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A new job post from AWS has shown the e-commerce giant is looking to hire a “Principal Digital Assets Specialist” in New York for its global financial services team.

As part of the job ad posted on November 30, Amazon stated that the chosen candidate will interface with senior management of the company’s enterprise AWS clientele to “transform the way they transact digital assets.” This will include crypto, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

Other details from the job post include plans to drive cloud-based virtual asset price discovery, settlement, as well as custodial solutions on AWS for financial service clients.

One of the responsibilities of the chosen candidate, as stated in the job ad, involves promoting the value proposition of AWS digital asset solutions in financial services.

In July, the e-commerce giant also advertised another crypto-related job position. At the time, the company was looking to hire a digital currency and blockchain product lead as part of a global expansion focused on virtual assets.

© 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 student loan debt market in the United States stands at more than $1.73 trillion, with over 42.3 million debtors required to pay an average debt of $39,351 each. For now, the government has put federal loan repayments on pause until January 2022, but that deadline is fast approaching.

For students who hold crypto assets and are interested in exploring different avenues for repaying their loans, there are a number of decentralized finance (DeFi) options worth knowing.

What is DeFi?

DeFi expands the use of blockchain from simple value transfer to more complex financial services. Specifically, DeFi refers to an ecosystem of decentralized applications – autonomous applications that operate using smart contracts instead of relying on an underlying company to manage them.

Smart contracts are self-executing computer programs that perform certain functions when conditions are met. These programs lie at the heart of every decentralized application.

DeFi applications offer a range of financial services similar to the loans, insurance and savings accounts offered by traditional institutions.

The main difference is DeFi applications allow anyone to access these services, regardless of a person’s documentation, credit history or geography. Through DeFi, people have the ability to access collateralized and uncollateralized loans, and earn interest by lending, borrowing and staking crypto assets.

Why is a DeFi loan a viable loan repayment option?

The first thing that makes these solutions appealing is that they offer better interest rates. In some cases, the borrowing rates are near zero.

Another factor is the possibility of accessing loans with a flexible repayment period. When taking DeFi loans, you do not need to make payments on a specific date each month. You can decide to skip a month or two without worrying about the damage it will have on your credit score.

Even more important, because these loans are issued via smart contracts and not by financial institutions you do not need to maintain a good credit score to access these loans.

DeFi loans also allow users to take loans against their crypto holdings to avoid missing out on potential bullish price movements and avoid paying capital gain taxes on sold digital assets. This removes the need to sell your crypto holdings to settle a debt or finance a project.

Another key difference about DeFi loans is that protocols often incentivize users to borrow. Think of it as being paid for taking out a loan. While this system is alien to the traditional financial system, it is a common strategy used by DeFi protocols to attract liquidity and reward users for contributing to their ecosystems. Users are usually rewarded with governance tokens, which allow participants to contribute to the day-to-day running of the protocol.

Now that you understand what makes DeFi loans tick, how can they be used to pay off student loans?

Example: Jim has to pay a $10,000 student loan debt to a private lender. Assuming that Jim’s foray into the crypto industry has yielded $20,000 worth of ether over the years, he can simply sell $10,000 worth of digital assets and, in one swoop, erase his debt. While this approach seems like the right call, it does put Jim in a bad spot. He has sold half of his holdings and, in the process, reduced his position in the crypto market. Therefore, the amount he would have made if the prices of digital assets were to maintain an upward trajectory has been halved. There is also a capital gain tax (CGT) Jim is expected to pay whenever he sells his crypto holdings. In the United States, how much CGT is owed depends on how long a person has held the asset and his or her income tax bracket.

Read more: Crypto Tax 2021: A Complete U.S Guide

A viable alternative is to deposit the $20,000 worth of ether in a DeFi loan platform as collateral and take out $10,000 worth of loan denominated in stablecoins. Then, he can exchange the stablecoins for fiat to pay the outstanding student loan. Jim has his loan denominated in stablecoin so he does not have to deal with price volatility. Because there is no fixed repayment period, Jim can take as long as he needs to repay the DeFi loan – so long his collateral remains valuable enough to prevent risk of liquidation. This approach takes away the pressure of meeting a repayment target each month.

