The partnership follows on from former LA Dodgers owner Frank McCourt earmarking $100 million last year to disrupt incumbent-dominated social media.

Project Liberty, the initiative backed by real estate billionaire Frank McCourt aimed at disrupting today’s social media platforms, has found a home on Polkadot, the framework of parallel blockchains conceived by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood.

Last year, McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, earmarked $100 million to attack the existing structure of social media, which he says is dogged by problems around data privacy and user manipulation that can’t be tackled by regulation.

The solution, in his opinion: an open-source, publicly owned infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) to center the internet around people instead of giant data-harvesting platforms.

In fact, the idea of a core internet protocol for identity, networking and messaging – much as HTTPS underlies the web – has been something of an elusive aspiration since the early days of social networking, when people began to see problems arise, says Braxton Woodham, the creator of DSNP.

Still, a commercial implementation is needed to operate the system, Woodham said, in the same way HTTPS requires a web server.

“We started last year and looked deeply at over 30 different projects and ultimately concluded Polkadot has characteristics that make it particularly adaptable for social networking,” Woodham said in an interview. “We’re working with the Polkadot team at Parity Technologies designing for scale, latency and low cost volatility for messaging, which is essential for social networks. You don’t see that with other chains.”

A growing number of projects have chosen Polkadot’s parallel-but-connected blockchains, known as parachains, to build on. Coveted parachain slots have been allocated to projects backed by user communities through special auctions. Within Polkadot’s parachain ecosystem, there exists a category of projects designed for the common good, which might eventually include Project Liberty.

“Project Liberty will likely launch as a standard parachain, at least initially,” said Peter Mauric, head of public affairs at Parity Technologies. “There’s an opportunity for something like this, a very good service for everyone in the Polkadot ecosystem and Web3 broadly, to be voted in by the community later as a common-good chain.”

Also further down the line, a token attached to Project Liberty is in the planning, Woodham said. Details will follow later this year.

“The token is important because messaging is a resource and a token will be used to manage stable bandwidth resources for messaging and social media that is scalable,” he said. “We think that’s going to be really unique in the blockchain space.”

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Other ETP issuers are planning crypto-linked investment products that also yield staking returns.

Investment firm WisdomTree launched another tranche of crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) in the European market.

New ETPs covering Solana (SOL), Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) listed on Swiss stock exchange SIX and Börse Xetra on Tuesday, according to a press release. Euronext exchanges in Paris and Amsterdam will add them at the end of the month.

Crypto ETPs are mainstream investment vehicles that offer easy exposure to cryptos. They’re prevalent in Europe where regulators have moved faster on crypto products. WisdomTree and other issuers like VanEck and 21Shares all have launched crypto ETPs in Europe well beyond plain-vanilla offerings in bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).

Meanwhile in the U.S., crypto asset managers are still fighting for the first bitcoin spot vehicle to clear the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC allowed two cash-settled bitcoin futures ETFs last October.

“A key component to our approach is launching strategies which will resonate with institutional investors,” WisdomTree Head of Digital Assets for Europe Jason Guthrie said in a statement.

Competition has driven crypto ETP expenses down (WisdomTree’s 0.95% is among the lowest) but also pressured issuers to innovate. FTX and CoinShares said last week they were working to launch “the first” Solana ETP that returns a portion of staking rewards to investors.

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Coming just weeks after a $22 million fundraise, Astar’s new fund will offer liquidity and financial support for smart contract developers.

Astar Network, a parachain or parallel chain of the Polkadot network, has announced the $100 million Astar Boost Program fund to provide liquidity and offer financial support and incentive programs to smart contract developers. The company told CoinDesk that the program was funded through $22 million in fundraising, as well as an allocation of the native ASTR token.

Last month, Astar raised $22 million in strategic funding from crypto venture capital firms Polychain and Alameda Research.

Polkadot, a framework for connecting various blockchains, does not support smart contracts on its main relay chain. Astar provides that support for smart contract developers.

Astar also lets developers earn tokens for building smart contracts or infrastructure, supported by the #Build2Earn protocol and paid out in ASTAR.

The new Astar Boost Program has already supported liquidity and incentives for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on the protocol, including decentralized exchanges ArthSwap and PolkaEx, and Celer cBridge, a multichain asset bridge.

“Astar Network will support projects committing to Astar financially by Astar Boost Program as well as dApp Staking, our original incentive system for developers,” said Sota Watanabe, founder of Astar Network, in the announcement blog. “We expect to grow rapidly together. Through this program, our community will be extra rewarded for their on-chain activity.”

