The Celsius Network halted all withdrawals today, preventing its users from taking their crypto deposits and yield off of the Celsius platform, and setting off speculation about the company’s solvency. Clearly there are liquidity issues or they would not have suspended withdrawals, it remains to be seen whether they have enough assets to pay out on all of their liabilities once the dust settles.

What are the events that led up to this crisis? Here is a full timeline of events that you will not get anywhere else:

• October 2021 – New York Attorney General (AG) sends letters to crypto yield savings platforms: Nexo, Celsius, and others,
• February 2022 – Nexo abandons US accounts
• April 2022 – Celsius abandons US accounts
• May 2022 – Celsius withdraws $0.5 billion from Terra/Luna
• May 2022 – Terra/Luna crashes
• June 2022 – Celsius suspends all client withdrawals

October 2021 – New York AG sends “Cease and Desist” letters to 2 crypto yield platforms

Letitia James, the New York state Attorney General, sent Cease and Desist letters to two crypto lending platforms and requested information from three other platforms. It appears that Nexo was the target of one of the C&D letters and that Celsius was the target for one of the requests for information. The other companies are unknown at this point.

February 2022 – Nexo abandons US accounts

Nexo prevents US customers from using its flagship “Earn Interest Product”, saying:

“Nexo’s Earn Interest Product in its current form will not be available for new clients, until the restructuring of the Earn Interest Product and the registration process with the relevant regulatory bodies are finalized, as per the recently received guidance.”

Nexo official subreddit

April 2022 – Celsius abandons US accounts

Shortly after Nexo, Celsius follows suit and prevents US clients from earning yield on their platform. In an announcement on the official company blog they say:

As we previously have acknowledged, Celsius has been working closely with regulators around the world. It is our intention to be as transparent with our community as possible. More specifically, we have been in ongoing discussions with United States regulators regarding our Earn product. As a result, there will be changes to the way our Earn product will work for users based in the United States.

Celsius official company blog

And more crucially:

New transfers made by non-accredited investors in the United States will be held in their new Custody accounts and will not earn rewards. Non-accredited investors can continue to swap, borrow, and transfer within their Custody accounts based on their local jurisdiction.

Celsius official company blog

May 2022 – Celsius withdraws $0.5 Billion from Terra/Luna

In May, Celsius made the decision to pull all $0.5 Billion USD from Terra’s Anchor protocol that was paying 17-19% yields. See Block Crypto’s writeup on that event.

May 2022 – Terra/Luna Crashes

The Terra/Luna algorithmic stable coin system crashes, precipitating a broader crash in the crypto markets. See our full writeup and analysis of that event.

June 2022 – Celsius suspends all client withdrawals

Celsius takes the drastic move of suspending all client withdrawals from its platform. This clearly indicates Celsius is facing a liquidity crisis and potentially a solvency crisis given the broader crypto market crashes of 20+% caused by Celsius’s action to halt withdrawals.

The post FULL Timeline of the Celsius Crypto Crash first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

1. Virtual Fidelity property in Decentraland, that offers “gamified” financial education
2. FMET – an official Fidelity ETF that gives exposure to metaverse-related companies

With these two offerings we see that Fidelity is expecting the metaverse to grow in a major way and has positioned itself to profit not just from financial investment growth, but also to expand the core business into the metaverse itself and offer its financial education services in the metaverse as well as brick-and-mortar. This marks yet another company moving its corporate business into the metaverse reality.

Fidelity is often at the forefront of emerging technologies. They were one of the first companies to embrace Bitcoin and their research department has been mining Bitcoin for many many years. It is no surprise that they are leading the way in the metaverse. Will we be looking back in 5 years to see Fidelity once again had amazing foresight into the future of technology?

To take a video tour of Fidelity’s office in the Decentraland metaverse on Fidelity’s youtube channel!

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When asked to comment on digital currencies in the wake of the Terra/Luna algorithmic “stablecoin” crash that precipitated the broader crypto market crash, the director made sure to separate digital currencies into 3 groups, which she went on to give her position on each group:

1. Central Bank Digital Currencies
2. Asset-backed Stablecoins
3. Non-backed coins

Presumably responding to the Terra/Luna crash that occurred a few weeks prior to her comments, she stated:

When somebody promises you 20% return on something that is not backed by any assets how would we normally call this thing? We would call it a pyramid. In other words this is pyramid in the digital age, but we should not be mistaken to immediately classify everything in the digital world in a negative way because there are three categories. The first one is Central Bank Digital Currencies, they are backed by the state and they offer finality when transactions are settled.

