Mask Network is a portal that allows users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and even DApps (Defi, NFTs, DAO) over the top of social networks without migrating, and thereby creating a decentralized Applet(DApplet) ecosystem

Mask Network

2023 has been a somewhat slow year for . There are fewer investments because of the liquidity crunch, and VCs have a lower appetite for risk because of rising interest rates. Web3 While there have been in the past few weeks, it is undeniable that the spate of investment in Web3 products has reduced from its 2021 peaks. This slowdown in investments has also contributed to the liquidity crunch in crypto as well. encouraging signs Despite this, interesting and exciting projects are still receiving funding from VCs. In this article, we will be taking a look at the top 5 Web3 investments in the first quarter of 2023. The projects on this list have recently received millions of dollars in funding from DWF Labs. Despite the current liquidity crunch in crypto, DWF Labs has doled out over a hundred and fifty million in funding in the first quarter of 2023 alone. This means they are one of the — or perhaps the this year. It all goes to show just how much faith the firm has in the future of crypto and DeFi projects. most — active venture capitalist in DeFi However, it's important to know that access to investment isn't a guarantee of success. The companies listed below might eventually fail despite the investment in them. That's because crypto is going through a trying time, and the projects that will survive this will be very special indeed crypto winter Synthetix SNX The first project on this list is Synthetix. Synthetix is a decentralized liquidity layer on Ethereum and Optimism. Over the years, Optimism has served as a backend for some of the most innovative projects in DeFi. Over the past two to three years, Synthetix has displayed extraordinarily deep liquidity and composability. Despite the crypto ecosystem experiencing the worst liquidity crunch ever, Synthetix has remained standing. This has put it in the right position to power products like Lyra, Polynomial, and Kwenta. With Synthetix’s liquidity network, dApps now can offer their users a lot of financial derivatives with low slippage, low fees, and exciting use cases. All of these have made Synthetix an attractive option for VC funding. In late March 2023, the project entered into a partnership worth with DWF Labs. The value of the partnership shows just how much the market believes in Synthetix and just how far the project can grow. $20 million As part of the funding deal with DWF Labs, the firm will concentrate on integrating Synthetix’s perpetual futures into DWF Lab’s business as a part of the funding deal. The deal will also seek to improve Synthetix’s liquidity across both centralized and decentralized platforms. Yield Guild Games YGG Yield Guild Games (YGG) is the world’s first and biggest web3 gaming guild where players can enrich themselves as they find their community, discover games, and level up together. YGG is the first gaming guild in Web3 to give these opportunities to average gamers. Over the past three years, the guild has only grown stronger and has gotten even more members. The guild empowers its community to build its Metaverse résumé through initiatives such as Web3 Metaversity in partnership with Nas Academy, and the achievement-driven community token distribution protocol, Guild Advancement Program (GAP). YGG is also focused on supporting the burgeoning competitive web3 esports scene and has its own team of elite esports players, called YGG Elite, who have been competing and winning in various web3 game tournaments across the world. In the middle of February 2023, YGG announced its new venture arm, YGG Ventures with to support web3, gaming studios, and the blockchain gaming infrastructure. According to Beryl Li, the co-founder of YGG, the fundraising came at a perfect time because the Web3 winter had bottomed out. Currently, YGG is backed by the biggest investors in crypto – a16z, DWF Labs, BITKRAFT, Delphi Digital, Animoca Brands, Polygon, Mechanism Capital, and ParaFi Capital among others. intentions to raise US$75 million Mask Network MASK The Mask Network is no newcomer to the Web3 scene as the network has been live since 2017. Today, the network is a leader in the emerging decentralized social network scene. And that scene is only growing, especially as fears and uncertainties around traditional social media companies like Twitter continue to grow. Mask Network is also one of the earliest community members of the Bluesky protocol, the decentralized social network founded by Jack Dorsey. The network also maintains the most active instances of Mastodon and is looking to expand even faster. Over the last seven years, the Mask Network has accumulated over a hundred million dollars in funding. This is proof of the viability of the Mask idea, and it shows exactly why the network’s backers continue to back it. In the middle of January 2023 in the Mask Network by purchasing five million dollars’ worth of Mask tokens. DWF Labs invested According to DWF Labs, this investment would be used to continue expanding the network and strengthening the emerging decentralized social media scene. Since Mask Network is arguably the leader of this subsystem it just makes sense more investment in the project would lead to even further growth. Conflux CFX Conflux CFX is the only regulatory-compliant blockchain in China, which gives it a unique market advantage in the region. In the past year or so, the chain has experienced enormous growth. For example, the Chinese answer to Instagram, Xiaohongshu, has integrated with the network to create a permissionless mainnet. Now, Xiaohonghsu allows users to display their NFTs on their profiles as a result of this integration. Another example of the growth that Conflux CFX is experiencing can be seen in its integration with China Telecom, China’s second-largest wireless carrier. China Telecom has now partnered with Conflux to develop blockchain-enabled SIM cards. This will increase the adoption of Web3 technology in the long run. Interestingly, the market has responded rather gleefully to the strides Conflux CFX has been taking. Despite being in a crypto winter, the blockchain’s native coin has increased its value by since the beginning of 2023. And there is no sign it is slowing down. more than x10 Conflux CFX has not only seen rapid improvements in its market cap since 2023, but it has also drawn the attention of VCs. DWF Labs recently of the network’s native token after signing an investment agreement with it. That made the network one of the very few projects receiving millions of dollars in funding in 2023. bought about $10 million Flare FLR Flare (FLR) is an EVM-based layer 1 chain created to provide developers with decentralized access to data from off-chain sources like other blockchains and the internet. The goal of the chain is to enable the creation of blockchain applications that are more useful to more people through access to real-world data. Developers can use the chain’s data acquisition protocols for building bridges, cross-chain messaging, innovative DeFi products linked to real-world triggers, and other such tools which might not have been previously possible to build in a decentralized way. In 2021, Flare FLR raised about $11 million from its seed round. This investment went into propelling the network, and now it has built a network that is fast, secure, low fee, and with very little carbon footprint. In the first quarter of 2023, DWF Labs made a move to expand this network by investing an undisclosed amount in the network. The hope is that this new investment will help the network build new use cases and monetization models. Fetch.AI Fetch.ai is a platform that powers decentralized applications with AI capabilities. Today, Fetch.ai is arguably one of the few projects in Web3 trying to power innovation through AI. The project creates what it calls smart agents that help builders act on behalf of humans and organizations. It also has an AI service that automates decentralized machine learning. The goal of Fetch.ai is to create a decentralized system that has a limited need for user interaction and intermediaries. This will reduce costs and increase operational efficiency as well. To Fectch.ai, the only way to build this network of automated agents is through comprehensive machine learning. Through this, the project will be able to build stronger agents that will be able to perform even more complex machine logic on their own. At the end of March 2023, DWF Labs worth about $40 million. The goal of the partnership is to support the development and deployment of AI agents through Fetch.ai. The investment will also support the research and development needed to give AI agents an even stronger use case in Web3. announced a strategic partnership with Fetch.ai The one thing these investments in Web3 have shown is that there is still a lot of faith among investors in the underlying principles of decentralized technology. That faith may just be what Web3 needs to power through its current liquidity crisis.

