Unbound: No 117
It's Lonely in the Metaverse: Decentraland’s 38 Daily Active Users in a $1.3B Ecosystem
By Cameron Thompson | Coindesk
While metaverse platforms Decentraland and The Sandbox both have below 1,000 daily active users, they each have over $1 billion in valuation. So who's actually using the metaverse right now?
What’s going on in the metaverse these days, you might ask. Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, the answer is surprising: Not much, or at least not enough to bring users back every day. According to data from DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox boasted 522 active users in that same time.
An active user, according to DappRadar, is defined as a unique wallet address’ interaction with the platform’s smart contract. For example, logging onto The Sandbox or Decentraland to make a purchase with SAND or MANA, each platform’s respective native utility token, is counted as an “active use.”
This means that DappRadar’s compilation of daily active users doesn’t account for people who log in and mosey around a metaverse platform or drop in briefly for an event, such as a virtual fashion week. It also likely means that these spaces are not where people are making transactions such as buying non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Seaweed-Based Battery Powers Confidence In Sustainable Energy Storage
by Guest Contributor | CleanTechnica
Bristol-led team uses nanomaterials made from seaweed to create a strong battery separator, paving the way for greener and more efficient energy storage.
Sodium-metal batteries (SMBs) are one of the most promising high-energy and low-cost energy storage systems for the next-generation of large-scale applications. However, one of the major impediments to the development of SMBs is uncontrolled dendrite growth, which penetrate the battery’s separator and result in short-circuiting.
Building on previous work at the University of Bristol and in collaboration with Imperial College and University College London, the team has succeeded in making a separator from cellulose nanomaterials derived from brown seaweed.
The research, published in Advanced Materials, describes how fibres containing these seaweed-derived nanomaterials not only stop crystals from the sodium electrodes penetrating the separator, they also improve the performance of the batteries.
Can NFTs and blockchain help you buy or sell a used car?
By Sami Haj-Assaad Special to the Star | Toronto Star
When selling a used car, good documentation is the golden ticket to maintaining resale value.
That means having logs that show when and where a car was serviced, and if any important services or checks were performed.
It might sound like a concern for classic car buyers seeking provenance, but even new cars seem to be worried about resale values. Consider the upcoming 2023 Alfa Romeo Tonale, which includes the first standard nonfungible token (NFT).
Now, NFTs have a stigma due to people spending wads of money on what is essentially a special digital collectible, but Alfa Romeo wants to use this technology to help owners deal with resale value. Poor documentation can kill as much as 20 per cent of a car’s resale value, so these NFTs will record vehicle data and then generate a certificate to assure a prospective buyer that the car has been properly maintained.
Both the buyer and seller can benefit from this technology: the buyer receives peace of mind that the car won’t be a lemon, while the seller uses the NFT as a way to protect and record the car’s life, ensuring it earns its maximum value on the market.
🌙 NASA - Best Photo from Last Week
Staring Into the Hurricane's Eye
The Operational Land Imager aboard the Landsat 8 satellite captured this natural-color image of Hurricane Ian’s eye on Sept. 28, 2022 at 11:57 a.m. EDT (15:57 UTC), three hours before the storm crashed into the coast in Caya Costa, Fla.
When Ian’s eyewall made landfall, its maximum sustained winds were 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center. That is the equivalent of a category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale and fast enough to tear the roofs off homes and snap power lines.
The eye of a hurricane is a circular zone of fair weather at the storm’s center. It is surrounded by a towering ring of extremely powerful thunderstorms called an eyewall, the part of the hurricane with the strongest winds. The swirling clouds along the edges of the eyewall are mesovortices—small-scale rotational features found in hurricanes with unusually strong winds.
Read more: Staring Into Ian's Eye
Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Last Updated: Oct 4, 2022
Editor: Michael Bock
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