Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

If crypto ever goes mainstream as a currency, it’ll have to compete with government issued money like the US Dollar - that is, unless the government creates their own crypto based currency.

And that is the idea behind a Central Bank Digital Currency, also called CBDC. Many suspect that eventually governments won’t be able to compete with the advantages of crypto, and the best way to get around that is simply use the technology themselves.

But is that really crypto? Let’s dig in.

Remember that Bitcoin was invented in 2008 as money that is not under the control of a single entity - for example a government or corporation. Governments, of course, would likely not find this an appealing concept - the whole point of having a government currency is to exercise control over it. And that can be for good reason - monetary policy steer economies the right way if done well.

So it is safe to assume governments would likely just use the technology behind blockchains, but remain in charge. It’s still crypto - just not decentralized in the way that crypto proponents would like it to be.

Good or bad? We’ll leave you to judge as always. But sometimes a comprise is already a step forward.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

This is the easiest way to get your first NFT… for free!

The link for today’s episode: https://www.cryptohunt.it/lessons/example-wallet-valora

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Ever wondered how getting your first NFT actually works? Where does it come from? Where do you view it? Can you hang it on the wall?

Just like mastering arts and crafts, speaking a new language, or getting really great at throwing basketball hoops – learning is done best by just doing it. That’s why we’ve created our own Cryptohunt NFT, which we’ll send it to you for free, so you can get the hang of it.

Here’s how it works… Ready to get started?

First, you need a wallet. Think of it as your good old real-life wallet. Somewhere between those credit cards and coins, and maybe some real money bills, there may be a photo of your family or your loved one.

That’s exactly how it works for NFTs as well. Wallets can hold virtual money, but they also hold NFTs. They are usually phone apps or browser extensions. Some are really bad, some are pretty good. For our NFT, you’ll need one called “Valora”. We think it’s pretty good, and if you’ve used Paypal or Venmo before, you’ll feel right at home.

There is an easy lesson on how to install Valora on www.crypothunt.it. Go there next, and find a course called “How do I install and use a crypto wallet?”. In it, there is a lesson to help you add Valora to your phone. We’ll post the direct link in the podcast description as well, so don’t worry.

And the rest is really easy: Send us an email to [email protected] with your wallet address. You’ll find that in Valora’s menu. There is a neat “Copy Address” button to copy and paste it easily. Then, again, just send it to [email protected].

Then, we’ll send you your NFT. And you can do with it what you want. We just like to look at ours, but you are free to sell it if you don’t. Or print it out and hang it on the wall. Or just tug it away like that sandwich reward card you only used once and never pulled out of your wallet. The choice is - as always - yours!

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Crypto winter, meaning a significant downturn in the crypto markets, is here: Total market capitalization has been under $1 trillion US Dollars for months now, down from twice that.

The reason, of course is two-fold. The global economy is cooling off and people are pulling their money into safer investments. But confidence in crypto is also fading in parallel.

And that is, we think, paradoxically a good thing.

How? Let's get into it.

You may remember our past episodes about scams, frauds, and other letdowns that have plagued crypto during its recent bull run. NFTs copied, pasted, and illegally resold. Pump and dump schemes. Illegal ICOs. Collapsing stable coins and funds. Fake accounts. Users playing super boring games to generate crypto earnings. The list goes on.

It seems that the crypto space has had many, many more negative headlines than positive ones. Where there is an abundance of money, and people playing the crypto casino in hopes of making a quick buck, there are also scammers and grifters.

That seems to have changed, now that the market crash has pushed the majority of investors away. Take Decentraland, the virtual world previously valued at a billion Dollars by investors. Allegedly there are less than 10 daily active users left these days. Same with OpenSea, the NFT marketplace - it crashed from over $300 million in monthly revenue to just $9 million last month. Still impressive, but you get the point.

This all may turn out to be a good thing: Games will have to be entertaining again. NFTs will have to be traded between people who appreciate the art. And blockchains will have to prove harder - and rightfully so - that they have a real killer use case.

Agree or disagree? Come find us on Twitter at cryptohunt_it and let's get into it!

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Today we look at the incredible story of how Reddit become the largest NFT creator in the world - and why you've probably never heard about that before.

If you don't know Reddit, it is a network of message forums, also called Subreddits, where people can discuss practically anything they are interested in. Through a clever system of moderation and user voting, Reddit is known for its high quality content of anything you could think of. No surprise then that there are almost half a billion active users on the platform.

Now Reddit has entered the NFT space, by - listen to this! - never actually talking about NFTs. That's the secret: They call it a collectible avatar and it's usable on the platform without you knowing even a thing about crypto. Clever, right?

