ALPEX Global Weekly Newsletter — December Week 3

Latest news and updates from ALPEX Global, a leader in digital asset trading!

As a leading fintech company, ALPEX Global aims to educate people on how this disruptive technology will benefit the entire world. ALPEX Global introduces a variety of subsidiaries including ALPEX Derivatives Exchange, ALPEX Academy, and its own APX Token. With a keen eye on the market, ALPEX Global aims to create a safe, reliable, and flexible trading platform building its core on innovation and sustainability. We utilize our years of broad experience and sharp insights to provide our investors with secure operating systems, complete transaction tools, and various financial resources. Our technology helps investors better understand risk and make more powerful trading decisions.

Overview

This week, NFTs are becoming mainstream. Is this the beginning of a boom? As a result of the Coinmarketcap pricing glitch, every crypto hodler became a millionaire, at least for a few minutes. To prepare for the future, Solana and Polygon have announced hundreds of millions of dollars to develop web 3.0. You can read these stories and more in this week’s newsletter.

Our newsletter this week starts with Adidas’s First Ethereum NFT Drop Netting $23 Million. Does that mean NFT is ready for mainstream adoption? Last week, sportswear giant Adidas made $23.4 million from its debut of “Into the Metaverse”. This drop was a collaboration between the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC, currently the seventh biggest collection based on sales volume), Pixel Vault, NFT creator for PUNKS Comics, and private NFT collector gmoney. In early December, Adidas revealed its plans when it bought a Bored Ape and covered it in Adidas apparel.

As a result, Adidas Originals NFTs were available on the Ethereum blockchain for a total of 30,000 NFTs, with 20,000 of them offered first to Pixel Vault holders, Bored Ape users, and Mutant Ape users, and holders of Adidas Originals POAPs, Ethereum-based badges of proof of attendance.

This mysterious POAP token was first tweeted about by the sportswear company last month, although it did not seem to be commemorating anything in particular. In spite of that, people minted the coins anyway, expecting everything to be clarified in the future.

In the wake of Adidas’ announcement, things became clearer. The early access tokens sold out in less than an afternoon. Here’s where things get interesting. A total of 380 tokens were held by Adidas and its partners for “future events” while the remaining 9,620 tokens were released to customers with a limit of two tokens each. They sold out in less than a second.

By creating 165 distinct smart contracts, each with its address, one customer managed to circumvent Adidas’s cap, minting NFTs from Adidas’s smart contract in one transaction, before sending the 330 tokens to the creator’s ETH address.

Montana Wong, a blockchain engineer, provided a neat breakdown of the process on Twitter. Wong says the creator of the contract paid $104,000 for gas, plus about $252,000 for NFTs. To break even, each NFT had to price at 0.28 ETH, so the creator needed the value of the tokens to rise to 0.28 ETH each. Considering that the price has skyrocketed to almost 0.8 ETH, their effort has paid off three times over.

As Adidas makes a concerted effort to gain a foothold early in the metaverse, the drop is excellent news. As part of its metaverse strategy, it announced a partnership with Coinbase last month. As part of the same announcement, the Metaverse game The Sandbox revealed that Adidas had earmarked land for its use. A lucky few who own an Adidas NFT will have exclusive access to Adidas wearables, both in-person and online, coming in 2022; some of the exclusives will no doubt make their way into The Sandbox

In other news, a data aggregator glitch temporarily displayed enormous Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrency gains, which caused traders to experience a moment of joy and confusion. According to CoinMarketCap and several other price indices, Bitcoin is close to $900 billion and Ethereum is above $81 billion.

The platform quickly resolved the issue, so the displayed numbers had no effect on the trading prices on exchanges. As part of its remediation plan, CoinMarketCap explained on Twitter that it is rebooting its servers. In the words of a spokesperson, “CoinMarketCap is now back to normal after an issue which affected our ranking”. Were you affected by the glitch? Alpex Global team was following tweets about unrealistic price movement and felt the sentiments of all those posting funny tweets. We see and we feel you.

This week, an interesting event occurred. Reddit’s co-founder launched a $200M social media initiative for Web 3.0 after seeing huge potential. In a $200 million initiative, Polygon and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six will invest in projects at the intersection of social media and Web 3.0. The initiative will focus on social media platforms and gaming applications using Polygon’s infrastructure.

Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian left in 2010 and returned as executive chairman in 2014, leading a turnaround before resigning in 2020. In addition to Coinbase, Instacart, Sky Mavis, the developer of Axie Infinity, and Patreon, he has been a seed investor in several prominent tech and blockchain firms.

Over 3,000 decentralized applications have been built on Polygon’s network this year as the company’s scaling solution for Ethereum. Polygon announced earlier this month that it would dedicate up to 250 million MATIC tokens, valued at $627.5 million, to the development of zero-knowledge technologies intended for complex decentralized finance applications. In much of this year, its token price has been driven up by protocol launches and cross-chain migrations.

According to Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, social media business models will have a “profound impact on our world,” especially considering Web 3.0, which refers to the next generation of Internet technologies. As a result of Web 3.0, “users create value, control the network, and reap the rewards,” he said. Polygon isn’t Alex Ohanian’s first venture into Web 3.0. In November, he teamed up with Solana Ventures to raise $100 million for various Web 3.0 initiatives.