• Note: Stablecoins are digital assets backed by fiat currencies to enable stability. Typically, these assets maintain a 1:1 peg to a selected fiat currency. For example, USDT has a 1:1 relationship with the U.S. dollar, which means that if you hold 10 USDT tokens, the value of those tokens will be about $10.

Jim’s debt has not disappeared automatically. Instead, he has transferred his debt to a decentralized ecosystem where he has more freedom to dictate how he wants to make repayments. As an added advantage, the governance tokens or rewards can be sold to pay a fraction of the debt. For instance, USDT borrowers on Aave currently earn 1.66% APR – paid in staked Aave (stkAave) tokens – as rewards when they take out a USDT loan. Notably, the current interest rate of a USDT loan is 3.88%. In light of this, a borrower can use the earnings to pay part of the debt.

Likewise, the size of Jim’s DeFi loan will technically diminish as the price of the digital asset held as collateral rises. To better understand this possibility, it is necessary to discuss the loan-to-value (LTV) metric and how it could impact the activities of DeFi borrowers.

What is LTV?

LTV is a metric indicating the size of your loan relative to your collateral. In essence, LTV is the ratio of loan to collateral. From our example above, Jim has taken out a loan that is worth 50% of his collateral. In essence, his LTV is 50%. If he had taken a $5,000 worth loan, then the LTV would have been 75%. Although some protocols may allow users to borrow over 50% of their collateral, the goal is to ensure that the loans remain over-collateralized to avoid counterparty risks.

The LTV of a borrower is bound to fluctuate all through the duration of the loan, especially if the collateral is denominated in volatile cryptocurrencies. Assuming Jim deposits 5 ETH priced at $4,000 each as collateral, the LTV will automatically reduce if the price of ETH rises to $6,000 in the next two months. Let us do the math to back this up.

• Initial price of ETH = $4,000
• Number of ETH deposited = 5 ETH
• Initial value of collateral = $20,000
• Size of loan = $10,000
• Original LTV = 50%
• Price of ETH at the end of the year = $6,000
• Value of collateral at the end of the year = $6000 * 5 = $30,000
• LTV at the end of the year = $30,000 * 100% = 33.3%

In summary, Jim’s LTV has reduced from 50% to 33.3% because ETH experienced significant price gains. Note that this example is based on the assumption that Jim has not made any payment whatsoever. However, just as the volatility of cryptocurrencies could potentially reduce the value of the debt, it could also lead to liquidation risks (more on this later).

DeFi loan rates

On platforms such as Aave, Maker and Compound you can access loans with fluctuating interest rates. The rates are determined by several factors, including the demand for the digital asset in question. Depending on the protocol being used, you can also take out loans on DeFi protocols with fixed rates but those come in higher.

Average 30-day lending rates on Compound range from 0.01% to 5.12%, and 0.01% to 5.89% on Aave. Borrowing rates are between 2.79% and 28.06% on Compound and between 0.04% to 168.98% on Aave. Information on Maker was not available.

It is also worth mentioning there are options that do not implement any loan rates whatsoever. Here, the borrower gets to repay only the sum borrowed. An example of a DeFi solution that offers interest-free loans is Liquity.

Self-repaying loans

Another concept that makes DeFi loans unique is the possibility of accessing self-repaying loans. We have already established the potential of paying back a fraction of the loans with rewards earned by depositing digital assets as collateral. Some protocols take this system a little further by incorporating interest-generating opportunities for enabling a self-repayment scheme.

Here, the protocol uses the collateral as capital to fund yield farming operations on other protocols. What this means is that the protocol takes the collateral and deposits it on other DeFi platforms where it can generate interest. Subsequently, the earnings are used to repay the debt repayments over time. In other words, the loan will eventually be canceled by the potential income generated by putting your collateral to good use. Alchemix is an example of a platform that offers this type of service.

What are the risks involved with DeFi loans?

Seeing that DeFi loan is a relatively new concept, it is no surprise it comes with risks. Be sure to consider the following before opting to repay your student loan with DeFi.

