• The NFT project launched by Donald Trump is seeing a revival, with prices skyrocketing 800% this week despite no update in the collection. (Investors)
• Genesis files for bankruptcy. (The Defiant)
• L’oreal-owned brand NYX Professional Makeup will release an NFT access pass to GORJS, a DAO dedicated to beauty. (Binance)
• South Korea has finally brought us the long-awaited metaverse version of its capital city Seoul this week. (CoinDesk)
• Federal government has seized $700 million from FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried. If convicted of fraud, he could lose it all. (Fortune)
• Blockchain analytics firm DappRadar released its Blockchain and Dapp Adoption Report 2022 this week and found that more than 101 million NFTs sold in 2022 across all blockchains. (DappRadar)
• Binance Charity to provide over 30K Web3 scholarships in 2023. (Cointelegraph)
• Signature Bank halts SWIFT transactions under $100,000 for crypto users, says Binance. (Decrypt)
• Crypto lender Nexo fined $45 million over unauthorized security sales. (The Verge)

The chatbot can turn human prompts into lines of code: At my command, ChatGPT wrote a smart contract in Solidity, Ethereum’s programming language, that turned the DALL-E image I had generated into an NFT.

Some crypto professionals are already making good use of the tech:

• Hugh Brooks, head of security for the smart contract auditing firm CertiK, said the chatbot wasn’t half bad at finding bugs in code, and has become invaluable at summarizing complicated code and dense academic articles.
• And Stephen Tong, founder of a small blockchain security company called Zellic, said his company’s already using it for sales and customer support. “It makes everyone on those teams more efficient,” he said, allowing cosplaying tech bros to provide a “super-buttoned-up, professional experience” without breaking a sweat.
• Also close to the front of the pack of crypto-utopians is Tomiwa Ademidun, a young Canadian software engineer who has used ChatGPT to code a cryptocurrency wallet from scratch, then generated a detailed guide, complete with diagrams, that teaches people how to use it.

It was Mark Twain who purportedly said: “Buy land, they’re not making it any more.”

It turns out the American humorist was wrong — landlords are snapping up digital space in the metaverse and renting it out for profit.

The practice took off in Decentraland. A block of land near the centre of Decentraland is on sale for 198,888 MANA, the in-world cryptocurrency, which is equivalent to $147,844. To rent the plot for a day costs 175 MANA, or $130.

The tenant can build on the plot, and Mastercard and Heineken have used the system for one-off virtual events known as “experiences”. Both worked with LandVault, a company that helps customers buy, sell and rent land in the metaverse, the digital world championed by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta.

Sam Huber, LandVault’s chief executive, said it was “basically a construction company but in the virtual world, so we kind of operate like a real estate company”.

Critics have raised concerns that the practice will result in a class system that undermines any hope of the metaverse uniting people from all walks of life.

Huber said while land used to be cheaper – when he entered the market in 2017 parcels were $50 compared to more than $1,000 today – he did not see an issue with the business model.

Let’s make 2023 the year for influencer accountability.

FTX was just like the ill-fated Fyre Festival: a hollow project fueled by mendacious influencer marketing, says Oxygen's Nemo Yang.

Celebrities, and their managers who present advertising opportunities, owe a responsibility to fans and followers to properly vet products and services, and to actually understand what they’re promoting. While most builders in Web3 understand the risks of investing in cryptocurrency projects and have some lay of the land regarding DeFi architecture, it’s unlikely that Kim Kardashian's 228 million Instagram followers are well-versed in topics like portfolio allocation. They are sheep being led to the slaughter by someone who has never even ventured an opinion on Ethereum.

To create a Web3 free of bad actors promoting pump-and-dump schemes, the incentive structures need to change for crypto marketing. Web3 is full of unproven startups, value propositions and teams requiring greater accountability than just disclosing payments for promotions. 

Promoters in this space need to explain why they chose to align themselves with certain brands. Unlike skincare products or merchandise, cryptocurrencies directly impact financial markets and carry the risks for derivatives trading and contagion into other institutions. With all transactions visible on a public ledger, blockchain tech is built with transparency in mind. Those who tout the technology’s virtues should abide by this essential principle from both a legal and moral standpoint, and the industry needs to hold them accountable... Read more on CoinDesk