Weekly inflation in Russia slowed to 0.99% in the week to April 1 from 1.16% a week earlier, taking the year-to-date increase in consumer prices to 9.99%, data from statistics service Rosstat showed last week.Rosstat is due to publish the latest weekly inflation data later on Wednesday. More
TOKYO (Reuters) -Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda on Wednesday warned the recent rise in inflation driven by higher import costs could hurt the economy, stressing the central bank’s resolve to keep monetary policy ultra-loose.Consumer inflation is likely to clearly accelerate as energy prices rise sharply and companies steadily pass on higher raw material costs to households, Kuroda said.While the BOJ chief said the world’s third-largest economy was expected to recover as consumption shows signs of improvement, and robust overseas demand underpin exports, he also warned of risks.”The outlook, however, remains highly uncertain due to the impact of the pandemic, as well as developments regarding Ukraine and the impact on commodity prices,” Kuroda said in a speech to an annual meeting of trust banks. He stressed the need to maintain the BOJ’s massive stimulus to support an economy yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels.”Recent rising inflation, driven by higher import costs, weighs on Japan’s economy by reducing households’ real income and corporate profits,” Kuroda said.The spike in global commodity prices, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, and a weak yen have inflated the cost of imports for resource-poor Japan, threatening to derail a fragile economic recovery.Finance Minister Shinichi Suzuki jawboned markets against pushing down the yen too much, saying earlier on Wednesday that rapid moves in the yen were “undesirable.”The remark, however, failed to prevent the yen from sliding below 126 to the dollar on Wednesday, the first time it breached that level since May 2002. More
Fiji’s government did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the presence of the Amadea, owned by Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, at Lautoka Wharf.The Marine Traffic website showed Amadea moored on Wednesday, after leaving Mexico 18 days ago.The Fiji Times newspaper published a photograph of the superyacht at the wharf where it said it docked on Tuesday. More
BitDegree, a blockchain-enabled, online education platform with a million learners around the world, has announced the launch of the first-ever crypto learning metaverse — the Learnoverse — as its next stage of development. The Learnoverse will be a crypto-native metaverse featuring a Learn&Earn token economy and NFT-based assets. E-learning Is Moving to the MetaverseBitDegree features instructor-submitted short courses, tutorials, and crypto tools such as coin and dApp trackers. The platform aims to become the world’s #1 crypto educator. Essentially, BitDegree is transforming from being a “Crypto Udemy” into a “Crypto-enabled World of Warcraft for Crypto Learning” to spearhead crypto-native education. The platform offers blockchain credentials and scholarships, all of which will receive a major upgrade following the implementation of the Learnoverse. The transition is expected to take place over 2 to 3 years, while the Learn&Earn token economy, NFT-based ‘learner’ avatars, course cards, and course maps will be made available by the year’s end. The major catalyst for the platform’s adoption will be partnerships with other crypto-centric companies, with whom BitDegree will work to help acquire new end-users and employees through education.A Gamified Learning SpaceThe Learnoverse will be a game-like virtual world centered on CryptoDegree City, according to the creative team. The districts and buildings will represent and play host to various crypto topics and courses respectively. Learners will be able to roam the city in search of topics of interest, explore courses by entering buildings, and progress by rising through the buildings’ floors. Learners will also have NFT avatars which represent their specializations. Users can increase in level, while earning tokens through learning and eventually obtaining crypto-degrees, thus endowing them with work opportunities.Instructors can buy NFT land and construct standardized NFT buildings to represent their courses. Course material will be uploaded and managed through BitDegree’s e-learning platform. Inside the Learnoverse, instructors will be able to customize their facades to make them more attractive to prospective learners. Crypto companies, brands, and influencers will have the opportunity to build their own dedicated courses and buildings. They will also be able to use their tokens and NFTs to sponsor and promote particular courses and advertise themselves to attract users and talent alike. The spending of such interested parties in the Learnoverse will make the Learn&Earn token economy sustainable. Through the Learnoverse, BitDegree assumes leadership in “crypto-native education.” The aim is to re-form the education process with concepts native to the crypto community, such as Play2Earn, airdrops, ICOs, and more. Earn While LearningThe Learnoverse will transform ‘Play2Earn’ into ‘Learn&Earn’ by paying out tokens to its users for their learning efforts. The same principle will be used to compensate instructors based on the usage of their educational content, similarly to the operations of Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX). BitDegree already offers crypto companies “Learndrops.” This is a way for firms to build awareness among users by providing token reward incentives for completing a course related to them.This is all made possible thanks to the interest shown by crypto companies looking to acquire and educate users, sponsor learning, and buy ads. The goals of all parties will be aligned through the Learn&Earn token economy, which distributes rewards. The Learnoverse provides opportunities for “status development” for each of the involved parties by allowing users to attain higher levels. Users can achieve this by upgrading their avatars with personalized NFTs, acquired upon course completion. Instructors, influencers, and brands can similarly boost their course-buildings.Henceforth, this status becomes a condition for social interaction between learners, instructors, influencers, and brands. For example, course alumni can access special instructor-led events. In other cases, users could access particular hiring events upon reaching a specific level. Towards the Future of LearningBitDegree has spent the past four years developing various blockchain applications for education, such as blockchain credentials, peer-to-peer blockchain scholarships, and different incentive-based products, including platform gamification. The company has been featured in scientific literature and awarded numerous accomplishments for its pioneering work. It was named the Global Champion in SDG 4 – for improving education through ICT – by the United Nations’ World Summit Awards in 2020. BitDegree highlights that the application of blockchain in the conventional education sector has