DAY LONG NEWS ROUNDUP: LATEST NEWS 02/12/21

• Avinandan Banerjee
• April 10, 2024

Hello, crypto fans!!! Here is a list of some recent news across the crypto domain that captured the maximum attention of the users. Take a look and thank us later:

$106M worth of Metaverse Land Traded across 4 Top Platforms

Calling Metaverse land the new ‘trendsetter’ of the NFT field won’t be an exaggeration as the former continues to climb the success ladder with each passing moment. In the latest development, four blockchain-powered Metaverse projects have pooled more than $100 million through virtual land NFT sales last week. The data was released by DappRadar, a renowned DApp analytics firm in one of its posts on November 30.

According to the DappRadar team, the Metaverse land assets were the ultimate hot-commodities in virtual space. Leading firms like The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, and Somnium Space fetched a collective trading volume worth $105.8 million between November 22 through November 28. Nearly 6,000 traders made the Metaverse sale figures soar to the top while giving a significant push to the price charts across the NFT space too.

The Sandbox is recognized as a revolutionary crypto gaming platform that allows users to play, create, and monetize their experiences in the virtual Metaverse land. With its strong market presence, The Sandbox was able to grab the biggest share of trade volume and got $86.56 million to its kitty. On the other hand, Decentraland settled for $15.53 million, CryptoVoxels got $2.68 million, while Somnium Space generated $1.1 million from the trade. Decentraland recorded the biggest virtual land sale over the last 30 days. On November 23, the firm traded a plot comprising of 116 pieces of land in the virtual Fashion Street District. The sale involved 618,000 MANA tokens amounting to $2.7 million in worth. The same day witnessed The Sandbox selling a tokenized mega yacht for 149 ETH representing over $666,000 in value.

The DappRadar team stated that the sudden rise in popularity of Metaverse can be directly attributed to Facebook’s recent inclination towards the industry via its rebranded form, Meta. The blog post highlighted that this is just the beginning of the Metaverse supremacy. The firm feels that virtual worlds carry high potential and soon Metaverse will become a mainstream industry.

Square Changes Name to Block To Explore Blockchain Technology

Serving as a well-known digital payment firm from the United States, Square has decided to change its brand name to ‘Block’ to show its inclination towards blockchain technology. In a Twitter post, Square stated that the rebranding will help the firm to work together with Cash App, the BTC exchange project tbDEX, and music and video streaming portal Tidal. Square Crypto, the crypto-oriented leg of the payment group will also change its name to Spiral before joining the Block ecosystem.

Talking about the significance of the word ‘Block,’ Square stated that it represents the neighborhood block community. This neighborhood includes sellers, a blockchain channel, musical block parties, code sections, building blocks, tungsten cubes, etc. The team was working meticulously to introduce the change for over a year. The blog clearly mentioned that the change merely represents a new corporate name while the vision, purpose, and working remains the same.

The rebranding news comes shortly after Square founder, Jack Dorsey announced his resignation as CEO of the social media giant, Twitter. The top post will now be chaired by the present CTO and board member, Parag Agrawal. Dorsey’s resignation made people speculate his deeper interests in crypto and blockchain through Square similar to Facebook that shifted its focus to the blockchain through its refurbished brand name Meta. The name change would be effective on or around December 10. There will be no organizational alterations to Block, Spiral, Tidal, tbDEX, and Cash App post the legal name change.

NFT Faces Glitch During Matrix NFT Drop Event

It’s raining NFTs!!! Yes, the world is going cray-cray about the digital collectibles that offer them a perfect mix of fun and rewards. This craze was recently witnessed during the Warner Bros.’ Matrix NFT avatar drop on the Nifty exchange where excessive overload caused infrastructural glitches. The NFT revelations were proposed to be made public on November 30 on Nifty’s meticulous exchange interface.

Earlier this month, the Warner Bros. studio announced that it would be unveiling 100,000 unique Matrix-themed avatar NFTs for fans. The cost of each Non-Fungible Token was fixed at $50. The NFT drop was a strategy adopted by the team to promote the upcoming Matrix Resurrections movie slated for a launch in the U.S on December 22.

To everybody’s surprise, the strategy worked really well for the studio as more than 300,000 Matrix fans lined up for the event. The huge demand compelled Nifty to start and stop the queue several times which eventually caused infrastructural issues. The multiple pauses caused several other issues as well including failure of the buy button, failed checkouts, fluctuating positions on the queue, etc. Nifty has apologized for the unforeseen inconvenience caused by the glitch on the network. The team has decided to offer a free ‘glitch in the Matrix NFT’ to every user who queued up on the launch date.