Weekend Wrap: Sony’s ‘super-fungible token,’ $250K for Vegas Sphere wifhat and more
Sony patent sets out a ‘super-fungible token’
Technology giant Sony has laid out its concept for a distributed ledger-based “super-fungible token for gaming,” according to a United States patent application.
The August 2022 patent filing was publicly released by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on Feb. 29 and details a process for how a player’s gaming assets can be tracked through a bundle of nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
The patent describes an electronic device that would track gaming assets tied to a player. Metadata from those assets would make up a super-fungible token — depicted as a “set of nonfungible tokens” — stored on “a distributed ledger associated with the gaming application.”
Sony’s diagram for how the super-fungible token works. Source: USPTO
“Gaming assets” are described by Sony as weapons, tools and avatars. These would be made into NFTs and rolled up into a super-fungible token for use in video games.
The patent infers Sony is exploring some form of NFT or blockchain technology for its games, but it’s not clear if the “distributed ledger” would be one of its own design or a publicly available blockchain such as Ethereum — which the patent filing mentions as an example.
The patent doesn’t mean Sony will implement such a system and the company has filed for other NFT-related patents, such as one published in March last year for an “NFT framework for transferring and using digital assets between game platforms.”
Dogwifhat punters raise $255K for Vegas Sphere ad
The Solana memecoin dogwifhat (WIF) community is almost 40% of the way to reaching a $650,000 goal to put a picture of a dog wearing a hat on the Las Vegas Sphere arena.
The fundraiser — “sphere wif hat” — was started on March 10 by X user “Ansem” and has already seen over $255,000 in donations.
are pending approval on the blockchain.
PayPal zeros its stablecoin fees for transfer app users
PayPal has removed fees on its stablecoin PayPal USD
PYUSD
$1.00
for users of its remittance app Xoom as the token’s market capitalization fell over $75 million in under a week.Xoom will convert PYUSD transfers into the recipient’s local currency, which won’t have an impact on the supply of the stablecoin, PayPal crypto and blockchain lead Jose Fernandez da Ponte told Fortune on March 9.
Xoom senders, meanwhile, won’t have to pay the industry average 2% customary fee, but the foreign exchange spread rates will still apply.
PYUSD’s market cap fell over 25% from around $300 million to under $225 million between March 1 and March 5, where it’s stayed since, according to CoinGecko.
PYUSD’s 30-day market cap fell from its all-time high of nearly $314 million to around $224 million. Source: CoinGecko
PayPal launched PYUSD in August 2023 and has grown to be the ninth-largest U.S. dollar stablecoin, far behind the over $100 billion leader Tether
USDT$1.00
and the $30 billion runner-up USDC issued by Circle.