Top 6 Web3 Investments in the First Quarter of 2023

Moonshot Commons, a global Generation-Z Web3 builder community backed by 10+ top-tier investors, successfully concluded its winter hackathon themed “Rethink, Restate, and Recharge.” The winter hackathon was the 7th Hackathon that Moonshot Commons has hosted, as the Web3 builder community celebrates its second anniversary in January. Speaking on the occasion, the founding team said, “even amidst crypto winter, Moonshot is still determined to support smart, scrappy, and globally-minded builders, founders, and researchers in the crypto space.” More than 1000 participants, in 216 teams, building in fields such as infrastructure, SocialFi, open finance, and DAO tooling responded, resulting in 22 projects being crowned and demo-ed their projects to 50+ participating VCs and receiving credits and prizes from sponsors and partners like , , , , , , and . All of them also have the opportunity to receive post-hackathon incubation support as batch 5 members of Moonshot’s founder community. KCC Mask Network Mirror World Chainbase Signum Capital UOB Vnetures AWS From Team Selection to Apollo Demo Day The Hackathon was conducted in three weeks - from Dec. 19, 2022, to Jan. 9, 2023. Starting with opening addresses from speakers including partner Xing Liu, CEO Evan Shapiro, Professor Kani Chen, and Founder Suji during the event inauguration, hackers were provided with “closed-door workshops” led by industry mentors, cohort office hours organized by Moonshot community members, and personalized pitch preparation sessions supported by top-tier investors. On Jan. 14, 2023, 22 teams were selected to enter the final battlefield “Apollo Demo Day” and showcased their creativity and innovation to 50+ VCs, funds, and media companies from across the globe. Sequoia China Mina Protocol HKUST Mask Network Unlike many hackathons which are usually backed by a single sponsor and require hackers to only build on the sponsored network, Moonshot's biannual hackathons aim to provide an open platform for Web3 project development and thus do not limit participants to a specific chain. The founding team believes that it is far more important to onboard the next generation of developers to the Web3 world rather than fight over which chain they build on or which solution they adopt to accelerate project growth. Kevin, the Founder of Moonshot Commons, expands upon the team’s vision to Hackernoon: “According to a , the number of monthly active Web3 developers reached over 23,300 as of December 2022, compared to over 20 million Web2 developers in the world. Through our hackathons and other initiatives, we want to break down the barriers for Web2 developers and establish Moonshot as the gateway to the Web3 world.” Jan. 16 report from Electric Capital One way that Moonshot supports participating projects is by hosting “closed-door workshops” led by industry mentors. This winter, Moonshot saw strong and active engagement from its founder community and brought 30 of them to interact with fellow hackers live. Sample topics and speakers include: “Cold start and GTM strategies for Web3 applications” by Founder Charles Galxe “Product design of Web3 decentralized application layer” by Founder Chess Quest3 “Opportunities and applications of zero-knowledge proof” by Co-Founder Victor Manta Network “The future and opportunities of the Move ecosystem” by Founder Wendy Momentum Safe “The spread of Web3 innovation in a decentralized world” by Founder Wu Xiao ChainIDE “Web3 community building and marketing promotion” by Founder Wilson Cyberconnect Following three weeks of intense hacking, learning, and networking, Moonshot’s “Apollo Demo Day” took place on Jan. 14, 2023. The event featured an opening address by Hash Global founder KK and a closing address by ByteTrade founder Dr. Lu, in addition to active participation and live Q&A from representatives of 50+ VCs including Sequoia China, , , , , and . HashKey Zhen Fund IOSG Matrix Partners China Redpoint Ventures Meet the Top Project Teams These 22 teams emerged victorious: an NFT-gated messaging app Chataverse: a UGC platform that combines 3D and AI, allowing users to create, share, and monetize virtual environments and AR decorations with ease ST World (System Terminal): a decentralized organization and community management tool based on the ENS subdomain Org3: a decentralized crowdfunding ecosystem governed by $KOM token Kommunitas: a decentralized open science community powered by blockchain and AI Symposium Lab: a decentralized NFT AMM, enabling instant NFT swaps and better price discovery Ladder Protocol: privacy-focused zkVM for developers Eigen Network: a Machine-Fi fitness-to-earn application project Caldance: helps Web3 builders create user-owned professional identities and warm intro networks using SBTs and verifiable credentials Lewk: a decentralized Web3 metaphysics platform Ascendant Network: a decentralized NFT marketplace that supports leverage trading, Share2Earn, and Play2Earn Winner: a next-generation on-chain podcasting platform that aims to make the spread and evolution of ‘sound civilization’ more free and diverse xCast: Kindle in the Web3 era - come to The Reader and invest in the next “The Three-Body Problem” The Reader: easy-to-use next-generation digital wallet ZK MPC Wallet: trust-worthy and security measurement platform for Web3 projects Descrypto: a Web3 intelligent investment research community MemeBook: : a Web3 marketing and loyalty management platform based on account abstraction and brand NFT Tristan Alliance brings beverage brands and consumers together via NFTs with gamification and socialization features to build a digital community centered around beverages DrinkUP: : provides gamers with a high-quality decentralized game social open platform to help game producers gather players and users Gameland a disruptive way to interact with an array of Web3 Defi dapps Avault: an SBT-based open social network Discoverse: provide users with clear and transparent dealmaking derivatives trading Scale Protocol: a non-ownership-transferred, collateral-free, protocol Ghost NFT: allows anyone to send subjective, relational, or programmable SBT based on social layer protocol Solas: Find details about all Moonshot Commons’ 2022 Winter Hackathon winners and their video pitches in the . If interested in any of the projects above, please fill out this or reach out to to be connected. pamphlet Typeform founders@moonshotcommons.com About Moonshot Commons , based in Hong Kong, Singapore, and New York, we’re a global Gen Z Web3 builder community backed by HashKey Capital, ChainIDE, Mask Network, Hash Global, Zhen Fund, and more. Within two years, our founders raised over $100 million from VCs — with many more launching soon. Moonshot Commons

