Welcome, and thank you for being part of the MyZucoins community! Dive into some important crypto, finance, and tech news to stay ahead.
Sotheby’s Digital Artwork Auction Nets $1.2 Million in Crypto Sales
Historic auction house Sotheby’s took a modern twist on Wednesday, showcasing works of Vera Molnár, a 99-year-old pioneer artist, in a unique Dutch Auction. This type of auction, a first in Sotheby’s 300-year history, starts with a high asking price that gradually decreases until a buyer steps in. The auction was launched with an opening bid of 20 Ethereum (ETH), equivalent to about $37,000.
In an astonishing turn of events, all of Molnár’s pieces were sold within an hour, each fetching above the auction’s minimum of 1.5 ETH. The total sale amounted to 631 ETH, or $1.2 million. Following the sale, demand for Molnár’s work skyrocketed, with the secondary market trading volume jumping to 457 ETH.
Molnár’s series, ‘Themes and Variations,’ is a collection of 500 generative artworks, which she created with collaborator Martin Grasser. These unique pieces transformed hand-drawn versions of the letters N, F, and T into captivating black-and-white graphics and vibrant color combinations. This fresh perspective on letters through algorithmic transformations offers a compelling intersection of human and machine interaction.
The success of Molnár’s auction not only highlights her long-standing practice with the ‘Machine Imaginaire’ since 1968 but also underscores her significant influence on today’s digital artists. This event further cements Sotheby’s position as a leading platform for selling and collecting top-tier digital artworks in the NFT space since 2021. It also showcases that digital art, via NFTs, is fast becoming accepted in an increasing number of high-end luxury industries, such as the art collecting world. Read more here.
Zucoins In The Digital Art World?
One primary takeaway from Sotheby’s success with Vera Molnár’s auction is the high demand for digital art and the willingness of buyers to transact in cryptocurrency. Zucoins could leverage this trend in future to establish itself as a cryptocurrency for such transactions. Its capacity to support up to 32 decimal places enables microtransactions without high fees, making it an attractive option for art enthusiasts who wish to buy or sell lower-priced artwork. This could also encourage a more extensive range of buyers and sellers, contributing to a more vibrant and inclusive digital art ecosystem.
On the technical side, the Splitchain network could benefit from the growing interest in generative art, that is, art often generated by computer algorithms. The Splitchain network’s structure, which allows for specific nodes to cache data related to certain use cases, could be tailored to support the ownership proof and sale of generative art.
DeFi Headed Toward a ‘Major Resurgence,’ Tribe Capital’s Boris Revsin Says
Decentralized finance (DeFi) saw its heyday in 2020, with venture capital funds piling in and a peak value locked of $248.84 billion. However setbacks including scandals, hacks and wider economic tightenings have seen the sector cool off in 2022. Boris Revsin, managing partner of Tribe Capital, sees a resurgence on the horizon. He believes a focus on infrastructure, particularly outside the U.S., will stimulate new projects and propel the crypto industry towards a $10 trillion valuation, dwarfing its current $1.22 trillion.
Revsin expects DeFi regulation in the U.S. will push projects towards more open regions such as Dubai and Singapore. However, infrastructure projects like layer 1 and 2 blockchains and rollup technology are likely to flourish stateside. He sees the keys to a more expansive crypto market as the infrastructure and the developers who bring these projects to life.
Tribe Capital, where Revsin oversees the $96-million early-stage Tribe Crypto Fund I, uses a data-driven approach to evaluate startups. They aim for as much quantitative data as possible from a company, processing it to produce a comprehensive report featuring key metrics for investors. Tribe Capital focuses on Series A to Series D investments in more established companies, while also running a pre-seed incubator for early-stage startups.
Revsin is most interested in investing in “products and protocols that become part of the developer stack.” He believes successful infrastructure projects will attract more developers and facilitate the migration of Web2 users to Web3. The improved revenue stream from increased developer usage will allow these projects to enhance their products, further encouraging developers to join the space. Revsin sees this as a crucial step towards the crypto industry reaching that $10 trillion valuation. Read more here.
Splitchain Is Next-Generation Web3 Infrastructure
A key takeaway from Boris Revsin’s perspective is the importance of infrastructure in driving the growth of the crypto industry. Of course, this has been Splitchain’s core focus for a number of years.
Splitchain’s unique design as a layer 1 network solution, where it caches transaction results, eliminates the need for competitive mining or pooled validators, as seen in other cryptocurrencies.
This not only ensures more efficient on-device peer-to-peer processing, but also significantly reduces energy consumption and environmental impact of the network.
Revsin’s emphasis on the role of developers in the growth of the crypto industry resonates with the goals of the Splitchain project. Splitchain has numerous fundamental design features, from being able to run on commodity (low cost) systems, to being written in existing familiar software languages. This is in contrast to most other blockchains’ smart contracts, where they require custom languages to be learnt by developers. This is a high bar for friction and Splitchain’s architecture aims to ease the burden of getting involved in the fast-growing Web3 space.
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All the best,
Peter & Rob
MyZucoins