How to Survive a Bear Market

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Altcoins, Bitcoin, crypto, Economy, Stablecoins, TipsLeave a comment

The year has not started well for crypto investors. Many of you will be trapped in the falling market and unable to cash out without incurring heavy losses. According to data from Intotheblock, 28% of Bitcoin investors and over 31% of Ethereum investors are in a situation where the assets are worth less than they paid for them.

The question most would like an answer to, is how can I survive this? Here are a few suggestions.

  1. Use dollar-cost averaging

If  you have stablecoins or fiat, you can buy the dip. But when you do, the most recommended strategy is to implement something called “dollar-cost averaging (DCA).” For example, let’s say you have $1,000 in reserve funds. A good DCA strategy would be to break up the amount into five tranches of $200 or even 10 tranches of $100 and place trades using those smaller amounts. So, instead of spending all your money in one go, it usually works out better to buy a small amount and wait to see if the asset falls in price further. If it does, buy a little more, and so on.

  • Diversify your investments

One way to hedge your bets is to use DCA for a range of different crypto assets. To choose your assets, look at the following: 1. Previous all-time-high; 2. Past performance and 3. Future roadmap announcements.

You should also look at whether an asset is considered to be ‘overbought’ or ‘oversold’. If an asset is deemed to be ‘overbought’, it means that its price is considered to be too high and that it will fall soon. If it is oversold, its price is considered to be undervalued, and that is usually a sign that prices will rise soon.

  • Don’t panic

In a bear market, you really need to manage your emotions as much as your money. Fear and greed can lead to investors making foolish, snap decisions that result in losses. Greed, for example, often leads to investors staying in a a trade beyond your take profit level in the hope the asset will rise even higher in price. What you need to do is set a stop for losses. Basically, take profits when you can and don’t panic when the bears arrive!

Is Aave making the case for decentralized social media?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, DeFi, Innovation, Web 3.0Leave a comment

What shall we call ‘decentralized social media’? Decentralized finance was easily turned into DeFi, but DeSM or DeSocMed doesn’t have quite the same ring. Still, somebody will come up with a shortened version in time.

One of the proponents of decentralized social media is Stani Kulechov, the founder of the Aave DeFi protocol. He has been tweeting teasers about his support for decentralized SM platforms, pointing out that there is a widespread belief that the current SM platforms generally ‘suck’. Twitter has also been talking about it, which surely points to that’s the way it is considering going.

According to The Defiant, five persons in crypto told the website that Kulechov has sent them a cryptic text asking them to sign up to ‘lens.dev. However, The Defiant was unable to find out from Aave or Kulechov any more information about this site.

The Lens Protocol

Follow the lens.dev link yourself and you’ll find yourself at a simple site that contains a  short letter expressing dissatisfaction with Web2.0 social media companies, such as Facebook and Twitter. The letter says, “Web3 brings forth a renewed hope for what social media can be. It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used. We can have the power to own and monetize our content and community with no middlemen or centralized data harvesting.”

Should you wish to sign the letter, you do so with a tweet. The tweet includes a cryptographic signature that uses their Ethereum wallet and text that usually reads “I should own this tweet @lensprotocol #digitalroots.”

This is not the first attempt to decentralize social media. Other efforts include STEEM, which emphasized blogging; FEEDWEAVE, which was built on Arweave and Cent is an experiment in selling content. None of them have made much impact on the SM world, but as The Defiant says, “the top minds in the space seem to believe that this is still a crackable use case for one blockchain or another.” Indeed, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX said, “I think social media on the blockchain — I continue to think this could be absolutely huge. I think it solves a lot of existing pain points, which are really coming to the forefront of society right now.” Of the others who have been talking up the idea, one supporter is Vitalik Buterin, who has proposed an SM platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. However, perhaps Aave will beat him to it, and these cryptic tweets are just the beginning of the platform’s attempt to finally deliver a blockchain-based, decentralized social media platform. Then perhaps we’ll know what to call it!

NFTs Rock for Musicians and Music Fans

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Metaverse, NFTsLeave a comment

NFTs have so far proved to be popular in several industries, including art, gaming and luxury brands. The reason for this is that they have demonstrated an important use case: they create a lasting connection between brands and their customers.

Enter a new industry eager to experience some NFT magic: the billion-dollar event-ticketing industry. According to Rachel Wolfson, the sector of this industry most likely to be disrupted by non-fungible tokens is the online event-ticketing sector, which is expected to reach $60 billion by 2026. The form this is likely to take will be the emergence of NFT ticket platforms or marketplaces issuing virtual tickets on a blockchain network.