Liquidation

Note that these DeFi platforms have liquidity thresholds – the LTV at which collaterals are sold off by the protocol to settle debts. From our original example where Jim borrowed $10,000 at 50% LTV, let’s assume that the liquidation threshold is set at 75% LTV. Hence, Jim must ensure that the value of his loan is kept below ¾ of the total value of his collateral, even if the price of ETH drops astronomically.

Jim could incur liquidation risk if the price of ETH drops from $4,000 to $2,800, thereby causing the value of the collateral to slump from $20,000 to $14,000. In this scenario, Jim must either deposit more collateral or pay the loan instantly. If he fails to complete any of these two actions before the price of ETH slips to $2,680, the protocol will liquidate the collateral to pay the $10,000 loan.

Variable rates

DeFi loan protocols often offer variable rates as the APR fluctuates depending on the demand and supply of digital asset loans. In such cases where the APR increases, DeFi loans become expensive. For those planning to opt for self-repaying loans or other reward-generating techniques, the lack of stable interest rates makes it difficult to accurately gauge how long it would take to repay loans.

Smart contract issues

DeFi protocols are powered by smart contracts, which automate the processes involved in borrowing loans. It is worth mentioning that the underlying codes of these smart contracts are written by humans. Hence, it is impossible to ignore the possibility of encountering errors that could jeopardize the safety of users’ digital assets. We have witnessed time and again how bugs expose smart contract-based protocols to security and systemic risks.

Like every crypto-related opportunity, it is crucial to do your own research before setting out to use DeFi strategies to pay your student loan. While DeFi loans are a great way to reduce the pressure of owing traditional lenders, this technique also exposes borrowers to risks.

The content in this article is purely for educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice. Investing any amount of money in cryptocurrency carries risks and it’s possible you may lose all your invested capital. It’s advisable to seek professional advice and perform your own rigorous due diligence before making any type of investment.

The price of Squid Game token crashed to near-zero today as the developers behind the project sold their tokens on the market for 22,328 BNB ($11.9 million).

The price of the token fell from $2,856 to $0.00079 instantly as 70 million tokens were dumped on the market.

The price of Squid Game token fell 99% instantly. Image: CoinMarketCap.

But it wasn’t just a surprise drop. It appears to be a highly engineered scam. 

Early warning signs

The project had a number of red flags that initially drew a healthy dose of skepticism.

The project itself was themed after the hit Netflix show Squid Game, but with no apparent official approval or connection — despite a claim on its website that it was partnered with Netflix.

It also claimed to have further partnerships including NFT marketplace OpenSea, crypto tracking sites CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, and Microsoft. Plus a partnership with Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a decentralized blockchain (while the token did indeed run on BSC, that’s hardly a partnership).

Sucking in all the money

The biggest concern about the project, however, was that some users reported they couldn’t sell their tokens after buying them. According to reports at the time, the project claimed it had “anti-dumping technology” to prevent sales if certain conditions were met — but this was still a major red flag. 

It appears that there was a lock-up function in the smart contract that was designed to prevent sales, according to The Block Research’s Jae Oh Song. This meant that when money flowed into the market on the decentralized exchange PancakeSwap, it was locked up. It’s unclear what percentage of users were able to sell their tokens at any point. 

Since there was little to no selling pressure, the price of the token rose astronomically. This was bolstered by mainstream news articles that highlighted the skyrocketing price but contained few warnings of the apparent risks.

The token was only available through one liquidity pool: between Binance Smart Chain’s native token BNB and the SQUID token. This meant that all of the money getting spent on the SQUID tokens was together in one pool. 

Once there was enough money in the pot for the taking, it seems the developers behind the project, who held a large number of tokens in one wallet, decided to dump them on the market. Since their tokens were unlocked, they were able to sell on PancakeSwap and take nearly all of the liquidity.

Since the dump, it appears that the developers have unlocked everyone else’s tokens, so they can sell whatever’s left against the remaining liquidity.

© 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 developers behind a crypto project inspired by Netflix’s mega-popular show “Squid Game” say they’ve left the project after the price of its affiliated token crashed to nearly zero.

The latest development shows just how risky it can be to invest in a new and hyped token in the crypto market.

As CoinDesk reported last week, the pay-to-earn crypto project Squid Game gained instant popularity and the SQUID token rose by more than 35,000% in just three days – despite several red flags including grammatical and spelling errors in the project’s white paper and the fact that the project’s website was registered less than a month ago.

