19.537 ETH, or roughly $55,000 (at the time of the transactions). That is how much was spent in an attempt to be at the front of the line to purchase STG, Stargate Finance’s cross-chain ecosystem token. This piece will break down the three successful transactions that constituted the entire sale, as well as the activity from before and after. After reading it, you should walk away with an understanding for the strategy used by the frontrunner and some of the risks involved.

TL;DR: Content is at the heart of all social media, so decentralized social media efforts must focus on data sovereignty rather than platform development. One key benefit of starting with data primitives is that it allows for the application of Web3 data ownership principles to Web2 platform activity. This piece proposes an architecture for a Portable, Persistent, Private, and Provable personal social media data management system, called Hypercube. The full text is available on GitHub.

NFTs for games sounded like a great idea; games are played online, so it makes perfect sense for a digital-native asset to represent items in an inventory or skins a character wears or commemorative art pieces. But game publishers have faced high degrees of backlash for announcing initiatives that make use of NFTs.

This article will show some sample code for how to use the “shift right” and “shift left” (\`shr\` and \`shl\`, respectively) opcodes in Solidity’s assembly language in the context of manipulating bytes.

I recently found myself with the need to call a single read function from a contract deployed on the Polygon network, but was unable to do so through polygonscan (the L2 version of etherscan) because it was a proxy.

Blockchains and Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are paving the way for an era where we can truly own our digital identity. Up until now, citizens of the internet have established online personas by making tradeoffs with centralized platforms, which promptly turned around and built trillion-dollar advertisement empires with no value shared with the users.

NFTs have ascended from a niche novelty to a worldwide movement that is impossible to ignore (if you are completely new to NFTs, there are tons of articles on how they work that I would recommend as a primer. Otherwise, read on). The powerful implications of how corporations can leverage them become clear once they are understood to be more than just “art but on the blockchain”, and actually fixed-supply certificates of ownership for anything. Adopting an NFT strategy produces three useful outputs at the company level:

The carbon financing chain is broken. While the general consensus among companies is in favor of reducing their carbon footprint, executing green initiatives tends to be capital intensive and often does not yield immediate returns. Bond issuance appears to be an appropriate financing mechanism on the surface, but the process is notoriously expensive. The result is that companies that choose to issue bonds are much more likely to do so for endeavors that will drive more immediate revenue. Lately, the concept of “green bonds,” or bonds with proceeds specifically earmarked for sustainability purposes, has gained traction, but it faces logistical challenges in staying transparent with where the money actually goes.

Disclaimer: Peloton has been a polarizing company ever since announcing it’s IPO, with profitability concerns on one side and the potential for leading a brand new luxury home-fitness category on the other. This piece is the result of digging deeply into the merits of both sides and is not financial advice.