenized a 540-degree ollie, last performed in the 80s, and is auctioning it off. Lindsay Lohan is taking her NFT-game to Tron. Why?

– Daniel Kuhn

Sound Bite

Overheard on CoinDesk TV

"For an institutionalist like me, I like bitcoin at $20,000 or $30,000 more than I liked it at $400 a coin, because of the scaling nature of it and the potentiality for exponential growth."

Anthony Scaramucci, one-time Trump administration communications director and founder of alternative investments firm, SkyBridge Capital, which is big into bitcoin, said Friday on CoinDesk TV's First Mover.

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Off-Chain Signals

What others are writing....

Robinhood plans to hire a "ton" of people for its crypto business. "As much as people are bugging me on that on social media, I'm bugging our crypto team and our software engineers," CEO Vlad Tenev said. (Markets Insider)

Artnet published two opinion-driven articles on the Beeple NFT sale. This one covers how it could have been a $69 million marketing stunt (for tech!) Then there's this closer look at the 5,000 images that make up the collage: the writer didn't like what he saw.

Jeff John Roberts covers the latest departure from Facebook's digital currency team. Kevin Weil was around back when Diem, renamed from Libra, was known as "Facebook coin." (Decrypt)

The Onion's Guide To NFTs, or "unique digital assets that cannot be replaced due to their sentimental value."

– D.K.

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The Takeaway

Putting the news in perspective

On Covering the NFT Hype

The Lindsay Lohan NFT is the kind of story we at CoinDesk approach with a bit of trepidation.

On its face, it seemed tawdry and inconsequential: A tabloid celebrity cashing in on this bull market's version of the 2017 ICO bonanza, in partnership with a blockchain project known mainly for its marketing stunts. Plus, by simply writing about it, we risked abetting an endeavor that was, at best, silly. In a field where attention is almost as valuable as money, merely pointing out to our readers that something exists is often misperceived as "pumping" it.

But cover the story we did. Reporter Danny Nelson held his nose and did a yeoman's job of spelling out how the auction of a non-fungible token by a former Disney moppet was a sign of the zeitgeist and market froth. He asked the right questions (was Tron paying Lohan? What exactly did the NFT entitle its holder to?) even if he couldn't answer them with the limited information provided by Justin Sun's PR team. When the pandemic is over, I will be buying Danny many drinks.

Why cover it at all, though? It's a fair question. Not for clicks. Well, not just for clicks.

In my book, Lohan's NFT was far less important in the scheme of things than, say, the progress of Bitcoin's Taproot upgrade or the return of BTC micropayments to Twitter (alas, poor ChangeTip!), both of which we covered the same day.

Still, a quick Lohan write-up was worth doing for the same reason other circuses sometimes merit a few paragraphs. As noted, it's a bull market, and every day tens of thousands of new readers who normally don't give a thought to cryptocurrency are coming to CoinDesk. When normies hear that Lindsay Lohan is hawking some weird investment, or that Elon Musk is tweeting about an electronic currency with a cute dog mascot, they are going to seek out information about these things whether we like it or not. So the question is: What do you want them to find?

Hence, last month, when dogecoin was trending, tech reporter Colin Harper wrote a deep dive showing how the canine cryptocurrency's codebase had until recently been neglected like a stray mutt. And last week, as numbers kept going up, CoinDesk Research analyst Christine Kim and Research Director Noelle Acheson penned a 41-page report (and a shorter article) detailing the risks of investing in two more-serious assets, bitcoin and ether. (They also co-hosted a webinar on the topic.)

To be clear: These pieces did not engage in fear mongering, as so much mainstream coverage of our industry does. They treated the audience as adults. Educated investors assess risks before making decisions, and we are trying to give readers some of the rudimentary tools to do their own research. I'm proud of those articles, and I'm proud of the way we handled the Lohan story – with context, skepticism, and merciful brevity.

All the same, I'm glad we skipped the Charmin toilet paper NFT.

– Marc Hochstein

What are bitcoin and ether's value propositions for investors?

A new report by CoinDesk Research explains how the two most popular cryptocurrencies by market capitalization behave in the market, how their infrastructure differs, and what on-chain metrics say about them.

Download "Bitcoin + Ether: An Investor's Perspective" from the CoinDesk Research Hub.

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