Here’s what happened this week in the crypto world.
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Welcome to Nonfungible Tidbits, a weekly roundup of news in crypto, NFTs and their related realms.
Our lead story this week is the possibility of a US Central Bank Digital Currency or ‘digital dollar.’ We’ll also cover the million-dollar NFT of a cartoon rock that accidentally sold for less than a penny and declining Google searches for NFTs.
Stay tuned for more next week.
US considering centralized cryptocurrency
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Biden signed an executive order last week directing various federal agencies to come up with policy recommendations on cryptocurrency. The order included a call to explore a US Central Bank Digital Currency, a type of cryptocurrency controlled by the government. Part of Biden’s strategy includes ensuring any US CBDC is inline with the country’s priorities and democratic values, according to the order’s fact sheet.
The Federal Reserve has been researching CBDCs for a while now. In January, the Fed released a report that delves into what a CBDC could look like in the US. Countries across the globe, including Australia, China and Brazil, are also working on CBDCs of their own.
Read CNET’s full story on a potential US Central Bank Digital Currency.
Owner of $1 million rock NFT accidentally sells it for less than a penny
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There’s an NFT collection called EtherRock that contains NFTs of clipart rocks, each one a slightly different color. Last year, an EtherRock NFT sold for 400 ether, or about $1.3 million at the time. Earlier this month the owner of an EtherRock NFT accidentally listed the NFT for sale for 444 wei instead of 444 ether. Wei is the smallest denomination of ether, like pennies are to dollars, with one ether containing 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 wei. This means the owner of the EtherRock NFT sold an NFT potentially worth over a million dollars for less than a penny. People are now using bots to give them an edge when buying NFTs, and a bot snapped it up immediately after it was listed.
Google searches for NFTs are falling fast
Searches for NFTs on Google plunged over the first few months of 2022, according to a recent report from Statista based on Google Trends data. Google searches for NFTs rose in December 2021 and reached a high point in January 2022. Since then, there’s been a sharp drop-off. Currently, Google Trends shows only one-third of the search volume for NFTs as January’s.
Despite what appears to be declining interest in NFTs from Google Search users, Meta (Facebook) Founder Mark Zuckerberg said NFTs are coming to Instagram during a talk he gave at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
Thanks for reading. We’ll be back with plenty more next week. In the meantime, I encourage you to read this feature on how cryptocurrency and NFTs are funding Ukraine’s resistance against Russia by Roger Cheng. Roger also recorded an interview series with Alex Bornyakov, deputy minister of digital transformation for Ukraine, which you can find embedded in the story.