Weekend 🔗 Digest - Interpol enter the Metaverse 👮🏼♀️👮🏿♂️
[7 min read] In your inbox every Saturday morning, best enjoyed with coffee and brunch ☕. This week: Turkish earthquake scam, Saudi Arabia dives into the Metaverse, & NZ banks ice out crypto companies
Good morning everyone!
Hope everyone is battening down the hatches, another big storm on track to hit the North Island. Stay safe everyone.
Please enjoy this weeks Weekend 🔗 Digest. As always, if you are new be sure to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Hope you all have a good weekend!
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
Market update: Crypto markets take a breath but DeFi continues to get stronger
Interesting news: Turkish earthquake crypto scam, Saudi Arabia dives into the Metaverse, and NZ banks ice out crypto companies.
Video of the week: Learn about Sandbox, 2023’s hottest metaverse virtual world
This weeks AI creation: I apply Midjourney to interior design
Market update 📈
Heatmap shows the market taking a break after weeks of positive price action (size of the blocks are market share, colour & % show the change over the last week)
Sentiment cools off, macro forecasts of the US economy continue to be rough for 2023
DeFi ecosystem continues to get stronger in 2023, a recent boost due to SEC targeting staking of crypto by Centralised Exchanges
Interesting news from the week 🗞️
👮🏼♀️👮🏿♂️ Interpol is working out how to police the metaverse. “Criminals are sophisticated and professional in very quickly adapting to any new technological tool that is available to commit crime…We need to sufficiently respond to that. Sometimes lawmakers, police, and our societies are running a little bit behind.” said Interpol’s secretary general.
🆘 Over $3.9 million in crypto has been donated to Turkish victims after Mondays earthquake, but of course some bad actors (aka scumbags 💩) have been making fake donation pages to scam donations. Here is a link to the 3 official donation wallet addresses (Eth, BNB, AVAX) along with a tally of total value of donations.
🏴 On Tuesday it was announced that Saudi Arabia will be working with The Sandbox to help develop its metaverse causing a 31.4% spike in the SAND token. Sandbox is one of the leading metaverse virtual worlds, where we have a Johnson & Hunt NFT Gallery and Store being built as we speak 🏗️. More in this weeks Video below.
⛔ NZ banks are fearful to work with crypto companies due to a lack of regulatory clarity. Binance is a huge player in the global centralised exchange space (approx 67% market share), but the General Manager of their local operations Ben Rose shared with NBR on Thursday that local banks will not work with Binance NZ, and that it has to pay staff and rents from offshore bank accounts.
Video of the week 🎥
This a great primer on how to get involved in this years hottest metaverse virtual world. Not just a game, bring brands are investing millions in gamified experiences to help build communities and lay the foundation for a societal shift in how we shop and socialise
This week’s AI creation 🎨🤖🎵
Each week I showcase something amazing generated by an AI-based tool.
First an update from DJ Nik Tesl-AI, last week’s AI-generated song. Boomy.com published it to various streaming platforms for me, where I can earn (tiny) royalties. Making and publishing the song took 5 min total! 🤯
Today I am going to experiment with ways to generate interior design ideas using Midjourney. I have a photo of a space that needs some inspiration:
This was uploaded into Midjourney with the prompts: “Mid Century Modern Interior Design, lots of woodgrain, earth tones”. Midjourney offered a number of initial inspiration images:
I then selected a few of my favourites to generate some variations:
These were the favourites, these images can be fed into a "shop by image" system (recently announced by google) to find when to buy the physical world items.
In the example above, the original structure of the space was not preserved. Specialist interior design solutions will be able do this, and selectively choose paint/wallpapers with separate prompts to furniture inspiration.
The purpose of this was to show the raw power of these tools, even in a simple free version like the one I used. As platforms link images to e-commerce solutions, then immersive VR shopping experiences, we start to progress towards a fully bridged physical and virtual world - aka the Metaverse.