Network users can now be active participants in the making of Hollywood films. The producer expects transparency in the distribution of profits.

The Hollywood film production company, Mogul Productions, announced on February 18 the launch of a platform, which will allow filmmakers and movie fans to choose which films will obtain financing with the new Stars token.

The experts and members of the production company clarified that it is a decentralized film financing platform that “will give everyone a voice in the creative process.”

In that sense, Mogul will activate a platform where filmmakers and film fans can register to create an account that will let them enter the white list and, in the future, access the native token of the platform called Stars. Users will then watch movies at a showcase and use the Stars to vote for the film projects to be funded.

Fans stake Stars tokens to vote on which movies they want to see funding. Mogul teases a quadratic voting system to make each vote cast by the same user exponentially more expensive to prevent rich STARS users from having undue influence over the whole process.

Gagan Grewal, CEO of Mogul Productions

The Mogul platform will also have a non-custodial wallet and on which users can manage the Stars tokens once the leading network starts operational.

According to Grewal’s statements to the press, there is no transparency about the origin of the film industry’s financings. It is always unclear how the distribution of the profits occurs. For this reason, they went along with quadratic voting, which is a voting method that will let people rate their consistent opinion about the company projects.

In case a project receives approval, the filmmakers will work under the supervision of the Mogul team and the regular feedback with a fan base that guarantees, according to the production company, the success of the film after its distribution.

Grewal Explained How Complex it Could Be for Independent Artists to Finance Film Projects

Grewal and the production company he runs consider an almost insatiable demand for content. It is hard for independent creators to receive the proper financing for their stories and turn them into movies.

According to Grand View Research, the mainstreaming platforms experienced global audience peaks in 2020, reaching a generation of USD 50 billion. It is a sector that is forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 21% from 2021 to 2028.

Mogul Joins Forces With Chainlink

On February 11, Mogul Productions announced that it would join forces with the Chainlink blockchain network. The alliance’s goal is “to serve as providers of more transparency and accessibility when it comes to film production and financing.

Mogul intends to bring off-chain film budget and primary profitability data to the blockchain, enabling a fair market profit share’s disbursement in a more efficient, transparent, and trusted way.

By: Jenson Nuñez

The digital business cards feature characters from the ever-well-liked arcade ensemble, which appeared 30 years ago in 1991.

Video game developer Capcom is the latest brand that joins the crypto-collectible world by releasing a set of Street Fighter II-inspired NFTs on WAX block clamping on February 18.

The digital packs with 10 and 60 Road Fighter II cards will be available for complete operations with plastic credit only. The Cards release will be public through packages in an “unpacking” process that emulates all the compromises of a physical business card package and can even go through an engineering process to form other NFTs. Unhulled card packs often appear in secondary markets at much higher prices too.

The balance already started its operation on February 18 at noon EST and lasted 24 hours. During that time, a high purchase of an unlimited number of packages happened. The enabling of the unpacking and creation skills happened immediately after the conclusion of the balance.

Digital collectibles’ explosion is an event that saw considerable growth this year, with more than $ 133 million in NFT sales in the last month. More than 54% due to the NBA Leading Shot collection, a recent release in a crypto-asset-centric block clamp by Dapper Labs.

Lee Jenkins, head of product at WAX, expressed that blockchain technology means that now is “the first time that electronic ownership is positively equivalent to physical ownership of an item.”

“Collectors can now have a digital item forever,” Jenkins said. “They can pick up, buy, betray, and exchange and the items are easily verifiable as authentic, with verifiable scarcity and deformity.”

Thanks to WAX’s low transaction costs, the market for WAX-based second-hand crypto collectibles is a prosperous alternative. Jenkins also believes that these aspects will allow WAX’s secondary markets to serve as consolidators of the crypto-world individual collector business.

 Jenkins also points at the statistics that show that the average secondary market balance for WAX is $ 3.66, while this same statistic for competitors is $ 1,608 on OpenSea and $ 533 on Raible.

According to NFT data aggregator Cryptoslam.io, WAX-based projects account for 17 of the top 30 NFT producers by secondary sales buckling. However, Ethereum-based projects still aim at the majority of total sales.

With just over $ 1.3 million in secondary market sales, WAX’s best-selling NFT brand is Topps’s Garbage Pail Kids, its newest extension being a cartoon series about a pose worthy of a senator’s meme.

Other commercial releases on WAX are a sequence by Atari, William Shatner, and Deadmau5. There is also a set of original art collections that, in some cases, are proving to be equally or more popular, like Bitcoin Origins and Blockchain Heroes sequence.

Capcom has always shared sympathy for block clamping. An example of this is the Digital collectibles maker ECOMI, home to the CBS, Warner Brothers, and Cartoon Community brands. ECOMI is the creator of VeVe, a digital marketplace, and showroom for subscription-grade digital collectibles.

