Stories by Mason Marcobello
Are Your NFTs Safe? How to Protect Digital Assets From Disaster
In the ever-volatile world of NFTs, collectors have spent years amassing fortunes in generative art and unique digital assets—only to face the possibility of losing it all in an instant. Picture the ensuing chaos when, instead of a cascade of bids in one's inbox, a message from a major marketplace announces that it’s filing for bankruptcy, rendering NFTs on the platform "inaccessible once the site shuts down." Customer support only offers generic canned responses, and users are left frantically...
What Are Stealth Addresses?
Stealth addresses provide privacy for transactions on Ethereum. While it’s impossible to completely hide a blockchain transaction, stealth addresses can, at the very least, conceal the recipient's identity. And in doing so, offer an added layer of protection for anyone who doesn't want the transaction data overtly tied to them. On a distributed ledger (a public record of transactions), anyone can view details of a transaction such as the date, the amount, and the wallets or the entities involve...
What Is Counterparty? Historical NFTs Built on Bitcoin
Long before collections like CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties and the OpenSea marketplace helped popularize non-fungible tokens on Ethereum—even before the term "NFT" ever existed—an ecosystem for verifiably unique digital assets was already thriving on Bitcoin, circa 2014. Counterparty is the platform that helped catalyze this innovation for the world and spark a multibillion-dollar industry. The platform uses Bitcoin’s technology to power more than just digital money, enabling verifiable ownershi...
What Are Nouns? The Ethereum NFT DAO Building Open-Source IP
Pixel art NFTs are nothing new—one of the first NFT collections, CryptoPunks, pioneered the blocky 8-bit design style. But Nouns is shaking things up with a novel distribution method and open-source IP that has led to the collection's signature pixelated specs popping up everywhere from beer cans to movies. Here’s how Nouns works, and how it has built a multimillion-dollar decentralized brand. What are Nouns? First and foremost, Nouns is an NFT collection, whose owners are part of Nouns DAO, a d...
What Immortalizing the 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' Theme Means for Music NFTs
Larry David, when asked in a 2009 interview to describe the opening theme to "Curb Your Enthusiasm," didn't mince words: "It introduces the idea that you're in for something pretty idiotic." Despite the HBO comedy's six-year hiatus from 2011 to 2017, the jaunty tuba, piano, and mandolin waltz called "Frolic," written by the Italian conductor and composer Luciano Michelini, continued to grow in popularity on the internet as the star of countless memes, from Bernie Sanders to Steve Harvey to Chris...
How Rare Pepe NFTs Reclaimed Pepe the Frog—And Why They Remain Relevant
It's no secret to veterans and newly indoctrinated DeFi "degens'' that memes are as native to Web3 as Satoshi's Bitcoin white paper is to Bitcoin. And when it comes to anthropomorphic characters nestled throughout the NFT world, there's nothing more at home in crypto than Pepe the Frog. While Pepe may not be getting the kind of buzz and attention these days that Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are, look no further than this for a sign of Pepe’s lasting appeal in the NFT world: In October, a one-of-...
The Story Behind the CryptoDickbutts Ethereum NFTs Resurgence
Laugh if you want: Sales volume for the CryptoDickbutts NFT collection briefly surged last week shortly after Rug Radio host Farokh shared his 3.8 ETH (about $12,000) entry into the collection. However, mirroring the sentiment in a recent tweet about memes from Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen, the lasting appeal of this 15-year-old meme may be driven by something more than just lighthearted trolling. Created in 2006 by the comic book artist K.C. Green, Dick Butts eventually became...
This Week on Crypto Twitter: Kylie Jenner, Michael Saylor and NFT NYC
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt The annual NFT NYC conference took center stage this week on Crypto Twitter, swarming feeds with NFTs faster than people could mint them. But sift through the noise and there’s even more going on this week. Read on to find out. Monday On Monday, Michael Saylor, co-founder of US software company MicroStrategy, tweeted in recognition of the 13th annual Bitcoin Whitepaper Day. “Happy #Bitcoin White Paper Day,” he tweeted, in reference to the day before,...