Hackers Shine: Moonshot Commons Web3 Hackathon Concludes Successfully

Hackers Shine: Moonshot Commons Web3 Hackathon concluye con éxito

Les pirates brillent : le hackathon Moonshot Commons Web3 se termine avec succès

हैकर्स शाइन: मूनशॉट कॉमन्स वेब3 हैकथॉन सफलतापूर्वक संपन्न हुआ

Hackers Shine: Moonshot Commons Web3 Hackathon が成功裏に終了

Hackers brilham: Moonshot Commons Web3 Hackathon conclui com sucesso

Hackers Shine: Moonshot Commons Web3 Hackathon kết thúc thành công

黑客大放异彩：Moonshot Commons Web3 黑客马拉松圆满结束

The founders of , an identity-oracle protocol connecting , are proud to announce its first alpha launch this winter. Their first product will allow users to securely share social media and content consumption behaviors with interested parties. Their initial partners include on-chain social graphs, DID protocols, NFT projects, web3 games, guilds, and web2 IPs/brands. Clique web2 and web3 About Clique — How it Works is launching a decentralized identity-oracle protocol that re-imagines the way user social behaviors can be utilized for community marketing, brand awareness, and creator output. Clique On the surface, Clique provides projects, protocols, brands and IP owners with an ingenious way to incentivize community engagement and user-generated content (UGC), one of the most valuable and organic types of marketing. It also provides a way for companies to send their marketing budget and other rewards straight to the consumer, saving on expensive rewards programs and PPC advertising. In a nutshell, the platform empowers to easily find and reward users for garnering attention about their products or services. their community Users can enter their platform, which then compiles information across different social media accounts (e.g., Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) and content distribution services (e.g., YouTube). and authentication middlewares are used to prove end-user behavior and reputation. As a result, original creators are made aware of fans at multiple levels from UGC contributions to basic engagement, and can reward them accordingly. Tech like privacy-preserving oracles Generic influencer marketing has become extremely popular over past years; however, the traditional method can be costly and audience limiting. With Clique, projects and brands alike can incentivize fans and contributors of their products or services directly. Why is this important? Bootstrapping communities and scaling engagement is a challenge commonly faced by many projects and brands. Clique’s interoperable platform design allows anyone to participate without risk. So, companies don’t need to pay substantial upfront fees or spend time dredging up social credit. Instead, they can scale rewards for all users and fans based on provable contributions to build networks from the ground up. User’s can easily participate in the various programs run by Clique, since they are being incentivized for user behaviors they are already enacting on a day to day basis. Overall, Clique gives companies an opportunity like never before by facilitating direct consumer-to-product/service engagement and interaction. Brands, companies, and projects can use Clique to save those precious marketing dollars, while fans get to enjoy rewards and discounts for interactions and behaviors they already have. To top it off, their privacy-preserving oracle technology ensures that user data is safe; it is not collected and sold to third-party companies for future use. Visit the to stay on top of developments as the group at Clique continues to test their proof of concept. Those interested in getting in at the ground level as a primary marketer can contact the team at the email below. Clique website More About Clique The team has raised $3 million in seed funding earlier this year from investors including GGV, AllianceDAO, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Qiming Venture Partners, SevenX, Sky9, Mirana Ventures, Smrti Lab, Mask Network, SNZ Crypto, Dweb3, Formless, Redline DAO, Artichoke Capital, Tess Ventures and various angels. Clique was previously incubated at Stanford Blockchain Accelerator. They were also in the last cohort of AllianceDAO (ALL8). Recently featured in , the team is currently building out the public alpha version of their product. The founders Kevin Yu and Jaden Yan have a strong vision of the identity/privacy space and firmly believe that it will play a significant role in the way social networks grow and evolve over the coming years. Bloomberg.com