On the topic of CBDCs, she remarked “90% of central banks are exploring CBDCs” and “[digital currencies are] moving so fast the International Monetary Fund has to embrace it.” before going on to discuss some of the CBDC pilot projects that are already underway “China has a pilot with 128 million participants”. From Kristina’s perspective, it seems clear that with countries already implementing pilot projects, there should be some level of global coordination through a body such as the IMF.

Next on her list, the director addressed stablecoins specifically, saying “Stable coins backed by assets are OK. They look a lot like money market funds, but funds in this digital space”.

Last on the list were what she termed non-backed coins and spoke some words of empathy and caution for those investing in these risky coins: “I want to be very direct that I do feel for the people that lost money because part of the reason they lost money is not being educated in this new investment world.”

The director made some intriguing comments on bitcoin itself, saying:

Bitcoin may be called coin but it is not money. Why? Because a prerequisite for something to be money is to be a stable store of value so you can actually plan around it.

Ending on a positive note and encouraging her colleagues not to throw in the towel after the recent digital currency panic, she states:

I would beg you not to pull out of the importance of this world because of what Julia said. It offers us all faster service, much lower cost, and more inclusion, but only if we separate apples from oranges and bananas

Watch this video to see Director Georgieva’s comments:

The post IMF Managing Director Embraces CryptoCurrency and CBDC at WEF first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

Starting off we hear from Peggy Johnson, CEO of Magic Leap, as she describes the view of the metaverse from Magic Leap’s headquarters in this clip:

Later on in the disucssion, Peggy sheds light on who she sees as the first corporate adopters of metaverse technology: medical devices and industrial training.

Magic Leap is working with industrial plants and factories to develop training systems where a new employee can put on an Augmented Reality headset and learn how to operate a piece of complex machinery or get expert advice and tech support if an existing machine has broken down.

Perhaps more interesting is the near term product they are developing for brain surgeons. This is an actual product that will be approved to be in the actual operating room to help assist with brain surgery. Watch this clip to here more about industry applications in the metaverse:

Switching directions, we hear from Ed Lewin of Lego Group discuss Lego’s partnership with Epic Games. Ed sees tremendous opportunity in immersive educational experiences as you can see in this clip:

And to cap it all off, we get some fascinating insight from famed Swiss Neuroscientists Pascal Kaufmann as he discusses his ideal predictions for how the metaverse can help revolutionize the scientific process by providing AI lab assistants capable of doing the laborious research and solution generation and free up the scientists to focus on asking the right questions that guide the scientific process and create progress.

It’s clear that the metaverse is getting serious attention from industry. As we covered yesterday, it’s one of Microsoft’s areas they expect a 10x-100x change and are investing heavily in it. It will be interesting to see the progress the industry makes in 2022 and 2023 and how that may shape discussions at the next World Economic Forum 2023 in Davos.

The post Practical Metaverse Applications from World Economic Forum 2022 first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

We’ll review the highlights of the discussion and report on some great quotes from the panelists: Peggy Johnson from Magic Leap, Omar Sultan Al Olama from the United Arab Emirates, Chris Cox from Facebook (now Meta), and Philip Rosedale from Second Life.

Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, started the session off with a great description of how Meta thinks of the metaverse it is building:

“I at least think about it as the next chapter, the next evolution of the internet, except where it gets less flat. If you think about the primary metaphors for the internet to date have been about web pages and literally two-dimensional objects that we peer at through screens. One of the most trends in computing is that the computer moves from the basement to the desktop to our pocket, as has happened over the last 50 years. And we believe, I think we as an industry believe that it ultimately gets closer to the senses, to the eyes, to the hands, to speech. So keyboard input goes away and peering at everything through a screen in our pockets eventually goes away. The metaverse is a way of describing a transition to a three-dimensional environment.”

Chris Cox – Chief Product Officer, Meta

Before we get to the other highlights, watch Chris give his description from 02:09 – 02:55 in this video:

Chris also discusses how hyperlinks were the foundational primitives of the internet, and forecasts that the primitives of the metaverse will be what he calls “complex hyperlinks” and functionally provide the links to navigate directly from one Web3 experience to another.

