Soderbergh Launches Crypto Film Fund $300,000
Veteran director Steven Soderbergh has partnered with blockchain-based movie fund Decentralized Pictures to set up a $300,000 grants program to provide financial support for indie filmmakers.
Soderbergh said that the initiative is an experiment to confirm if blockchain financing works. According to Indiewire, Soderbergh’s production company’s subsidiary Extension 765 has unveiled the Andrews/Bernard Award on the Decentralized Pictures platform.
The Academy Award-winning director’s resume includes cult classic films such as Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s 8, Erin Brockovich and Traffic. Soderbergh’s 2017 film “Logan Lucky” was financed through preselling foreign distribution rights of the project. He said, “The funding model of preselling distribution provides complete transparency. It’s not a scratch to imagine that the director would be attracted to a blockchain financing model with that philosophy.”
Members of Francis Ford Coppola’s production company American Zoetrope alongside producer Roman Coppola founded Decentralized Pictures. The platform allows filmmakers to submit projects which are then reviewed by its community to select films to be financed through the organization’s treasury.
Axie Infinity Sales Drops
Popular Play-to-Earn (P2E) game Axie Infinity’s sales volume has significantly declined to $31 million in March 2022. It brought in $81 million in sales in February 2022, a 61% drop in revenue in just one month.
The platform’s lagging sales volume is attributed to a fall in the number of new buyers and a low transaction count, which could severely negatively affect its ability to compete with other on-chain digital collections. Bulls nevertheless believe that the project will have a resurgence as the broader crypto market regains its momentum from 2021.
Axie Infinity’s sales volume has been up nearly 468% since March 2021. The platform observed a record sales volume of $666 million in July 2021 and sales volume of the play-to-earn game peaked at $848 million in August 2021.
Musk To Join Twitter’s Board
According to the latest tweet by CEO Parag Agrawal, Elon Musk has reportedly joined the board of social media platform Twitter.
The announcement came at the heel of a recent poll taken by the entrepreneur in which he asked the audience if they believed that Twitter strictly adheres to free speech.
Out of 2 million respondents, 70% answered that the platform does not adhere to the principle. Musk then reportedly bought a 9.2% stake in the company. As of 5 April, 2022, the common stock of Twitter was trading at around $39.31, meaning that the deal cost the entrepreneur $2.8 billion. As per a regulatory filing with the SEC, Musk can only increase his share in Twitter to 14.9%. To prevent the tech CEO from completely overtaking the social media company, he was invited to join the board.
Exchanges Hit Multi-Year Low BTC Balances
Blockchain analytics firm Glassnode reports that the cumulative BTC balances on major exchanges hit a “multi-year low” in May 2022 since August 2018.
The crypto exchanges have experienced a net outflow of 96,200 BTC every month since 2020. Most of these withdrawals are from leading exchanges such as Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, Bitfinnex and Gemini. Despite these large outflows, Binance and Gemini have significantly increased their balances in the same period.
According to Glassnode, the outflows are a net positive for Bitcoin because the coins are now moving from exchanges to wallets that typically don’t spend them for an extended period. These coin accumulators range from individual investors to corporations and institutional custodians. An excellent example of these accumulating entities would be organizations like MicroStrategy and Luna Foundation Guard (LFG).
Glassnode informs that even shrimps (addresses with balances less than 1 BTC) have been on an accumulation spree since the beginning of 2022. Both whales, shrimps and other investors have stacked nearly 217,000 BTC (worth $10 billion) since the first week of December 2021.
Public BTC Miner's Dominance Increased Six-Fold
Blockchain.com reports that the hash rate dominance of publicly listed BTC miners has increased nearly sixfold since March 2021.
Hash rate is a metric used to define the computing power plugged into the Bitcoin network.
A higher hash rate gives the network more security and increases the chances that a miner will solve a Bitcoin block and receive a predefined amount of bitcoin as a reward. Publicly listed miners now claim 19% of the total hash rate on the network. Although more listed mining companies are on the network, their participation has not yet necessarily translated into increased security for Bitcoin.
The overall Bitcoin hash rate has remained stagnant since February 2022 despite the growing computing power of publicly listed miners. Arcane Research claims that many supply chain issues might hinder miners from building new facilities or getting equipment for their operations.
The increased dominance of public miners continues as many existing private miners went public recently. Bitfarms, which contributed nearly 1% of the total hash rate, went public in June 2021, and Core Scientific, one of the biggest miners in the United States, went public in January 2022. As of 6 April 2022, there are 26 public Bitcoin mining companies, including giants like Riot Blockchain and Marathon.