Meet Clique: An Identity Oracle That Brings Web2 User Behaviors to Web3

Hi Deng Chao, welcome Please tell us about your journey and the motivation behind ? Ishan Pandey: to our series “Behind the Startup.” HashKey Capital Hello, Ishan. Thanks for the interview invitation. This is DC, CEO of Hash Key Capital and we are an asset manager investing in blockchain technology and digital assets, managing over US$1 billion in client assets since inception. Our goal as one of Asia's largest crypto funds and an early corporate investor in Ethereum is to help bring cryptocurrency into the mainstream while also bridging the gap between the Web2 and Web3 economies. Since its inception in 2015, Hong Kong- and Singapore-based venture capital firm Hash Key Capital has invested in over 500 projects across a wide range of sectors, from Layer1 protocols and crypto finance to Web3 infrastructure, NFTs and the Metaverse. Deng Chao: exclusively Besides Ethereum, our portfolio also includes Cosmos, FTX, Coinlist, Aztec, Blockdaemon, dYdX, imToken, Animoca Brands, Falcon X, Space and time, Mask Network, Polkadot, Moonbeam and Galxe (Originally Project Galaxy). : Vested Interest Disclosure The author is an independent contributor publishing via our . Be it through direct compensation, media partnerships, or networking. The author has a vested interest in the company/ies mentioned in this story. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR brand-as-author program Tell us about the License that you obtained from the Securities and Futures Commission (‘SFC’) of Hong Kong. Why is this license important and how will it help the company? Ishan Pandey: Since 9th Sep 2022, HashKey Capital Limited has secured SFC’s Type 9 license uplift to manage virtual asset portfolio. HashKey Capital Limited will be among the first group of licenced virtual asset managers in Hong Kong, and will be able to manage funds that invest solely in virtual assets in accordance with SFC regulations. Obtaining a Type 9 licence demonstrates our continued dedication to developing Hong Kong's and Asia's blockchain ecosystems. Deng Chao: 100% What are the current business lines of Hash Key Capital and how does it help the crypto industry as a whole? Ishan Pandey: o: Hash Key Capital is an asset manager with three dedicated funds investing exclusively in blockchain technology and digital assets. We see ourselves as a Web3 ecosystem builder, not just following a thematic-driven investment strategy. Deng Cha Besides that, we focus on post-investment management, including empowerment that helps projects expand their markets, design products, find target audiences and provide strategic support through active management. Meanwhile, we have been actively engaged in ecosystem contribution. The HashKey ecosystem is the official partner with Polkadot and Dfinity while helping them host high-quality Bootcamp and hackathons. What are your views on upcoming DeFi and Stablecoin regulations by US regulators? Ishan Pandey: Devcon 6 has shown that regulatory changes in DeFi and stablecoin will be significant in the future. The industry’s DeFi players have already begun to embrace compliance, especially those large companies. Our opinion is that stablecoins such as USDC will go further in the future. Overcollateralization will be the new norm for most stablecoins. For many projects, compliance will also become a critical factor that needs to be concerned about. Although DeFi is globally distributed, most of the teams behind DeFi will not go against regulators. The upside of more regulation is that scrutiny will make it easier for institutions to come in. Deng Chao: Do you think the declining Bitcoin and the insolvency of big cryptocurrency players like Celsius will adversely affect investments in the blockchain industry? Ishan Pandey: By the nature of competition, it is quite normal that players that start to lag behind will be washed out in the early stages of the market. When the market condition is good, it is hard to tell which projects are doing better. Once it goes down, it actually helps us automatically screen projects. Deng Chao: Do you think regulations and compliance are necessary to increase trust and sustain growth of the blockchain industry? Ishan Pandey: Regulation and compliance are indeed essential for traditional investors to secure their trust in the industry. In our opinion, it depends on the institutions and what they are looking for. Meanwhile, adding many traditional users to the market, that is to say, mass adoption, will certainly require compliance and regulation. Hash Key Capital has insisted on being fully compliant since the beginning of our business, and we are also in constant contact with the regulators to comprehend the visionaries from the authorities' perspective. Despite our Type 9 license uplift in Hong Kong, we are also in the process of applying for a CMS license in Singapore. Deng Chao: According to you, what is the next big thing in Blockchain technology? Ishan Pandey: There are two things to consider here. First, Ethereum will become more and more user-friendly from a technical standpoint. With roll-up and sharding running at total capacity, Ethereum will become an all-around better platform. Second, blockchain needs to bring in more traditional users, and it is vital to offer products and services that appeal to them. In this regard, the recent discussion of abstract accounts can be considered a phenomenon. Deng Chao: Don’t forget to like and share the story!

