The two Hennessy NFTs will appear on the BlockBar liquor NFT platform on January 12 at a whopping price of 70.47 ETH ($ 226,450). Upon purchase, the buyer will receive two NFTs that represent the physical and digital ownership of the first and last bottles (1 and 250) of Hennessy 8, a limited edition cognac house. NFTs also serve as proof of authenticity as well as the right to deliver physical bottles upon request.

The physical bottle kit includes a commemorative sculpture, blown baccarat, engraved decanter, pipette, cork holder, chest designed by Arid Levy, 4 vintage tasting glasses, personalized ID plaque, and numbered certificate. The physical packages also include a free ride to the impressive Hennessy estate in Cognac, France.

Alternatively, the owner can choose to keep the physical asset bundles in secure storage at the BlockBar. At the same time, they will have the opportunity to trade the digital tokens of the bottle on the BlockBar trading platform, however, if at some point the physical package of the bottle is redeemed, the corresponding digital token will be burned, permanently stopping the possibility of trading.

Twitter Hennessy

Chris McCann identifies four key trends that are contributing to major changes in financial architecture. We’re going to work from this list and add a few recent details as well as our perspective on these trends:

A fifth trend that McCann adds as a postscript to his article is the rapid adoption of decentralized finance (DeFi). At the end of the blog post, we give our take on the future of DeFi.

Global internet users have climbed to 4.95 billion at the start of 2022, with internet penetration now standing at 62.5 percent of the world’s population. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Binance, Shopify, and others are serving a global customer base from day one. The younger the consumer the higher their digital expectations.

Historically, banks have been limited to local brick-and-mortar business models. New fintechs like Monzo, Revolut, and N26 in the UK and EU have paved the way for digital-first banking products since 2013. Based on their growth, it is clear that consumers love it! Take Revolut as an example. According to Statistica, their customer base grew from 1.5 million in February 2018 to 8 million in December 2019.

As McCann points out, traditional financial services companies were built to serve a limited set of customers within established geographical limits. They started as local institutions and slowly expanded across international borders.

In contrast, new companies like Uber, Airbnb, Binance, Shopify, and others are serving a global customer base from day one. Global internet users have climbed to 4.95 billion at the start of 2022, with internet penetration now standing at 62.5 percent of the world’s total population.

Digital access to money is further reinforced with government mandates all over the world. For example, India has introduced bold policies to go digital by wiping 86% of cash with a 4-hour notice in 2016. During the peak of Covid in 2019, Cash App saw a surge in usage by making it easy for customers to accept their stimulus checks and unemployment benefits in the USA.

In developed countries we predict all financial services will be fully digital within the next decade. Digital adoption in emerging countries should not be discounted. The recent rise of Paystack, Snapscan, Yoco, Stitch, Root, Pineapple, Sendwave, and Flutterwave in Africa is a testament to this. There is a big opportunity to bring financial inclusion to these economies through the use of digitization.

In our previous blog post, we looked at the growing opportunity for businesses to add fintech elements into their business models. This drives customer engagement and increases revenue. Infrastructure and tools are now becoming readily available for businesses to incorporate finance features in existing products.

Angela Strange from A16Z takes it further by saying that every business will be a fintech business. Smaller businesses are better positioned to drive customer engagement than traditional banking channels.

A key argument for embedded finance is the ability to offer a more unified customer experience by combining existing products with added financial offers, e.g. point of sale lending. The offering is made when it is most relevant, the user is engaged and it’s tailored to the user based on the data gathered by the appropriate channel. The sale is frictionless since the user’s information is already on the platform and therefore conversion is only a click away.

Rather than standalone products, businesses can adopt embedded finance to unlock new revenue streams, save on transaction fees, increase sales, retain customers better and gain direct insight into customer spending patterns.

At Rehive we have identified three types of embedded finance models:

Banks have established incredible moats over centuries and service broad market segments:

Unbundling of banking services refers to immerges of new fintechs providing competing banking products or services, but with a more niche and tailored value proposition for the customer. Tom Loverro clearly illustrates the unbundling of Wells Fargo’s services by highlighting new players in the U.S. banking market.

CBInsights have created a similar illustration of the unbundling of Bank of America:

Fintechs gain traction by pursuing narrow verticals and market segments. Examples:

Banks aren’t positioned to move fast and respond to the market need of digitization and niche market segments. New fintech startups are aggressively going after these low-hanging opportunities. As a result, there is a growing need for fintech infrastructure providers to abstract banking capabilities as developer tools.

A new market segment has opened up with a focus on developers. Some refer to the movement as the “Amazon Web Services of finance”. Again, Chris McCann demonstrates developers as a customer best with the illustration below.

Not only do developers want access to data, but, more importantly, they also want access to the underlying functionality that banks provide. For example, being able to open a customer bank account via an API instead of needing a banker behind a branch computer to do so.

Providers like SynapseFi, Wyre, Sila and Treasury Prime in the U.S. are making it easy to build a finance product without needing to invest time and money to secure a bank partner.