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• Ethereum and Bitcoin, two of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the market, are set to at least double their price before the end of the year, according to analysts.

• The rally for Bitcoin is predicted to stem from more ETFs coming into the market, giving the cryptocurrency more legitimacy as an investment asset.

• Goldman Sachs pegs Ethereum to hit $8,000, in-line with breakeven inflation.

After hitting a new all-time high in October, analysts are betting on Ethereum and Bitcoin to double in value before the end of year.

The analyst behind Plan B, who correctly predicted the price of Bitcoin in September and came very close in October, believes that Bitcoin will reach $98,000 this month itself and go on to breach $135,000 in December.

This is in-line with other price predictions for Bitcoin that banking on the world’s oldest cryptocurrency. Standard Chartered, for instance, pegs that Bitcoin will hit $100,000 in 2021 or early 2022.

Meanwhile, global investment bank, Goldman Sachs, estimates that Ethereum’s price is set to reach $8,000 by year-end — higher than what a recent panel of 50 cryptocurrency experts, put together by Finder, predicted at $5,000.

The push for Bitcoin to double in value

After the first ever Bitcoin-based exchange traded fund (ETF) hit the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the money from institutional investors has been flooding in. According to CoinShare’s weekly report, crypto investment products saw inflows of $288 million for the week ending on October 31 — Bitcoin accounted for 93% of it at $269 million.
The cryptocurrency, which turned 13 years old on October 31, is up by 112% this year so far and hit the all-time high of $67,000 in October. Analysts expect the cryptocurrency to rise further with more ETFs coming in, giving a boost to Bitcoin’s legitimacy at least as an investment asset, not an actual medium of exchange.

Ethereum price to rise in-line with breakeven inflation

Goldman Sachs’ prediction for Ethereum to breach $8,000 is based on the second-largest cryptocurrency’s historical correlation to inflation. According to the banking behemoth, cryptocurrencies have traded in-line with inflation breaks — the difference between the yield of a nominal bond and an inflation-linked bond of the same maturity — since 2019.

“It has tracked inflation markets particularly closely, likely reflecting the pro-cyclical nature as a ‘network based’ asset. And the lastest spike in inflation breakevens suggests upside risk if the leading relationship of recent episodes was to hold (grey circles),” said the note.

According to an analysis by blockchain data firm Kaiko, Ethereum has offered higher returns than Bitcoin with respect to market risk over the past one year. As compared to this time last year, the cryptocurrency’s price is up by 1,000% — leaving not just Bitcoin, but other major cryptocurrencies, in the dust.

Ethereum’s price rally

The rally in Ethereum has been aided by the growth of decentralised finance (DeFi), which is touted for its probable disruption of the international monetary system by eliminating the need for middlemen like banks, remittance providers and other players. Moreover, the boom in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has all seen a host of new projects use ether and jump onto the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum’s protocol is currently in the midst of an upgrade from the proof-of-work (PoW) to the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus method, which is expected to reduce the energy consumed for mining — validating transactions — by 99%.

Challenges that lie ahead for Ethereum

Ethereum’s growth trajectory is not without its challenges. The time taken for the community to agree on the upgrade left opportunity for other blockchains to pop up — like Cardano, Solana, Polkadot and others — each claiming to solve either for high transaction fees, energy consumption or transaction times.

Some of the participants in Finder’s panel of 50 cryptocurrency experts expect that their ‘Ethereum Killers’ could run up to win their fair share of the DeFi and NFT market from Ethereum.

Bitcoin, however, is expected to continue its reign as the biggest player of the crypto world — at least for the time being.

In view of the coming wave, banks and financial institutions in the US have been on a crypto hiring spree. Over the past three years, they have onboarded more than 1,000 crypto experts. Currently, financial institutions are offering significant bonuses to attract even more talent their way, according to Bloomberg.

Indian technology companies and crypto exchanges are also on the lookout for crypto talent. The demand for talent has jumped over the last 8-10 months with more than 12,000 job openings on the docket in October, according to a report by Bangalore-based staffing specialist Xpheno cited by the Economic Times.

Since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on cryptocurrencies in 2020, interest in blockchain technology has seeped back into the country, despite the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) attempts to dissuade investors. BrokerChooser, an investment broker comparison company, pegs that there are currently 10.07 crore crypto owners in India — reportedly higher than everywhere else in the world.

By PRABHJOTE GILL @ Insider

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