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Rupt Weekly Newsletter

24 September 2022

We’re less than 60 days away from the 2022 FIFA world cup and the world governing body FIFA wants fans to own a piece of the world cup history.

How? Meet FIFA+ Collect, an NFT marketplace that allows you to own and trade clips of the greatest goals, saves, celebrations and more from the men and women World Cup history.

Who said NFTs are a fad?

Now the stories of the week!

IN THIS ISSUE

💎 Twitch bans crypto casinos but is it not enough?
💎
Helium network moves to Solana
💎
$22 million

🤯 THE BIG IDEA

Twitch bans crypto casino

American video live streaming service, Twitch is clamping down on cryptocurrency gambling.

On September 20, the company announced that it will update its policies, effective October 18, to specifically prohibit streaming gambling sites “that include slots, roulette, or dice games that aren’t licensed either in the US or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protection.”

Backstory: A year ago, Twitch was in the middle of a gambling boom, fueled by the rise of websites where gamblers can purchase cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum for use in digital games of chance like slots, blackjack, and baccarat. These sites, which were also known as crypto casinos, paid popular streamers sometimes as high as $10,000 to play the casinos on their channels.

The problem: Despite the fact that many crypto gambling sites are not legally permitted to operate in places like the US because they’re based offshore and don’t abide by gambling regulations, users are still able to access them using VPNs.

This has led to cases of users falling into gambling addiction. UK-based creator Sliker recently admitted to his audience that he had swindled about $200,000 from fans and fellow streamers to fulfil his gambling addiction.

Why not ban gambling outrightly?

That’s what many users are asking for, but the popular counter-argument is that betting/gambling is a professional sport that requires certain skills and experience.

Zoom out: Twitch will still allow streams for legal activities like sports betting, fantasy sports, and poker, and even chance-based games like US-licensed slots or dice. But for cryptocurrency gambling platforms to stand any chance on the platform they’ll need to subject themselves to the abiding by existing regulations.

Sounds like something has to give.

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Helium network moves to Solana

It looks like its transfer season in the crypto world. First it was Ethereum’s Merge and now it’s the Helium network moving over to Solana, after its developers voted in favour of this move.

What’s Helium?

Helium is a decentralised wireless network for “internet of things” devices, powered by cryptocurrency.

Let me break it down

Helium is creating a version of the internet that helps connect electric devices around us such as Fridges, parking metres, dog tags and many more.

The network is made up of devices called Helium hot spots, gadgets with antennas that can send small amounts of data over long distances using radio frequencies.

These hot spots, which cost about $500 apiece, can reach 200 times farther than conventional Wi-Fi hot spots. They share their owners’ bandwidth with nearby internet-connected devices like air-quality sensors or smart kitchen appliances.

Where’s crypto in all of this?

In addition to transmitting data, Helium hot spots owners get rewarded for participating in the network by creating units of a cryptocurrency called $HNT. These tokens can be bought and sold on the open market like any other cryptocurrency, and the more a hot spot is used, the more $HNT tokens it generates.

Hot spot owners can profit when the price of $HNT rises but the main way they make money is by adding new hot spots, not by trading $HNT tokens on a crypto exchange. Outside Hot spot owners, anyone can buy the $HNT token.

So why’s helium moving over to Solana?

The current system just can’t hold up anymore. Co-founder of Helium Amir Haleem described Helium as a massive Jenga-like tower.

“You move one block and the thing starts wobbling, and we've had downtime and outages,” Haleem explained.

As the number of users and use cases on Helium increase, they believe Solana which can handle thousands of transactions per second at peak and its mature ecosystem is a good fit. This is despite Solana’s recent stability issues as the network has experienced periods of downtime.

Big picture: As many web3 projects mature, they’ll have to choose whether to build their supporting infrastructure on their own or collaborate with others. It might be a better route in terms of efficiency and stability to rely on another platform but it requires giving control on making certain decisions.

For instance, what happens when regulators come requesting for information related to Helium from Solana?

🗣 NUMBERS SPEAK

$22 million

Last month, 4 Binance.us customers unexpectedly received almost $22 million in cryptocurrency.

Was it a bonus or a promotion from Binance.us? No

A section of the world map showing Pacific Islands

The crypto-exchange had wrongly credited the holders of the Helium’s new MOBILE token, with the more valuable helium (HNT) token instead.

What happened?

Binance's systems contained a bug that caused it to classify Helium's new MOBILE token as HNT, which is vastly more valuable. One MOBILE token is worth less than one thousandth of a HNT token. This fluke was also possible because Binance.us had previously stopped consolidating its users' HNT deposits to one main exchange address.

The accidental payout coincided with a selloff that saw HNT's price dive from over $7 to an 18-month low of around $3.33.

23 days and more

To make matters worse, the error lasted for 23 days (from August 23 to September 15) before someone at Binance.us noticed what was going on and the exchange put a stop to it. By then its wallet of 4.5 million HNT had been reduced to only 310,000.

As for the ‘lucky receivers,’ they have sold their HNTs, and Binance is asking for it to be returned but pending when or if that happens, Binance.us has to buy back the HNT token it has lost.

Looking forward: Since September 16 when this incident became public knowledge, HNT has climbed 17.6% from $3.93 to a current price of $4.62.

Word of the Week

Shill


The act of heavily promoting a cryptocurrency, stock, or other asset in an effort to increase adoption and, in turn, raise its price. This is usually done via spamming on social media, and generally carries a negative connotation. A person who performs the act of shilling may also be referred to as a shill.

As seen Online

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