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You can find more information here:

✏️ Join the waiting list!

No economic incentives for nodes

IPFS inherited the spirit of “one for all, all for one” in the early days of the Internet. Nodes contribute their own storage and bandwidth for free, and also use the storage and bandwidth of other nodes for free. The advantage of being free is that there are basically no requirements for participation, but there are also many defects: 1) Users often use their home PCs and home bandwidth as IPFS nodes, because home PCs have excess storage space, and home bandwidth is paid monthly without adding extra fees. However, users will not spend money to deploy servers in IDC to purchase bandwidth. The home node is not stable enough, and the upstream bandwidth of the home is much smaller than the downstream, which greatly limits the bandwidth for providing services to others; 2) Free services are easy to be attacked, and the cost of malicious nodes is low, IPFS has to adopt a more complex identity mechanism and mutual evaluation mechanism between nodes, but doing so encourages the tendency of centralization to a certain extent; 3) The user experience is not good enough, due to the instability of many nodes plus the low efficiency of DHT retrieval, users cannot expect an efficient and stable file service.

We are also optimistic that the cost for home users to share bandwidth and storage for decentralized storage is not high, because they originally had to pay monthly bandwidth services for connecting to the Internet. By designing an appropriate economic model, many home users would be happy to Provide stable storage and bandwidth services to form a large-scale decentralized network.

2. Bitswap

3. IPFS absorbs the excellent design of BitTorrent in file transfer and further develops it into Bitswap. BitTorrent divides large files into many blocks, when multiple users download the file at the same time, they exchange blocks that others do not have. This design is particularly good for downloading popular large files. We know that if it is a centralized service, when a large number of users request a large file at the same time, the bandwidth requirements of centralized services are very high, so large video websites have high bandwidth costs, but BitTorrent does not need it. The more users at the same time, the more users provide bandwidth services, which makes the download experience better.

4. There are pros and cons to storing files in blocks. Blocking is not good for download speed. The overhead of establishing a connection with the TCP/IP protocol is not small. There is also a slow start mechanism. A large file is divided into thousands of blocks, because other nodes may not be online, too many attempts to connect are needed, which is inefficient for unpopular large files.

5. For the paid decentralized storage service, the credit and the strategy of Bitswap seems to be unnecessary.

6. 3.DHT retrieval

7. IPFS adopts the widely used Kademlia DHT. For a large network with 10 million nodes, the query requires an average of 20 hops, which may not meet the response time requirements of many applications. Can super nodes be introduced under the current economic model? The retrieval is only completed by stable and powerful super nodes, which greatly improves the user experience. Of course, this reduces decentralization.

8. File blocking

9. There are many benefits of file blocking: 1) Tamper-proof, all content is verified by checksums, and once tampered or damaged, it will be detected immediately; 2) Reuse, the same blocks from different files or different versions of the same file do not have to be storage repeatedly; 3) For paid decentralized services, consumers and supply nodes have a service consensus that needs to be resolved, blocking helps to find a practical solution. 4) Beneficial to file version management.

10. Blocking also has some flaws: 1) A node cannot know whether the content it stored violates the laws of the country where it is located, or whether the content violates the beliefs of the node operator, and it cannot refuse to serve content that it does not want to serve; 2) For large files, dividing them into too many blocks will lead to queries and downloads involving too many nodes. If most nodes are unstable nodes, the user experience will be terrible; 3) For the paid decentralized services, blocking leads to more complex economic models, which is equivalent to a transaction from two-party participation to multi-party participation.

11. The IPFS project team launched Filecoin with economic incentives in 2020, constructed the world’s largest decentralized storage network, but so far, Filecoin has not solved the problem of incentivizing nodes to provide bandwidth and garbage data, making it impractical.

12. 
    

In 2013, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched the satirical cryptocurrency as a way to make fun of bitcoin and the many other cryptocurrencies boasting grand plans to take over the world.

It isn’t totally clear when or why dogecoin captured the heart of Elon Musk.

The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO has spent years talking up the token.

Musk’s tweets with sometimes oblique references to dogecoin often send it to new record-high prices. These posts have also helped drive retail investor interest.

“You have this one guy who is sort of like the cult leader,” said Asheesh Birla, a general manager at Ripple, which manages an alternative cryptocurrency used for payments.

Musk, however, isn’t alone in his celebrity endorsement of the animal-branded token. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Snoop Dogg and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons have all publicly rallied behind dogecoin. Even beef jerky brand Slim Jim is getting in on the action.

“The real value is in today’s meme-driven culture, and doge represents the network value of memetics, which may prove to be enormous,” explained Bucella. “If at some point, the doge community decides to implement a burn or new supply mechanism, via a protocol hard fork, then this value will have a higher likelihood of being retained long-term.”

People are making a killing both holding (hodling) and trading NFTs, but one rarely-advertised aspect of NFTs could cause you to lose lots of money when selling: royalties.

In essence, the original creators can code the NFT so that some percentage of the price when you sell it diverts back to themselves. For example, if you sell an NFT for $100, and the fee is 10%, $10 would automatically go from the $100 you made to the creator.

