A month-end round-up for August 2022 of key technology news headlines, looking at NFTs, Web3, crypto and related technologies.
Headlines here capture a snapshot, globally, of all things blockchain-related, and related venture capital funding. Items featured are hyperlinked headlines – one click and you’re reading the Web3 news that interests you the most.
Also below is a section focused on cybersecurity news headlines and related fields, looking at ransomware, nation-state cyber-attacks, digital ID and beyond.
We’ve also recently launched weekly tech updates on Substack, alongside weekly LinkedIn tech news summaries, and the less-frequent Startup News Asia e-newsletter on Revue.
- Decentraland partners Transak payment gateway, Metaverse Architects studio for ‘metaverse ATM’ allowing users to buy in-game crypto, and to deploy ATM to metaverse ‘property’
- Coinfest Asia 2022 set for August 25-26, running from Bali, Indonesia, for crypto & blockchain founders and ecosystem builders in Web3, GameFi, DeFi and more
- Nomad, cryptocurrency bridge allowing users to swap tokens between blockchains, hacked and drained of near $200M due to misconfigured ‘smart’ contract
- A look at how cryptocurrencies and NFTs may become attractive payment tools for buying a home
- “Illicit finance poses one of the key national security challenges facing the crypto industry.”
- Iran steps into crypto for cross-border trade with $10M import order, seeing a further method to dodge sanctions
- Switzerland’s Lugano city authority working on ‘formal approvals and installing the technological infrastructure’ to add acceptance for crypto as payment for all goods and services, including taxes
- Podcast: ‘A skeptic’s guide to crypto – boom and bust’ from the Financial Times
- World’s largest cryptocurrency ATM operator, Bitcoin Depot, to go public with Nasdaq listing by merging with GSR II Meteora, a special purpose acquisition company, at estimated value of $885M
- Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse bid: “This is bad. They should stop. It doesn’t look like an actual product. There’s nothing ‘immersive’ about this.”
- A brief overview of the rise of artificial intelligence-driven ‘virtual influencers’
- Direct-to-Avatar: The new frontier for brands in the metaverse?
- Big Tech & the Metaverse: “By offering deep-pocketed tech firms the ability to indulge in their own virtual reality…it exposes their complete inability to envision anything worthwhile.”
- Nike, with acquisition of RTFKT, has already made $185.3M in revenue from its NFT collections
- Czech prince turns to NFTs and more to preserve legacy, using blockchain to record, store and safeguard heritage
- Soulbound Tokens: A proposal for building blocks for a Web3 decentralized society composed of non-transferable and non-financialized tokens, from Ethereum’s Buterin
Cybersec news headlines, August 2022
- Ransomware and government: “…when you’re going to put out a fire, the last thing you want to do is to just pour more gasoline on it. Enabling ransomware payments by governmental entities are just that.”
- Interesting suggestion from the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service that spreading fake news deliberately on behalf of a foreign power should be criminalised.
- Cybersecurity and ‘identity sprawl’: “Is Jane Doe in your payroll system the same as JaneD in your CRM, and is it the same JDoe in your SaaS application?”
- ICYMI: Lloyds of London announces its insurer groups will exclude ‘catastrophic’ state-backed attacks from cyber insurance policies, citing difficulties around attribution and ‘knowledge of’ components
- ICYMI: LastPass digital password manager hacked, with parts of the company’s source code and other sensitive data taken, potentially affecting the firm’s 25 million users
- Binance Chief Comm’s officer deepfaked by scammers using AI hologram, built using online interviews and TV footage and used to discuss Binance listings with outside project teams
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