With this roundup we find some finality. Enjoy this final crypto and blockchain roundup because next week is going to be completely different.
There’s going to be crypto and blockchain related content, but it’s going to be joined by other wider, tech-based pursuits in what’s probably going to be a more general technology sector roundup featuring more companies, more options and hopefully less about hashrates and people adding another bajillion antminers to their fleet.
You gotta agree with me at least on this that that stuff’s basically a tiresome boor.
Speaking of tiresome boors: Let’s talk about Walmart.
Walmart is so meta
News came out this week that Walmart is looking to venture into the metaverse with plans to create its own cryptocurrency and non-fungible token collection.
The company filed new trademarks late last month that suggested its intent to make and sell virtual goods, including electronics, home decor, toys, sporting goods, and personal care products, and in a separate filing indicated it’d be offering users a virtual currency and NFTs.
One has to wonder whether or not a virtual Walmart would pay its employees better. Somehow, I suspect the answer is still no.
Coinanalyst shows some love for the passion economy
Coinanalyst (COYX.C) is a strange addition to the world of crypto.
They’re not a miner, nor are they really to be considered fintech. What they offer is a platform where you can get all your coins, see their performance, figure out what exchanges they’re doing well on. Nothing new there. But what they also have is a social media aggregator wherein you can check in with influences to determine if the coin, or initial coin offering (ICO), or protocol, or liquidity pool, or DAO, you’re looking to get involved with is full of shit.
Cryptocurrency and its many sub-categories is confusing enough without the legions of assholes out there trying to upsell you on their latest bullshit scam wallet. When some douchebag appears on my discord feed (or lately, my facebook messenger) from some hacked account, trying to sell me a crypto wallet, or get access to some DAO that’s blacklisted one of their other accounts due to bad behaviour, I’d like to be able to have a place to add his or her name and product to warn other folks. If only to provide a little finality to the tale.
In this case, what COYX offers is access to influencers, who theoretically could inform you (or you could theoretically inform them) about these things. That’s a solid business arrangement there if you can get enough people involved.
The problem is… we’re nowhere near mass adoption, especially with Bitcoin presently shitting the bed. We’re closer to some serious finality with Bitcoin than we are with all-time highs as hodlers get greasy fingers.
Regardless, I like what I see from this company. They’re brand new on the CSE—having gone live in the dying months of 2021—and if they keep going at this rate, there’s no reason to suggest they won’t make folks good money in the near future.
Their latest news involves a binding letter to acquire RockStock Equities, wherein they’ll—actually, here’s the paragraph—the overwrought language always makes me chuckle.
“RockStock is poised to capitalize on the dramatic impact of blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens on a once beleaguered music industry. With a primary focus on the development of an artist/fan utility, RockStock will facilitate and empower artists through a state-of-the-art app platform, allowing them to directly monetize their music, create pay-per-view performances and participate in the exciting new world of NFT revenue generation. For the fans, it is an opportunity to connect and support the artists they love through a multigenre, on-line competition and participate in profit opportunities created through the purchase of artist security tokens and NFTs.”
Once beleaguered. Ha. What they’re looking to take advantage of here is what’s being called the “passion economy.” Artists getting paid to do what they love, rather than getting shafted by shady middlemen in terrible deals and shunted into entertainment industry slavery.
It’s a prospect I can get behind—even if the wording does make me laugh.
Intellabridge gets infrastructure boost from DeFi partner Prime Trust
Intellabridge Technology’s (KASH.C) recent collaboration with Prime Trust, itself a financial infrastructure provider, will give Intellabridge customers the ability to load up their DeFi account with U.S. dollars and get a 10% stable interest rate on their Kash savings accounts.
“We’re proud to work with Prime Trust which offers best-in-class financial infrastructure for fintech and digital asset clients globally. This collaboration opens up the remarkable returns seen in decentralized finance by offering customers an on-ramp that makes it easy to move assets from traditional financial institutions like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and exchange to U.S. dollar stablecoins which can be deposited into Kash’s high-earnings savings accounts,” said John Eagleton, chief executive officer at Intellabridge.
Savers have had few reasonable options of where to put their money over the previous few years, and with the consumer price index jumping to 7% in December from a year ago, the highest rate in nearly four decades, the result is a loss of purchasing power and overall wealth for the consumer.
“With Kash DeFi’s 10-per-cent stable interest rate and cash deposits powered by Prime Trust, our financial solutions are making it easier for people to earn on their savings and protect themselves against inflation,” said Eagleton.
The question remains as to whether or not people would actually want to move their assets from names like Wells Fargo or Bank of America to a little known, untested company, operating in a niche space on the fringes of the financial world. Maybe a few years from now, but something in me suggests it’s not going to be today.
Blockchain Foundry to release SkooJAH NFTs
Blockchain Foundry’s (BCFN.C) has gone into business with graphic artist Andrew ‘Skooj’ Skuja, to produce his Babylon Misfits brand of peculiar digital oddities into non-fungible tokens for their LastKnown NFT marketplace.
An original SkooJAH. I just saved the $45 NFT price. YOU’RE WELCOME!
“I was so stoked to work with LastKnown.com on this NFT collection. I had been watching other artists jump into the NFT community, so it was a no-brainer for me to collaborate with LastKnown when the opportunity came up. What I liked about working with LastKnown on this drop was the expertise on their end to generate the images exactly as I had designed them,” said SkooJAH.
Inspired by the series of oddities and wonders he regularly saw on the subway during his everyday commute in Toronto, SkooJAH’s illustrated NFT collection is 1,990 unique Babylon Misfit NFT’s. Lastknown will be holding events to give community members a chance to win a whitelist spot and free NFT off their upcoming drop.