This is different than practically any other asset— when I sell my house, I don’t have to pay the original builder anything. But with NFTs, you often do!

Permitted royalties vary by marketplace and are determined by the creator. OpenSea caps royalties at 10% of the sales price, while SuperRare always charges a 10% royalty.

SuperRare also charges an additional .5–1% royalty (depending on the number of sales that NFT has gone through) back to previous owners of the NFT.

NFT marketplaces also charge their own transaction fees of usually 2–3%.

NFT royalties reward artists for their work by cutting them in on the upside— when the NFT sale prices go up they make more money. This way, both collectors and artists profit when the value of an artist’s work increases over time.

You can also think of royalties as an incentive for creators. For instance, since 10% of secondary sale proceeds of Gary Vaynerchuk’s VeeFriends goes back to Gary, he has a huge incentive to increase the value of the NFTs.

Royalties can also act as a disincentive to people buying NFTs just to flip quickly. Unless there’s a considerable increase in price to account for a 10% royalty, 2% marketplace fee, perhaps a collectors’ fee, and gas fees, flippers won’t be able to make money.

If you can read the code in the contract, you’ll see it there. Thankfully, there is another way for the code-illiterate like myself (though they don’t make it easy!).

Once you have connected your wallet to an NFT marketplace like OpenSea and pressed “buy it now,” you can see the royalty to the creator the seller will pay.

However, if you want to know the fee before pressing “buy it now,” like when you’re doing an auction, visit the FAQ page of the NFT project to see if a royalty is mentioned. You can also join the project Discord channel or message the creator on Twitter to ask directly.

I hope OpenSea makes the fee visible under the “Properties” or “Project” section soon in the name of transparency.

NFT royalties pay a portion (usually 10%) of the resale price of your NFT back to the original creator.

They exist to reward artists for their creations as the tokens sell on the secondary market. They also act as an incentive structure for creators to continue providing value to the NFT community since the higher the value, the more money they create.

You can find out whether your NFT has a royalty attached via the OpenSea “Buy it now” page, the project’s FAQ, Discord, or by messaging the project team.

It’s important to take NFT royalties (as well as marketplace fees) into account when making NFT sales to make sure you are profiting as much as you actually think you are.

Consider joining my new email list, where I’ll answer your questions on autonomy, travel, investing, and everything improvement.

The platform provides decentralized fundraising in the Cronos ecosystem for project at an early development stage at favorable terms for investors and platform creators.

We are helping to new projects in early stages to raise capital from users, by making them into real clients in GameFi

As a member of the expedition to the Cronos galaxy, you will fly through uncharted solar systems with our team who will help in their exploration and intergalactic token trading.

Our cruiser Crodo is built from automatic decentralized mechanisms, which allows to distribute tokens evenly according to a pre-calibrated algorithm.

Advantages When developing this platform, we wanted to bring a new convenience in the work of IDO sites and become an example for others.

After analyzing the work of other IDO sites, we found the following problems:

-Lack of reminder to participants about the start, approval in the whitelist, the start of the token redemption stage, etc. Because of this, participants sometimes forgot to enter the site on time and lost the chance to buy a token at a bargain price.

✔For this, a chat bot developed in Telegram, which will warn you in advance about an important action.

A chat bot was developed in Telegram ‘Crodo bot’ -Slowly running site servers that do not cope well with a sharp increase in traffic, which leads to problems accessing the IDO site at right time.

✔ This problem is solved by using CDN and DDOS protection through CloudFlare.com and hosting servers in Kubernetes on dynamically virtual servers in DigitalOcean.com

Fast server with protection against a sudden increase in trafic

-Staking system without additional motivation to keep tokens locked. This causes the price to drain at an unfavorable market period.

✔ Implemented an additional motivation system for holders of frozen tokens.

-Lack of convenient ambassador programs

✔ An ambassador program was created with the ability to send tasks monitor their status, view the balance of points earned, reminders of new tasks, a competitive system, an affiliate program

-Participants do not understand projects and buy everything in a row

✔ Project integration options have been developed to engage the audience for real use

Looking at the development of Crypto.com, we began to understand the large scale of its spreading around the world. The company stood out not only with large-scale marketing but also with really useful functions:

The main disadvantage of the Crypto.com network was the inability to develop decentralized applications. To this, Crypto.com has developed an additional Cronos network. It has implemented EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) support, which allows the use of smart contracts, as well as a bridge with the main network, which allows you to conveniently exchange tokens https://cronos.crypto.org/bridge

At the moment, the development of projects in the network is just beginning, so developers and users really lack the IDO platform, with the help of which the network will develop even faster.

Team experience — 10 years in personal and joint projects, that created business solutions for companies.

Contacts:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Crodo_io

GitHub: https://github.com/Crodo-io

Instagram: www.instagram.com/crodo.io

Telegram Channel: https://t.me/+ZIYIOeZvU4dmYjQ6

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpDC5h1Sb8Kp8LY6mlCci6w