As part of a truly unusual recruitment drive, the German Intelligence Agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has launched an NFT collection called Dogs of BND. The initiative aims to attract tech-savvy individuals adept in blockchain technology and NFTs to aid in combating cybercrime. Inspired by the agency’s Pullach branch service dogs, Inka and Alex, the collection comprises…
Artists who use AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney often catch flack for producing work that is somehow cold, unfeeling, or lacking a distinctly “human” touch. The great irony buried just beneath the surface of this critique is twofold; first in that it glosses over the necessarily collaborative nature of such tools. But the…
Nouns DAO has funded its first feature-length animated film, The Rise of Blus: A Nouns Movie, which features popular NFT characters from the Nouns community. This marks the first-ever animated movie to be funded by a DAO. The film is produced by Atrium, an animation studio and network of independent artists and creators who have…
In a crucial move to combat criminal activities both on the darknet and associated with cryptocurrencies, several U.S. federal enforcement agencies have joined forces to establish the Darknet Marketplace and Digital Currency Crimes Task Force. The announcement was made public on June 20, indicating an intensifying focus on crimes, including drug trafficking, money laundering, child…
Things are once again heating within the Yuga Labs NFT ecosystem — and this time, it all has to do with HV-MTL. Launched in March 2023, the Bored Ape-adjacent NFT collection has already gained significant traction in Web3 and is about to undergo a major evolution. Billed as one of the “final” stops in the…
Bitcoin Ordinal Inscriptions have significantly impacted the Web3 space since the Ordinals protocol was introduced in January 2023. Millions upon millions of Inscriptions have been minted, inspiring established projects to expand from Ethereum and Solana to Bitcoin. Ordinals also seem to have inspired Ethscriptions — a recently launched (and quickly adopted) protocol that enables the…
Binance, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, is seeking to make a major upgrade to its Bitcoin infrastructure. After developer and Taproot Wizard founder Udi Wertheimer reported finding “Binance nodes” on the Lightning Network on June 16, the exchange giant has now revealed its intention to integrate Lightning, a layer two scalability solution built…
Renowned auction house Christie’s is dipping its toes into the weird wide world of Web3 yet again with another NFT-focused auction. Titled Cartography of the Soul, the curated selection — in partnership with collectors hub 1OF1 — aims to support the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a non-profit organization dedicated to researching and promoting…
Companies in the Web3 space are increasingly looking to incorporate artificial intelligence with blockchain-related technologies. On June 19, Etherscan, the popular Ethereum block explorer, took a significant step in that direction when it announced the integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its suite of tools. The move is aimed at enhancing the understanding and interpretation of…
