Snippings

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Game Blockchain User count (last 30 days)
Alien Worlds WAX 759,600
Axie Infinity Ethereum, Ronin 602,210
Splinterlands Hive 597,980

From • NFT games with most users 2021 | Statista:

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The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, wrote recently that while many national governments are “inefficient and slow-moving” in adjusting to changes in the needs of populations (and, I might add, environments), cities and states have the potential for more flexible and dynamic responses. He looks in particular at cities, observing that there are great cultural differences between cities and therefore it is easier “to find a single city where there is public interest in adopting any particular radical idea” that it is to find, or convince, whole nations.

This is a fascinating perspective, and one that I have much sympathy for. In my 2017 book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin” I suggested that the multiple monies of the future will be linked to the multiple communities we will inhabit and I wrote that there were reasons for thinking that the city identity would be the most important. I remember reflecting on Dan Hill’s Europe has functioned via urban centres for much, much longer than it has functioned as a collection of nation states and think that (as in some many other ways) the money of the future is going to look more like the money of the past.

Cities as well as being the focus for economies and economic growth are above physical locations and, as I recall the futurist Gill Ringland suggesting in her financial services scenarios for 2050, the ability to enter, do business and reside in desirable cities will become a valuable right and the basis for one of a number of demographic asset classes. I remember an FS Club discussion about this last year, where the even more expansive view that cities might begin to dictate the policies and trajectories of the nation state was put forward.

In this context, Gill’s prescient narrative of the “C50” (the organisation of the 50 richest city-states that will replace the G20 as the mechanism for “managing” the world economy), forms a solid narrative around the future economic organisation of a successful, functional world. As the respected commentator Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times some years ago, “this is the age of cities, not of national economies” (going to say that “it is high time London became a true city state).

City-Centric

I find these views very interesting, because they surely imply that the money of cities will become the most important kind to the average person. In a world in which the public have abandoned Sterling for London Lolly and US Dollars for New York Notes and LA Loonies, city currencies might be a key medium of exchange in a the future economy that grows into the metaverse but has deep, deep roots in the universe. In that universe, most transactions remain local and even at the supra-national level in a single market, only 1%-2% of European transactions are cross border and an even smaller proportion are national. Even in the proto-metaverse e-commerce world, still nine in ten European transactions are local.

These ideas have been around for a while. In the Havas “14 trends for 2014” Marian Salzman wrote about post-nationalism, countries breaking up and London becoming independent from the UK. These views may have seemed fanciful to readers then, or indeed now, but I am not so sure they can be easily dismissed. CityCoins, which is a startup backed by Balaji Srinivasan and others, is launching a MiamiCoin, a token that raises money for the city while allowing its holders to earn mining and staking fees. According to the company, MiamiCoin has already raised $21 million and there are plans to launch an NYCCoin as well.

(MiamiCoin isn’t quite the kind of city currency that those writers were predicting, because it’s not actually issued by Miami or backed by assets that Miami controls. While, as noted in the Financial Times, there is a long history of city-states producing their own money that production came with sovereignty — the ability to control quality and volume. Miami is a different experiment, branding money that it doesn’t control for the purposes of signalling.)

Breaking Free

Some crypto billionaires want to go even further and create their own cities (in, for example, Nevada) but the link between cities and currencies is not confined to rich first world enclaves. The noted rapper Akon is about to begin building another crypto city in Africa.  He already started work on a city in Senegal and the new one will be in Uganda. Both of these cities will run on Stellar rails using the “Akin” cryptocurrency.

Cryptoassets and token trading aside, there are plenty of communities beginning to experiment in this way. Last year, for example, in virus-ravaged Italy the town of Castellino del Biferno in southern Italy’s Molise region started to issue its own money (the “Ducati”), redeemable at local merchants only, with a 100% reserve in euros. This money (strictly speaking, a “currency board” rather than a “currency”) was intended to keep value circulating within the local economy but there’s no reason why an actual local currency might not circulate over a wider area. In the north of Italy, to continue with this particular theme, anti-euro Lega nationalists and the alt-Left Five Star Movement were at one time planning to go around the euro and create a rival payment structure based on ‘IOU’ notes (a course of action I may well have helped to stimulate).

If the economy shifts and people find themselves in a depression, then more regions may well decided to decouple themselves from national and supra-national currencies in order to manage their own monetary policy on the road to recovery. In a world before mobile phones, tokens and de-fi this would have seemed unimaginable! Imagine trying to print and distribute and maintain and manage a Miami Metro Moolah, with Miami Moolah cards for residents and pretty bills for visitors. A hurdle, for sure. But frankly it would take five minutes to create such a money today and the ability to creating city monies that would compete to the benefit of consumers and businesses is no longer beyond the abilities of the average City council. Pretty soon, they’ll be able to download a new currency are shareware.

