Nigeria's leading banks are collaborating to create a new stablecoin, CNGN. 

Nigeria's largest banks are collaborating to create the CNGN stablecoin, a digital currency, aiming to complement the existing eNaira and maintain DC support, improving the Nigerian volatile and financial system.

Backed by the Bank of Ancient States and interoperable with various government authorities, CNGN symbolises Nigeria's progressive adoption of digital currency and digital currencies technologies, positioning the country as a leader in financial innovation.

 

Sotheby's: digital art sales in 2023 amounted to $35 million.

Sotheby's Vice President Michael Buanna said this year has been a successful year for the auction house, with sales of digital art reaching nearly $35 million.

He recalled that in 2023, Sotheby’s organised the first specialised auction, which was attended by more than 300 people and brought the company $12 million.

Sotheby’s also managed to update the price record in the digital segment - $6.2 million for NFT Ringers #879 by artist Dmitry Chernyak.

Buanna also recalled that in 2023, 99-year-old Vera Molnar, one of the first artists to use computers for art, auctioned a collection of 500 NFTs called Themes and Variations at Sotheby's.

 

Worldcoin personal identification technology will be used in Minecraft.

Worldcoin, a project that scans the iris of the eye for digital identification, has partnered with Microsoft to achieve integration with the award-winning game Minecraft through one of its applications. The inclusion of Worldcoin in the game is aimed at solving the problem of a bot user joining the server, which negatively affects the game process. With the help of Luckperms, a Worldcoin application, server administrators can use the World ID to set a set of allowed actions that only verified users can perform. Unverified users who have not been verified with World ID cannot access these features. This feature will be available after installing the plugin on the Minecraft server, and according to the description of the Luckperms application, users will have to confirm their identity using the command line.

 

Thunder Terminal was hacked for $190,000.

Decentralized trading platform Thunder Terminal experienced an exploit that resulted in the attacker withdrawing 86.5 ETH (~$190,000 at the time of writing). The incident was brought to the attention of an on-chain detective under the nickname ZachXBT in his Telegram channel. According to him, the hacker transferred funds through the Railgun ecosystem. Thunder representatives later released a statement, noting that private keys were not affected.

 

Experts from Brevan Howard gave a crypto forecast for 2024.

Brevan Howard is one of the world's leading hedge funds with a net worth of $1.35 billion.

 

1. The capitalization of GameFi tokens will grow to $40 billion. At the time of writing, this figure is $20.12 billion.

 

The number of Web2 studios that have switched to Web3 will also increase. More blockchain games will be coming to the App Store, Play Store and Epic Store.

 

2. Stablecoins will surpass Visa in terms of payment processing volume.

 

The volume of transfers in stablecoins within the Solana ecosystem will reach 6% of the total.

 

A decentralised stablecoin will emerge. Its value of blocked funds (TVL) will exceed $1 billion.

 

3. ETH supply will decrease to 119.6 million as the volume of coins burned will double compared to 2023.

 

The total number of transactions in rollups on L2 (Arbitrum, etc.) will be 10 times higher than the main network.

 

Google Cloud Bolsters Blockchain Innovation With Bitcoin Layer-2 Network Partnership.

In a groundbreaking alliance shaping the future of blockchain, Google Cloud and Bitcoin Layer-2 Network MAP Protocol have joined forces to amplify innovation in the segment. Meanwhile, today’s announcement marks a pivotal moment as these tech powerhouses unite to propel blockchain applications into the mainstream for businesses of all sizes as well as for the general public.

The collaboration between the layer-2 network MAP Protocol and Google Cloud signifies a momentous leap forward in blockchain evolution. MAP Protocol’s ingenious solutions for cross-chain communication, executed in a trustless and peer-to-peer manner, provide a seamless bridge between EVM and non-EVM chains.