Regulatory Changes in DeFi and Stablecoin will be Significant 

Los cambios regulatorios en DeFi y Stablecoin serán significativos

DeFi और Stablecoin में नियामक परिवर्तन महत्वपूर्ण होंगे

NFTs and the metaverse have already taken the world by storm. The notion dates back to the early days of blockchain, more than seven years ago, but we have only recently seen the widespread implementation of this technology. CryptoKitties sparked the NFT collectibles frenzy in 2017. Following this, the development of Cryptopunks and BoredApes pushed the prominence of NFTs further into the mainstream. Since then, NFTs have proved to be a game-changer in the crypto industry. In addition, NFTs can solve real-world problems due to their unique feature of non-fungibility. Similarly, another hot topic of discussion is the metaverse. This technology is another revolution focused on building the next-gen internet. The entry of Meta (previously Facebook) and Microsoft have set the idea of metaverse rolling. The metaverse has already begun to take root, and NFTs are significant drivers for its expansion. 2021 saw many developments in space, like the multibillion-dollar sales of NFT art and the rise of virtual worlds, and the revolution will reach new heights in the next year. So, let's look at how metaverse and NFTs will look across various industries in 2022. Gaming Industry The euphoria around play-to-earn games and NFTs resonates throughout the gaming industry, luring in newbies looking for their lucky break. The future of gaming is in NFTs and the metaverse. Many gaming giants like WWE and Electronic Arts are launching their NFT strategies. Similarly, Fox, WarnerMedia, Live Nation Entertainment, the NFL, and the NBA are also in the NFT game. is one such blockchain network creating the groundwork for such projects after raising $25 million from prestigious investors including Hashkey, Eternity Ventures, Bitscale, Youbi, Morningstar Ventures, Polkastarter, Good Guild Game, and Mask Network. They created , a Game Studio promoting the development of the Blockchain ecosystem that has partnered with leading game studios including Topebox, Wolffun Game, Hiker Games, Divmob, and KEIG Studio. KardiaChain Whydah NFTs will start to be used as a mode of payment in games and across ecosystems. They will add a layer for monetization of virtual goods, which is already evident in the success of Thetan Arena, Axie Infinity, and Sandbox 3D. Cross-game interoperability is another leap in the gaming industry. is the first personalized metaverse game, allowing players to interact with characters from other universes like Cat Gunner and Axie Infinity and move in-game items across different games. Players can also expect to inhabit different lands, trade weapons, warriors, and compete in tournaments. With this feature, the game experience can finally go beyond just earning rewards for playing. Warena Even gaming giant Epic to build a focused gaming metaverse and provide a better experience. According to Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, "As Epic strives to create this virtual future, we want outstanding creative people who understand how to create compelling games, content, and experiences." acquired Tonic Games Music Industry NFTs are revolutionizing the music industry with better use cases. The music industry has reported some mind-boggling figures, with electronic musician . 3LAU selling $12 million in NFTs and Ozuna publishing an NFT compilation, earning $1 million Moreover, the Grammy Awards revealed that they would remember next year's ceremony with a set of NFTs. They have partnered with OneOf, an NFT marketplace funded by legendary producer Quincy Jones, to develop the NFTs. The first drop will occur on January 31, 2022, with subsequent drops scheduled for 2023 and 2024. Quincy Jones, a 28-time GRAMMY Award winner, that "I've spent my whole career pushing for artists, and any technology that enables musicians to earn a livelihood is something I wholeheartedly support. It excites me to know that OneOf is working to bring more money into the ecosystem." stated Music also appears in the metaverse, and some musicians have already gone live in the virtual world. More music events will occur in the metaverse, with individuals participating via VR and AR headsets. Eric Reid, the founder and CEO of Roar Studios, : "What's truly occurring is that we're building technology that allows individuals to play in real-time without suffering delay." mentioned Sports Industry For those who follow sports trends, the metaverse's promises may appear to be nothing new. The most significant effect on sports will be on how we watch games. Rather than being confined to a couch, spectators will be able to experience the game as if they were in the stands. The spectator experience could look different as well. An entire digital NBA may emerge, with player statistics modeled after their real-world counterparts but owned and governed by fans or fan token holders. Additionally, the virtual world may offer supporters seats in actual seats. John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic, the company that co-developed Pokemon Go, recently authored a blog post in which he described the metaverse as a "dystopian nightmare." He proposed a "real world metaverse" in which technology enticed people out of their homes and enhanced their experiences by animating historical tours or bringing blackboard scientific teachings to life. Thoughts like this indicate that sports or arena-based Go-like games could be unlocked and played on phones during and between the action. Sports fans will participate in online games as members of their tribes. A connected metaverse compatible with the actual world might enable leagues and shops to sell tangible footwear and jerseys and their digital counterparts simultaneously. Fashion Industry The fashion industry is diving into the NFT craze and the metaverse. The sector saw its debut with Burberry's NFT collection with Blankos Block Party, Gucci's Garden Metaverse with Roblox and their Aria Collection Film at Christie's, and Louis Vuitton's 'Louis The Game' NFT to mark the French house's founder's 200th birthday. However, substantial new developments are coming in 2022. Givenchy, one of the most well-known French fashion houses, plans to promote its Spring 2022 collection with NFTs. The initiative is overseen by Givenchy's creative director, Matthew M. Williams, in partnership with digital artist Chito. Moreover, Paris Fashion Week Men and Haute Couture Week, set for July 2022, are the first fashion weeks to feature NFTs. The fashion business has also found its way into the metaverse with platforms like , a decentralized protocol enabling lifestyle brands to enter it. The platform is developing glamorous avatars and a marketplace for consumers to buy, sell and trade their lifestyle goods for the metaverse. Trace Network Art Industry The art industry has seen tremendous growth post the NFT mania. An evident example of this is Beeple. Mike Winkelmann, alias Beeple, became an instant cultural superstar after a jpeg of his work backed by an NFT sold for . $70 million at Christie's Image credit: 10,000 unique VeKings by RingrEven Since then, the 40-year-old has been on Jimmy Fallon's late-night program, earned GQ's "artist of the year" award, and had his work published on Time magazine's cover. In November, he made when his "kinetic video sculpture" named Human One sold at auction for $29 million. news The NFT business, which is growing at this pace, will experience a massive rise in volume over the next year as more significant investors join. According to , sales of NFTs have already surpassed $2.5 billion in the second quarter of 2021, more than double the $13.7 million recorded in the first half of last year. reports NFTs will continue to flourish in this environment in 2022, becoming a typical feature on a wide range of platforms. Furthermore, Virtual Reality content makers will increasingly design experiences that use NFTs as a monetization tool to supplement their existing income sources. Moreover, new models, such as the affiliate/network model, will emerge in 2022. Instead of engaging with an intermediary, you deal directly with another party that distributes your digital work on your behalf. For example, you may utilize influencer marketing to spread your digital artwork on various social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram. is one social media platform for cryptocurrency users expanding into the metaverse. Torum's ecosystem integrates with an NFT marketplace, a yield farming platform, and metaverse avatars powered by their token XTM. These features will become more integrated with even more communities in the future. Torum There will also be many more entries into these places since artists will release their artwork online utilizing existing technologies. When creators can express themselves and earn a living through these digital tools, it drives more demand for NFTs. How Big Will the Metaverse be in 2022? The era of NFTs and the metaverse has just begun in 2021. Many projects have come into the space, offering solutions to various real-world problems, and most of them are now focusing on providing some utility. The combination of the metaverse and NFTs will be a game-changer in 2022, with many incredible breakthroughs in the sector. As more and more brands adopt this technology, we will see tremendous growth in the space. The revolution has begun, and many people are thrilled about the collaboration and connectivity choices that the metaverse and NFTs will provide. However, there is still much work to be done in this domain before this technology becomes an important location where we live, play, and work.

