The Daily: Crypto’s Latest VR World, New Blockchain Analytics Tools

As the maxim goes, bear markets are good for building out cryptocurrency infrastructure – or “buidling” as the meme of the meme goes. Thursday’s installment of The Daily is rich in examples of the sort of development work being undertaken across the industry. From dapp trackers to virtual worlds, there’s a little bit of everything in today’s news roundup.

Also read: Bitpay Reports Processing Over $1 Billion Transactions in 2018

Blockchain VR World Beachhead Enters the Fray

The blockchain-based virtual reality realm is getting crowded. Decentraland, which resides in the virtual metropolis of Genesis City, has got itself a competitor in the form of Beachhead City. BH2020VR, as it’s also known, aims to blur the line between gaming and roaming a virtual world of commerce and adventure. Income can be earned in-game through protecting the city or supplying defense weapons and other resources.

Just as video games like Grand Theft Auto have a main storyline complemented by side missions and mini-games, Beachhead has a primary narrative running through it, but participants are at liberty to interact with the world in a multitude of ways. This includes participating in the cryptoconomy within BH2020VR, purchasing real estate, and upgrading virtual turf by incorporating theaters, shops, and cars including user-generated content. Virtual assets will be tradable within Beachhead as non-fungible tokens, with a tokenized rewards system making BH2020VR feel like the crypto world’s equivalent to The Sims.

Dappradar Adds Crosschain Metrics

Virtual worlds such as Decentraland and the forthcoming Beachhead are the sort of decentralized applications (dapps) that can be monitored at Dappradar.com. The popular Ethereum dapp tracker has just had an upgrade, allowing it to track onchain activity on the Tron and EOS protocols too. The site now boasts of having stats on 1,700 dapps including decentralized exchanges, crypto collectible marketplaces, and gambling dapps.

According to Dappradar’s statistics, the top Tron and EOS dapps are seeing significantly more usage than their Ethereum counterparts in terms of the number of reported daily users. Predictably, betting dapps seem to be faring the best across all blockchains featured on Dappradar.

Cryptohound Follows the Money Trail

ORS Cryptohound, a blockchain analytics firm, has been sniffing around in the Ethereum network in a bid to identify the source of six “highly unusual transactions” that were spotted in December, comprising approximately 5 percent of the ETH supply. “We discovered that over 5.5m ETH were sent to 39 wallets after 313 transactions,” they explain. “All six wallets have the same portfolio which consists of more than 92% share of OMG tokens” plus 150,000 ETH each. Cryptohound’s investigative report then goes on to speculate over the identity of the entity behind the $500 million move.

Demonstrating a practical application for blockchain forensics, a number of leading cryptocurrency exchanges have vowed to freeze funds stolen from Cryptopia. The hackers who infiltrated the New Zealand-based exchange earlier this week, before making off with several million dollars’ worth of ETH and tokens, have attempted to send their ill-gotten gains to Binance and Kucoin, prompting both platforms to freeze the accounts of the suspects.

For anyone who cares about the Cryptopia hack, KuCoin will freeze any funds from Cryptopia. Please rest assured.

— Michael Gan (@gan_chun) January 17, 2019

What are your thoughts on the stories in today’s news roundup? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Dappradar.

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.