Monthly Archives: February 2023

Reese Witherspoon

Coming off the back of her media company sale, American actress Reese Witherspoon had a lot of cash to invest in other ventures.

Consequently, she announced her first Ethereum purchase on Twitter in early January 2022. Before that, she had posted a few tweets in support of Crypto and blockchain developers.

Reese is also a major backer of the World of Women NFT collection, as she promotes it frequently on her Twitter page. She’s thrown her weight behind the metaverse, too, calling for people to get ready before they are left behind.

Maisie Williams

She is known as Arya Stark in the colossal HBO medieval television series, Game of Thrones. The English actress’ lead role in the hugely successful series catapulted her career several steps into the pinnacle of TV fame.

Maisie Williams engaged her Twitter followers in November 2020, asking them which is better between going long or short on Bitcoin. And of course, many skeptics advised her not to jump on the “bandwagon.” She bought it anyway; she announced later to thank her fans for the advice.

Lionel Messi

Besides getting paid a significant portion of his sign-on fee in fan token $PSG, Messi also backed a blockchain-based operating system.

In addition, Messi invested in the new trend in NFT, the metaverse. His first authenticated NFT called Messiverse went live in August 2021.

Paris Hilton

One of America’s most famous faces, Paris Hilton, is heiress to the famed Hilton family. Paris Hilton, regarded as an all-rounder in the entertainment industry, is an actress, singer, DJ, model, socialite, and businesswoman.

According to Paris in an interview with CNBC in 2021, she became an investor in Crypto long before the boom. Although she didn’t specify the exact time, some online speculators put the timeline between 2015 and 2018. She also got into NFT in 2020 before the boom.

Mike Tyson

Mike Tyson is one of the first celebrities to get involved with Crypto. In 2015, “Iron Mike” partnered with Bitcoin ATM manufacturers “Bitcoin Direct.” The partnership got his iconic face tattoo engraved on the ATMs.

Besides his investment in Solana, his NFT collection, “Iron Mike,” is also an investor in the Cool Cats NFT collection.

Jay-Z

Jay-Z is not in crypto for fun. His series of investments made through his investment company Marcy Ventures Partners (MVP) touches different facets of Crypto. Jay-Z’s Crypto investment portfolio includes Alchemy, Ledger, and spatial LABS (sLABS).

That’s not all; Jay-Z also funded a trust with an initial investment of 500 Bitcoins in partnership with Jack Dorsey, Square CEO. The trust is to fund Bitcoin development in Africa and India. His love for NFTs has also seen him participate in the Series A funding of NFT marketplace Bitski. A fan of NFTs, he’s also a holder of some NFTs, including Cryptopunks and RTFKT Clone X.

To Cap it all, Jay-Z sits on the board of Square, which intends to build a decentralized exchange for Bitcoin.

Elon Musk

Unarguably the biggest Crypto influencer. Elon Musk, an innovative entrepreneur and current world’s richest man, built an enviable reputation as a major force influencing the rise and fall of the market, particularly Dogecoin, through his tweets and actions.

Although it’s not clear the volume of Crypto Elon musk has, what is certain is that he has at least 0.25 Bitcoin, which was gifted to him by a friend a few years ago. However, his company, Tesla, has invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Tesla also started accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment in 2021.

Jimmy Fallon

The host of Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon, caught the NFT fever. He revealed in a chat with the world’s most successful NFT artist, Beeple, that he bought “an ape,” referring to a collection from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collections through MoonPay.

Expectedly, the revelation turned into an internet frenzy in no time as many NFT enthusiasts rushed to Opensea to see the exact NFT the show host bought.

Snoop Dogg

Snoop Dogg is one of the few celebrities who got involved with Crypto early. In 2013, he made Bitcoin a means of payment for his new album. A unit of the album was made available for 0.3 Bitcoin each, equivalent to about $11,000 an album in today’s Bitcoin valuation.

It is unclear how much Snoop Dogg raked in from the venture or the current value of his portfolio.

He’s a holder of Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other cryptos. His NFT portfolio includes Cryptopunks, Cool Cats, Sandbox, and other NFT collections, and he has continuously reiterated his belief in cryptocurrencies.

Mark Cuban

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is a businessman, TV star, and media mogul popularly known for the Shark Tank series.

The billionaire invested in several coins in the early days of Coinbase. He also has a massive investment in NFTs, and he has one of the largest NFTs portfolios as a collector.

Recently, Mark Cuban claimed 80% of his investment outside Shark Tank is in Crypto, including UniKoinGold.

Furthermore, his NBA franchise, Dallas Mavericks, started accepting payments for tickets in Bitcoin through BitPay in 2019.

Ashton Kutcher

Making an unexpected turn from a red-hot acting career to focus on investing, Ashton’s foray into investment has yielded positive results so far.

His investment journey wasn’t overnight; Ashton founded the investment company “A-Grade” in 2010 with his friends. The aim was to invest in tech startup companies.

Besides investments in established tech companies like Uber and Airbnb, Ashton has also invested in a couple of Crypto startups, including BitPay and UniKoinGold, alongside billionaire Mark Cuban.

Serena Williams

Floyd Mayweather Jr

Tom Brady

Tom Brady once stated in an interview that he wishes part of his buccaneers’ salary is paid in Crypto — highlighting his interest in the Crypto ecosystem.

Clearly, the popular Crypto exchange and one of the biggest globally, FTX, got the memo and approached Tom with a multi-million-dollar partnership deal.