What Will the Metaverse Look Like in 2022

As Bitcoin and Ethereum soar to all time highs, we take a look at how successful venture capital funds eye up their future winning investments The blockchain industry is once again booming, with pioneering startups changing the face of finance, e-commerce and a myriad of other sectors. As capital floods into this ever-evolving space, venture capital firms search for diamonds in the rough, looking to invest in the innovations of tomorrow. In this article I speak to Charles Read, an angel investor focusing on protocol investments and Co-Founder of Rarestone Capital, a prominent venture capital firm in the blockchain space. Over the years, Charles has been involved in the DLT, DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and NFT sectors as both a collector and investor, eventually moving into Venture Capital as a way to both invest in and support the world’s most talented blockchain founders and project teams. When asked about his overall approach to investing, Charles told me: “I back founders primarily. Good founders can come back from difficult obstacles, they can pivot when required, and they’ll usually come through the other side. On the other hand, while I acknowledge I’m not the most technical analyst I am good at reading people. My gut feeling has a remarkably high hit rate, which I pray doesn’t end anytime soon. When we’re investing as Rarestone, I make up for my shortfalls with an amazing team. We are diversely skilled, highly active, and as a collective we don’t really have any weaknesses. Not many can say that.” With that being said, I wanted to look deeper into what ticks the right boxes underneath the hood a blockchain project that makes Charles and the Rarestone Capital team want to invest in their future development. Below is a selection of Rarestone’s current investments and an insight from Charles as to why they chose to support the teams behind the projects. Please note: The following is not an endorsement to buy any of cryptocurrencies mentioned. I am not invested in any of the projects or cryptocurrencies mentioned and I was not paid to write this article. Mask Network Coined “The Portal to the New, Open Internet”, Charles refers to Mask Network as a “Bridge to Web3 for Web2 apps”. Applications like Twitter are centralised, but we all use them; with Maskbook, you can interface with Web3 while using them. For an example of how this works, with Mask installed anyone can now airdrop tokens to their twitter followers, or encrypt their tweets so that only Mask users can read them. "This is about restoring privacy and enabling more value from these traditional applications to be funnelled to the user, rather than the company in control of the application." Using Mask Network, when you search for a cashtag ($) you can see that Mask adds additional features to the twitter interface, such as price tracking, exchange and swapping directly through the popular decentralized exchange Uniswap. The above is what is seen when hovering over the Alchemix tag ($ALCX) using the Mask Network extension on Twitter. "The implications of this have the potential to be a real game-changer, as Twitter users in theory they don’t even need to leave Twitter to trade." Charles and the Rarestone team believe that the most attractive thing about Mask Network is that it doesn’t require users to do much apart from install a plug-in. It’s not trying to take over or replace Twitter, but rather add extra layers of privacy and customisability for the user as well as allowing them to interact with Web3 directly. ALEPH Aleph provides cloud computing and decentralised storage for Web3, allowing blockchain enabled applications to securely access trusted off-chain data or computation within just a few lines of code. "What’s interesting about Aleph is that it’s much further along than most competitors in terms of product development, yet still seems to be a bit of a sleeping giant. It is cross-chain compatible and has committed use from multiple chains already." Aleph didn’t raise funding other than OTC sales from the team and was built from the ground up in a grassroots fashion. Pretty much all significant ALEPH token holders are long term supporters and running nodes - including Rarestone who run the . Friends of Rarestone node The project is also supported by nodes from globally recognised companies including Ubisoft’s Strategy Lab and Synaps, the decentralised identity provider that handled KYC for sales including Polkadot. Charles insists that considering Aleph’s already aggressive adoption and the growth that projects such as have seen, the project has a lot of room for growth in the coming years. Filecoin Web3API Universally compatible smart contract APIs mean you can use any program language with any protocol. Something that has really skewed adoption of some protocols is that they require rare programming languages that not many developers use. With Web3api, this issue is solved. The team celebrated a win at HackFS, an ETHGlobal hackathon focused on building the foundation for the Ethereum ecosystem and with prestigious judges such as Vitalik Buterin, Austin Griffith from Ethereum Foundation and more judging. The Web3API team  were presented four awards at the hackathon. The engineering team have a background building protocols such as Balancer, Gnosis, Aragon, Metamask and more. "Web3Hub is the portal to the Web3API ecosystem, and will allow developers to discover, use and integrate the API of their choice. The project presents a major milestone for the development of Web3, opening the door for wider adoption by the traditional software development community." Web3API is governed by a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) and the token holders will control all financial decisions, on-boarding of new developer teams, partners, and future control over the API standard.  As it’s built by Web3 veterans, my research on this DAO makes me very confident in the approach. My Neighbour Alice MNA is a desktop game built by Antler Interactive. Originally viewed as somewhat of an outlier in the space, the project went largely under the radar and was ignored by most because of the funny name and concept. I asked Charles why he and Rarestone had decided to invest in the blockchain-based game: "Antler Interactive was acquired by Chromia in 2019 for an undisclosed sum. What makes that acquisition interesting is that Antler are an award winning gaming studio who have an incredibly talented team of developers - combine this with Chromia’s technology that is ideal for building blockchain games, their teams ability to incubate and you have a winning combination." During this difficult time of lockdown and economic turmoil many people are craving interaction, turning to games like Animal Crossing to connect with their friends. These are what Charles calls web-spaces and reflects the new world we are moving toward; an open metaverse. The game taps into this and players are rewarded while they play. In MNA, the world around you is player-owned and player-built. Every asset you deploy in game is an NFT owned by you, so you can truly own the experience. "It’s nice to see the Chromia Foundation putting this acquisition to good use, and sets precedent for more acquisitions across the industry that may spawn incredible blockchain games and applications." Investment in the project was a no brainer for Charles and Rarestone, with Charles also now advising the MNA team on product roll out, strategy and marketing. Biconomy Biconomy are on a mission to simplify the experience Web3 offers by providing powerful APIs that offer gas-efficient meta-transactions, and the team behind the project created the project with one mission in mind; to make blockchain-based applications work seamlessly and conveniently for mainstream users, especially those who are new to the blockchain space. By tackling the bottlenecks and barriers to entry that have so far stunted the overall growth of the blockchain space, Biconomy look to accelerate a Cambrian explosion of adoption. With this new and exciting platform users do not even need to download digital wallets or buy cryptocurrencies from exchanges; the platform has automated the whole process for them. "A new Biconomy round is coming and the Rarestone team are now looking to also contribute in a big way; we believe the project is a potential Unicorn for 2021. " As well as a strong team, Biconomy has the support of several well established projects such as blockchain Matic  (now Polygon), as well as DeFi behemoth Curve Finance and others. As an angel investor in Biconomy and good friends with Founder Ahmed Al-Balaghi, Charles believes that the project represents a perfect storm in the current market conditions, with the demand from other projects in the space looking to partner with Biconomy overwhelming. The next 5 years in blockchain venture capital: What does the future look like? When asked what he sees the blockchain investment landscape looking like in the coming years, Charles tells me: "The landscape is evolving much faster than it ever has. I feel that we're entering a rapid epochal shift similar to what humanity experienced as we transitioned into the information age; the growing institutional interest in digital assets, combined with the red pill that NFTs and digital artwork present to the mass market and the leaders of the internet (celebrities with influence) is a recipe for absolute fireworks in the next 5 years. We're absolutely ready for the inevitable cultural whiplash that follows." is a Venture Capital fund focused on backing remarkable project founders on a mission to make positive societal change through technology. You can learn more about the Rarestone Capital portfolio and investment thesis over at . Rarestone Capital https://rarestone.capital

How Does a Blockchain VC Fund Choose What to Invest in?

