Google + NFTs And Web 3.0

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GOOGLE INKS DEAL WITH DAPPER LABS

In a story broken by ForbesGoogle’s

GOOG
cloud arm 
has joined forces with Dapper Labs, a Canadian startup best known as the developer of the $680 million NBA Top Shot marketplace, to support and scale Dapper’s Flow blockchain. Through the multi-year partnership, announced on Monday, Google Cloud will act as a network operator, offering its infrastructure to help Flow scale.

The Flow network already supports more than 50 applications, including some of the most popular NFT collections such as NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, and now more than 2,000 developers building on Flow will be able to easily connect to Flow access nodes through Google’s suite of cloud services. As the worldwide web transitions into what is often called Web 3.0, an internet of decentralized networks, this latest move positions Google to target Amazon’s

AMZN
market lead by branding itself as a developer-friendly alternative.


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LITECOIN-WALMART HOAX

Enthusiasts of Litecoin, an early competitor to Bitcoin conceived in 2011, woke up to a seemingly exciting announcement Monday morning. The Litecoin Foundation, focused on advancing the token and the namesake open-source software project, retweeted a press release sent out by GlobeNewswire that referenced a partnership with Walmart

WMT
A number of media organizations (but not Forbes) picked up the news that the U.S.’ biggest retailer had agreed to accept the cryptocurrency as payment at its stores…only to find out shortly thereafter that the announcement was false.

Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove confirmed that the press release was fake and said the retailer had been in touch with the newswire company to investigate how the false press release saw the light of day. The creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, clarified that the Litecoin Foundation had nothing to do with the scam, saying: “We try our best to not tweet fake news and this time we really screwed up.” As the story goes with pump-and-dump schemes, Litecoin rose and fell approximately 20% amid the confusion.

A DARK DAY FOR SOLANA

Ethereum competitor Solana bills itself as “the fastest blockchain in the world and the fastest-growing ecosystem in crypto.” Its native cryptocurrency SOL has tripled in less than a month to a market capitalization of more than $41 billion on the back of the network’s foray into NFTs (non-fungible tokens), typically created and sold on the Ethereum blockchain. But a rapid surge in transaction volume prompted the blockchain to crash on Tuesday. Solana’s founder Anatoly Yakovenko said on Twitter the disruption was caused by bots flooding the transaction processing queue, which caused an outage that lasted for almost 20 hours . It appears that Solana’s validator community has successfully restarted the network since.

Following the stoppage, the network’s token SOL lost ground, nosediving towards the mid-$140 range Tuesday night, according to Messari, and continued a downward momentum falling below $140 on Friday.

BLOCKCHAIN 50 SPOTLIGHT: A.P. Moller-Maersk

The Danish shipping and logistics giant’s blockchain, TradeLens, is digitizing supply chain information. Since its August 2018 launch, it has onboarded roughly 50% of container ships around the world. In 2020, it processed 1 billion shipments, 30 million containers and 14 million documents, more than double the previous year. Maersk has also partnered with Microsoft

MSFT
to process marine insurance using blockchain tech.

ELSEWHERE

Bitcoin ATM Burned in El Salvador Amid Anti-Bukele Protests [Bloomberg]

The Beguiling Promise of Decentralised Finance [The Economist]

OpenSea Parts Ways With Executive Caught Trading Ethereum NFTs on Insider Info [Decrypt]