Very clever actually, and it exploded in use: Once you realize that NFTs are just digital goods that can be transferred or sold, you'll discover that there is a mind-blowing amount of activity going on. There are almost 3 million collectible Reddit avatars, out of which over 20,000 have already changed hands. On good days, $2.5 million dollars worth of avatars get traded. Fun fact? Reddit just completely destroyed former NFT king OpenSea, the marketplace which now has less NFT holders than Reddit.

And heavy users are benefiting too. Reddit has long had a system of so-called "Karma Points" that users get for posting content that gets upvoted by the community. People with a lot of Karma got those collectible avatars for free.

So: Becoming the #1 player in the NFT market by not saying "NFT"? We applaud you, Reddit! Right up our alley - and if you think crypto and co should become easier to understand, you've come to the right place - subscribe to the podcast and check us out at www.cryptohunt.it!

We also produce this podcast and try to create the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Today, we’ll talk about a crypto concept that has it’s rapid ups and downs, called “Play to Earn”, or P2E in short.

Play to earn is exactly what it sounds like: Play a game and make money in return. Sounds too good to be true? We agree, so let’s take a deeper look together!

During the hight of the crypto craziness late last year and earlier this year, games like Axie Infinite made a lot of headlines. Seemingly out of nowhere, millions of players were making often valuable crypto incomes just by participating. People even quit their day jobs to go all in.

But with everything in life, you have to ask yourself: If someone is making money, who’s paying the bill? And that was the problem with all of these games: You had to buy into the games - so in reality it was more pay to play and then maybe earn. And as speculators piled more and more money into these games in hopes of all being able to generate returns, the undelying tokens shot up in value, making everyone richer on paper.

But that was just it – as soon as the trend reversed, and money got pulled out of crypto, these games collapsed. Suddenly everyone is losing money. There were 2.8 million people playing Axie Inifite in January, today there are only 700,000 left and the numbers keep dropping.

What makes things even more complicated is that virtually every crypto game is a horrible game, worse than the worst smartphone games. People weren’t playing for fun, they were participating to make money. And that right there is another big problem: If you don’t have an underlying product that people use because they want to, a monetary incentivize is guaranteed to be short-lived.

And Axie Infity? They have quietly changed the concept name from  Play to Earn to Play AND Earn… A small, yet big difference.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

The Aptos token debacle: Have we reached peak craziness?

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

This weeks’ favorite crypto media punching bag is Aptos token. The project rose from the ashes of the Facebook’s canceled Libra Coin - actually one of our earliest episodes on this podcast if you want to catch up on that. And the news was a doozie: They raised $150m in their initial token sale, valuing the project at $2bn market value.

But on the first day of trading, things immediately crashed. Over the course of a day, that value shrank to half, and original investors were left with large losses.

And on the face of it, we should have seen this coming. The project promised to build a lightning fast blockchain with 100s of thousands of transactions per second, but was only able to deliver 4. That’s even slower than Bitcoin, putting it right into the last place here. And there was more: The company didn’t even say how tokens were allocated before the sale, and just 1 day before it became clear that they would keep almost 50% to themselves.

This all sounds bad, and like a money grab, right? So why were investors piling in money anyways?

Well, let’s not be so fast to judge. The team had a rocket scientist track record of working on some pretty remarkable stuff way back when Facebook poured endless amounts of money into the project. And an early investor’s bet is as much on people as it is on the product itself. Investing in crypto is risky in the first place, but doing it at launch can be even more unpredictable. Many companies with good ideas need that capital to at least have a shot at the goal, and investors know the risks are high.

So - have we reached peak crypto investment craziness yet? You’ll be the judge as always, but we like to know more about projects than Aptos had revealed to the public. But hey - valuation is just one thing, the people behind it might still make something great of it. We keep our fingers crossed, more people working towards something in this space is a good thing.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

One of the more prominent companies in the crypto market, the exchange Crypto.com is seemingly in deep trouble. It has laid off thousands of people and dramatically cut back on marketing spending. Reports are now facing that raise doubts about the company’s ability to even survive.

And it’s not like other companies haven’t struggled a lot - notably, publicly traded crypto exchange Coinbase has seen big drops in revenue, since people are not trading as actively anymore.

But is Crypto.com just another big blockchain business hit by the crypto winter? Let’s take a look!

Crypto.com has a long history of attention-grabbing marketing deals. It paid a mindnumbing $700 million to put its name on the former Staples Arena, a big sporting arena in downtown Los Angeles where the Lakers play. There were Formula One sponsorships, and high-interest rates paid on deposited funds. And the biggest one of them all - you probably at least heard about it, was that now almost famous Superbowl ad with Matt Damon. A reported $6.5 million later, that ad was mocked for its script - things took off so much in fact that Southpark devoted an entire episode to make fun of it.

But big, bold bets are fine, if they work, right? Always easy to criticize them after they’ve taken their shot? Fair point, but let’s take a look a little over 20 years back when the Dotcom bubble was just about to burst.

