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cryptochaint-blog · 5 years

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Cryptocurrency Hedge Funds

The ongoing flood of Bitcoin on April 02, 2019, made many individuals conjecture that there was a tremendous flood in the volume of stablecoins. There was an expanded dissemination of 200 million USDT. Paxos pursued a similar pattern as the flow expanded by roughly 5 million, and that of USDC by 7 million.

Albeit just hypothesis, the abrupt increment in stablecoin volume could be associated with the spike in Bitcoin's cost. Pretty much every altcoin siphons when Bitcoin siphons, proposing a relationship and the predominance of Bitcoin over different altcoins. The unexpected spike could be the reason behind a great deal of retail brokers endeavoring to money out, and when stablecoins come into the image.

Stablecoin, Tether [USDT], has cryptochain dependably been the focal point of hypothesis and talk since its dispatch; the gossip was that Tether doesn't have proportionate USD support.Waves, the 29th biggest cryptographic money, hit lows against BTC on April 17, and clients theorized this could have been because of a huge sell request.

As found in the above graph, the cost of Waves against BTC hit precisely 0.0000001 BTC, which adds up to 1 Satoshi. The volume for the said flame is additionally gigantic, further affirming a sell request of enormous sums. The coin has since expanded by around 3% against Bitcoin in less than 24 hours.

Coinbase, a main cryptographic money trade stage, declared that it has extended its crypto-to-crypto exchanging administration in 11 additional nations, on its official blog. With the expansion of these new nations, the scope of Coinbase has extended to an aggregate of 53 nations.

As indicated by the blog entry, Coinbase has opened its exchanging entryway for digital money devotees in India, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Phillippines, Chile, Columbia, Peru, and Argentina.

Clients will most likely benefit crypto-to-crypto exchanging administrations, for example, purchasing and selling crypto on Coinbase Pro and Coinbase.com. Moreover, clients can likewise purchase and sell digital currencies by means of the Coinbase application accessible on iOS and Android.

This news is critical for India's crypto-network. This is for the most part a result of the boycott put by the Reserve Bank of India, the Central bank. A year ago, the bank discharged a round notwithstanding every one of the banks controlled by the national bank from partner with people and organizations required with virtual monetary standards.

Because of the boycott, some significant neighborhood trades, for example, Zebpay needed to close down its tasks. Despite the fact that Coinbase is giving just crypto-to-crypto exchanging, this acts as a standout amongst the most huge minutes for the Indian crypto-network.

Alongside this, the trade additionally declared that its clients will most likely exchange Augur [REP], one of the main cryptographic forms of money in the space, starting today. Outstandingly, this exchanging administration won't be accessible quickly for clients in New York.

The exchange will be live on Coinbase.com and Coinbase application on iOS and Android.The Bitcoin SV adventure proceeds with another arrangement of claims from the BSV camp set to shake the business.

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jacobhinkley · 6 years

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Tron [TRX]’s Governace Era begins: 27 Super Representatives elected

Justin Sun, the Founder and CEO of Tron Foundation, announced that all the 27 positions for Tron Super Representatives have been filled by the community’s votes. This is going to start the Governance Era of Tron and take Tron forward to achieve their main goal i.e., ‘Decentralize the Web’.

The Super Representative buzz has been going on ever since Tron’s TestNet launch in the community. Several candidates were shortlisted and only a few got elected by the community.

Justin Sun announced on Twitter:

“Congratulations to all the 27 #TRONSRs, now we are in constitutional phase(after SRs replace GRs. Officially online).”

The elected Super Representatives will be playing a major role in the governance structure of the firm. The representatives’ main role would be representing the ‘will’ of the Tron community. They will be participating in the calculation and validation of the network and represent themselves as the guardians of the network.

Moreover, there were over 129 candidates running for the elections. Out of these candidates, Sesameseed took the 1st position with over 365 million votes. Team Tronics is placed at the 2nd position with over 300 million votes. The 3rd position is taken by Skypeople with over 287 million votes. The 4th position is secured by Trons Tronics with 255 million votes and the fifth position is taken by CryptoGirls with 196 million votes.

