crypto – Page 2 – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo # 34 heads to the basket against Bam Adebayo # 13 of Miami Heat in the second half at the American Airlines Arena on March 2, 2020 in Miami, Florida.

Michael Reaves | Getty Images

A city trying to rename itself as the center of the crypto world could soon have a cryptocurrency exchange in the stadium of its NBA franchise.

FTX has won the naming rights for the entertainment venue currently known as the American Airlines Arena, which is home to the Miami Heat. The deal, which was approved by the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners on Friday, has a term of $ 135 million over 19 years.

The NBA has yet to approve the deal before it becomes official, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said in an email. The NBA did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Heat declined to comment.

The company now has a long and sometimes checkered history of companies with stadium naming rights. Some brands, like Gillette and the New England Patriots or Staples Center and the Los Angeles Lakers, become synonymous with their franchises.

For other companies, however, the naming rights served as billboards reminding audiences of their struggles. The sports authority was forced to forego its sponsorship of the NFL’s Broncos Stadium after it went bankrupt in 2016.

Enron is known to have the rights to the MLB’s Houston Astros Stadium before an accounting scandal brought the company to a standstill. And in Oklahoma City, Chesapeake Energy’s branding is still in the basketball arena for the NBA’s Thunder, even after the company filed for bankruptcy last year.

The dot-com era two decades ago offers even more fodder for misnamed naming rights. Tech company CMGI was the original sponsor of what would become the Gillette Stadium, but had to cut that agreement after a CNN report at the time after stocks were replenished. The now dissolved companies Adelphia and PSINet also had naming rights for the NFL stadium at the turn of the century.

Politicians and business leaders in the Miami area have worked over the past year to make the company a welcoming environment for tech and crypto firms. Francis Suarez, the mayor of the city of Miami, told CNBC last month that Miami “positioned us as one of the most tech-friendly cities in America” and announced that city workers could choose to be paid in Bitcoin.

Many of the commissioners and Miami-Dade County’s mayor Daniella Levine Cava praised the agreement that funds from the deal could be used for initiatives to curb poverty and armed violence. Some of the commissioners, including Rebeca Sosa, raised concerns about granting the rights to a young company with limited US presence, but the deal was overwhelmingly accepted.

FTX is a non-US international cryptocurrency exchange that has more products than its FTX US counterpart. Bankman-Fried said the two were separate companies and that he was the majority shareholder of both.

The Miami Heat has been one of the most successful NBA franchises in recent years. Since 2010, it has appeared in five NBA finals and won two titles.

The buyer of the non-fungible Beeple token for $ 69 million is a crypto investor operating under the pseudonym Metakovan.

Metakovan’s true identity is unknown, but the investor is a co-founder of the Metapurse NFT collection, which gathers NFTs to display in the Metaverse through virtual museums. Metakovan already owns the largest collection of Beeples and has split ownership of a collection of Beeples using a special token called B.20 Coin.

Speaking to Metakovan’s partner in Metapurse, known as Twobadour, CNBC said the NFT was “the most valuable work of its generation.”

Twobadour said they don’t know their exact plans for this work, but options include factioning or offering it as a new character. He said the goal is not to make money, but rather to decentralize and democratize art so that token holders everywhere can share a piece of history and share the wealth.

For example, it’s like people can go to the Museum of Modern Art and actually own some of the work, he said.

“We made history and created a god,” he said in Beeple.

A detail taken from a collage “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” by digital artist BEEPLE, which is being auctioned in Christie’s, an unknown location, in this undated Reuters flyer.

Beeple | Christie’s Images Ltd. | via Reuters

The announcement only partially solves the biggest mystery behind the most dramatic transaction in the art world since Leonardo DaVinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” which was sold for $ 450 million in 2017. The market for NFTs – that can be any digital asset owned on a blockchain – has exploded to over $ 400 million in the past few weeks as a huge new army of young collectors pays record prices for everything from NBA highlight Videos to cat memes and art.

For his $ 69 million, Metakovan will receive “essentially a long series of numbers and letters,” according to Noah Davis, art specialist at Christie’s. “It’s a code that is on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a block on the chain that is put into your Ethereum wallet.” The buyer also gets “a gigantic JPEG,” said Davis.

The sale closed two weeks of frenzied online bidding and ushered in a new era in collectibles, where prices for blockchain-based digital images now compete with prices for Picassos and Monets. While the future of NFT pricing and its longer-term role in the art world remains an open question and many view it as a speculative fad, the eight-figure price tag for the Beeple has suddenly taken notice of the art world.

Shortly after the auction result, Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, tweeted: “Holy F —“. On Thursday evening he also tweeted a picture of a digitized “Mona Lisa” with the headline: “THE NEXT CHAPTER”.

The record work “The First 5,000 Days” was the first to be sold in a major auction house.

In 2007, Winkelmann set out to publish a new digital work of art every day for the rest of his life and never missed a single day. The first 5,000 of these works, which he calls “Everydays”, were put together to “The First 5,000 Days”.