InfinityWeekly: Bitfinity EVM Testnet is LIVE!

Welcome to Issue #49 of Infinity Weekly for our INFINISWAPPERS community. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here.

What's in Today's Email?

• IC Ecosystem News
• This Week in our Blog
• NFT Market Bytes
• Around the Web
• Tweet of the Week
• Video of the Week
• Meme Time
• A Matter of Opinion

IC Ecosystem News

♾ LFG!: Good news, #INFINISWAPPERS! Our Bitfinity EVM Testnet is live and ready for you to build on. Check out the resource links below to get started:

♾ Festival Season: Dominic Williams, founder, and Chief Scientist of DFINITY will be speaking during the opening ceremony of the inaugural Hong Kong Web3 Festival next week. The event is the largest crypto conference ever hosted in Hong Kong. Over 300 distinguished guests, including Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), will speak during the event.

♾ New Money: Say hello to the latest DFINITY grant recipients contributing to the growth of the Internet Computer ecosystem! From dynamic storytelling, tournament card games, scientific computing tools, and an on-chain cross-chain oracle service, these exciting new projects deserve your attention!

♾ We're So Back: Taggr, one of the largest social media dApps on the IC, accidentally shut itself down after publishing some faulty code late last month. The Taggr DAO submitted a proposal to remedy the situation via the NNS on April 1st and passed by a narrow margin. Good news for Taggr fans, not only will the dApp return, but the community has been promised new features by Mr. X, the founding dev.

♾ Full Speed Ahead: Monday saw the full release of $ckBTC with the passing of Proposals 115468, 115470, and 115473. Chain-Key Bitcoin ($ckBTC) is DFINITY's solution to secure Bitcoin transactions without the use of traditional bridges, avoiding the typical problems of insecure bridges. Read more on the official DFINITY Medium blog:

Chain-Key Bitcoin: A Decentralized Bitcoin Twin

Chain-Key Bitcoin (ckBTC) is now live on the Internet Computer. Acting as a bitcoin ‘twin’, ckBTC enables fast, low-fee, cryptographically…

The Internet Computer ReviewDFINITY

This Week in Our Blog

This guest post by Goodmint explores the current state of the NFT economy and three key challenges for NFTs in the IC ecosystem. Learn how the GoodMint app at ICPverse Labs can help creators:

What’s Holding the NFT Ecosystem Back on the Internet Computer?

The NFT ecosystem on the Internet Computer (IC) began with a lot of excitement and impressive projects such as BTC Flower, Poked Bots, Cosmicrafts, and more. Despite this promising start, the NFT ecosystem has been unable to sustain its initial momentum.

InfinitySwap BlogHarsh Nambiar

Brush up on your knowledge with this comprehensive guide to the fundamentals of Decentralized Finance. Unfamiliar with asset management protocols, smart contract vulnerabilities, or what liquidity is? We've got you covered.

A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding the Fundamentals of DeFi

Here, we give you a comprehensive overview of exactly what DeFi is and the promises it holds for a more financially independent future.

InfinitySwap BlogSunny

Catch up on this week's edition of The State of DeFi! From Bitcoin's surge back to $28k to regulatory crackdown fears, here's everything you need to know about what happened this week in the world of DeFi:

The State of DeFi: Bitcoin and Regulation Rally

This week, we’ll focus on Bitcoin’s rally, BlackRock’s warning about federal rate hikes, implementing KYC measures in DeFi, Ethereum’s continuing dominance, and the Internet Computer’s potential for resurgence in 2023.

InfinitySwap BlogGeoffrey Miller

The Bitfinity EVM will make the Internet Computer Protocol into an EVM-compatible chain. Read on to discover why adoption of the IC is set to boom when the Bitfinity EVM opens the doors to the wider crypto community.

Why the Bitfinity EVM is Critical for the Development of Decentralized Applications

The Bitfinity EVM is being developed for the Internet Computer to improve its capabilities and performance and to make the IC blockchain compatible with Ethereum and all other EVM-compatible blockchains.

InfinitySwap BlogDaniel M

Everything that's happened this week in the world of ICP NFTs, from Yumi's launch of their Shiku metaverse to Plethora's move to be completely hosted on-chain, Adam covers all you need to know to stay in the loop:

It’s a Buyer’s Market for NFTs

It’s certainly a buyer’s market for NFTs on the Internet Computer right now.. What projects have big news this week? Let’s take a look at just a few.

InfinitySwap BlogAdam Kantrowitz

If you've been keeping an eye on crypto news lately, you've already heard about Ordinals, but what are they, and what's ahead in the future? We take a deep dive into the history of $BTC NFTs and what makes Ordinals so special.

Let’s Talk About Ordinals

If you’ve been paying attention to crypto news lately, you’ve probably heard about Ordinals. From an outsider’s perspective, the Ordinals protocol, launched by software engineer Casey Rodarmor on January 21, is a seemingly innocent bit of coding that allows NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain.

InfinitySwap BlogInfinitySwap

NFT Market Bytes

Partner Spotlight: Eimolad

The Eimolad Dwarves floor price is up from 14 ICP to 22 ICP this week. This is a massive increase over the lowest sale of the month (11.5 ICP). The Weapons of Eimolad collection also saw a nice rise in floor price this week from 1.9 ICP to 2.6 ICP. Remember that you need to stake both weapons and Dwarves to get the best in-game rewards, and the rarer your weapon is, the better. InfinitySwap is proud to be partnered with Eimolad to ensure Eimolad players receive the benefits of our marketing, while Infinity Canister holders will receive a nice surprise at a future date.