Tron Foundation said:

“Today #TRON is entering the Governance Era, with all 27 SRs elected by the community! A small step for TRON, a giant leap for digital democracy and for $TRX holders. Keep voting to elect SRs for our community! Make your voice heard”

Tron Super Representatives | Source: Twitter

The representatives of Tron from the U.S are:

Sesameseed

Team Tronics

Trons Tronics

Justin Sun Tron

uTorrent

Blockchain Org

Tron Silicon Valley

Tron Alliance

The Last Me

dApp House

TRX Market

Ether Poker

BitTorrent

Representatives from China are:

CryptoDiva SR

Call me SR

Raybo Tron

Huobi Pool

Tron One

Lianjinshu

BitDog SR

The representative from Vietnam is:

Tron Vietnam

The representative from South Korea is:

Sky People

The representative from Romania is:

CryptoGirls

The representative from Germany is:

Tron Europe

The representative from Brazil is:

Cryptochain

The representative from South Africa is:

CryptoGuyInZA

The post Tron [TRX]’s Governace Era begins: 27 Super Representatives elected appeared first on AMBCrypto.

Tron [TRX]’s Governace Era begins: 27 Super Representatives elected published first on https://medium.com/@smartoptions

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cryptobully-blog · 7 years

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Can The Blockchain Turn Pepe The Frog Into Modern Art?

http://cryptobully.com/can-the-blockchain-turn-pepe-the-frog-into-modern-art/

Can The Blockchain Turn Pepe The Frog Into Modern Art?

Illustration by Kelsey Dake

Editor’s note: This article includes depictions of a cartoon character that many deem offensive due to its association with white supremacist groups. Some links in this story lead to offensive material.

Pepe the Frog started as just a chilled-out amphibian with a chilled-out catchphrase: “Feels good man.” That was back in 2005, when he first appeared in a comic series called “Boy’s Club.” When the comic debuted, Pepe and his cartoon roommates dabbled in “laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment, drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief,” according the publisher of a book compiling the strip.

But even cartoon amphibians can go through a metamorphosis. Pepe soon took on a life of his own, and his mischief became much less impish. The image board 4chan.org — a sort of twisted, anarchic incubator for memes ranging from wholesome to hateful — adopted Pepe and relentlessly remixed and repurposed him for far different purposes than the character’s creator, Matt Furie, had intended. Users depicted Pepe as a crudely drawn, bright-green frog with enormous eyes and a wide mouth, often shown looking vaguely sad or slightly sly. He became so broadly popular that he even started showing up in celebrities’ Twitter feeds.

But soon those remixes included hateful messages. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the frog was co-opted by the so-called alt-right, a loose collection of conservative, populist, white supremacist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups. Pepe became an unofficial mascot of a racist and anti-Semitic campaign in support of the candidacy of Donald Trump. The frog had long since lost its aura of childlike enchantment and had donned MAGA hats and SS insignia. Pepe is now listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. Furie lawyered up, trying to wrench his creation back to its original status, but the alt-right fought back. When Richard Spencer, the white supremacist and alt-right figurehead, was famously punched in the face on a D.C. street on President Trump’s Inauguration Day, Spencer was explaining his frog lapel pin, saying, “It’s Pepe. He’s become kind of a symbol —” before being cut off as the punch landed.

Now one group of people wants to make Pepe symbolize something else: the future. Artists and speculators are building a new way to make and sell art, trying to repurpose a cartoon popularized by a message board so lawless that it scared away advertisers and turn it into a viable commercial enterprise.

Gathering in a digital bazaar for Pepe-related images, they’re trying to use the blockchain to create a new kind of art market, one that uses crypto technology and allows anyone to submit their work to be bought, sold and traded. The people involved hope to prove that crypto can be used to shift the art world’s balance of power, putting control into the hands of artists, rather than galleries or commercial third parties. The art that they’re selling, though, depicts that same frog that was featured in so many racist and anti-Semitic memes. But that hasn’t deterred the artists, many of whom believe they’re returning Pepe to his original, chilled-out roots. And they’ve sold over $1.2 million worth of his image in the process. That’s about 100 million in Pepe Cash. Yes, Pepe Cash.

