The start of a new week and indeed a New Year. Now is a great time to just stop and zoom out for a second.

Crypto Slang — HODL

We’ve come a long way since the birth of Bitcoin on this day 13 years ago. Happy Birthday Bitcoin! Last week a great article was doing the rounds on LinkedIn — “A Normie’s Guide to Becoming a Crypto Person.” For ‘newbies’ it was a useful look at the current crypto scene, with a few golden nuggets in there also for crypto natives.

I must admit I never quite knew the origin of the term “HODL.” Tomer Niv, who is the Director of Global Crypto Solutions at eToro, and from whom I saw the post, ended up linking me to the original message which was posted back in 2013 and which now has had over 794,473 Views. This shows the evolution of crypto slang over time — HODL > Paper hands > Diamond hands > WAGMI and I’m sure 101 different ones in between. Amusing if nothing else.

The Battle of the networks

Back in 2013 there was only one network, and one crypto — Bitcoin. Today in 2022 there are thousands of networks with an ever-increasing array of crypto tokens on offer.

Each new network typically is a child of necessity, born to fix/develop something its predecessors lacked. Comparing the Bitcoin Network or Ethereum to the likes of recent developments like Heco or Solana, is like comparing Windows DOS to Windows 95 — let alone to what we have today. Networks being born today compared to Bitcoin, are like electric vehicles compared to a ‘Model T Ford.’

2022 will enable development not yet even comprehended.

The Tech Titans have been busy on social media, think what it means?

Elon Musk seems to currently be enjoying tweeting and speaking about Web 3 as a “marketing buzzword,” while himself using tech which falls into this category across most of his current businesses. Tesla, Space X, Starlink, The Boring Company, Neuralink, are just a few that come to mind.

Either Elon musk has no concept of what Web 3 is and needs to attend Tech Circuses next event at the end of January on the subject, or he is doing what he does best and is trolling the internet. Just take a look at his past PR coups with the launch of the Cybertruck ‘bulletproof’ window.

Then think of Mark Zuckerberg and his sweet baby ray sauce during the META rebrand video. Even Jack Dorsey is in on the game of denial saying recently on twitter “I have nothing to do with “web3”. “ Is that before or after selling his NFT for $2.9 million…?

Where is this going? Long story short, we have the merging of technologies never before deemed possible. Alongside people with a major voice and access to platforms at the click of a button to either validate the Web 3 revolution or build an even larger media storm via click bait in denying it.

Companies are getting involved across the industry with fully funded teams working, planning, and pushing the new concept. If technology is doubling each year as mentioned in my last article, think about that now being paired up with the ability to share information to a wider audience at an ever-increasing rate. When this does finally start to shift to mass adoption, it will leave not only people but also companies in the dust.

We have already seen a prime example — take social media (a section of something aka Web 2) Those that laughed when hearing of people being paid to manage Social Media channels and the advertising opportunities within, are not laughing today. Are we going to see a repeat ?

What you pay attention to, grows.

At a moment when every single person on the planet should be single-mindedly focused on addressing climate change so we don’t irreparably destroy our environment and ourselves, it is borderline criminal for people to be pushing a technology with such a massive carbon footprint.

Plutonians — is an NFT enabled VR-Metaverse-MMORPG built on Solana. The flagship metaverse game IP from the U.A.Fabrica gaming division with a capital ‘M’ for Metaverse, Plutonians is foundational with user-editable levels, content, and story, with the best content brought into the master narrative, and the most talented artists and developers brought into the fold to work on official expansions.

The game framework will be developed as a combination of web2 multiplayer universe, and web3 enabled metaverse. Built-in the spirit of openness that the Metaverse demands, Plutonians is a persistent-state web3 video game, with an underlying framework of primitives built to leave open the graphical layer to be reimagined by the community if they see fit.