had minimal impact. This is due to the education sector’s low technology adoption rate, ranking as the second least digitized area. However, if the same products were to be recreated for the crypto community in a form that comes naturally to them, they would stand a good chance of achieving widespread adoption with great potential. Today, only a few startups globally offer proper crypto-native education, the most notable among them being on-chain “learn-by-doing” crypto educator ‘rabbithole.gg’, which raised $20 million back in February 2022 in a funding round led by Greylock.Many crypto metaverses, such as The Sandbox and Bloktopia, consider education one of their use cases, albeit a minor one, as gameplay always comes first.BitDegree’s Learnoverse sits at the intersection of these two crypto-native education categories. It combines a blockchain-enabled EdTech platform with the metaverse, the gameplay of which is education. BitDegree looks to follow in the footsteps of The Sandbox and Axie Infinity to become the #1 crypto educator metaverse, helping the crypto community to onboard the next billion users in crypto-native, exciting ways. Continue reading on DailyCoin More
The Golden State Warriors, San Francisco’s NBA team, announced the first-ever responsive NFT collection to be presented by a professional sports team. The collection is also their second NFT collection, as it came to commemorate the Warriors’ 2022 playoff run.The announcement came in a blog on the team’s official website, backed up by a Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) post on their official account. The Golden State Warriors 2022 Playoff NFT Collection was created to include 3,000 NFTs that feature 12 unique designs. The designs will be randomly assigned when minted on FTX US, the Warriors’ official marketplace.According to the news blog, each of these designs has its level of rarity, and all of the NFTs are collectibles that double as a pass to the GSW community on Discord. Based on the NFTs rarity, fans have the opportunity to unlock prizes, including NBA Finals tickets, Warriors NBA Championship Rings, autographed items, additional NFTs, exclusive merchandise, and more.The NFT collection will include 1947 Warriors NBA Championship Ticket Stub, Oracle Arena Ticket Stub, Warriors Varsity Jacket (1-of-1), Warriors Foam Finger, Warriors 2015 NBA Championship Ring, Warriors Championship Banner (NASDAQ:BANR) (1-of-1), Warriors Historic Logo Collage, Warriors Basketball Hoop, Warriors Golden Basketball Hoop, and a Warriors 75th Anniversary Diamond.In addition to the collection mentioned previously, a special addition of the 1-of-1 Gold Bar All-Access Pass is also presented as the “crown jewel” of the collection. The NFT is paired with a lot of benefits and utilities, along with a physical version of the Gold Bar and two tickets to all Warriors 2022 playoff games at Chase Center. All these can only be purchased directly from the auction.As promised, a part of the proceeds of the NFT collection will go to the Warriors Community Foundation, the team’s official charity foundation that supports education and youth development. Since its inception in 2012, the foundation has granted $25M to support educational institutions over the Bay Area.Continue reading on CoinQuora More
Towards that end, the swapping platform will distribute 600,000 MST tokens to participants in the first campaign. MST is the native token of the protocol anchored on the Eurus low-fee and highly scalable blockchain. As a requirement in the first campaign, users must join, like, retweet their promotion tweet, and tag three friends. After that, participants would also have to watch MappedSwap’s YouTube video and find their mystery code. Once they successfully complete these two simple tasks, winners will be notified via Telegram and receive 12 MST after 24 hours of verification time.The second campaign will be a trading contest where the protocol has set aside 200,000 MST as a pool prize for active traders. As a first step, a user in this campaign has to share the referral code on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR). This decision is tactical because the swapping protocol has a referral program allowing traders to invite their friends and family to trade. As compensation, fees earned from their activities are rewarded to the referring trader. Typical of a referral program, the more a user refers to other traders and conversion rates are high, the more the rebates.Afterward, to stand a chance to win, they have to trade actively and maintain their stand on the leaderboard to win a portion of the 200,000 MST prize pool. They have to keep a trade figure above $1k in value. At the same time, they have to trade and maintain a Profit and Loss statement at $10k in value.However, most importantly, the protocol is confident that its trading platform is a cut above the rest. The MappedSwap protocol boasts of high liquidity in the Eurus blockchain of up to $6 billion, which goes a long way in guaranteeing low slippage rates from an underlying platform where transactions are confirmed after two seconds. In the last 24 hours, the exchange has netted over $6.7 billion in liquidity and registered over $135 million in trading volumes. During this period, the protocol generated $406.3k in fees.Continue reading on BTC Peers More
The feather in the hat is the YAY ecosystem support. YAY Games is an Avalanche based game launchpad that brings games and players together in a single space. The collaboration with YAY Games means tons of benefits to Bold Point players, such as LOOT marketplace integration and the ability to tap into the YAY Loyalty Program.The IDO has been timed to coincide with the launch of the Bold Point game itself. Immediately after the game and token launch, BPT will be publically available on the 14th, listed on Trader Joe. The listing itself will be accompanied with new farms to provide multiple incentives for BPT investorsSelecting Avalanche blockchain offers multiple benefits. The network is blazing fast with unlimited TPS, less than 2 seconds of transaction time, energy-efficient and highly secure. As such Bold Point will be able to leverage these advantages, with a game that experiences no delays and runs extremely smooth.On the other hand, YAY will be required for epic items in the game and buying effigies or buildings, with the token minable through special battles, tournaments and unlocking legendary achievements.Bold Point is a game by industry veterans, creating an ecosystem that will keep players engaged with its rich storyline, customizable characters, high-quality graphics and tokenomics designed to increase in value along with the game’s demand.Continue reading on BTC Peers More
On Tuesday, April 12, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York handed down the decision. Judge Castel stated that “what you see here is intentionality, a deliberate, willful intent to violate the sanctions’ regime,” adding that the crime was made worse because Griffith had a “desire to educate people on how to evade sanctions.”Continue Reading on Coin Telegraph More
