The city of Miami will soon give out a “bitcoin yield” to its citizens from the staking of its cryptocurrency, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez announced on CoinDesk TV Thursday morning.

“We’re going to be the first city in America to give a bitcoin yield as a dividend directly to its residents,” Suarez said.

The yield comes from the staking of the city’s own cryptocurrency, MiamiCoin, which was introduced early this year and has already earned over $21 million in the past three months for Miami. Suarez noted that if you were to annualize that revenue, it would equal roughly one-fifth of Miami’s total annual tax revenue of $400 million.

The payment will be done through a digital wallet for which the city will work with a variety of cryptocurrency exchanges to allow its residents to acquire a digital wallet, register and get verified, the Mayor said.

“[Mayor Suarez] just turned his city into an oil-producing country that gives bitcoin yield to its citizens. That’s incredible,” Community Lead for CityCoins Patrick Stanley told CoinDesk TV. CityCoins is the organization that set up and runs MiamiCoin.

In the long run, Suarez said the approach could potentially eliminate the need for Miami residents to pay taxes, which would be “revolutionary.”

“I do see very quickly a world where the Satoshi system is what is used to make payments,” Mayor Suarez said. “We need for people to understand that … yes, we want you to hold bitcoin but we also want to increase the utility of bitcoin.”

Read more: CityCoin’s Plan for NYCCoin Is Welcomed by Mayor-Elect Adams

The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee will hold a hearing on Nov. 17 focused on clarifying the role of government in the context of digital assets. 

The hearing, entitled “Demystifying Crypto: Digital Assets and the Role of Government,” will take place in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. at 2:30 p.m. EST. The Joint Economic Committee’s YouTube channel will also stream the hearing online.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Don Beyer (D-VA), will preside over the hearing. He introduced a bill in July focused on regulating digital assets.

Four experts are scheduled to testify at the hearing: Alexis Goldstein, director of financial policy for the Washington, D.C.-based Open Markets Institute; Tim Massad, a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and adjunct law professor at Georgetown Law Center; Kevin Werbach, legal studies and business ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and director of its Blockchain and Digital Asset Project; and Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center’s director of research. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Quick Take

• Non-fungible token (NFT) trading exploded in 2021 — with special attention paid toward collections created through randomization algorithms like Bored Ape Yacht Club. 
• The Block spoke with the teams behind three so-called combinatorial NFT collections to learn about how they are created behind the scenes.

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Bitwise Asset Management has withdrawn the application for its Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) citing what it said are the cost and complexity of such ETFs. The company will instead focus its efforts on its spot bitcoin ETF filing already in the pipeline.

• “Our analysis suggested contango (associated with a futures ETF) would cost investors 5%-10% per year, before compounding,” said Matt Hougan, Bitwise Asset Management chief investment officer, in a tweet thread explaining the company’s rationale for the withdrawal.
• “Ultimately, what many investors want is a spot bitcoin ETF [that holds bitcoin itself rather than futures]. We think that’s possible,” Hougan said.
• The CIO added that, “Bitwise will continue to pursue that goal, and we will look for other ways to help investors get access to the incredible opportunities in crypto.”
• The first bitcoin futures ETF, the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO), was approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Read more: Bitwise Joins Hunt for Bitcoin ETF Approval With Futures Product Filing

South Korean gaming developer NCSoft has announced plans to launch non-fungible token (NFT)-based games in 2022. Hong Won-jun, NCSoft’s chief financial officer, made this known during the company’s Q3 earnings call on November 11.

According to Hong, the planned NFT gaming titles will be in the form of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) with release dates scheduled for Q2 2022.

NCSoft’s NFT-based gaming titles will also follow the play-to-earn (P2E) model where players are rewarded for playing the games, in this case with cryptocurrencies. NCSoft plans to create its own crypto tokens to use as rewards for playing the games.

The game maker may also extend the P2E format beyond its upcoming catalog of NFT-based games with Hong stating: “We are also considering applying the play-to-earn game model to all games developed and distributed by NCSoft.”