This Week on Crypto Twitter: Wolf of Wall Street, SHIB Boasts, CryptoPunks
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt After Bitcoin’s all-time high boosted traders to altitudes never reached before, the past few days included plenty of surreal and heady moments on Crypto Twitter. First, remember Leonardo Di Caprio’s dramatic “I’m not leaving!” scene from The Wolf of Wall Street? If not, fear not: the real wolf, a trader called Jordan Belfort, is no different in real life. On Monday, Belfort proclaimed his love of NFT Twitter after sharing his purchase of CryptoPunk...
This Week in Coins: Ethereum Hits ATH, SHIB Becomes Top 10 Token
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Crypto never fails to disappoint fans of volatility. This week, Bitcoin and Ethereum reached prices never seen before, then promptly pulled back while prices of altcoins like SHIB soared. Ethereum (ETH) recorded a new all-time high on Friday. Transactions came so thick and fast that the network burned more tokens than it minted, thanks in part to solid performances and activity in Shiba Inu (SHIB). At the recorded all-time high of $4,416 on CoinGecko...
This Week on Crypto Twitter: Coinbase's NFT Play, Cardano, Paris Hilton
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Another week has gone by, and with it, a cacophony of historical, inspired, and questionable events proliferated across the ever-expansive world of Crypto Twitter. On Monday, Sanchan Saxena, a VP at Coinbase, shared details about the exchange’s upcoming NFT marketplace. With a waitlist that has already surpassed 1.5 million applicants, Sanchan reassured the community that Coinbase would not erect a "walled garden.” Recently, we announced the launch...
This Week on Crypto Twitter: Elon Musk's Puppy, Snoop Dogg's NFT Wisdom
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt Twitter is the undisputed watering hole of the crypto industry, and something pops up on our feeds that propels the industry along each week. Here's our handy roundup of the tweets that made waves this week. On Monday, a picture Elon Musk posted of his dog is believed to have contributed to the 266% surge of meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB). Although some argue that the association is hard to quantify, the coin set new highs for daily trading volumes—$20 bi...
Gutter Cat Gang Shows How NFT Collections Try to Stay Relevant
Cat videos received more than 26 billion views on YouTube in 2014 alone, according to a 2015 research paper published by Indiana University. Given these statistics, along with the fact that cats have been called the "unofficial mascots of the internet,” it’s no surprise the initial Gutter Cat Gang NFTs, a collection of 3,000 unique cats, sold out in 10 minutes when it launched in June. Back in 2017, the first truly viral NFT project—though cryptoland wasn’t widely using the term NFT yet—was Cryp...
Who Are Bitcoin Whales and How Do They Trade?
While digital assets theoretically help facilitate a level playing field for individuals, in distributed networks such as Bitcoin, some people have more leverage and influence than others: whales. Bitcoin whales are people or entities that hold enough Bitcoin to influence or even manipulate the value of the currency. The bigger the price movement, the bigger the whale. According to data from BitInfoCharts, the 10 largest BTC wallets control 6% of all Bitcoin in circulation, representing roughly...
EIP-1559: What Happens Next for Ethereum
Ethereum's London hard fork drops this week, and bundled with it is EIP-1559—an Ethereum Improvement Proposal that aims to address the network's persistent issues with transaction fees. It's a significant change for the Ethereum network, and one that's already got the markets a-flutter. But how's the upgrade set to unfold, and what comes next for Ethereum users? What is EIP-1559? At its core, EIP-1559 aims to make Ethereum's transaction fees less volatile and more predictable, removing the probl...
Is Bitcoin Mining Finally Getting Greener?
As the price of Bitcoin surged over the past year, so did the noise around the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, an energy-intensive process in which large computers race to solve math problems and win the right to upload bundles of transaction data to the network. Bitcoin mining uses a method called Proof of Work (PoW), and it’s been no stranger to criticism from regulators and environmentalists. Their main contention is over the increasingly large amount of energy (computational power)...
