Stablecoins also provide crypto investors with a “safe haven” when cryptocurrency price volatility is high. So when cryptocurrencies go on a wild roller-coaster ride, as they have in recent months, demand for stablecoins rises. This tends to push them off their pegs, which rather destroys their purpose. So when people are cashing out of risky crypto into nice, safe stablecoins and USDC is starting to look expensive, Jeremy Allaire cranks up the printing presses.
The point being, all these institutions need funding, all these middle entities. It’s become quite common in crypto to parrot the same kind of liberatory promises of a Web 2, where you’re borrowing again from the romance of the independence economy. It’s like, no, no, no. The opportunity here is to rebuild lots of different competing institutions. I don’t want there to be just one, and I don’t want everyone to be atomized. But we need these scenes and factions to be established again, and that’s absolutely happening.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s crypto fundraising effort announced that it would be conducting an airdrop to those who had made donations. (An airdrop is an unsolicited distribution of a cryptocurrency token or coin, usually for free, to numerous wallet addresses.) There were few details of what crypto might be dropped, but a reasonable guess would have been some sort of “thank you” token with little explicit monetary value.
“I’ve been drawing ever since I was really young,” Yang said. “I like to constantly take in information, whether it’s the commercials, movies, music, videos, TV shows, anime.” But with Asian parents, there was a part of her life where she had to “forget about” the artsy part of herself.
My own support for it, by the way, does not stem from “some philosophy of libertarianism or whatever.” It is grounded in the practical reality that – to quote the pseudonymous Web 3 thought leader 6529: “There are no other constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact.” The idea: It’s all very well for governments to profess support for free speech, but if they prevent citizens from obtaining or sending funds to pay for, say, a computer or for internet access, they effectively deny them that right.
Building on Axie’s popularity, leading global gaming studio Ubisoft announced Ubisoft Quartz, a platform for collecting and trading gaming NFTs. The backlash from gamers in its community, however, was immense, and the project died a silent death. Gamers were repulsed by the blatant revenue grab of an NFT model, which added little to the overall game experience.