💥 NFTs: celebrity investments gone wrong

💥 NFTs: celebrity investments gone wrong 📊 Binance introduces new crypto index to help investors evaluate the market 🚀 Polkadot's devs are on a roll

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💥 NFTs: celebrity investments gone wrong

📊 Binance introduces new crypto index to help investors evaluate the market

🚀 Polkadot's devs are on a roll

NFTs: celebrity investments gone wrong

The NFT market can be a bit up and down, but it's still going strong. NFTs are taking centrestage on this massive platform and there's a lot of opportunities for the right individual to really make their mark in the space. And although they offer some great benefits, like the ability to give each token a unique identity, they also come with some serious risks. If you don't do your due diligence first. Just ask multiple celebs that got lured in by the hype and then got burned.

Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, or “Neymar” for short, is a well-known footballer from Brazil who recently became an unfortunate poster child for what can go wrong with NFTs. In January of this year, he decided to invest in this new and exciting form of cryptocurrency, shelling out roughly $1m to buy two NFTs from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. He was obviously very proud of his purchase, as he proudly displayed one of his apes on his twitter profile page.

Unfortunately for Neymar, though, that pride must have turned to disappointment rather quickly. While the value of his NFTs initially skyrocketed, it wasn’t long before they started to drop like a rock and by the end of May he was staring at a loss of about $700k.

Neymar isn’t alone in this struggle, either: many other celebrities have also been burned by their NFT purchases. There’s Eminem, who lost nearly half a million dollars on a Bored Ape token in January and hasn’t seen any recovery since then. And Snoop Dogg has had little to no luck with his Bored Apes either: despite making an appearance in one of his music videos earlier this year, the two kush-loving apes have continued to lose value.

NFTs are definitely a cool way to get into the crypto world, but they also come with significant risks. If you’re not careful, you might end up losing money. But the same could have been said about regular crypto, stocks or other investments.

The NFT market doesn't work in a straight line, the success of the collection might depend on the developers or set of external values that are out of your control to interfere. However, the current state of NFTs is still promising. With multiple players entering the market and some big names getting onboard, there are plenty of opportunities for the right individual to make a name in this space. We just have to wait and see how the NFT landscape will evolve. Whatever happens, it's definitely a good idea to do your due diligence before buying in and invest wisely.

Binance introduces new crypto index to help investors evaluate the market

Crypto exchange Binance is launching its first index product – the Top 10 Equal-Weighted Index – as part of its new CMC Index Series.

This index will monitor the performance of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and will be rebalanced monthly. Designed to help investors evaluate price and performance, this index is another example of Binance’s efforts to improve the crypto market and make it more accessible to investors. Binance plans to use this metric together with their Auto-Invest product to make it easier for investors to automate their crypto investments, so here's hoping that this new index will help set a positive tone for the industry moving forward.

What does an index mean in this case?

An index is a collection of assets – in this case, cryptocurrencies – grouped together to create an easy-to-understand reference point. The goal of the Top 10 Equal-Weighted Index, which will be rebalanced monthly, is to help investors evaluate price and performance more effectively in the fast-changing crypto market. This means that by monitoring the top ten cryptocurrencies listed on Binance, investors will be able to get a better sense of how these assets are performing overall. The index products are just one example of Binance’s ongoing efforts to improve the crypto market and make it more accessible for all investors.

If you've been into crypto for a while, you've likely seen that most market indicators, such as price and market cap, rely on the top ten cryptocurrencies to create a baseline for how things are performing. So in effect, having an index that monitors only these top ten assets isn't necessarily a new idea – but it is one more tool that investors can use to make sense of this rapidly evolving ecosystem.

Polkadot's devs are on a roll

Polkadot devs are having a record year. They've managed to integrate 14,930 developers' contributions in August and 66 blockchains are now live on the protocol. There were 500 contributions each day in September according to GitHub data, probably making it the most productive month for a blockchain protocol.

The success of Polkadot can also be seen in the number of messages sent between parachains and that's not surprising since they integrated 26,258 messages in September alone according to data from their cross-consensus interoperability standard, XCM. Now that developers are seeing successful results on this protocol, it looks like things will only get better for Polkadot.

Polkdot's scalability roadmap is also impressive. The team has been making progress on the scalability issue with the integration of asynchronous backing which will result in an increase of 50% blocktime and tenfold block size, allowing for up to a million transactions per minute on the network. That means more opportunity for developers and more solutions to be built on this protocol. And as its community continues to grow, it looks like Polkdot's record year is only bound to get better.

This is a huge accomplishment that only a few projects in the space have come close to achieving. And hard working devs is something that's been lacking in the blockchain space lately. It seems like Polkadot devs will be reigning supreme for a long time to come, at least in the developin​g world, they're leaving all other projects behind.​