📔 Weekly Journal: McNuggets in the MetaverseⓂ️🍟
[8 min read] Your guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier (& the weekend!). Today, the usual market news & treats as well as 40th Birthday celebrations for the beloved Nuggies in the Metaverse
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 35 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Enjoy your weekend! 😎
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
📈 Market update: The market takes a dip but $30K BTC seems to hold, $1.2T Market Cap. Sentiment back to Fear.
🗞️ Interesting news: Global Staking Market Cap crosses $100 billion for the first time, McDonald's Hong Kong launches McNuggets Land metaverse, Eth update to reduce fees teaser.
👓 Read of the week: “If DeFi Wants to Grow, It Has to Embrace Real-World Assets”.
🎥 Video of the week: Learn about Futureverse, a Kiwi Metaverse startup that recently raised $54 million in funding.
🤖 This week’s AI showcase: Explore the nuances of the AI vs Artists copyright infringement court case and debate.
✅ Weekly poll: Help choose the emerging tech topic for Wednesday’s showcase.
🤑 DCA with me: Follow my regular $50 weekly investing in an emerging asset class.
Market Update
🔥🗺️ The 7-day heatmap shows a healthy cool-off. Bitcoin seems to be holding around $30k, likely the market is snapping up lower prices to catch a bargain. (size of the blocks are market share, colour & % show the change over the last week)
🎭 Sentiment levels have pulled back slightly, as expected with the market dip.
Interesting news 🗞️
Digital Assets News 🌐💱
🌏 Exciting news as the Global Staking Market Cap has reached an impressive milestone, surpassing $100 billion for the first time and currently standing at $103.58 billion. This achievement is noteworthy as it is equivalent to the combined GDP of Croatia and Slovenia. A reason for celebration in the staking community!
🔷 Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, hinted at a game-changing upgrade for the network that could slash costs by 100 times. This "account abstraction" plan aims to transition externally owned wallets to smart contract-based ones, making transactions faster and cheaper. The upgrade also allows receiving various cryptocurrencies and paying network fees without converting to Ethereum.
🧩💸 Ripple, renowned for its XRP cryptocurrency and global payments network, is eyeing the tokenised assets market. In its 2023 New Value report, Ripple believes blockchain technology can unlock trillions of dollars by tokenising real-world assets like stocks and real estate. The company is building tools and services to facilitate blockchain-based trading. Despite legal challenges, Ripple expands into new areas, with the recent ruling in partial favor, boosting XRP's price by over 60%. The company is optimistic about the growth of tokenised illiquid assets, projecting a $16 trillion business opportunity by 2030.
XR & Virtual Worlds News
🍟 McDonald's Hong Kong has launched its McNuggets Land metaverse on The Sandbox gaming platform to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Chicken McNuggets. Players can engage in McNugget-themed virtual mini-games, earning rewards like SAND tokens and in-game accessories. McDonald's coupons are also available as real-world rewards until August 28. The Sandbox, an Ethereum-based metaverse platform, collaborates with celebrities and brands. This move showcases McDonald's interest in blockchain technology, following the launch of NFT collections in the US and China.
🎮 Sony plans to invest 300 billion yen ($2.13 billion) in R&D for its game business, focusing on live service games and "extended reality." The move is driven by a shift from hardware to subscription-based models. Sony aims to have 12 live service game titles by 2026, and 55% of PlayStation 5 game development spending will go to live service games by March 2024. The company is also exploring extended reality and intends to use its game development technology in other fields, such as in-vehicle content for electric cars.
👓Read of the Week
This week’s read is an opinion piece on CoinDesk.com:
If DeFi Wants to Grow, It Has to Embrace Real-World Assets
To scale, DeFi platforms need to attract institutions keen to trade tokenized bonds, equities, and debt, and physical assets such as gold, real estate and art, says Enrico Rubboli of Mintlayer.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been highly successful in the cryptocurrency world, attracting over $44 billion in total value locked. However, its use in the overall financial industry remains relatively small.
To address this, Enrico makes the case that DeFi must connect with traditional finance, enabling access to real-world assets and tokenized financial instruments. Integrating with traditional finance can provide more stable assets, reduce volatility, and improve accessibility, making DeFi a superior alternative to traditional financial systems. By tokenizing real-world assets, DeFi can offer fractional ownership and other unique benefits, creating a gateway to the broader digital asset ecosystem and appealing to institutional investors.
Exciting stuff!
Video of the week 🎥
Futureverse is a Kiwi Metaverse startup, a vertically integrated tech, gaming & media group that are are positioning themselves to lead the way in the development of an open Metaverse. They recently secured an impressive $54 million in Series A funding from 10T Holdings and Ripple Labs.
The company's goal is to create a metaverse experience by integrating AI and blockchain. Futureverse has formed out of the merger of 11 companies including FLUF World and FIFA AI League (8 in 2022, with three more added since). They have been able to defy the prevailing trend of limited capital in the digital asset industry! This highlights investors' interest in projects that blend digital assets with emerging technologies like AI, fueled in part by platforms like ChatGPT.
Learn all about them in this week’s watch:
This week’s AI showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
AI is disruptive, challenging industries and driving innovation. Each week I showcase something amazing generated by AI-based tools. My vision of the emerging Metaverse predicts the use of many AI tools to enhance how we work, learn, play and socialise.
Art is one of the most used applications for generative AI over the last 12 months. In fact, I use them as cover images for every article.
In a high-profile lawsuit, artists have brought claims against AI companies Stability AI, MidJourney, and DeviantArt, alleging copyright infringement. The artists argue that these companies used their artwork without permission to train AI models, resulting in AI-generated outputs that plagiarize their content. However, U.S. District Judge William Orrick expressed skepticism about the claim, stating that it is "implausible" that specific plaintiff works are involved given the vast scale of training data. The debate revolves around whether AI outputs can be considered derivative works infringing on the artists' creations and who owns the copyrights. Orrick's view signals a preliminary stance on the matter, but further lawsuits will determine how courts handle these complex AI copyright issues.
I came across this interesting infographic in my travels, with some interesting applications of AI (recipes?!). Quite thought-provoking! (source)
Weekly Poll ✅
Help choose what you would like to learn about on Wednesday for my weekly emerging tech showcase:
That’s all for the free version this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.
DCA With Me 🤑
Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy in which an investor regularly invests a fixed amount of money into a particular asset/asset class at regular intervals, regardless of its current market price. By doing so, the investor can reduce the impact of market volatility and potentially earn a better return over time. An investor can buy more of the asset when prices are low and fewer when prices are high, which averages out the overall cost of investment (time IN the market beats trying to time the market).
To experiment with this, I invest $50 NZD into a Digital Asset every week. Each week I will choose an asset that seems underpriced in the short term and has positive long-term potential. My timeframe is 3-5 years. I don’t give financial advice but if you want to follow along with me you can use my easycrypto.co.nz referral link to support this newsletter. Let’s dive into this week’s pick:
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