“If you think about the hyperlink just as a really brutalist simple metaphor for the structure of portability that made the original internet work. I click on a blue word and you will go from one service to another service. That was the structure that enabled Google, that enabled sort of the first generation web services to build utility because we had some agreement on what the primitives were of the internet. The primitives in the metaverse are going to be more complicated because travel. The equivalent of the hyperlink in the metaverse is I can go from Second Life into a work meeting and I can go from there into an educational experience where I”m visiting the colosseum, and then I can turn it all off and be in an A/R (augmented reality) experience where I can just pull my messages up or I can translate the person who is speaking a different language next to me. These are the kinds of things I think we’re all envisioning.”

Chris Cox – Chief Product Officer, Meta

The event is wrapped up with a discussion over rating content in the metaverse and some debate about what sort of revenue model will succeed.

The post Making the Metaverse in Davos – World Economic Forum 2022 first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

The likely outcome is a new regulatory working group composed of financial leaders from the major economies that will work together to establish common guidelines and synchronize essential aspects of the regulations that govern crypto currencies in their respective countries.

To give you an idea just how important an issue this is, authorities say this is equal to COVID and Climate Change.

“But I do think now it’s seen as one of the three C’s (COVID, climate and crypto) so it’s very, very important. It has gone up the agenda, so I would not expect that to be the case the same time next year.”

Ashley Alder, chair of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO)

While speaking at an online meeting for the OMFIF, Alder, who is also CEO of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission, followed up and said:

“If you look at the risks we need to address, they are multiple and there is a wall of worry about this (crypto) in the conversations at an institutional level,”

Ashley Alder

The post Global Crypto Regulation Likely In 2023 first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

Kevin Johnson, President and CEO of Starbucks has committed his company to the metaverse with this direct quote:

Starbucks is committed to create a [digital] third place experience that is exactly tuned to that need — providing safe, familiar and convenient experiences.

Kevin Johnson, President and CEO of Starbucks

Brady Brewer, the Chief Marketing Officer of Starbucks, takes this concept even further in this piece written alongside Adam Brotman. Here he describes utilizing Blockchain, Web3, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) in Starbuck’s vision for this “digital third place“.

We believe NFTs have broad potential to create an expanded, shared-ownership model for loyalty, the offering of unique experiences, community building, storytelling, and customer engagement. And, while doing so also being a source of accretive business that can benefit a number of stakeholders in the process, while creating a new type of digital ecosystem to complement Starbucks current digital platform offering.

Brady Brewer, Chief Marketing Officer, Starbucks

This is a concrete example of a major corporation not just dipping its toes in the waters of the metaverse, but definitively committing to it. Not only will this result in capital investment by Starbucks, but the reach of Starbucks into the daily routines of millions around the globe will help usher in end-user adoption on a massive scale. Think of what happens when suddenly everyone who gets a coffee at Starbucks is now introduced to the concept of a digital third place as the bridge between the brick and mortar world as they know it and the ethereal metaverse?

And the really groundbreaking part are the future plans that will drive invite-only engagement through events and membership perks exclusive to Starbucks NFT holders. Think “Bored Ape Yacht Club for coffee drinkers” – a much larger addressable market. Not only will this result in a Tribal Marketing win for Starbucks, but more importantly it has the potential to drive mainstream adoption of NFTs as the technology that facilitates the metaverse-bridge. Here’s the direct quote that outlines this reality:

We plan to create a series of branded NFT collections, the ownership of which initiates community membership, and allows for access to exclusive experiences and perks. The themes of these collections will be born of Starbucks artistic expressions, both heritage and newly created, as well as through world-class collaborations with other innovators and like-minded brands. 

Brady Brewer, Chief Marketing Officer, Starbucks

Read the full post on the use of Blockchain, Web3, and NFT in the creation of a Starbucks metaverse.

Read the full open letter from the CEO of Starbucks on their commitment to the third place.

Read up on NFTs in this handy NFT guide.

The post Starbucks Commits to Metaverse With Web3, NFT and Blockchain Technology first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

Located near Genesis Plaza, at the heart of Decentraland, the latest hotel by Millennium Hotels and Resorts sits on prime digital land. Similar to its brick-and-mortar sister hotels, M Social Decentraland is positioned as a hub for explorers keen to discover new experiences and connect with like-minded individuals. The virtual hotel flaunts a giant “M” on each of its four sides, with glass exteriors and neon pink accents creating a sleek interior look.

“M Social is about being different, being one of a kind. As we look towards the future, we need to look past the traditional model of hospitality and engage our guests through new immersive experiences.”

“We hope to redefine hospitality through M Social Decentraland by creating online adventures that integrate with real life events.”

Mr. Kwek Leng Beng, Executive Chairman of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels Limited.