DANK PEPENo. issued: 420

Most of this Pepe buying and selling happens through a website called Rare Pepe Wallet. The site features about 1,600 “Rare Pepes,” with more added regularly. They depict Pepe in all manner of memetic mashups and aesthetic forms. Many, but not all, look like trading cards. There’s smiling blonde Trump Pepe. There’s Pepe as Super Mario. Pepe as the Pope on the cover of Time. Warhol Pepe. Dalí Pepe. Kardashian Pepe. “Futurama” Pepe. Run-DMC Pepe. The Pepe Sistine Chapel. And on and on and on.

The absurdity of this project is not lost on its participants. “We’re using the most secure financial computer application ever known to man to swap cartoon frog pics,” Steffen Cope, a Web developer who creates and trades Rare Pepes, told me.

There’s such a thing as a Rare Pepe market only because of what the blockchain can do: It makes digital assets that are provably scarce. The blockchain’s decentralized record of transactions — a digital ledger — can’t be altered without leaving a public record. That allows for a more reliable accounting of who really owns digital art. Each Rare Pepe carries a finite number of digital tokens, and these tokens are what you really buy or sell when you buy a Rare Pepe. The blockchain guarantees, for example, that there are precisely 420 tokens associated with the image “Dank Pepe” — never more, never less.

This is the same technology that drives cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and, in fact, the Rare Pepe tokens live on the Bitcoin blockchain, making the frog meme tokens as provably rare and as secure as Bitcoin itself.

Rare Pepes are even purchased with a cryptocurrency named after the frog — Pepe Cash — a unit of which is, as of Monday afternoon, trading for about 5 cents. Pepe Cash, which has been around since 2016, is, itself, a Rare Pepe — though there are 701,884,009 units of Pepe Cash in circulation. The currency has a market cap of roughly $37 million.

That’s a lot of money that could potentially be spent on something that doesn’t tangibly exist. So why in the world would anyone buy a Rare Pepe? After all, the only thing you really own when you buy a Rare Pepe is a digital token; the images themselves are freely available and infinitely reproducible. You can copy them, paste them, email them or tweet them for nothing. So why part with your hard-earned Pepe Cash?

“I think the image isn’t the most important thing,” Joe Looney, the co-founder of the Rare Pepe Foundation and a developer of Rare Pepe Wallet, told me. “It’s not the image so much as it’s the whole legend of it.”

By “legend,” Looney meant not the frog’s fraught past but the origin story of the each card’s creation — its artist, its creation date, its ineffable memetic appeal. Sure, the image associated with the token you buy may float around the Web or find its way onto FiveThirtyEight, but you and provably few others are its owners, for whatever that’s worth. (Right now, it appears to be worth a lot — more than 75 individual Pepes have sold for over $1,000, and over 25,000 in all have changed hands.)

RARE PEPENo. issued: 300

But, of course, that legend doesn’t necessarily undo Pepe’s legacy. While the Rare Pepe project is exploiting the blockchain for its digital immutability, it’s also attempting to overcome the nature of the internet itself, which can preserve posts for decades, serving as a kind of fossil record for what would once have been cultural ephemera. Regardless of what the cartoon comes to mean in the coming years, the internet is and likely always will be rife with references to the racist Pepe, the Nazi Pepe, and the Pepe lapel decorations of cold-cocked white supremacists.

The people who trade Rare Pepes are familiar with that tension, though they don’t see it as a reason they should stay away from the frog. I recently found them on Telegram, a messaging app and favorite hangout of the crypto set. I was lurking in a channel called Rare Pepe Blockchain Trading, which at the time had more than 1,500 participants, and I had private chats with about 20 members of the Rare Pepe community. I asked them about what they thought they were creating — and its politics.