By: Jenson Nuñez

Current Debt stands at 355% of global GDP, according to IFI. Experts estimate that by 2021 more than USD 70 billion could be added to the Debt.

Two hundred thirty-three billion dollars is an unprecedented figure that is already making history when it comes to world debt. The end of 2020 was crucial for skyrocketing such amount, and the beginning of 2021 keeps promising an even more significant increase.

The coronavirus pandemic, together with the economic stimulus policies that various governments adopted worldwide, are the causes that triggered the Debt.

Members of the Institute of International Finance (IFI), with the representation of the expert Emre Tiftik, point out that the Debt increased at least 20 billion dollars over the past year. This amount represented 7 billion dollars more than what financial organizations previously stipulated, placing indebtedness at 355% of global GDP.

The entity points out that countries such as Spain, France, and even Greece are the ones that have committed the most to state loans. Countries like China have experienced the most significant increase in their debt-to-GDP ratio. Other economies like Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, also show worrying numbers. On the other hand, public Debt keeps being high in nations like India.

According to the IFI, the governments living such enormous budget deficits will show a skyrocket of their Debt by amounts like8.3 billion dollars or more by 2021. In this sense, this year seems to promise that an additional 76.2 billion dollars will adhere to the already existing Debt.

 After the advances regarding the vaccination process due to coronavirus, there is a general thought among economists that foresees the increasing the Debt as a tendency if organizations and the governments don’t take action soon as possible.

Since 2018 the experts determined that the world deficit increased in worrying numbers, going from 318% of GDP to 320% in one year.

The most vulnerable to Debt is the private sector

The private sector could suffer the most because of this situation, as companies in this niche have increased their dependence on government support to avoid bankruptcy and defaults. However, economists stressed that governments need to develop an innovative global strategy for “these extraordinary fiscal measures.”

Experts also recommend the withdrawal of economic stimulus measures. A plan that they must evaluate in order not to generate even more crisis in the financial sector. This recommendation comes from Mervyn King, former governor of the Central Bank of England, who foresees a critical situation in the United Kingdom and the United States.

The conditions of the world economy are undoubtedly exceptional due to the coronavirus pandemic. As debt numbers increase to worrying levels, US banks respond negatively to excessive cash circulating on the market due to over-issuance of dollars and financial aid.

By: Jenson Nuñez

The company will start its testing process in two weeks and then activate support. In its first phase, users would have a deposit limit of $ 500.

The lightning network is receiving the P2P service for the exchange of bitcoins, Paxful. Paxful is already paving the way for integrating its system into the Lightning network. The company works on the preliminary tests in two weeks to activate the service.

Paxful CEO Ray Youssef said that the platform has been working in recent days to adhere to new ways to support this second-layer solution over Bitcoin for rapid trades. In a message on Twitter, Youssef said: “I had an extraordinary meeting today about the Bitcoin Lightning Network. This is going to happen, Paxful.”

Previously, on Monday 15th, Youssef clarified the integration, but there are no further details about its progress or its release date.

This Friday, the 19th, Youssef himself responded to an investor on Twitter by referring to the payment channel network issue by saying: “Lightning for the victory!” User @hhua_ also noted that he was impressed by every Paxul achievement regarding the Lightning network.

The investor commented that, with the Paxful user base, it would be the most significant application using the Lightning Network in history. Paxful website stated that the service would have around 5 million registered users globally.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network and Its Parameters

Paxful is about to create a system to evaluate operations on the Lightning network in two weeks. Once the verification happens and the platform’s integration gets its completion, a gradual process will allow operators to deposit and withdraw funds.

Artur Schaback, the co-founder of Paxful, recently announced this action and explained that its parameters to complete its operation remain unclear. Schaback indicated that the maximum amount to make deposits would be about 500 dollars, but there is still no official limit.

In general, renowned bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges have been adding support for operations on the Lightning network for years. In December 2019, Bitfinex started offering support with its node.

Recently, Kraken and OKCoin announced that there would be faster deposits and withdrawals due to a supporting system on the Lightning network. Kraken did not specify its activation date but indicated that it would do so sometime in 2021. OKCoin said that the company would set the service’s activation in the first quarter of the year using its node.

According to the recent report, the Lightning Network is a decentralized network for quick payments that works with the Bitcoin blockchain to start a trade channel that is not registered in the said chain until the last amount occurs between both parties.

Faster transactions are always a goal for users within the crypto-world. These new decisions by Paxful are waking up the interest of many personalities in the environment. Users want to feel relief and safety when making a fast transaction and Paxful seems to be working on it.