$PLD (Plutonian DAO) is the Plutonians governance token, it will be used as an integral part of the governance system. But it also has in-game utility. One of the use cases in-game is that you need to stake it to be able to lend out or borrow spaceships. You will also need it at TGE to put into LP (Liquidity Provision) with RPC farms to earn rewards and also an upgraded NFT spaceship.

$RPC (Republic Credits) is the in-game utility token, you can use them to purchase upgrades, NFT spaceships, components, and accessories. It can also be used to stake to earn PU238 — the in-game fuel. There are a lot of other use cases for RPC and PLD, more information on which will be available to users shortly.

Note: Plutonials will release two tokens: $PLD (Plutonian DAO) is the Plutonians governance token, and $RPC (Republic Credits) — is the in-game utility token. In this vested sale you will receive a package with PLD/RPC tokens. For each PLD/RPC users will receive 1PLD and 100RPC tokens. Tokens can only be purchased as a single unit, separate purchase is not possible.

The calculation: Price 1 PLD/RPC = 0,24$ (1PLD = 0,12$ , 1RPC = 0,0012$)

In this article, we will cover some of the popular scams in crypto, the difference between software and hardware wallets and what to do to stay safe out there.

Let’s dive in !

When starting off with crypto or NFTs, there’s a lot to learn, and it can quickly become overwhelming. However, one thing that you really do not want to tamper with is your crypto security. This is no joke.

In the non crypto world, you often use your credit card to make transactions and transfer value from one place to another. If this card gets hacked or stolen, you can call the bank, freeze the card and most of the times you will get your funds back after verifying that it wasn’t you who made the fraudulent transactions.

When dealing with crypto currency, there’s no bank or police to call if your wallet gets compromised. Everyone wants to be freed from the clamps of the centralised financial system, but this also comes with its dangers. You know, uncle Ben couldn’t have said it better.

In this next section, I will highlight some popular scams out there and how scammers can get access to your coins or tokens.

You were having trouble with Opensea or Metamask, and then when you tweeted about it, some “Support” account contacted you. These fraudulent ‘support’ accounts are bots that target twitter users when tweeting something with the word Metamask or Opensea in it.

They will ask you to share your seed phrase to help fix the issue. Once you shared your 12/24 word seed phrase with a scammer impersonating they are someone else, then you just committed crypto suicide.

Once a malicious actor has access to your private keys, they have total control over your funds and wallet. There’s no way back from there.

I feel like I should say this, and there’s no easy way to put it, so here it goes: There’s no such thing as free money. If it is too good to be true, then it probably is. No one will send you double the amount of ETH after you send them ETH. Why would they do that?

So, stay vigilant and keep your eyes wide open.

You had your recovery phrase saved somewhere on your laptop/phone. If you allowed malware on any of these devices, they can easily access all files on your computer. Some malware can scan all your computer’s text files and get access to them all. If they’re sniffing for any file with a 12/24 word combination written there, then you most probably know the ending to that story. This is why you should always keep your seed phrase safely stored on a piece of paper and not on a device.

When using DeFi, you are usually asked to ‘allow’ the project to spend tokens from your wallet. On Ethereum, these are called ERC-20 allowances and they help make the interaction with the smart contract easier. The permission you grant to the protocol is usually unlimited, so you don’t have to ‘allow’ the token each time you want to interact with that project.

In a normal scenario, the protocol will only spend the amount set by you, the trader. However, some smart contract bugs can exploit this permission and drain your wallet. This happened before during the UniCats scam in 2020 where everyone who gave allowance rights to the protocol got their tokens drained out.

This is really dangerous because users did not only lose that token, but also every token in their wallet was drained as a result, until the user revoked the permission.

To check which tokens you’ve given permission to:

Revoking the allowance will involve paying gas fees. (This can also be done on revoke.cash)

This type of hack was highlighted to us by non other than 4lteredBeast, who is a cyber security expert I met last year thanks to the dogepound. He always shares security tips and best practices to stay safe in all NFT communities we are in.