Hanna Hurr, Tyler Reinhard, and Ripley Soprano are the co-owners of Mask Magazine. Photos: Ada Banks . When the founders of first announced they would publish a style and culture magazine “in an age of unrest” in February 2014, they were starting from scratch. Thirty-eight months later, the independent media project reaches 750,000 people globally, has published nearly 200 emerging writers, and recently founded a new podcast network, . With zero revenue from advertisements, a group of friends in Brooklyn are making waves in an industry struggling to find a sustainable home on the internet. Mask Magazine mask.fm How It All Began Hanna Hurr and Tyler Reinhard say they started Mask Magazine because they wanted to make sure there was a place for the communities that would inspire a resurgence of radical politics in popular culture. “When we launched, Orange is The New Black was one of the ‘wokest’ things in mainstream culture — so we asked a friend who had recently been imprisoned for resisting a grand jury to write a review,” Reinhard said of the first long form piece the magazine commissioned. “If you read between the lines, that strategy is still with us. Ultimately, it’s lifestyle content for people who want to completely rethink society.” It’s not the product story advertisers were looking for, but for a new generation of readers Mask Magazine offered something worth paying to support. “Breaking into the turbulent online publishing industry was tough,” Reinhard continues, “especially from our backgrounds.” Reinhard’s former projects include , the encrypted messaging app, and , the anarchist publishing collective. He says he moved to Brooklyn with Hurr explicitly to start the magazine. Hurr had led the Swedish-speaking School Student Union of Finland and went on to study Critical Theory in Minnesota, where she and Reinhard met in September, 2012. “I was an organizer at an autonomous community center during my studies in Minnesota and met Tyler when we both worked a benefit for CeCe McDonald,” says Hurr. By late 2013, the two founders had rented a small office in Brooklyn and were building the first version of . Signal CrimethInc. maskmagazine.com How It Works Mask Magazine is behind a paywall, but it’s not the typical model. Unlike the metered paywalls used by publications like , everything Mask publishes is free to read for the first three days. “We don’t publicize it, but if you checked our site often, you could probably read everything for free if you timed it right. But we have to balance starting conversations with making sure it’s possible to sustain them. Our readership pays monthly for access to the full back catalog,” says Hurr. The Mask Magazine subscription is . Pay $3, $5, or $10 a month for the same access. “Sliding scale works. When given the choice to support us with more money, lots of people do. Our readers want to see this experiment succeed and we owe what we have to their support,” Hurr added. The New York Times available at a sliding-scale “It’s an important part of the idea,” Reinhard says. “If we were to put ads in our articles, we would probably make more money. But that would encourage us to publish a different kind of story. From the outset, we’ve been concerned about the economic model behind publishing content.” In September 2015, Reinhard posted on Medium, where he outlined the larger philosophy behind their experiment: “Ragebait pays. It drives traffic. It also insulates ideas from discussion, and flattens our lives into hashtags and campaigns. Perfectly arranged for data analysis, but terrible for capturing how we actually feel and experience the world. In reality, our lives are complex and difficult. So many of us are in fact marginalized by the culture we’re producing.” The Advertisement Industrial Complex Mask founders at a worker-owned co-op called Norbert’s Pizza, a local favorite. The owners of Mask Magazine credit the DIY ethic, not technical skills, with their success. If you ask Ripley Soprano about what it takes to run a modern publishing company, they will tell you culture has always come from the bottom. “Most people are surprised when I say we’re only a half-dozen people. They think we’re a big operation,” says Soprano, who runs social growth and partnerships, and co-owns the magazine. “The cultural moments that reframe important conversations have always come from the so-called margins of society. It only takes a small team to amplify it. If you do that without making every voice fit in a certain box, you’re doing something the publishing industry usually won’t. People just assume it takes a lot of people to do that.” Tracking Mask down is not easy. “We could be anywhere…” Soprano whispers jokingly. In truth, the media company operates out of a living room in a collective apartment in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. “Fifteen years ago, we might have been a punk band.” Reinhard added. “We did all of this ourselves. Before we launched, I got a few books about writing code and built our tech. Hanna [Hurr] isn’t a native English speaker, and taught herself how to edit. She built the whole editorial pipeline on Trello. And when Ripley came on, they put the thing on a loudspeaker. Honestly, it’s got the same ethos of a punk band — it’s chaos to watch live, but looking back it seems like something coherent and new. This might look like a sound booth from inside,” Reinhard said of their new podcast studio, “but at the end of the day, it’s just a bedroom in our apartment.” “We look for writers with that same DIY spirit,” Hurr says. “For many of the writers, this is their first time getting edited and published. We’re always looking for the voices missing from a conversation, or the people who insist on speaking up even without formal training.” Hurr’s approach to editorial content focuses on the stories subscribers want to read, rather than what will get the most clicks. “We try to offer writers something uncommon: the freedom to publish deeper essays on themes and issues that other magazines edit out. The awkward, marginal, otherwise unspeakable stuff.” With this strategy, Hurr says, Mask Magazine can publish aspiring writers who couldn’t tell their stories elsewhere. But the model also creates a platform for professional writers. “Even when most professionals could get paid way more to write elsewhere, a lot of freelance writers choose to work with Mask because they appreciate the opportunity to participate in the experiment,” said Hurr. And the same goes for the people featured in Mask’s long-form interviews. “The people Mask features will probably end up in , , or with their own show at MoMa,” says Soprano, “like . . of FLuCT … these were conversations with people who I’m sure will inherit the creative industry they’re breaking into now. We want to help that happen.” To date, Mask Magazine has published 100 longform interviews with creative and emerging thinkers. “The entire operation relies on its own question: to what extent is it possible to materially support ourselves through cultural production?” Soprano added. Vogue The New York Times Juliana Huxtable Sarah Nicole Prickett Monica Mirabile Stills from the studio, from producer Yvette Hall A New Podcast Network In September 2017, Mask Magazine announced they would be creating a new podcast network, . “It’s been a dream of mine to do podcasts,” Reinhard confided. “I started taking notes about how to build a studio many years ago, and this month we’re actually doing it. I can’t believe it.” Like the magazine, mask.fm will be supported directly by its audience. Asked to describe the model, Reinhard explains, “Here’s how it works: we invited some of our favorite thinkers to create podcast shows and agreed to cover all the distribution and production costs. Then, we all . Each month, we divvy up that support money to the show hosts and producers and set a little aside for equipment upgrades.” Mask Magazine hopes mask.fm will reach new audiences and help expand the intersections between listeners. “It’s an extension of our editorial process,” says Hurr, “we have to listen to and value what makes our perspectives different so we can fully appreciate the power we have when our stories intersect.” mask.fm share one Patreon account The shows launching with the network include: BRUJAS World, Health Autonomy at the End of the Empire, drumBOOTY, and T.W.I.G.’s Podcast. With the help of audio and program producer Yvette Hall, the network plans to add shows as the Patreon grows. “We’ll do as many shows as our time and budget allows. We’re just getting started,” Reinhard says. How To Support Mask Mask Magazine is fueled by audience support and affinity. People looking to help the project can get involved right now. The best way to support Mask Magazine is to talk to people personally about why you endorse ad-free, DIY publishing. Send emails, post on social media, and reach out to anyone looking for a different perspective and model on culture. You can also: Subscribe to the Magazine. Mask Magazine is always ad-free and subscription payments are the only source of revenue that pays writers and contributors. Subscription includes access to the full back-issue catalog of more than 900 articles of in-depth essays, long-form interviews, and cultural coverage. You can subscribe to Mask Magazine and join a community of supporters for a sliding scale fee that starts at . $3 per month Sign up for the Newsletter. Once a week, Mask Magazine editors send out an email update about new articles, back issue content relevant to current events, and announcements about the project. A great way to get access to new articles that are for guest readers and subscribers alike is to . sign up for the newsletter Join the Conversation on Social Media. Mask Magazine credits communities that emerge on social media with their success thusfar. “We put a lot of time into connecting with content creators trying to make a name for themselves on social platforms like Twitter and Instagram,” Soprano says. “That’s where we notice the people that we think our audience would love.” Reinhard adds, “we think of social networks like our comment section. When we built Mask, we made a choice not to enable comments on our articles – we don’t really care if a page gets refreshed over and over, like most other publications. But we work really hard at maintaining a healthy social community. Participating in conversations there is probably the easiest way to help Mask reach more people.” Facebook Twitter Instagram Help the Team by Supporting Through Patreon. Currently, all of Mask’s subscription revenue goes to paying their writers, artists, contributing editors, covering rent and other expenses. “We don’t pay ourselves for our work. We could change that. There’s a lot of work to be done, and it’s only feasible for us to do this work if we can compensate ourselves for it,” says Hurr. To help them keep going, you can pledge a monthly donation via . their Patreon page All photos taken by , unless otherwise noted. Ada Banks