At press time, the project’s official website and its account on Medium were down and Twitter had temporarily restricted its account, saying it had detected “unusual activity” from it.

Data from CoinMarketCap shows that prices for SQUID, were down nearly 99.99% to $0.002541 in the past 24 hours. Its trading volume has increased more than 130% over the same time period, indicating huge selling pressure.

The token is only available for trading on decentralized exchanges PancakeSwap and DODO, both of which are based on Binance Smart Chain.

On Monday, the project claimed in its official Telegram channel that its developers do not want to continue running the project due to the stress of dealing with scammers.

“Someone is trying to hack our project these days. Not only the twitter account @GoGoSquidGame but also our smart contract. We are trying to protect it but the price is still abnormal. Squid Game Dev does not want to continue running the project as we are depressed from the scammers and is overwhelmed with stress [sic]. We have to remove all the restrictions and the transaction rules of Squid Game. Squid Game will enter a new stage of community autonomy,” it wrote.

Squid Game is not the only crypto project “inspired” by the popular Netflix show, but none of them are officially affiliated with the South Korean survival drama. Prices of other tokens associated with the show, including squid game protocol, squidgametoken, squidanomics and international squid games, were also deep in the red over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

Bitcoin miners hauled in $1.72 billion in revenue during October, new monthly data shows, the second-highest level on record.

That figure edges out April’s $1.7 billion but doesn’t quite exceed the all-time monthly high of $1.75 billion reported for May, as shown in the graph below.

Likely buoying the October figure was bitcoin’s rise to a new all-time high above $66,000. The cryptocurrency’s price hit a high of $66,909.15 on Coinbase during that period. 

The vast majority of the revenue came in the form of block subsidies — amounting to 6.26 BTC per transaction block. Transaction fees represented a paltry 1.62% of the total monthly revenue, or $27.47 million.

That continues a trend seen since the end of the summer, though the October transaction fee figure represents a three-month high for fee-related income. 

© 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.

Stablecoins have a hegemonic hold over the crypto derivatives space. Most of the perpetual contracts across the CEX.IO cryptocurrency exchange [Ed note: taking CEX to mean the exchange] are priced in stablecoins, and all contracts on the FTX exchange are USD margined. Likewise, all perpetuals on decentralized finance (DeFi) derivative protocols like Perpetual Protocol and DYDX are USD linear contracts. This is the stablecoin standard in the derivatives market.

But a new protocol from Qilin allows altcoins to be used in crypto derivative deals, which will rapidly expand the utility of altcoins. We believe that just as fiat money supply exploded once we came off the gold standard, so altcoin demand will explode as the crypto markets move off the stablecoin standard. And a key driver for this move will be the development of derivative markets priced and traded in altcoins.

Derivatives generate critical volatility, which is likely to be the engine of growth for altcoins. Volatility creates critical trading opportunities for a cryptocurrency. Derivative availability leads to more volatility which leads to more trading opportunities, which in turn leads to more value.

However, as a cryptocurrency expands in market capitalization, it becomes more difficult to generate volatility. The lack of volatility generation tools further restricts the growth of a cryptocurrency. Altcoins need coin-margined derivatives for token-native value accrual. Stablecoin-margined derivatives hijack the value created by altcoins for stablecoins.

Coin-margined (inverse) derivatives accrue the value created by altcoins for altcoins. Perpetual contracts are index products that do not require underlying asset settlement, making them the most capital-efficient capitalization expansion tool.

Qilin V2

A critical reason for the lack of traction in the decentralized derivatives market is because the typical business model fails to attract users. Most derivative protocols today are based on the spot market model of Uniswap V2. This means they have one uncapped liquidity pool and an automatic market maker model. However, without an effective liquidity provider (LP) risk management system or an LP reward premium, LPs have no incentive to provide liquidity for derivatives, which have a higher risk profile.

Qilin Protocol has changed all this with its permissionless, crypto-denominated perpetual trading protocol for all crypto assets. At the core of Qilin Protocol’s design is its understanding of the LP business, having been an active market maker for both projects and exchanges since 2017.