By: Jenson Nuñez

Binance CEO stated that Uniswap should move to the ‘Binance Smart Chain.’ PancakeSwap accounts for 31.2% of the volume traded on decentralized exchanges.

PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange developed on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), positions itself in the first place of the ranking according to sales volume in the last 24 hours. It displaced Uniswap, which had long established itself as the undisputed market leader, from this location.

On February 19, 2021, PancakeSwap puts 31.2% of the trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEX)under its control. Over the last day, more than $ 2 billion in BEP-20 token transactions happened.

Also, Uniswap, developed on Ethereum, gets dethroned and reaches second place with a market share of 18.5%. During the last day, the volume of ERC-20 tokens on that platform was around USD 1,067 million.

A prominent feature that helps PancakeSwap attract many users is offering high performance to its liquidity providers. They receive the CAKE governance token in exchange for depositing other tokens in the exchange’s smart contracts.

In the early days, after PancakeSwap saw the light in September 2020, the annual return on investment in the CAKE-BNB pair was over 170,000%. The current yield, although more moderate, is still high: 141%.

It is essential to consider that operating with smart contracts implies risks due to potential attacks and code errors. In some decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, participants have entirely lost their deposited money even with security audits.

The PancakeSwap developers remain anonymous (although they are active on social media, under pseudonyms). This behavior adds risk if a significant mishap happens that they would vanish from the scene.

Also, the delivery of governance tokens with a market value in exchange for providing liquidity to the business has received criticism from some users and personalities in the crypto-environment because they share similarities with Ponzi schemes’ operation.

Binance CEO Invites Uniswap to Move to BSC

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the centralized exchange Binance, launched an invitation to Uniswap developers: “Uniswap should consider moving to BSC. It is not easy to run with weight on the ankles.”

The increased use of PancakeSwap and the rise in CAKE price might be a cause for Binance Coin (BNB), a native coin of the BSC, to reach a new all-time high today. Also, each BNB is trading at USD 304 (equivalent to 0.0057 BTC)

Uniswap is commanding the decentralized crypto exchange that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. These platforms receive orders from a single authority (the company that operates the trade) and require users to place funds under their control by using a traditional order book system to facilitate trading.

The Uniswap platform dates from 2018, on top of the Ethereum blockchain, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency project by market capitalization, making it compatible with all ERC-20 tokens and platforms like MetaMask and MyEtherWallet.

By: Jenson Nuñez

The Bitcoin thin client operates independently, without enabling third-party applications. It integrates into mobile devices and syncs with the entire chain.

The infrastructure that strengthens Bitcoin is moving down to a path that makes it easier for anyone to operate, an approach through which developer Alexis Sellier decided to walk. This developer has brought to light the project he is working on, a lightweight Bitcoin node with a broad capacity to run on mobile devices with the same security and privacy that full nodes offer.

The full nodes of Bitcoin play the role of financial security systems. Systems that work on validating the first of the cryptocurrencies’ blockchain transactions and protecting users from deceiving from third parties that could claim they have received money when it is not so.

These full nodes take up a lot of computing space, and their size keeps increasing as the registry of their blockchain weighs more than 300 gigabytes, after having a significant growth of almost 25% during 2020.

Since these nodes are the most “reliable” way to use Bitcoin, developers have long tried to make it easier to use. This mission led Sellier to work on a project that offers the ease of running on any platform, be it mobile or desktop, without putting at-risk user privacy or security.

The Bitcoin Trading Technology Group (Bitcoin Optech) newsletter published this week reports on the launch of Nakamoto, the thin client developed by Sellier for easy integration with mobile applications. Rust is the language that runs for these nodes, but it has an external function interface that makes it easy to link with programs that work with other programming languages ​​such as Python or Java.

The project is still under development, so it still has a long way to go before users can start using it with the idea of ​​setting their flag of financial self-sovereignty. But, it appears to be the first sample of a new generation of light nodes. It is available in its first version with only basic functionalities, as Sellier points out in its technical description.

What Are a Lightweight and Private Bitcoin Node?

The lightweight nodes can reduce the size of the Bitcoin chain’s transaction history to just 2 gigabytes. They operate under the Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) procedure that does not require as much computer storage space as a full node.

However, SPV nodes do not preserve user privacy and are more susceptible to attack than full nodes. This preservation is precisely where the Nakamoto project reflects itself as an initiative that can make a difference with other options nowadays. Their proposal points to the BIP157 protocol, which solves many of the obstacles that today’s thin clients present.

What makes a Bitcoin node lightweight is that such nodes minimize the amount of bandwidth, storage space, and computation to operate. To achieve this, they only download a fraction of the Bitcoin blockchain and work without checking all the blocks’ validity in the longest chain.

By: Jenson Nuñez