Day: December 10, 2021

Most Influential 2021: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong, the 38-year-old founder of Coinbase, took the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume public this year. In addition to his work making mass crypto adoption easy, Armstrong has been a vocal critic of onerous financial regulations, even proposing that the U.S. appoint a crypto-specific industry watchdog. Although a proposed savings feature called Lend was waylaid by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Coinbase continues to expand its revenue streams with a non-fungible token (NFTs) platform and credit card. Recently, Coinbase worked with decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Compound…

Matt Hall and John Watkinson

The project was started by a team of two Canadian software developers, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, who call themselves “creative technologists.” And many of the attributes they blended into CryptoPunks can be found throughout the NFT scene – any project, like Bored Apes or Pudgy Penguins, that has a limited mint of 10,000 tokens owes them a debt of gratitude. CryptoPunks is now a part of Ethereum’s aesthetics, and its intellectual property belongs to Larva Labs, the company Hall and Watkinson founded. Source

Most Influential 2021: Devin Finzer

Devin Finzer is the co-founder and CEO of the world’s largest non-fungible token (NFT) platform, OpenSea. Finzer says his interest was sparked by the feline-themed token project, CryptoKitties, in 2017, the same year he started developing OpenSea as part of startup incubator Y Combinator. Sometimes called the “eBay for NFTs,” Finzer’s decentralized marketplace, run by a team of 20 and backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), routinely sees daily volumes in excess of $100 million. Source

Most Influential 2021: Robert Leshner

Good morning. Robert Leshner has built one of the essential cornerstones of decentralized finance (DeFi) with Compound, a lending protocol. That’s important. As are the series of investments he’s made in fledging DeFi projects through a “scout” fund he co-founded, Robot Ventures. But you might say his affect and personality are just as influential. In late September, when the autonomous Compound protocol was hacked and mistakenly paid out $80 million worth of COMP, Leshner handled the situation poorly – at first. He briefly threatened users with Federal action, until collecting…

Former SushiSwap CTO writes short reflection about leadership failures at blockchain DEX

On Friday, Joseph Delong, former chief technology officer of decentralized exchange, or DEX, SushiSwap, published a brief reflection of experiences during his tenure. Delong unilaterally resigned two days prior, citing internal structural chaos among developers behind the popular DEX. In explaining his decision, Delong outlined failures to scale operations, lack of organization skills, problematic contributors, and poor communication as the primary reasons. On Twitter and among blockchain personalities alike, Delong received mostly praises for coming public with his experience and learning from his mistakes. According to Delong, he did not…

Makersplace Plans to Drop World’s First 2pac NFT Collection Authorized by the Shakur Estate – Bitcoin News

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On December 15, the non-fungible token (NFT) market platform Makersplace will drop an assortment of NFTs based on Tupac Shakur’s most well-known jewelry pieces. Makersplace and the NFT artists and curators Impossible Brief and Digital Arts & Sciences worked closely with Shakur’s estate in order to drop the NFT collectibles called “The Immortal Collection.” Tupac’s ‘The Immortal Collection’ to Drop on December 15 Fans of the rap legend Tupac Shakur (also known by his stage names 2pac and Makaveli) will soon be able to bid on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) officially…

AWS turns crypto exchanges offline, and Sushi CTO resigns, Dec. 3–10

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Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. Although the markets may be down and technical indicators built upon AWS malfunctioning, fear not young degens, fundamental news and the spirit of Wagmi is abundant as ever. So, read on and discover all you need to know about the most important events of this week. What you’re about to read is a shorter, more succinct version of the newsletter. For a comprehensive summary of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below. AWS outage highlights the need for truly decentralized…

Most Influential 2021: Do Kwon

The son of a pharmaceutical and medical equipment distributor, Kwon grew up traveling the world. He was a “nerd,” as a teenager, but “not nerdy,” he said. He liked reading, especially theoretical works, but didn’t get to “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged” until college, when he roomed with the president of the Ayn Rand Society. He’s smart. He takes cues from other Silicon Valley visionaries, and mostly wears black t-shirts. After five years at Stanford, he took a software engineering job at Microsoft. He quickly got bored. Source