Qilin’s key innovation is to create peer-to-tranches liquidity pools that have different risk-reward profiles, based on an understanding of the end users, be they market makers, traders or yield seekers.

For market makers, the liquidity pools have a primary liquidity tranche, a customizable tranche cap and a preferable annual percentage yield (APY). Yield seekers can access the reserve liquidity tranche, an uncapped public access as well as a secondary APY.

Meanwhile, traders can access peer-to-pool liquidity that has single-side margins for altcoin or stablecoin-settled contracts, counterparty liquidity for measurable risk exposure and a multi-pool liquidity to allow LP-generated volatility as well as LP risk protection.

Qilin Protocol also has an incentive structure that does not inflate the value of the tokens that are offered. Instead of the traditional incentive mechanisms based on a predetermined tokenomic pool with pre-allocated reward tokens, Qilin uses a rebate structure. This is a community-owned, non-inflationary front end with customizable rewards, asset pair marketplaces, trading fee settings, rebate settings and a referral link

These innovations dramatically increase the use cases for holders of altcoins, offering a new way to increase their yields through participation in these liquidity pools. Qilin Protocol can also form the foundation for a new suite of tools that other market participants can use to build their own crypto derivative platforms. Increasing the utility of altcoins in the derivative markets will massively increase their value. In the process, this will allow the market to move away from the hegemony of stablecoins and the dominance of bitcoin.

The Avalanche ecosystem is getting yet another injection of liquidity with the launch of Blizzard, an AVAX-focused venture capital and incubation fund.

Blizzard is kicking off with an initial seed investment of $200 million, including participation from the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital and CMS Holdings, among others.

The new fund comes on the heels of a separate pair of big-budget investment programs, including a $230 million fund primarily devoted to providing liquidity, as well as Avalanche Rush, a $180 million liquidity mining incentive fund.

Read more: Can Avalanche Keep It Up? DeFi Users Rush In as Incentives Roll Out

In an interview with CoinDesk, Ava Labs President John Wu, who will also be leading Blizzard, said that the new fund will invest in early-stage projects across the Avalanche ecosystem, including decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), social tokens and “all that stuff.”

Rival base layers to Ethereum have been exploding in popularity as of late, and venture capital firms see ample opportunity on each chain to re-create popular Ethereum-native verticals and services at much lower valuations.

A half-dozen current Ava Labs employees will migrate to Blizzard to provide business development and technical support for young teams, and the fund is being envisioned as closer to an incubator in the vein of Y Combinator rather than a pure, cash-only investment outfit. Services for selected projects will include “community building, marketing, introduction to service providers” such as security audits.

The structure of the fund does mean that the Avalanche Foundation and Ava Labs will become owners of governance tokens controlling products in the Avalanche ecosystem, but Wu said that Blizzard will be distributing portions of those tokens to the fund’s founders rather than holding them.

“We want decentralization, as all projects do. And a unique aspect of this fund is that the tokens that get distributed to Blizzard, they will be passed on to the Polychains, the Three Arrows, the Dragonflies, all these guys in the fund.”

Wu is also confident that the $200 million can be quickly deployed.

“We already have deals that we’re warehousing for the fund. The team has seen over 1,100 deals over the last ten months, and the dealflow has only accelerated.”

Wu told CoinDesk that Ava Labs has offered some form of networking, grants, or marketing assistance to some 400 teams of the 1,100 that have passed through its doors, and that the team directly invested in 40 of those projects.

“Our biggest regret is not having this set for our partners earlier, because we may have invested in more,” he said.

At the time of writing Avalanche’s closely-watched total value locked (TVL) metric sits at $8.46 billion, up over 100% on the month.

The Avalanche Foundation has announced another mammoth incentivization scheme to bring more developers to the Avalanche blockchain.

More than $220 million has been made available in incentives, with contributions coming from the Avalanche Foundation itself, as well as Ava Labs — an Avalanche focused incubator — and investors Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital, CMS Holdings, Republic Capital, R/Crypto Fund, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital and Finality Capital Partners.

The news comes just a few months after Avalanche began touting a similar, $180 million incentive program — a fund that targeted DeFi developers. Half a dozen other blockchains seeking to challenge Ethereum’s dominance have set up developer funds of their own since August.

