South Korea’s Hoseo University will issue non-fungible token (NFT) degrees and certificates to all 2,830 graduates of its 2021 batch at its graduation ceremony on Friday.

Fast facts
The university hopes the pivot from a paper-based degree to NFTs will improve access to administrative services and prevent forgery or alteration of the degree.
A wide range of industries and entities in South Korea have started to adopt NFTs, with the country’s leading conglomerates Samsung, SK and LG including NFTs in their newest line of goods and services.
Earlier this week, South Korea’s Samsung-backed Sungkyunkwan University issued NFT certificates to three students in its graduation ceremony.

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Fast facts
Digital collectibles is a phrase now commonly used by Chinese companies to avoid the term “NFT” since Chinese state media began denouncing the market frenzy over NFTs.
Over 51,000 digital collectibles of the word “tiger” and “love” in traditional Chinese calligraphy went into distribution on Monday in celebration of the Year of the Tiger.
The digital collectibles are minted on Tencent’s Zhixin Chain but can only be managed on the People’s Daily’s NFT platform, where users are banned from transferring the asset during the airdropping event ending on Wednesday.
Tencent’s Zhixin Chain provides government-related services such as judicial depository and digital licenses, but it does not have its own NFT market.
Amid Beijing’s cautions over NFT trading, Chinese tech giants pledged to resist speculation on digital collectibles, with Alibaba’s blockchain subsidiary AntChain imposing a 180-day lock before a buyer can resell.
China does not yet have regulatory policies on NFTs, but more state-backed entities have started adoption, including Hainan International Art Exchange Center and Blockchain Service Network.

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Chinese NFT project Bored Wukong attracted its fair share of bad publicity last week, following plagiarism accusations that started circulating on popular messaging app WeChat, reported South China Morning Post. 

Accused of plagiarizing Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Bored Wukong creator Wang Wendong insists that the art is original and that his monkeys have no connection to Yuga Labs’ apes.

Awfully familiar
The article, which received more than 243,000 views on the popular messaging app WeChat, was cited by several Chinese news outlets. In it, the authors called out Bored Wukong for appropriating design elements, such as the facial features of Bored Apes.

According to the project’s website, Wang Wendong is a lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Wendong’s NFT collection in question features different impersonations of Sun Wukong, or Monkey King–a legendary character from the classical Chinese novel “Journey to the West.”

The artist defended his NFT avatars on WeChat, arguing that the face shape of his monkeys is different from that of Bored Apes, as he claimed to have manually drawn each of them–making sure that every monkey comes with unique swag.

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XRP is down 4.00% in the last 24 hours.
XRP’s price has risen by 32% in the last seven days, according to CoinMarketCap.
Since the beginning of February, there has been an increase in XRP transfer activity when whales began shifting significant quantities of the cryptocurrency. A total of about 100,000,000 XRP were transferred from the Unknown wallet to the Bithumb platform today. A blockchain analytics business, Whale Alert, has revealed data indicating that the transfer was completed on February 11, 2022, at 06:16:31 UTC.

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 100,000,000 #XRP (80,182,485 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to #Bithumbhttps://t.co/WOmaxS9hff

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 11, 2022
XRP’s price has risen by 32% in the last seven days, according to CoinMarketCap. Due to its excellent performance over the previous six days, XRP has ended up among the weekly leaders. On February 4, XRP’s price started to rise following a long-stagnant movement in January.

Read More: XRP Price Prediction

XRP Surpasses Major Altcoins
Due to optimism around the current legal fight with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the XRP price increased by about 56% to hit highs of $0.91 on February 8. According to the regulator, Ripple offered XRP as an unlawful form of investment. XRP topped Cardano and Solana to become the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency in terms of market cap on CoinMarketCap.com.


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On February 7 and 8, Round Rock, Texas experienced an event that could prove to be a pivotal moment for the whole of the Bitcoin space. What was happening in this suburb of Austin was not motivated by “nUmBeR gO uP,” or “wen lambo.” The only conversations that could be heard were exchanges of real value: Discussions on how we can all improve our mining operations and facilities, educational materials, better strategies for speaking to those who simply do not possess the time to wander down the rabbit hole like we have and, of course, methods of better protecting the hardware that secures this goliath of a computing network.

It was Scott’s Mining Conference 2022, and below you’ll find the space’s most significant takeaways.

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There’s never a dull day in Bitcoin (BTC) land. Despite that markets calling for a lull, the creative Bitcoin community always has cause for amusement.

Yesterday, a Redditor by the name of Optimal-Dentistador (henceforth, OD) queried the longevity of the Bitcoin network with a time-lapse challenge.

In a post made to the Bitcoin subreddit, OD “wrote a letter and also put the private keys for $100  worth in BTC.” In private communication with Cointelegraph, they disclosed they “put 0.003 BTC on a new address, put the private and public key together with the letter in the envelope, and here we are.”

The life-long experiment was inspired by recent events put on by the public library in OD’s city–which will remain secret at OD’s request. They told Cointelegraph that in their cit:

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Decentralized finance (DeFi) has had a rough go so far in 2022, and data from Messari shows the top ten-ranked DeFi assets currently down between 10% to 50% since the start of the year.


Top ten DeFi tokens by market capitalization. Source: Messari
A positive is, the situation may change soon as funds have began to flow back into the DeFi ecosystem following a month of declines as data shows institutional and retail funds returning to crypto markets.

Data from Defi Llama shows that the total value locked in all of DeFi platforms has climbed to $211.1 billion on Feb. 11, up from a low of $185.14 billion on Jan. 31



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Flare has teamed up with Ola Finance to provide a broader range of DeFi solutions, including tailored lending networks. On Songbird, Flare’s canary network, Ola intends to create a loan network to deploy it on the mainnet eventually.

One of the company’s offerings is to provide its partners with loans as a service. The network is built using Ola Finance’s protocol; however, its partners become the owners once the network is implemented. Flare’s next-generation consensus, State Connector, and Flare Time Series Oracle enable it to interact with as many blockchains as possible, resulting in a robust cross-chain protocol that is genuinely decentralized, safe, and scalable.

Flare’s DeFi capabilities are expanding as a result of this relationship. Songbird and Flare-based projects will leverage Ola’s protocol to construct a lending network, making lending and borrowing services available to their customers.

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