Colby Mort, head of marketing and communications at Get Protocol, a company that is an NFT ticketing infrastructure provider using the Polygon network, commented, “Since 2016, Get Protocol has processed over 1 million on-chain registered tickets for events across the world, with 500,000 being NFT tickets processed during 2021.”

Essentially it is hoped that NFTs will solve some of the inefficiencies faced by traditional ticketing systems. Josh Katz, CEO of YellowHeart, a marketplace for music and live-event NFT ticketing, explained that NFT tickets give fans more control, as well as offering ongoing royalties for artists. He has pointed out that with the traditional ticketing system there are a number of issues, including that of ticket touts who inflate prices: “There are tremendous challenges around ticketing today, including counterfeiting, bad actors, rampant fraud and, more than anything, fragmentation. For instance, when a major ticketing platform releases a ticket, it can be bought and sold across secondary marketplaces multiple times. NFT tickets solve all of these problems.”

In his view, one of the benefits of NFT ticketing is that it redirects money from third-party ticket sellers back to artists, because they can pay out royalties, as well as benefit stakeholders and event organisers. As he says, “The artist take is 95% primary and 5% secondary, currently. But when YellowHeart secondary opens in Q2, artists will be able to set their own secondary rate and keep up to 100% of revenue flow.” That’s good news for artists.

The control over secondary markets is possibly the most important aspect of NFT tickets. It is well known that ‘ticket brokers’ buy up event tickets in the thousands to resell at inflated prices, and the NFT tickets will remove that market, which disadvantages both artists and fans.

So what do artists think? Marc Brownstein, co-founder and bassist of The Disco Biscuits, supporters and users of NFTs said: “As creators and artists, being able to have some stake in the secondary ticket market is valuable. For example, if you are releasing a 500-ticket show and each ticket is $50, these can sell out instantly and then be listed on Stubhub for $500 each. This is a scenario artists know too well, so having commission on secondary sales is very opportunistic.”

And Katz revealed that the Kings of Leon tokenised NFT album generated close to $1.45 million during the first five days of sales on OpenSea. That may be due to the fact that fans didn’t only get an album, they had an opportunity to experience VIP fan experiences, band meet-and-greets, exclusive tour merchandise and more.

Even if there are challenges to NFT ticketing in music and sport, there is a belief that it will nevertheless expand during 2022 with the rise of the Metaverse. Katz added that YellowHeart is looking into applying its NFT tickets within Metaverse environments, although he did say that Metaverse ecosystems will never be able to fully replace live concerts, but they can complement them.

Web 3 is nothing new

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, Metaverse, NFTs, Web 3.0Leave a comment

The idea of a decentralized web has been in the minds of many for around 20 years, but when you read much of the press about it today, you’d be forgiven for believing it was a brand new concept.

The concept is a response to the domination of Web 2.0 by the Big Tech companies, Facebook and Google in particular, explains Michael J. Casey, and their “data-driven economics.” Most of us understand by now exactly how those two companies in particular exploited the web and us, even as at the same time they reunited us with old friends, helped us grow businesses and made searching so more intuitive. After all, who remembers using search engines in the era Before Google? It was much slower and you really needed to know how to search.

However there is quite some debate raging around the concept of Web 3. On the one hand, as Casey reports, there is Chris Dixon who is a fervent Web 3 supporter and a believer that Web 3 projects are creating real value, and on the other, Jack Dorsey, who claims the “term is just a buzzword exploited by venture capitalists to boost their equity and token investment.” Casey says in response to this, “That smart people – including two famous “Tims” – have been exploring an exit from Web 2.0 for so long suggests Web 3 projects have worthy ambitions and that there will be public benefits and business payoffs if they succeed.” But he concedes, “this long history reminds us that solving a very big problem is hard and that investors would be wise to take grandiose promises with a grain of salt.”

It is possible not to side with either Chris or Jack, and instead focus on the core structural issues with Web 2.0 and why there’s a need to change them. The fundamental problem with Web 2.0 is the misalignment between the interests of the giant companies that dominate the Internet and those of the general public. Casey says that whilst blockchain is a solution, it is not the only one. As Casey says, “We need a mix of technologies (both decentralized and centralized), regulation and economic rationale to enable business models that bring those competing private and public interests together.”

Let’s not forget that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, said in 2006 that the web needed an overhaul. He allegedly coined the term Web 3.0, in reference to the evolution of universal data formats and artificial intelligence removing the need for intermediation by third parties to allow a true “machine-to-machine” communication network.

Currently, Web 3.0 is primarily associated with blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs, and the debate is still ongoing about what Web 3.0 could potentially be in the end, but as Casey remarks, there is still a long way to go before we can escape The Matrix!