One user I spoke with, Steve from Los Angeles, who goes by CryptoChainer, refused to share his full real name. He explained, “Having the first search result of my name come up with Rare Pepe isn’t entirely exciting, but I wish it was.” He added: “Most Americans still probably associate it with alt-right or some crap — 4chan, Nazis, what have you.” But for Steve and other Rare Pepe enthusiasts, Pepe’s appeal lies in part in his versatility — it’s a recognizable meme that allows endless artistic expression while also serving as a rallying point for their crypto community.

Like Steve, many in the Rare Pepe world — including a sizable percentage of the community who don’t live in the U.S. — aren’t very concerned about the frog’s popular connotations. They rejected its racist associations, or were barely aware of them, or were sick of being asked about them, viewing the troubling link as either passé or irrelevant — the artifact of a specific and fleeting moment in U.S. political history. But even when Pepe isn’t partisan, it can still have politics of a certain kind. “I think Pepe best represents the world’s pivot from P.C. and identity politics back to a more inclusive politics and open exchange of ideas,” someone with the username BuddhaNeedPepecash72 said.

JESUSPEPENo. issued: 10

Indeed, most in the Rare Pepe community see the frog as the future of art and art commerce. One Pepe enthusiast said he hoped to create “the first eternal digital open museum.” Jason Rosenstein told me that he’s able to pay his New York City rent with the money he’s made from Rare Pepes. Christine Lewis, who, at almost 60, jokingly called herself “crypto grandma,” came to the community because her friend told her that Pepe Cash was a good investment and that “it’s supposed to be a big deal … in five years, lol.” Another user, PimpingKek, claimed to be the world’s only Rare Pepe agent, identifying hot talent around the globe, getting them set up on the blockchain, and advising them on how to price their work and roll it out to the market. (Kek, of course, is the Egyptian god of darkness of whom Pepe is said to be a present-day avatar.)

Sometimes Pepe’s darkness creeps into the submissions to Rare Pepe Wallet. Anyone can create a Rare Pepe, which means that anything can be submitted as a Rare Pepe. Which is why the Rare Pepe Foundation — whose website tagline is “Blockchain Revolution” — says it takes pains to filter out offensive Rare Pepe submissions before they make it to the Rare Pepe Wallet gallery. (“Trying to be keep it light for now,” the site says in its submission guidelines. “Pepe has alot of bad press.”) Looney said that organizers have blocked the submission of offensive Pepes before, but that they hadn’t needed to recently. “That probably coincided with when it was more in the media as a Nazi frog,” he said.

Even among the Rare Pepes approved for display in the online gallery, it’s difficult to judge how many people might find them offensive, or even whether they’re intended to offend. One work, titled “Trump Wall,” depicts a crude Mexican frog caricature, but Looney said it was created by a Mexican artist, and it has a description that reads, “Pepe not impressed by Trump Wall.” Many others explicitly address politics. There is one titled “Killary Pepe” that features the caption “circumvent any law” under an image of a Hillary Clinton frog sending an email. There is an entire series of Putin-themed Pepes. There are a handful of Trump-themed ones. There is a Pepe take on Clinton’s “I’m With Her” campaign slogan. But many Rare Pepes are so tongue-in-cheek, so caked with alternating layers of irony and truth and absurdity that it’s hard to hear any definite political signal through the noise. “There isn’t a ‘no political Pepes’ rule, so you’ll certainly find them if you’re looking through the directory,” Looney said. “Some definitely toe the line.”

MODERN PEPENo. issued: 100

Art is often political, and good art nearly always provokes. But the specter of Pepe’s past remains. Can the project navigate the tightrope between the perfect memory of the blockchain and the long memory of the internet? The topic comes up in the Rare Pepe Blockchain Trading group from time to time. A representative exchange: “Pepe is a symbol for Nazis,” someone said. “Lol no,” came a response. “Did you know that since racists drive cars that cars are racist?” someone else added sarcastically.

Rare Pepes are now catching the eyes of the art world’s old guard, as well. In January, a digital art festival in New York City hosted an in-person auction of a one-of-a-kind Rare Pepe called “Homer Pepe.” It sold for $39,200. Vice reported that, during the auction, “staff from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art sat silently.”

But for how long?

Coming this later week: How crypto-art and the blockchain could shape the future of art.

Blockchain

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