Riding The Wave News Summary #47
The Crypto Bros Are Snapping Up Manhattan Real Estate, Cardano’s ADA Spikes 25%, Leads Gains in Crypto Majors & more
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Table of Contents
Tweets
Why ‘Hunger Games’ Co-Producer Bryan Unkeless Is Making His Next Sci-Fi Project in Web3
Ethereum Scaling Solution Optimism Airdrops Tokens to 249K Wallets
Tweets
The Crypto Bros Are Snapping Up Manhattan Real Estate
crypto companies appear to be here to stay in New York, at least for the foreseeable future, judging from the way they have been leasing Manhattan office space.
for the last couple of years, cryptocurrency firms have been setting up or expanding offices in New York, often in edgier, somewhat peripheral locations, as opposed to marquee parts of Midtown Manhattan.
This month, Solana Labs, a cryptocurrency platform, signed a lease for 20,000 square feet across four floors of a new office building in the Bowery. A few blocks away, EmpireDAO, whose name incorporates the acronym for “decentralized autonomous organization,” has opened a co-working space for crypto entrepreneurs in a graffiti-covered building.
Most web3 companies have gravitated to three locations in the United States: Silicon Valley, the tech hotbed where many companies get their start; New York, a growing tech hub and longtime financial center; and Miami, whose mayor, like New York’s Eric Adams, has cheered on the sector by accepting his paycheck in cryptocurrency.
in some cases, web3 is changing real estate. WeWork, for example, has been accepting cryptocurrency for rent payments since last year. And Jamestown, a real estate firm, recently announced a partnership with BitPay that will enable tenants to pay rent in cryptocurrency.
While his company seeks tenants for the building, it is also putting the property up for sale as an NFT — essentially a ticket to acquire the deed.
Houses have been sold this way, but Mr. Okada, who is offering his building on OpenSea for $29.5 million or 15,105 Ether, the cryptocurrency that can be used to purchase the NFT, said he believed this was the first time a commercial building in New York had gone the same route.
It’s exciting to see a company in NYC leverage NFTS to sell their property as proof of ownership in a transparent and easily confirmable manner is one of the best NFT use cases I’m aware of.
Cardano’s ADA Spikes 25%, Leads Gains in Crypto Majors
Bitcoin regained the $31,000 level in U.S. hours on Monday after nine weeks of losses. That move came amid a relief rally in Asian markets, and technical data suggesting the asset may have bottomed out between the $29,000 to $30,000 range.
Cardano’s ADA token led gains among crypto majors with a 17% rise to trade over 64 cents on Tuesday. Fundamental catalysts include a rise in the issuance of native assets on the network – over five million assets have now been minted on Cardano, data shows – and the upcoming Vasil hard fork, a network upgrade expected in June that would increase scaling capabilities.
While this is exciting to see it’s normal to see small jumps in the short term following a move up from Bitcoin. Until Bitcoin turns around and shows a confident move up I wouldn’t expect any of the other major coins to see uptrends.
Why ‘Hunger Games’ Co-Producer Bryan Unkeless Is Making His Next Sci-Fi Project in Web3
On the planet Omega, speed is power, and whoever wins its racing competition rules the world.
That’s the premise behind the Web3 multimedia sci-fi project Runner, co-created with Metaversal by Bryan Unkeless, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Bryce Anderson, and Blaise Hemingway.
Runner will exist as a comic book, an NFT profile picture (PFP) project, possibly a video game, and eventually a TV show under Unkeless’ production company Clubhouse Pictures. Unkeless, Hemingway, and Anderson spoke with Decrypt about building the world of Runner in Web3.
Having co-produced the “Hunger Games” movies as well as “Bright,” “Birds of Prey,” and “I, Tonya,” Unkeless is enthusiastic about Web3’s potential to change the entertainment industry. Runner’s characters, not unlike many in the Web3 space, are looking to push up against “established power structures.”
As the Runner team members work to build out its story and high-speed universe, they already have some competition. Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin’s Metatheory raised $24 million to further develop its sci-fi franchise, Duskbreakers, which exists as an Ethereum PFP NFT collection and has plans for a comic book and a video game.
I’m happy to see more mainstream creators jump into the crypto space as when they bring their projects to market they will expose web 3 to an audience that has no experience with crypto and bring some of them into the space.
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