Tom is also the co-founder of the NFT platform, Autograph.io.

Naomi Osaka

World number 1 and four-times single grand slam winner claimed in an interview with financial magazine Bloomberg that the rise and the internet buzz around Dogecoin did catch her attention.

Subsequently, Naomi dived into the NFT pool through a joint project with her sister, Mari Osaka. The athlete’s signed projects are on the Autograph NFT platform.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow has a long history in lifestyle and investment advisory; this she does through “Goop,” a lifestyle brand she owns. She also joined Abra in 2017 to become the face and advisor to the Crypto wallet.

Along with other investors, Gwyneth invested in the Crypto mining operation “Terawulf” in December 2021. Terawulf is involved in a 100% zero-carbon Bitcoin mining operation, according to the CEO, Paul Prager.

The Winklevoss Brothers

Twin brothers and former US rowing team Olympians, popularly known for suing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in a claim that he stole the social network idea from them while they were in Harvard together.

The twin brothers got $65 million as part of the settlement from the suit, and they invested a significant chunk of it in Bitcoin early in 2013. Consequently, the explosion of the Crypto market saw them become the world’s first celebrity crypto billionaires.

Now, the brothers are principal shareholders in Crypto exchange Gemini, and both own an estimated 70,000 Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Jack Dorsey

Founder and CEO of fintech company Square, the former CEO of Twitter, is one of the most prominent pro-Bitcoin voices globally. Jack became heavily interested in Bitcoin in 2017 and has been a significant voice in the Bitcoin crusade. An avid advocate of “buy the dip,” he indicated that he spends several thousand every week to buy Bitcoin in an interview in 2020.

Apart from his personal Bitcoin holdings, Jack’s Square is a significant investor in Bitcoin after buying a combined 4,709 Bitcoins in October 2020. In late 2021, Jack stepped down as Twitter CEO to head Square himself.

Richard Branson

The British business mogul, the founder of Virgin Group, is known for two things: his business acumen and record-setting fun exploits.

Richard Branson participated in a $30 million funding round of the Bitcoin-based payment processing platform, BitPay. The value of his investment in the company is, however, not public. Still, if his audacious business moves are anything to go by, his investment in BitPay is expected to be significant.

Russell Okung

NFL offensive tackle was one of the most vocal and consistent pro-Bitcoin voices in sports. In December 2020, he famously asked to be paid half of his $13 million salary in Bitcoin.

However, it didn’t take long before his wish became a reality through the Bitcoin paycheck solution “Strike.” Russell made this known on his Twitter account when he tweeted, “Got paid in Bitcoin.”

The $6.5 million received in Bitcoin, which represented half of $13 million, soon increased in value exponentially with the rise of the king cryptocurrency.

Traditional social products are often considered fully packaged content feeds and communication apps. At their core, however, they are primarily identity products. They provide the foundational connection between a person’s digital persona and their data, content, and social connections. The person-to-content linkage is foundational to digital communication and yet, it is monopolized, monetized, and manipulated via sugary feeds built by a select few closed platforms.

Decentralized Social (DeSoc) protocols are re-architecting digital identity to be user-owned and governed. With DeSoc, users are free to trustfully communicate and construct applications without manipulation or censorship for profit’s sake. Before this can happen, DeSoc networks need to achieve a minimal level of network size and overcome the current centralized platform paradigm.

The traditional social platforms have been nearly impenetrable competitively due to advantages gained by closing external access to the rich sea of profile and content relationship data known as the social graph. While profitable for the platforms, locking access to the social graph creates three core problems for creators and tangential businesses:

• Disjointed creator monetization — Creators often are forced to use tools like email lists, blogs, and partnerships in addition to social media in order to adequately monetize their content. While the total creator market grew from approximately $14 billion in 2021 to over $100 billion in 2022, creator earnings are limited due to the added user friction of having to convert across tools and platforms.
• Disproportionate platform value share — While over $230 billion is earned by social platforms largely from advertising, content creators are only earning roughly $6.5 billion in revenue share. For example, on YouTube, which has by far the most generous revenue share, nearly 98% of creators would not meet the poverty line in the US on advertising revenue share alone.
• Concentrated creator revenue distribution — Because social algorithms are optimized for predictable viewership, only the uppermost creators with predictable appeal earn the vast majority of advertising revenue. Without developer access to the social graph data, there is no subsequent business model innovation that would support a creator middle class.

Given the large revenue imbalance between platforms and creators, there is a significant incentive for technologies to bridge the gap and for creators to adopt them. With an open social graph anyone can build upon, DeSoc poses a viable threat to incumbent social platforms whose competitive moat arises from their closed architectures.

DeSoc Architecture

DeSoc protocols, like traditional social, provide the core linkage of profiles to digital content. Profiles are typically represented as NFTs, and the content published, whether its posts, videos, or comments, is all tied to the core profile either on- or off-chain. Since all of the profile and content relationships (social graph) are open and readable by developers, anyone can build front-end applications and features on top of the social graph. This breaks apart the tech stack of traditional platforms and significantly expands the potential for innovation.

In the same way that increasing the contact surface area of two chemicals produces faster, more bountiful reactions, increasing the surface area between developers and technology multiplies the potential for new applications and features.

With the increased development surface area, numerous projects have spun up to tackle more than just the core social graph. They are building every facet of consumer applications ranging from developer infrastructure like video transcoding to features like messaging and search.

While still early, these projects are largely composable and are thus rapidly culminating toward being viable consumer application infrastructure.