Divide Emerges Between Retail, Pros on How to Play Ether Upgrade ok

The crypto world has been abuzz about Ethereum’s upcoming software upgrade. Yet there’s a divide in terms of how to position for the so-called Merge: retail investors have been selling the underlying token, while institutions continue to buy. The trading desk at Genesis saw “some fresh bullish ETH views expressed” with investors buying calls and selling puts. Analysts at Enigma say that traders are likely expecting a retracement following Ether’s big rally since June. Trading firm B2C2 is seeing a lot of Ether buying. And yet BlockFi’s customers have been selling in recent days. “Retail investors are getting a little nervous about another risk-off period for the markets,” given the Federal Reserve’s hawkish stance, said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. “Therefore, they’re taking some chips off the table. However, institutional investors, who are more sophisticated, are taking advantage of the dip to add Ether.” The two cryptos have been volatile of late Bloomberg Ethereum’s upgrade has been long-awaited and news around it has been welcomed by investors, who have since the start of July pushed its token’s price up by roughly 50%. The blockchain is set to facilitate a move from the current system of using miners to a more energy-efficient one using staked coins. The switch to this so-called proof-of-stake system from proof-of-work is expected to happen soon after being kicked down the road for several years. Ethereum recently completed its last test before the upgrade, and developers said the main event should take place next month. Speculators had been positioning for the token to continue its run, though many are also betting that once the upgrade actually happens, Ether could plunge as part of a “sell-the-news”-type of event. And the token has already given back some of its recent gains, dropping roughly 8% over the seven days through Friday. “The short-term rally on both BTC and ETH looked weak,” and “we were likely heading toward an inflection point,” wrote strategists at Securitize Capital. “This does seem likely to have been it.” READ MORE: Think Crypto’s Real Value Was $3 Trillion? Try $875 Billion Derivatives Suggest a ‘Sell-the-News’ End to the Ethereum Rally Bitcoin Believers Are Back to Watching Stocks After Crypto Crash Both stocks and cryptocurrencies have been choppy of late following a red-hot rally over the summer, wavering as the Fed promises to be aggressive with its interest-rate hikes. Traders are likely expecting Ether and Bitcoin to retrace some of its gains, “which, if true, will make $ETHUSD the target of bears,” Eliott Attl More than three decades after SimCity, tech companies, retailers and governments are using the game’s basic building blocks to create three-dimensional worlds. ByImmanual John Milton 27 Agustus 2022 11.01 WIB From In the video game SimCity, first published in 1989, players start with a simple plot of land — digital sediment that gradually transforms into a couple of houses, grows into a suburban utopia and finally materializes as a booming virtual metropolis filled with inhabitants commonly known as “Sims.” In-game city planning challenges range from the prosaic, like collecting taxes and building an electricity grid, to out-of-this-world obstacles like UFO attacks. Fast-forward more than 30 years from that initial launch, and today’s technologists are pitching a vision in which players don’t just control Sims-like characters — they become them. “The Internet today spans 200 countries, 40,000 different networks, millions of servers, billions of websites, tens of billions of different devices and billions of different people,” says Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and author of a new book called The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything. “But it’s primarily 2D. There is no live synchronous experience we’re all connected to. We’re all just pulling data,” he added. By contrast, a metaverse would be a live, 3D version of that internet, and technology will need to catch up, Ball says. Proving that point, Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg was widely memed and mocked this month when he posted a primitive “selfie” from the metaverse in announcing the expansion of the company’s Horizon Worlds. (He produced an updated avatar days later and promised improvements to come.) He said in May he plans to invest heavily in virtual worlds that will lose significant money in the near term. Many are following Zuckerberg’s investment strategy, even as some industry experts predict it may take decades for the metaverse to be fully realized. Beyond companies, some cities are already trying to make those worlds a reality by actively developing virtual environments for citizens. Seoul, tied for fourth in an Economist ranking of digitally-savvy cities, invested approximately $3 million in “Metaverse Seoul” as parts of its Vision 2030 plan. While only a smartphone pilot has been released, plans for the service include a virtual city hall and space to host and attend cultural events. Metaverse Seoul Metaverse SeoulSource: Metaverse Seoul Dubai, which holds the 18th spot in that Economist ranking, in July unveiled plans to become “one of the world’s top 10 metaverse economies” by 2030. The city’s key financial regulator for crypto, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, had earlier announced it was setting up a digital headquarters in a metaverse platform known as The Sandbox. In the Caribbean, Barbados established a diplomatic embassy on a competing platform called Decentraland. “This is going to change the way the world works,” said Gabriel Abed, Barbados’ real-world ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. “The embassy is a small thing. The big thing is what governments can do together when land is no longer physical land and limitations are no longer part of the equation.” And long before Barbados, Seoul or Dubai decided to enter the metaverse, Finland’s capital, Helsinki, was already there. “Virtual Helsinki” dates back to at least 2018. Created by virtual reality studio ZOAN and described on its website as a “digital twin of the Helsinki City centre,” Virtual Helsinki allows users equipped with virtual reality headsets to tour the city. During the pandemic lockdowns in May 2020, more than 10% of the Finnish population tuned in for a virtual reality concert, the Guardian reported at the time. Virtual Helsinki Virtual HelsinkiSource: Virtual Helsinki Richard Lloyd, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University, said that cities today have an incentive to remain open to new tech developments, as city councils don’t want to be seen as unfriendly to disruptors. “The city council understands this stuff, and tech companies have done a pretty good job of sort of subduing, bending leaders to their will because [they] hold the key to your survival,” Lloyd said. While nothing exists today that holds all the component parts of a city in one cohesive package, individual developers and large corporations are creating metaverse spaces that could function as essential parts. Office spaces are being built up by many teams around the world, such as South Korean start-up Zigbang’s virtual office program ‘Soma’ and video-based teleworking platforms like Gather or Meta’s Horizon Workrooms. gather Gather’s digital workplaceSource: Gather.town “Imagine if you could be at the office without the commute,” said Meta’s Zuckerberg in an October 2021 announcement that marked the launch of the company’s billion-dollar bet on the metaverse. “You would still have that sense of presence, shared physical space, those chance interactions that make your day, all accessible from anywhere.” It’s not all work though. There are virtual art galleries in Viverse and Spatial.io, and fashion shows with designers such as Perry Ellis and Christine Massarany