Is Vitalik on to something? I think he is. Would such competing currencies really be a big problem? If I live in London and use London Lolly for the train, for lunch and at the supermarket, is it such a big deal to convert it to Chicago Cabbage or Bronx Bucks to buy something online? Especially when your phone does it for you and an AI f/x bot is vigilant on your behalf to get the best prices? I don’t think so.

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The metaverse is important because it can “fundamentally change the medium through which we socialize with others, watch music performances, engage with fashion brands, learn and/or speculate on digital assets such as [non-fungible tokens] or in-game skins,” Morgan Stanley said in a research note.

From More Firms Embracing the Metaverse and Gaming Stocks Have Already Benefited, Morgan Stanley Says:

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NFTs as collateral. The metaverse is here,

Lastly, we have platforms like NFTfi that are offering NFT collateralized loans. By putting up any ERC-721 token up for collateralization, other users can begin offering you a loan. Once accepted, the ETH gets paid to you and the NFT is locked in the NFTfi smart contract, only to be returned once your loan is paid. If you can’t pay back the loan then the NFT is then transferred to the lender. NFTfi has already supplied nearly $4 billion USD in loans.

From Web3 Report Q3 2021:

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Market estimates project that by the end of 2021, the financial services market is likely to reach $22.5 trillion, growing at a rate of 9.9% from the previous year.2 This is lower than previous projections, due to the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic. With global GDP expected to reach $93 trillion in the same year, that would mean that financial services comprise about 24% of the world’s economy.3

From What Percentage of the Global Economy Is the Financial Services Sector?:

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Mercator Advisory Group has released a new primary research report titled 2021 U.S. North American PaymentsInsights: The State of the Consumer Market – Prepaid/Gift, Credit, and Debit Cards, summarizing the findings from the Summer 2021 North American PaymentsInsights survey of 3,001 U.S-based adults.

From North American PaymentsInsights Research Document – 2021 North American PaymentsInsights: The State of the Consumer Market – Prepaid/Gift, Credit, and Debit Cards – Mercator Advisory Group:

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Highlights of this document include:
The average dollar amount loaded onto retailer-specific prepaid cards
was $126.
 
Over half of respondents that used a retailer-specific gift card had spent the entire value on the card in just one shopping trip.
 
Over 60% of credit card users reported using their credit primarily to get rewards, while slightly over half said that they use a credit card only to build credit history and that they try to pay off the full balance every month.
 
Cashback was perceived to be the most important reward by greatest share of those that participate in credit card rewards programs (41%).
 
Only 32% of debit card users have used their debit card to get cash back from a merchant in the past 12 months.

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“I am bawling my eyes out. I can’t take a nude video,” Zoller wrote to the Ashly account. “I am going to kill myself, please you stole everything from me. Please give me my Instagram back please.”

Do you know about any other scams on Instagram or other social media networks? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

Then, the hacker told her to make a video promoting the Bitcoin mining scam in exchange for her account, according to Zoller’s mother. The hackers did not give Zoller her account back, and instead posted the video of Zoller to a Story.

“I can’t believe bitcoin mining is real, no cap you all should go give it a try, you should go and invest in bitcoin mining it [is 100%] safe and secure,” an image posted to Zoller’s story reads, along with a photo of a spread of $100 bills. The hackers also managed to break into Zoller’s Venmo, email, and banking apps, before sending themselves a $500 Venmo payment marked as an “Investment Fee” and buying $1,000 worth of Bitcoin with Zoller’s funds, according to screenshots shared with Motherboard.

From Hostage-Style Bitcoin Scam Videos Are Spreading Across Instagram:

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Three months ago, M-Pesa introduced its “Super App” across all its markets. It is described as one of M-Pesa’s “key service innovations’ and comes in the form of an overarching service that enables subscribers to complete a wide variety of tasks – “from shopping to accessing government services” – without having to download different apps for each task.

Development of M-Pesa continues apace. An open API is available and being used by more than 45,000 developers and 200,000 SMEs. Meanwhile the company is further growing its ecosystem to provide enhanced services to businesses large and small (and very small indeed).

As of today, more than 500,000 businesses transact more than £5 billion worth of services and sales of goods per month on the service and M-Pesa has now has a network of partners that allows subscribers to send and receive money from more than 200 countries and territories.

From Digital banking service M-Pesa is now the biggest fintech platform in Africa | TelecomTV:

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Brazil’s central bank has imposed spending limits on its new PIX instant payments platform in the face of a sharp increase in “lightning kidnappings”.

São Paulo has seen a 40% rise in lightning kidnappings – where people are grabbed on the street and forced to transfer money in exchange for their release – in the first six months of the year.

From Brazilian kidnappers take advantage of new PIX payments system:

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more than 8000 customers had received multiple low-value deposits, often of less than $1, with potentially abusive messages.

From CommBank implements AI tool to root out abusive messages in transaction fields:

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