Back then, companies were also piling millions into Superbowl ads. The most famous one was Pets.com, an online pet store, that had a sock puppet with a microphone as their mascot in the ad. The crazy thing? Worldwide internet adoption hadn’t even passed 8% of the population yet. Shortly after the ad aired, the entire Dotcom bubble burst and Pets.com collapsed as well. It was liquidated in 2001 and never reborn.

Seeing similarities? Interestingly, crypto is even earlier on the curve: It’s only at the same level of adoption as the internet was in 1998, suggesting that it’s still a baby. We may get there eventually, but it’s probably much too early to spend millions on marketing when there are just not enough users to make that money back. We are looking at you, Crypto.com, but are rooting for you - sometimes we all just get a little too excited, don’t we?

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

You’ll find very few large retailers even talk about crypto, let alone give customers the option to pay with it. That just changed this week, when Walmart’s Chief Technology officer alluded to a future where customers would be able to check out with crypto.

But why? Especially why Walmart, one of the largest American retail companies?

It helps to understand that Walmart is on an aggressive roadmap to go online with its business. They acquired innovative online store Jet.com a few years ago and have since built a sizeable and - if you ask us - impressive alternative to Amazon.

And the crypto connection makes sense too if you read between the lines. First, Walmart’s CEO sees a lot of disruption happening in the payments space - by which he means alternative ways to pay with digital currencies. Supporting crypto simply means reaching more wallets.

And this is where it gets a little crazy, but we suspect that Walmart will ultimately not want to miss the boat on selling digital items. Avid listeners of this podcast will remember that brands are already selling collectibles in virtual worlds for virtual money, for example through stores like Nike’s Nikeland inside of Roblox. It’s a small market today, but if it becomes mainstream, Walmart does not want to be unprepared.

Isn’t it interesting to look at the innovation of dinosaurs like Walmart? It might just tell us where the future may be going!

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

As you know, we are huge fans of the potential that blockchain technology has in solving some of the world's biggest problems.

Today, we talk about ImpactMarket, a blockchain project that is tackling one of those problems: Providing financial access and support to the communities that need it the most.

ImpactMarket is most known for providing universal basic income - short UBI - to those in need. By our estimates, it may actually be the largest UBI project in the world, having distributed about $3 million dollars to over 40000 people. Using those $3m, their recipients have generated over $7 million in total monetary movement - this is because money changes hands multiple times as economic   activities happen.

But you'll ask, and rightfully so: do we really need a blockchain to do this?

Well, we don't. Except that our system is broken. For every dollar you give to a traditional charity, double digit percentages end up in executive salaries, marketing, and the like. Take the Red Cross for example: Both CEO and COO made over $700,000 (!) dollar each per year. The Salvation Army, as another example, downright refuses to detail exactly how much money reaches people in need.

Don't get us wrong, these organizations do good things. But you can judge those numbers yourself, because we certainly do. Either way, fact is: A large organization has overhead.

Enter blockchain technology, like the one used by ImpactMarket: It puts most of the administrative effort into computer code, making it mostly overhead free. And because everything is on the public record, you can see where your money went.

And there is more: Donors get the PACT token, and can use that to vote on the communities who are applying to join the universal basic income program.

We hope you are as excited as we are about projects like this one, because it gives us an opportunity to solve problems in better ways. Check them out at ImpactMarket.com.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

If you have been around in crypto land, you have certainly heard of the SEC. Likewise, if you’ve ever invested in stock in the US or in a US-headquartered company, the SEC will have had a huge influence on your investment without you even noticing.

The SEC, which is short for Securities and Exchange Commission, is a US government agency that has the purpose of protecting investors and making sure markets works well and without interruption or interferrence.

It has a very interesting history! Let’s go all the way back to 1929, when the first massive stock market crash happened, bringing down the worldwide economy and causing a huge recession that caused poverty and pain for many ordinary people.

Things were so bad, in fact, that the US government looked at many options to avoid future crashes of those proportions. The result is the creation of the SEC in 1933.

Today, it still has the same job: It makes sure that companies present investments honestly, and give potential investors fair warning about risks and downsides. And it makes sure that those selling those investments - like banks and brokers - also treat investors fair and truthfully.

And that is a really big deal, because swindlers will tell you anything to make you buy their investment scams. Crypto is a great example: There is someone at every corner trying to sell you their token, lying about it just to run away with your money. Remember last week’s episode about Kim Kardashian promoting a really scammy token? Exactly.

But with laws in place, and the SEC cracking down on these things, bad actors are deterred, because the penalties can be dramatic: Jail time and large fines are very common.

We still have ways to go though: Officially, the US government hasn’t decided yet who’s going to oversee the crypto markets. And while the SEC is getting involved here and there, we have no clear rules and frameworks that honest companies can follow.

We’ll get there eventually - until then keep an eye on the news. And next time you know exactly what the SEC is.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.