Guests who step inside M Social Decentraland can interact with an avatar that welcomes everyone in the lobby. The avatar guides guests on a journey of discovery through the hotel. Those who reach the top of Decentraland will stand a chance to win real world hotel surprises.

This video shows an overview of the new Genesis Plaza in Decentraland:

“The hospitality landscape is rapidly evolving. We are embracing different technologies to engage customers and enhance guest experiences. The metaverse is one such avenue that presents a myriad of opportunities for us to create unique social connections with our guests.”

“M Social Decentraland will enable us to reach out to new and existing customers in both the physical and virtual world with online connection to offline engagement.”

Mr. Saurabh Prakash, Group Senior Vice President, Commercial for Millennium Hotels and Resorts.

In the upcoming months, Millennium Hotels and Resorts will be in discussion with like-minded partners on future collaborations. Guests can also look forward to treasures and surprises when they visit M Social Decentraland. Future integration for the hotel will include linkage to the M Social website and special events to mark special occasions like Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Day.

The M Social brand was launched in Singapore in 2016. M Social Decentraland marks the first virtual location together with other physical outposts in Paris, New York, Singapore and Auckland. Millennium Hotels and Resorts plans to grow the brand in more locations with strong characters to capture diverse stories in vibrant and creative communities.

The post New Metaverse Hotel ‘M-Social’ Launched By Millenium Hotels In Decentraland first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

You can use your apartment for many of the things that you would in a real life residence; you can relax, entertain and even do business there. Will this usher in a paradigm shift into a parallel reality in how people do everyday things? In that reality we may see non- gamers purchasing VR headsets in order to do virtual business or take in the scenery of a different location. The Ethereum Worlds ecosystem includes a feature called ‘E2E’, short for ‘engage to earn’, this is where residents and visitors to the digital property have the chance to earn rewards in the form of the in-world utility token $TWR just for being there. You get paid just to show up!

It’s impossible to escape the recent explosion of discussion about what and where the Metaverse will be in the future. With many established brands such as Meta (formerly Facebook), Adidas and Nike making strategic moves into the space it is plain to see that something is coming over the horizon. Even though it’s a cliché, anyone that is here now is still most definitely ‘early’. But the question we are looking into today, is whether or not the metaverse is solely for the gaming community or is there other utility that will be discovered by non-gamers too?

We are starting to see the expansion of the metaverse beyond just gaming and now into other sectors such as business and real estate. While the metaverse isn’t limited to VR headsets, will we see businesses start to adopt the VR-aspect of the metaverse and conduct more of their operations in this separate parallel reality?

Some big companies are already making such moves. In a nod to the importance of the metaverse, Facebook has taken the big step of renaming itself “Meta” and has already spent over $10 billion on its Metaverse division in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg definitely believes that there is a digital future for social interactions beyond gaming and is putting big bucks into that future.

One problem at the moment is that the Metaverse is so loosely defined and composed of different technologies that it means different things to different groups among consumers and businesses alike. In an attempt to demystify these emerging technologies, Meta has already done a series of videos to promote their vision for the metaverse.

Projects like Ethereum Worlds will eventually attract wider audiences than the gaming community in the future, though gamers will forge the way until the industry comes into alignment on definitions and technology to make it accessible to a wider audience of consumers, both B2B and B2C (Business to Business, and Business to Consumer).

For more information on Ethereum Towers and Ethereum Worlds you can check their website out at https://ethereumtowers.com, engage with them on social media at their Twitter handle https://twitter.com/EthereumTowers, or stay up to date at their blog on Medium https://ethereumtowers.medium.com/.

The post Ethereum Towers and Digital Apartments first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.

The StarryNift platform allows the creation of unique non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and provides tools to auction, trade and play with them. Players can also utilize digital creation tools to customize avatars and co-create the project.

“The uniqueness and irreplaceability nature of NFTs enables digital content to become assets, and the game is one of the most compatible digital content with NFTs.”

“Game tokens, equipment and pets can be digitized and created as a digital currency.”

“With the fusion of NFTs into games, players continuously earn rewards and become more involved, making NFT games more engaging and sustainable”

Lv Nan – Susquehanna investment manager, member of StarryNift’s board of directors.

At its Anniversary Carnival later this month, StarryNift will launch Starryverse, a metaverse marketplace, a spaceship expedition game and other features.

The post New Metaverse Game, Starryverse, to be Launched by StarryNift first appeared on MetaverseWatcher.