As part of the announcement, Hong also stated that the emerging NFT gaming space will provide an opportunity for new business growth for the $13.67 billion company.

The move to blockchain-based gaming comes after the company lost over $3.7 billion in market value between August and September following the failure of its martial arts role-playing game “Blade & Soul 2.”

NCSoft’s NFT gaming announcement met with a favorable investor response as the company’s stock price rose 30%, from 592,000 Korean won ($501.57) to 786,000 Korean won ($665.94), on Thursday to match its daily limit for the first time since January 2015. The company’s share price is still down almost 20% year-to-date on the Korean Stock Exchange following a nearly 50% decline between February and October.

Today’s announcement also offers another indication of the growing appeal of blockchain-based P2E games in South Korea. Mir4, an MMORPG with a crypto component, produced by fellow South Korean gaming studio WeMade Co, has become popular on the Steam platform.

Outside South Korea, NFT gaming also appears to be gaining in popularity especially as companies look to develop expansive metaverse ecosystems. This rise in prominence is evidenced by the growing volume of venture capital backing for NFT-based startups as seen in recent months.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Pixlr, one of the world’s most popular design and photo editing ecosystems, now introduces Pixlr Genesis, a revolutionary movement to build a 100% decentralized art museum on the metaverse to rival the Louvre, MoMa and National Gallery. 

Aspiring to bridge artists and art connoisseurs from around the globe, this movement aims to display 10,000 pieces of NFT artwork in a world-class crowdsourced museum.

Up to 10,000 exclusive passes would be released upon its launch. Each of these NFT passes allows one artwork to be displayed within the metaverse, and 2,000 NFT passes will be sold in each phase over five phases to ensure the galleries are refreshed with new curators and art pieces.

These premium passes also represent your choice in deciding what to display within this museum and how to invest secondary royalty funds.

Art patrons can explore and display their collections in Pixlr Genesis gallery.

What makes Pixlr Genesis so unique?

Its one-of-a-kind NFT pass aims to symbolize the human connection formed in art. Each pass has a cryptographically hashed connection to the next NFT.

With the Pixlr Genesis pass, you can officially become an art patron within the NFT space and explore the unique collections in our gallery. You can even play a critical part to nurture the second Renaissance, which would mark another revival of the arts, one that will last for ages.

What’s more, being a Pixlr Genesis NFT pass holder means you can enjoy exclusive access to new community airdrops for additional collections at the genesis of the crypto art movement. Not to mention owning said pass would also allow you to use Pixlr tools to create NFT-based experiences and community.

How rare is Pixlr Genesis artwork?

Every single Pixlr Genesis piece is guaranteed unique and is manually signed with a secret attribute which boosts up their rarity rate.

The 10,000 slots will be divided into five releases, with each release having their own special advantages accruing over time.

Pixlr Genesis will showcase NFT art from around the world. 

Supporting artists & creators from around the world

You’d also be thrilled to know that over 25% of all Pixlr Genesis NFT secondary royalties will be reinvested in gaining new art pieces and building new platforms in hopes to support new and upcoming artists to grow alongside the Pixlr Genesis Collection.

Be a part of the Pixlr Genesis Community now!

Interested in this revolutionary art movement? Visit Pixlr Genesis today. 

Follow Pixlr Genesis on Twitter and join their Discord server for more details and timely updates. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Agoric, a JavaScript-based smart contract platform built on the Cosmos SDK with Tendermint proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, has raised $32 million in a private token sale and has also launched its mainnet after over three years of development.

Agoric was founded in 2018 to help Javascript developers — the biggest developer community in the world with nearly 14 million people — build decentralized applications or dapps. Javascript is a programming language like Ethereum’s Solidity and Solana’s Rust language.

“The crypto market has overlooked the need to engage with non-crypto-native audiences to onboard the next wave of DeFi entrepreneurs,” Agoric co-founder and CEO Dean Tribble told The Block. “Agoric is aiming to bridge this divide” by enabling developers to create dapps using JavaScript smart contracts. 

