Jun 9, 2022 | Business
Paperback Price: $6.99
About the Author:
Justin Widener, at the age of 9, suffered a really bad accident when he was hit by a car. He was in a coma for two weeks but came out of it and left the hospital a little over a month later. After High School, he joined the Iowa Army National Guard, where he served for six and a half years. He started to suffer from seizures while in the military. He was released from the military because of them, and a little over a year later, he went to the doctor and found out he was miraculously cured. After that, he went on to become an emergency medical technician with the local ambulance.
Justin moved to Denver, Colorado, and served as an EMT out there. He had gone on to paramedic school but faced another struggle when he tore his rotator cuff and couldnt finish. Not long after that, he became homeless for 2 years. But he did not let that get him down. He had always known there was a certain purpose for his life. But he was not sure what it was. He had gone through several jobs but he always kept his eyes on the Lord. That is until one day at church when he met his wife and that is when his future began. For the next four years, they went on to have four beautiful children. Many years before he had written a poem for his hometown.52 poems were included in his book, working on a second edition to the first book inspired by the calling from God.
Oct 12, 2021 | Business
TRON founder Justin Sun tweeted that he had recently purchased three Digital Zones editions, a series of NFT artworks created by artist Mitchell F. Chan, for 569 ETH (or $2 million) and donated them to APENFT Foundation. The NFTs he bought are Edition 92 of Series 7, as well as Edition 83 and 84 of Series 6.
In tandem with the NFT, Mitchell F. Chan also wrote a detailed bluebook for his Digital Zones, and its limited hard copies will also be available. The blue book details the history of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets, and their relationship with Yves Klein’s artworks.
Digital Zones, short for Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, is a limited edition NFT issued by artist Mitchell F. Chan in August, 2017. It was inspired by Zone de sensibilite picturale immaterielle, an artwork created by the famous French artist Yves Klein. Chan produced eight series of Digital Zones, containing 101 NFTs in total, with ten for each series from Series 1 to Series 7 and 31 for Series 0.
The art series Zone de Sensibilite Picturale Immaterielle (Zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility) by Yves Klein takes the form of receipts. Considered one of the earliest representations of conceptual and performance art, it gives its own interpretation on materiality, ownership, and the ritual of exchange. The work involved the sale of ownership of “virtual” space, taking the form of a receipt, in exchange for gold; buyers who paid the gold as agreed on would obtain the receipt in return. Nevertheless, Klein claimed that in order to truly own this art piece, the buyer had to perform an elaborate ritual by burning the physical “receipt”, while the artist would throw half of the gold into the Seine. As Klein put it, tangible works derive from intangible concepts. In other words, intangible concepts are themselves artworks that may even outweigh tangible ones.
When Chan first learned about Ethereum back in 2017, he realized that he could convert Yves Klein’s project into an NFT through the blockchain technology and carry out creative experiments, thus taking a step further to non-visual and immaterial conceptual art. He then wrote a detailed bluebook for Digital Zones. The timing of the work’s contract minting makes it one of the earliest NFT works on Ethereum, second only to Cryptopunk, and three months earlier than CryptoKitties. More importantly, it made its debut at InterAccess in Toronto, which establishes itself as one of the first NFT artworks to be exhibited in a conventional art gallery. It is now widely received as the first “high art” in the crypto art field.
With NFT coming to the limelight and crypto practitioners vigorously pursuing “vintage” NFT projects, the general public started to see the huge value of NFT of this kind, plucking Chan and his works out of obscurity a few months back. Now, except for certain editions in Series 0 owned by the artist, all editions in other series have been sold out. The price in the secondary market has exceeded 200 ETH and is still soaring. It is reported that Digital Zones Edition 10 of Series 0 will be put up for auction between October 14 and 21 at NativelyDigital, Sotheby’s.
As one of the veteran collectors in this sphere, since this March, Justin Sun has purchased NFT artworks by world-renowned artists such as Picasso and Andy Warhol, and crypto artists such as Beeple and Pak from both conventional and emerging NFT auction platforms including Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Nifty Gateway, with a combined cost close to￥300 million. Ownership of these artworks has been mapped onto TRON’s public chain through TRC-721 standard, and will be permanently stored there and on the decentralized storage system BTFS. By far, TRON has established a fully-fledged NFT ecosystem with robust hardware and software. As one of the top three public chains in the world, TRON now boasts over 56 million users, upwards of 2.4 billion transactions, and the highest circulation supply of stablecoins across the globe.
APENFT is backed by the underlying technology of top-notch blockchains Ethereum and TRON with support from the world’s largest distributed storage system BitTorrent to deliver the mission of registering world-class artworks as NFTs on the blockchain.
Sep 24, 2021 | Business
On September 20, the founder of TRON, Justin Sun, announced the listing of VanEck TRX ETN (VTRX) on Deutsche Borse Xetra (www.xetra.com/xetra-en/). Meanwhile, Clearstream is leveraged to connect to Euronext’s system, which will facilitate the trading of VTRX on the major exchanges of 14 European countries including those in London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Switzerland. Not long ago, TRON also inked a partnership with the US-based asset management firm Valkyrie Investments to launch Valkyrie TRON Trust. With the listings of TRON tokens on an increasing number of mainstream exchanges around the globe, TRON is clearly stepping up its efforts to expand in a compliant and transparent manner.
Back in 2012, Justin Sun introduced the concept of “blockchain” as a “value network” to China, which established him as an early advocator and adopter of blockchain in his homeland. Later, in 2017, he founded TRON. Till today, TRON is at the forefront of various competitive races including DeFi, NFT, stablecoins, distributed storage, staking mining, and staking. Moreover, it secured the third spot on the 25th CCID Global Public Blockchain Technology Assessment Index released by China’s Center for Information and Industry Development (CCID) this August. Today, Justin himself is going all-in on blockchain with the mission of ‘building a Chinese presence in this sphere’.
In January 2021, Justin Sun was specially appointed as a member of the Editorial Board of Information China Magazine, an authoritative national journal of China under the NDRC. Here, he has discussed with other experts and researchers of the industry the growth of China’s information industry. Prior to this, Xuexi Qiangguo (a public app featuring quality content administered by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China), The Study Times (the official newspaper of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China), China Banking and Insurance News and other journals published Justin Sun’s article titled “Blockchain Redefines Trust in Financial Service”, garnering worldwide attention.
TRON has built a comprehensive ecosystem spanning from underlying protocols and smart contracts to NFT and metadata storage. With over 54 million accounts, it has handled a total of 2.4 billion transactions, settles over $6 billion per day, and contributes close to one-third to the circulating supply of stablecoins globally. The TRON Protocol, one of the largest blockchain-based operating systems in the world, offers high-scalability, high-availability, and high-throughput support that serves as the foundation for all decentralized applications in the TRON ecosystem.
TRON, as one of the world’s top three public chains, is not only committed to growing a scalable, thriving ecosystem but also to fulfilling the grand vision of the blockchain industry for mankind and the times. In his recent open letter to the community, Justin Sun mentioned that TRON is going to launch its layer-2 scaling cross-chain solution BTTC on October 30, 2021. With this release, TRON will form a closed loop of both layer 1 and 2 networks with sound cross-chain connectivity, which offers both a robust underlying network of the global human settlement layer and the heterogeneous scalable cross-chain network BitTorrent Chain that features high throughput and full compatibility with EVM. The cross-chain solution will usher in an era where all chains are connected and enable the smooth circulation of transparent and compliant digital assets worldwide.