The schemes have packed a punch. Total value locked (TVL) on Avalanche rose from $312 million on August 18 to $2.6 billion on September 14, according to DeFi Llama.

Avalanche’s foundation hopes the latest incentive program, named Blizzard, will attract developers focused on DeFi, enterprise applications, NFTs and culture. The program will also assist promising projects with equity investments, token purchases and other kinds of operational support.

Emin Gün Sirer, director of the Avalanche Foundation, said in a statement that Avalanche has experienced “incredible growth” in users, assets and applications joining the platform in the past two months.

“Blizzard will play a key role in further accelerating this growth, and solidifying Avalanche’s position as the premiere home for projects and people pioneering the next era in our space,” he added.

© 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.

Blockchain firm and crypto exchange Huobi Group is staking its claim in the metaverse with the trial of its non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, allowing users to buy and sell NFT artwork, collectibles and other digital items.

• Huobi said the launch of the Huobi NFT marketplace has been in the works for some time and is a “key milestone” in the expansion of its metaverse strategy.
• The metaverse is a space generated by the convergence of virtual worlds, augmented reality and internet services.
• The company has also been working on gaming and decentralized finance, or GameFi, projects. In September, Huobi Ventures, the investment arm of Huobi Group, announced it is launching a $10 million fund to invest in early-stage GameFi projects.
• “NFTs have opened up the public’s eyes to the wide range of blockchain applications out there. The concept of NFTs as an immutable proof of ownership is very powerful, so we’re excited to see where our NFT marketplace will take us,” said Jeff Mei, director of strategy at Huobi Group, in a statement.
• An increasing number of NFT marketplaces have launched recently where users can purchase, mint, display and trade NFTs.
• Most recently, Sotheby’s, the 277-year-old British auction house, announced the creation of 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: Huobi Ventures Sets Up $10M GameFi Fund

Sfermion, an investment firm from crypto podcaster and analyst Andrew Steinwold, says it has raised $100 million for a new fund focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with contributions from Marc Andreessen and the Winklevoss twins.

Steinwold told CoinDesk that the fund, dubbed simply “Fund II,” will focus in on the “experiential infrastructure that involves the NFT space.”

It’s part of Sfermion’s mission to usher in the advent of the “metaverse” – a digital layer sitting on top of the real world, accessible via VR and AR. This sort of thing has been around for years (remember Yelp’s Monocle?), but has yet to capture the mainstream imagination in a significant way.

And while some crypto investors have been consciously building toward this concept for years, particularly within the world of NFTs, metaverse fever is spreading far and wide.

Read more: Decentraland’s MANA Jumps 80% as Facebook Rebrand Fuels Metaverse Bets

Last week, Facebook changed its company name to Meta, signalling ambitions to dominate this new avenue of the internet; CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he hopes to see a billion people in the metaverse a decade from now.

To hear Steinwold tell it, parts of the metaverse are already here – and the rest is coming whether we like it or not.

“We don’t realize, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m spending literally all day on my computer, I’m spending all day on my phone,’” he said. “You almost don’t even notice it, it’s just natural. [The metaverse] is going to evolve in a similar way.”

Steinwold added that NFTs are key to metaverse infrastructure, since they can provide a form of digital ownership. “If you don’t have ownership, then really what you have is a communist-style dystopia,” he said.

Read more: This Casino in Decentraland Is Hiring (for Real)

Steinwold has expressed a fascination with what he sees as a “communist” internet on Twitter, too. “NFTs … give users property rights in the digital world,” he wrote in one post. “The internet just went from communism to capitalism (HUGE!)”

Steinwold, a 29-year-old Chicago native, also hosts a podcast called Zima Red; past guests have included Kayvon Tehranian, the CEO of the NFT marketplace Foundation, and Vignesh Sundaresan (a.k.a. Metakovan), the investor who paid $69 million for an NFT at Christie’s earlier this year.

Matthew Roszak, founder of the tech company Bloq and a general partner in Sfermion’s Fund II, called Steinwold “one of the best NFT thought leaders and investors out there.”

Other metaverse believers on board with the fund include Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon and the hedge fund manager Alan Howard.