The Small Media Company Making Independent Publishing A Threat Again

Take a look at the to quickly find common resources and/or assets for a given dataset and a specific task, in this case dataset=COCO, task=object detection. We are building a dataset-first marketplace focusing on the end-to-end machine learning pipeline, one where data and assets can be shared and traded. The marketplace will contain all that the contains (and much more for a lot more datasets) report report I’m open to suggestions, questions, and criticism — let’s start a conversation. I have broken up the report into the following blogs: Part 1 (this one): COCO Summary Card. Each link will take you to the longer report where you can learn more. The next 3 parts represent a specific section in the report. Part 2: This part is about COCO and examples and tutorials of tools and platforms used to work with COCO (or object detection tasks). Part 3: Process: This part is about the tools and platforms that can be used for different phases of data preparate or data processing involved in vision, object detection, and specifically COCO-related tasks. It will also discuss synthetic data and data quality. Part 4: Models: This part is about a quick introduction to some pre-trained models and some corresponding readings. COCO Summary Card (Common Objects in Context) COCO COCO is a large-scale object detection, segmentation, and captioning dataset. The dataset classes include 80 pre-trained objects. Website: https://cocodataset.org/ Github: GitHub — cocodataset/cocodataset.github.io Paper: Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context dataset with evaluation metric Average Precision (AP) Benchmark : Object Detection, Panoptic Semantic Segmentation, Keypoint Detection, DensePose Tasks Tools and platforms used to work with COCO (or object detection tasks) : Explore with tutorials FiftyOne, DataTorch, Know Your Data (KYD), OpenCV, OpenVINO, CVAT, Roboflow, SuperAnnotate, OpenMMLab, Coral, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Weights and Biases. Open-source tools and Paid platforms to perform the following steps. : Processing Data collection : CVAT, LabelImg, Label Studio, Makesense.AI, OpenLabeling, Dataloop, Hive Data, Labelbox, Scale AI, SuperAnnotate, V7, Ximilar Data labeling and annotation Data cleaning : Albumentations, AugLy, Augmentor, autoalbument, DALI, Data Augmentation for Object Detection, Imgaug, Kornia, MXNet, Tensorflow, Transforms (PyTorch) Data transformations Data visualization : Cvedia, Neurolabs, Synthesis AI, Unity, UnrealROX Synthetic data Data quality To answer what objects are in image X and where are they? (You’ll find a brief summary and readings.) : Models RCNN SPPNet Fast RCNN and Faster RCNN Pyramid Networks / FPN Mask RCNN YOLOv1 SSD RetinaNet YOLOv3 YOLOv4 YOLOv5 DINO (and DETR) Swin Transformer V2 Vision Transformer Adapter YOLOR If you have feedback please review this link ( ) and email me at samin@reasonets.com. Looking forward to starting a conversation. Marketplace — Coming Soon | ReasoNets Next, Part 2

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