We also want to congratulate the Eimolad team on their first anniversary since they started coding on this project. The launch of their marketplace this week marks yet another huge milestone for their project!  

Expect an InfinitySwap & Eimolad Discord AMA soon, with cool prizes: announcement this week!

Plethora Goes All-In for On-Chain Gaming

Plethora is making the transition to 100% on-chain gaming. While they already have a number of games available on the dApp, it seems there is much more on the way. Besides using NFTs as rewards for gaming contests, the Plethora game also has its own set of NFT avatars – the Moonwalkers. While there has always been a generic Moonwalker for use as an in-game avatar, more and more players are being able to use the NFT they actually own as their avatar. In fact, the team recently added all of the avatars for active players who responded to a tweet early last month. This will certainly bring more attention to the NFT collection as the number of players increase and want to flex their unique NFT.

Around the Web

🐇 Apple's Easter Egg: Blogger Andy Baio's tweet about a hidden PDF file on his Mac caused quite a stir this week, as it appears that the Bitcoin whitepaper has been included in a hidden file on every Apple computer running macOS Mojave or later. Apple has a long history of including hidden "Easter eggs" in its products.

🐕 April Fools?: Dogecoin saw a sudden rally on April 3rd when Twitter inexplicably changed its logo from the iconic blue bird to the kabosu/doge meme, best known for being the logo of meme cryptocurrency $DOGE. Twitter removed the logo without explanation a few days later, leading to a swift price correction.

‎‍⚖️ Event Horizon: Tighter international crypto regulation is likely coming, and coming soon. Japan's Kyoto news agency reported that one of the agendas of the next G7 will be to push crypto regulation. Leaders from Japan, the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, and the E.U. are expected to outline a cooperative strategy. This year's summit will be held in Hiroshima in May.

🤔 This Is... Democracy?: Arbitrum's $ARB token has been steadily falling, thanks in part to the recent drama over a governance proposal that would give the Arbitrum Foundation control of 750 million $ARB, worth roughly $1 billion USD. The negative reaction from $ARB holders was so overwhelming that the Arbitrum Foundation made some concessions, such as the implementation of a community budget approval. However, the details remain quite messy.

Tweet of the Week

DeFi for Bitcoin? Kind of a big deal, even if we say so ourselves...

Video of the Week

An incredible review of Inside Dark Studios by Andrei and the Video Content Production Team. Check it out if you haven't had chance yet, and don't forget to like, comment and subscribe!

Meme of the Week

A Matter of Opinion- Kyle Stoflet, AKA the Swop

The Swop is a Multimedia Web3 company offering the biggest Podcast with the best guests on the IC and beyond. Spaces hosts @StofAxeCap & @TheRealDanMcCoy All spaces stored on @TheSwopSpace Hosting crypto events IRL.

Will ICP Projects Gain Hype From NFT NYC?

The Internet Computer has seen many significant developments since its genesis launch! This year we have a handful of projects speaking during NFT NYC and more projects attending for media and to gain insight into the fast-paced industry!

The NFT Industry has seen quite the brutal bear market overall, which has led to the upcoming NFT NYC 2023 to see a decrease in attendance this year. However, this allows the Internet Computer projects in attendance to stand out on the world stage during the NFT conference! The Internet Computer projects attending have greater odds of networking and attracting new users to try the wonderful Dapps built on the world computer! We foresee this conference as the perfect opportunity to start becoming much more attractive to the brightest minds in the industry!

While the conference may be smaller, many projects look to make BIG announcements at these events, which could spark some FOMO for those who couldn't attend. We are very optimistic about the Internet Computer receiving much more exposure from this major event, especially with the long-awaited Entrepot Marketplace update! Could the Toniq Lab's team be looking to make their new features go live? Will DSCVR release their "Spaces" feature and demo it in NYC?

We are planning to share tons of content during the event! Internet Computer community members should follow The Swop Twitter and check for updates! We will have plenty of photos/interviews and additional clips to share!

Projects Speaking:

Tonic Lab's Bob Bodily (Entrepot Marketplace & Bioniq Marketplace)  
Friday at 3:40 pm EDT (-4)
Future Stage

Topic: "Dynamic NFTs are the Future"

DSCVR's Juan Bruce
Friday at 12:30 pm EDT (-4)
Community Stage

Topic: "Social Media Takes NFTs Beyond Collectibles, Unlocks Community and Enhanced Value"

Digital Time Capsule's Jesse Williams
Friday at 9:40 am
Future Stage

Topic: "2023:Adoption of Utility NFTs: E-commerce, Enterprise, Social Media and Beyond"

Media Coverage:
The Swop Multimedia - media access grabbing interviews with conference speakers

ICP Projects known attending:
BTC Flower
Outpost Metaverse
VRSTL Studios
Goated Gamer DAO


Thank you for reading!

- Kyle, Founder of The Swop


Check out our latest Twitter Space with Tom Serres!

Connect with InfinitySwap

Bitfinity Wallet |AMM | Twitter | Website | Telegram | Discord | Github