Crypto’s here to stay!

Welcome to Durlston Partner’s Digital Assets Newsletter – a bi-weekly instalment of Crypto News, DP’s hottest roles, and a small article of interest or an interview with someone working within the space. Welcome, thank you for subscribing, we hope you stick around!

Women in Crypto Event

Durlston Partners are hosting our very first Women in Crypto networking event tomorrow in London, aimed at bringing together women in all stages of their tech careers.

Spaces are limited, so please email shannon@durlstonpartners.com if you’re interested in attending.

📅 This Week in Crypto 📅

About a week into their public event, one BAYC Ape traded for about 0.16 ETH in secondary sales. The current floor price of the BAYC collection is 139 ETH or about $403,000, representing an ROI of more than 173,600%.

Cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, on Wednesday (20/04) released the beta version of a feature that’ll allow users to buy and sell NFTs on its platform.

Both set to offer immersive exhibitions of their cars through the use of virtual reality (VR), all this thanks to their partnerships with the video game developer startup VRChat.

📰 Digital Take Away 📰

Enter the Metaverse

I don’t know about you, but living in times like these makes me want to enter some sort of portal and transform the world around me as I know it – if only there was a device that offers this kind of magic.

If you were good last year then Santa probably treated you with such a device. Enter Meta’s Oculus VR devices. Meta does not release any sales numbers for their Quest headsets, but according to some figures, over 1 million VR players logged into the platform Rec Room across a 60 hour period over the Christmas holidays.

That’s a lot of people spending a great deal of time in a completely digital world. Metaverse is a word coined by Neal Stephenson and has been around for longer than you may think. Broken down, “Meta” means transcendent and beyond while “Verse” is just another word for universe.

Today, the Metaverse is quickly becoming a collaborative virtual space where people can interact, learn and even work via their 3D avatars and a VR headset. It’s evolving into a completely new economic realm that has the same characteristics of the current version of the internet we all know but is (𝘢𝘭𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵) completely immersive.

Who’s building it?

Well, social media giants like Meta have tried to monopolise the space, showing signs of how this is much more than a gaming platform and is a sign of where social trends are heading. Microsoft has also bought the gaming company Activision for $70 billion to “provide the building blocks of the metaverse”.

Major corporations jumping on this multi-billion dollar virtual Eden does have people concerned regarding their user privacy, data protection, unchangeable record-keeping and trustless transactions. That’s exactly where Blockchain technology comes in.

Technologies like cryptocurrencies allow for unhackable and secure transactions and NFTs are the foundation for property ownership in the metaverse. For all of this to truly work, there has to be a way to move from one digital space to the other and bring your avatars and digital assets along with you.

This kind of service is what a handful of our clients are offering. Whether it’s providing an exchange in the #GameFi space to allow people to value and transfer their digital items, or creating virtual fashion runways to show off the new merch you have gathered from your explorations. Looking fashionable in a virtual world is the next big thing.

Written by Karolis Kundrotas