This attack is possible due to the trust that we give to OpenSea when we approve a new NFT collection on their website. So, you usually pay an approval fee when you list a token for the first time on OpenSea. This allows you to list that token without paying the fee next time. This gives OpenSea the permission to list your NFTs with a signed message later, rather than an approval each and every time. Now this is convenient because you will save on gas fees, but there are risks involved.

The basis of this attack involves a malicious actor claiming to give you something for free, i.e: an airdrop and hence why there are no gas fees and you just need to sign. The contract interaction will simply look like you are signing a message and that is it. Should be safe, right?

In this instance, the scammer uses the interaction on their site to get you to sign a message on OpenSea to list an NFT for a very low price, and specifically for their address.

This allows them to buy your NFT for 0.001 ETH or whatever low amount that they set in the contract that you just signed.

This one might be one of the most sophisticated ones the NFT space has seen last year, and there’s a video that explains exactly how it goes down. The video is in Chinese though, so you’d want to use subtitles.

Okay, we get it, it’s a jungle out there. Now what should we do?

Well, first things first, we should define some basic terms.

To store your crypto and NFTs, you’d need a crypto wallet. There are software and hardware wallets. Both come with public and private keys.

Public Keys

This is the equivalent of your mail box address or your IBAN. Anyone who knows it, can you send you value, in this case: crypto or NFTs.

Private Keys

This is equivalent to your credit card pin code or your mailbox key. You are the only one who should have access to it. So, no matter what anyone you meet online says, you should never share your private keys!

The key difference between software and hardware wallets is that hardware wallets store your private keys offline.

Well, first things first, buy a hardware wallet. On a hardware wallet, your private keys are stored offline.

To make this representation visual, using the example given by Ledger, if you don’t own a hardware wallet, it is like leaving your apartment key (Private Keys) under the door step. Technically, you didn’t give your keys to the hacker, but you just left it there.

Ledger is probably the best one out there, and I would personally recommend that.

The wallet runs on their own in-house operating system called Bolos. This is powered by a chip which is the “secure element” developed by the world leader for microchips: ST Micro

This means that whatever you see on your ledger screen, is IN FACT, what you are signing for. However, with a software wallet, you can’t guarantee that all the time.

If you’d like to know more about how it works, here’s a video that explains more about it.

I know sometimes this can be daunting at first, and there’s a lot to think and worry about. That’s okay though. With every new technology, there will be malicious actors and we have to keep raising awareness against these issues.

Never forget that you are not alone, and don’t shy away from questions! This is how we learn, grow and help each other to build a stronger and safer community.

I hope you enjoyed this article and found it helpful :)

Stay safe out there!

-Cr8

The gaming industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that has been growing steadily over the years. However, most of these games are centralized, and the users have little to no control or ownership over their in-game assets. It is a common trend in the gaming industry that players spend hours playing games to earn game currency. This way of earning game currency is time-consuming and tedious, especially for those who are not hardcore gamers.

Battle Saga aims to solve this problem by providing an innovative decentralized solution with which users can earn tokens while they sleep or do other things in their daily lives. Battle Saga is a blockchain-based next-generation strategic game inspired by Clash of Clans that enables its users to Earn-Without-Playing.

With Battle Saga, anyone can play as much as they like without having to worry about spending any extra money because their tokenized system rewards players based on how well they perform during every battle instead of forcing them into an endless cycle of pay-to-play schemes.

It is a decentralized NFT game that gives its users full ownership of their digital assets while enabling them to earn rewards just by playing it. It also features an innovative DAO governance model which enables players themselves to decide on how they want their game experience to evolve over time through proposals submitted by fellow players.

Battle Saga was built with decentralization in mind from day one. Unlike other blockchain-based games, the game will not be governed by any single entity. The developers won’t be able to alter any aspect of the gameplay without community consensus. This will give gamers more power and control than they have ever had before.

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