Tribble is a former principal architect at Microsoft and leads Agoric with chief scientist Mark S. Miller, a Google research scientist who wrote a paper called Agoric Open Systems in 1988.

Now that the Agoric mainnet has been launched and the new capital has been raised, the platform hopes to build and grow its developer community. Tribble said Agoric will reward early developers with its native Build (BLD) token.  

Along with the mainnet, Agoric has also launched its native automated market maker (AMM) to let users swap tokens. It has also launched a native USD-pegged stablecoin called RUN for paying fees within the network.

There are currently 22 people working for Agoric and Tribble plans to hire around ten more people across various roles, he said.

Agoric is backed by notable investors, including Polychain and Naval Ravikant. The latest private token sale round was backed by several investors, including Placeholder, NGC Ventures, Spartan Group, Compound VC, Acrew Capital, Figment, and Chorus.One.

The round brings Agoric’s total funding to date to $38 million. It has previously raised $6 million in two rounds. Tribble said Agoric has no plans to raise more funds in the near future.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The metaverse is important because it can “fundamentally change the medium through which we socialise with others, watch music performances, engage with fashion brands, learn and/or speculate on digital assets such as NFT’s or in-game skins,” Morgan Stanley said in a research note.

• The metaverse does exist but not yet in its “purest form,” equity strategist Edward Stanley said in the report published Thursday.
• Companies such as Roblox, Facebook and Naver are all currently building metaverses on their own company platforms, but a “true metaverse” would allow for “interoperability between experiences” across all these companies’ platforms. However, it will take some time and “cross company collaboration to allow users to seamlessly move across millions of experiences,” the report said.
• South Korea is seen as an important hub because its alliance of over 400 technology companies could deliver interoperability between metaverses in the future, the report noted.
• The report described the metaverse as a “virtual world for immersive co-experiences that is persistently available and where users can explore vast numbers of experiences concurrently,” and “within these experiences, people across the world can meet, play, watch, trade and learn across millions of experiences.”
• The target audience for the metaverse at present is young gamers, observed the report, but noted the average age is rising, and it can be accessed over phone or PC gaming platforms.
• The metaverse is already moving share prices for gaming stocks such as Roblox, the bank said, and more companies are embracing the concept, it added.
• Facebook said in October that it was planning to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to develop its metaverse. The social media company also rebranded its name to Meta at the same time.

Read also: Facebook’s Metaverse Will Support NFTs

Decentralized search engine Presearch has integrated with OpenSea to build non-fungible token (NFT) searches into its platform.

• Presearch aspires to be a kind of “Google…for the Web 3 era of decentralization,” according to founder Colin Pape.
• Its aim for the integration with the world’s largest NFT marketplace is to streamline the way in which users can search for NFTs. Presearch says it is the first search engine to offer such a feature.
• Users will search the names of NFT projects and receive the top results from OpenSea.
• Blockchain-based Presearch has 2.7 million registered users, who earn PRE tokens each time they perform a search. Advertisers can also stake PRE tokens into a specific search term, with the advertiser who stakes the most having their ad show up when users search for that term.

Read more: Decentralized Search Engine ‘Presearch’ Becomes Default Option on European Android Devices

Sotheby’s, the 277-year-old British auction house, will allow live bidding in ether cryptocurrency in an upcoming virtual exhibition on Nov, 18 to be held at its “headquarters” in Decentraland.

• Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker will be fielding real-time bids from its New York saleroom for Banksy’s Trolley Hunters and Love Is In The Air (2006).
• Sotheby’s has been accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment for physical art work for a while and sold a separate painting by Banksy offered in May 2021.
• Art fans interested in the auction can tune in from anywhere around the world and follow the live-streamed broadcast by following Sotheby’s social media channels.
• Back in April, Sotheby’s held its first sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by pseudonymous artist Pak. The sale fetched $16.8 million over a three-day drop.
• In October, Sotheby’s launched a new platform called “Sotheby’s Metaverse” that allows visitors to view digital artworks available at auction, as well as learn about the collectors and artists behind NFTs.

Read more: Sotheby’s Takes Its NFT Experiment Into the Metaverse