We heard this week: Blockchain platform Polkadot launched its first parachains (or parallelized chains) to improve interoperability between multiple blockchains.

It was announced that Polkadot invested five years into the development of the parachains, which were auctioned off to teams, including Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover.

Within Polkadot’s ecosystem, individual blockchains will run simultaneously, allowing auction winners to lease slots on Polkadot’s Relay Chain for 96 weeks at a time. As a cryptocurrency that has been in existence for just over five years, Polkadot ranks among the top ten in terms of market capitalization. Currently, the ecosystem has five parachain slots, which is the maximum capacity for Relay Chain.

Nevertheless, the announcement states that “not all of these slots will be allocated through parachain slot auctions, as some of them will be used for government-enabled common-good parachains and parathreads.” In an effort to accelerate smart contracts initiatives across decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), Iota recently announced Assembly, a layer-one smart contract network. Iota’s existing architecture will be used by Assembly to build a symbiotic, self-sovereign bridge.

Let’s not forget to add a little woof woof to our lives! If you know what I mean?! Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, says bitcoin is suited to act as a store of value, while the meme cryptocurrency dogecoin is more suited for transactions. Dogecoin is better suited to transactions, even though it was designed as a joke, Musk said.

For nearly a century, Time has named a Person of the Year to recognize the person or group that most shaped the previous 12 months, for better or for worse,” CEO Edward Felsenthal explained. A Person of the Year award signifies influence, and nobody has had more influence on life on Earth, as well as perhaps life off Earth, as Musk has,” he said. Musk has a net worth of $300 billion.

Musk said that he played an integral role in creating Paypal, so he has a solid understanding of how money works and the details involved in it. “I think that very few people understand it better than me,” he said. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long endorsed the meme cryptocurrency. The crypto community even calls him the Dogefather. Dogecoin, bitcoin, and ether are among the digital currencies that he owns. Spacex and Tesla however only own Bitcoin.

During the discussion, Tesla and Spacex’s CEO continued to describe dogecoins. “It is somewhat inflationary, but as opposed to a percentage it is a fixed number,” he explained. As a result, its percentage inflation decreases over time, and this is good since it encourages people to spend rather than hoard it as a store of value.” Musk has previously explained that he sees DOGE as the people’s cryptocurrency and that everyone he talks to at Tesla owns DOGE. According to Shark Tank star Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA team Dallas Mavericks, “the doge community is the strongest when it comes to using it as a medium of exchange.”

Last but not least, we began with NFTs and must end with NFTs — As reported, e-commerce giant Amazon invested in a fractional sports trading card marketplace called Dibbs. Through the platform, users can purchase and sell fractions of collectible trading cards built on the Wax blockchain.

According to reports, Amazon has not disclosed the terms of its investment in Dibbs. In 2021, non-fungible token (NFT) assets and digital collectibles are gaining a lot of steam, and it seems like everyone wants a piece of the billion-dollar market. Earlier this year, it was reported that the online marketplace Amazon had invested in trading-card platform Dibbs. As of December 8, the official Wax blockchain Twitter account tweeted: “We’re thrilled to announce that Amazon has entered the collectibles space by investing in [Dibbs.io].” “[Dibbs] is a fractional card market built on the Wax blockchain using Wax virtual reality real-time lending technology.” What are your thoughts on Amazon reportedly investing in a fractionalized NFT trading platform that uses Wax blockchain technology? We would love to hear what you have to say about this subject in the comments section of our blog or our social media pages.

Ultimately, as the ALPEX Global team and the rest of the world celebrate Christmas this week, the song All I Want for Christmas is You will be played on repeat. Imagine a Santa that looks like Satoshi Nakamoto visiting you. What would you ask him for? Happy Holidays from ALPEX to you! Do your best to stay safe, invest, and HODL!

Marketing Summary:

In market news: As reported by Inner Mongolia Daily, the Inner Mongolia Development and Reform Commission has shut down 49 mining projects, 186 of which are being monitored to make sure they are empty. Until recently, Inner Mongolia was the main mining region in China, and its shutdown signals the de-Chinesization of the mining industry.

Additionally, the head of the innovation center for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) stated that a global regulatory policy for digital currency would be introduced by 2022, and then the regulatory framework for digital currency would be dispersed to several departments, including anti-money laundering and banking supervision.

Information about the marketing department : The ALPEX team attended BlockChain World in Abu Dhabi last week. This year, Blockchain World: DCS 2021 brought together an A-list celebrity and expert panel for a fun, interactive live chat and interview about Blockchain, NFTs, and Bitcoin.

There were some interesting keynote talks and panel discussions about the future of people-centric data ownership, as it relates to blockchains and crypto ecosystems.

ALPEX Global’s CMO Alison Du, Advisor Pekka Kelkka, and Dean of ALPEX Academy Anita Kalergis attended Blockchain World. Dean and Advisor of ALPEX Academy spoke about Birds, Bees, and everything crypto and blockchain.

We arranged and conducted interviews with crypto investors, Blockchain experts, and NFT artists through our ALPEX production team, led by our talented manager Mounir. These interviews will be shared on our social media platforms soon.

Moreover, new projects on NFTs are currently being developed by the ALPEX team.

In conclusion, the ALPEX Team and our leadership gathered for a pre-Christmas dinner. During the event, we danced and celebrated the beautiful gift of life. We wish you a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year.

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TEAM ALPEX Global