The Misfits are worth 0.068 ethereum each and SkooJAH will be donating 10% of all proceeds, split evenly because The 519 and The Covenant House Toronto.
Integrated Media Technology gets their NFT trading platform off the ground
Integrated Media Technology (IMTE.Q) finished developing their online digital asset trading platform “Ouction” today.
The platform is an interactive experience solution designed with dynamic image cryptographic verification technology to serve as bridge between online to offline transactions. This will allow the platform to provide encryption and Blockchain digital certificates of physical assets for a fairer experience for e-commerce companies and their users
“The number of digital assets listed on the platform is limited at the moment, but we expect this will increase as we promote and market our Ouction NFT platform in Asia and North America. NFT or Non Fungible Token faciliates moving assets from the real world to the digital/virtual world,” said Eric Zhang, Ouction’s CTO.
Bigg Digital looks back on a successful 2021
Bigg Digital Assets (BIGG.C) subsidiary, Blockchain Intelligence Group took advantage of Bitcoin’s great year to have a great year themselves. They made advancements in terms of their products and investments in marketing, and as a result enjoyed a revenue bump and some significant wins.
“In Q4 2021, Blockchain Intelligence Group recorded gross operating revenue of approximately $466,000, with 72 per cent from software sales, 27 per cent from training and 1 per cent from forensic consulting. Revenues increased 114 per cent year over year (YoY), with gross margin of approximately 89 per cent.”
All in all, the company enjoyed a banner year in 2021, pulling in a revenue of $1.6 million with revenue
“Blockchain Intelligence Group is winning more competitive bid situations. On numerous occasions in 2021 clients said they picked Blockchain Intelligence Group for its quality of data and attribution for nefarious addresses. We have said from day one, our growth begins with the quality of our data, granularity of information, and timeliness of attribution. We also hear how easy our services are to use and understand. Our team has done an excellent job developing what the industry is calling best-in-class forensic tools with an unparalleled user experience. I am excited about what the future holds as being one of the global thought leaders in cryptocurrency intelligence and analysis,” said President Lance Morginn. increasing 62% over hte prior fiscal year, at a gross margin of 88%.
They added a bunch of new clients, including Fortune 500 banks, US regional banks, virtual asset service providers (or VASPs), a global management consultancy, KYC (Know your customer) providers, accounts and independent investigators. They also expanded geographically throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America.
Let’s also not forget their exchange, Netcoins, which recently expanded their coin repertoire with hopes to drawing in more investment. Their fortunes unfortunately are tied to those of Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, which aren’t doing so well. But should Bitcoin see a rebound then there’s no reason to believe BIGG’s fortunes won’t be just as good as they were or better than in 2021 going forward.
Hut 8 Mining to acquire TeraGo’s data centre business
Proof of Work miners need electricity in large amounts or they’re not going to get far. Periodically, it’s easier just to go out and buy yourself your own supply so you don’t have to rely on anyone else’s. And that’s what Hut 8 Mining (HUT.T) has done this week.
They’ve signed an agreement to buy the cloud and co-location data centre business from TeraGo, and when it’s closed and the ink’s dried and everyone’s gone home to celebrate, it’ll establish Hut as a high performance computing platform, well positioned within among miners. I mean – more than they already are.
The acquisition brings home five data centers across Canada with an information technology offering include a complete section of scalable cloud services. The Data Center Business stretches from Toronto to Vancouver with over 36,000 square feet of geo-diverse data center space. Maybe even start leasing out the space. They do that elsewhere. Why not here?
DMG Blockchain releases 2021 annual review
We’re a few weeks into the year and most of the miners have already dropped their end-of-year in review. There’s nothing in particular that says they can’t do it halfway through the first month, so we’ll make an exception for DMG Blockchain Solutions (DMGI.V).
DMG has had a strong end to the calendar year with December, 2021, results of:
- Mined bitcoin: 66.71 BTC
- Daily average: 2.149 BTC
- Miners added: 441 S19J Pros
- Hashrate added: 45 Ph/s
- December maximum hashrate: 420 petahashes per second
- DMG also made its live hashrate publicly available on its website banner, which has hit an all-time high of 464.47 petahashes per second since the start of the new year.
Those numbers aren’t the best. This was one of the company’s in operation in 2017 when I started seriously paying attention to blockchain, and they’re still not quite out of the gate. At least not where mining is considered. They have a suite of other products that make up the majority of their revenue, and for awhile there was some curiosity as to how this company could be so well-involved and well-connected but as yet unable to launch.
They were trading at roughly $1.50 when last we wrote about them in the dying months of 2021, and they’ve since crated to $0.75. The problem is nobody knows who they are or what they offer. Now I wonder how they could solve that problem? Mind thoroughly boggled. If only there were an obvious solution.
Vortex Brands loads more miners, boosts capacity – but will it be enough?
Vortex Brands (VTXB.OTC) picked up three more S19j Pro for its Bitcoin mining operations, bumping its present order to six. They’re anticipating another series of S19’s to be online and pulling in coins from the ether within the coming weeks, jacking their mining capacity by another 42%.
The question here is a valid one, though. There are some companies out there buying their new mining rigs by the hundreds if not thousands, and Vortex is here boosting their fleet up by single digits.
Bitcoin mining is competitive. You’re competing with everyone else—from the misguided Redditor who thought buying up some old antminer 9’s and hooking up a generator in the back of his RV to the big boys with their entire server farms constructed on tens of thousands of former cattle pastures in snow-swept Alberta—and frankly, six machines ain’t gonna cut it, son.
Still, if you’re at all curious about how this whole things work, you can watch them fail at their own wallet address. Or you can watch paint dry. Same effect, really. Just about as titillating too.
Until next week.
—Joseph Morton
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