Prices are up a bit today, but crypto sentiment remains extremely fearful right now. And not sure if it helps crypto matters much, but “controversial rapper” Kanye West has been spotted sporting a Bitcoin cap.

The human headline who refers to himself as “Ye” has been in the news – financial and otherwise – quite a bit just lately. Probably the less said here about his recent anti-Semitic spray on Twitter the better (although it’s pretty messed up) so let’s instead just focus on the crypto angle at hand.

West was snapped outside a branch of US investment bank JPMorgan this week, wearing a cap displaying the words “Satoshi Nakamoto”. And if you know Bitcoin, you’ll know that’s the name of its pseudonymous, never-been-doxxed, may-or-may-not-be-dead creator (or creators).

JPMorgan Chase recently ended its relationship with the hip-hop artist and his clothing brand Yeezy Inc. That news hit amid the furore over West’s recent Twitter rampages, although according to the BBC, the bank’s decision actually predated his latest controversy.

Some Crypto Twitter commentators, including David Gokhshtein’s well-subscribed account and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson (see tweets below), have been talking up the need for decentralisation in the face of the Kanye bank-account block.

Whatever you might think of Kanye, this whole sorry episode is clearly a high-profile chance for the crypto space to highlight the fact there’s simply no way to de-bank the banked when it comes to Bitcoin.

 

Crypto will be a ‘major’ payments disruptor: Walmart CTO

There’s been a lot of big crypto adoption news just lately. Google Cloud’s Coinbase partnership to enable crypto payments; BNY Mellon’s custody announcement, BlackRock and other financial giants aping in.

And here’s one we’ve only mentioned in passing in Coinhead – Walmart. The US multinational retail behemoth recently announced it’s entering the metaverse via the gaming platform Roblox, launching its Walmart Land and Walmart’s Universe of Play.

And that’s presumably an effort to engage a younger audience to badger parents into buying them all kinds of plastic, landfill-bound crap. Well, that, and/or “verch”, the store’s name for virtual merchandise.

And speaking at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit just yesterday (October 17), Walmart’s global chief technology officer (CTO) Suresh Kumar outlined Walmart’s increasingly positive attitude towards digital assets in general.

“Crypto will become an important part of how customers transact,” said Kumar, in reference to paying for both physical and virtual goods.

“When you specifically talk about crypto, it is going to be about discovery of products, whether it is physical or virtual inside, either the Metaverse or upfront, and then how people transact,” he elaborated, adding:

“I think that there are three major areas of disruption. Crypto falls in sort of the middle of it.

“We want to make sure that we make it as friction free for customers to be able to transact, and to be able to buy, and how they are able to derive value out of it. And that is where I think a lot of the disruption is going to start happening in terms of different payment methods, different payment options.”

 

Ozzy Osbourne headlines Decentraland music festival

A quick teleport over to the another strange corner of the metaverse brings us to virtual world Decentraland (ticker: MANA), and its second annual Metaverse Music Festival (MVMF), kicking off on November 10 and block’n’rolling for four days.

An announcement informs us that the festival is a completely free event hosted by the crypto exchange Kraken, and will feature 15 virtual stages with more than 100 artists performing and representing a wide variety of musical genres.

Headline acts? Bonkers rock legend Ozzy Osbourne – he of bat-head-eating (and CryptoBatz NFTs) fame – electronic music DJ Dillon Francis, and the rapper Soulja Boy.

MVMF has this year also partnered with a bunch of brands helping to curate the event, including metal festival Ozzfest, NFT music platform Limewire (yep, that Limewire), AR metaverse platform OVER and various others.

And according to the official press info, the event will “showcase the latest metaverse technology” including “Decentraland’s unique Emotes – dance moves or poses that can be sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Yep – there’s an NFT for absolutely everything these days, it seems.

Top tip: want to make it feel more like a real festival? Set up a tent in the backyard if you have one, make sure the ground is boggy as hell – which it will be if you live in Sydney – purchase the most expensive beer you can possibly find, drink half and then tip the remainder on your clothes and shoes. (Might want to pee on your shoes, too.)

 

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