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Why We Opened The Belgrade Bitcoin Hub

With a rich history and recent evolution, Belgrade is now home to the latest Bitcoin working and presentation space.

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With a rich history and recent evolution, Belgrade is now home to the latest Bitcoin working and presentation space.

This is an opinion editorial by Plumski, a native of Serbia and founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub.

“What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife…”

–Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla.

As Bitcoin adoption grows at an unprecedented rate for a new technology, Bitcoiners are setting up physical locations around the world where enthusiasts can work and play in group atmospheres.

For those of us taking part in this Bitcoin "Renaissance" period, it has been a great joy to watch the Bitcoin Beach success story in El Salvador that likely resulted in the country-wide adoption of bitcoin as legal tender. Since such projects are numerous in Africa, Central and South America, Bitcoiners living in Eastern Europe have watched these developments with intrigue. And added to that is the fact that Eastern Europe is economically underdeveloped compared to its Western European counterpart.

Inspired by what we saw in other parts of the world, a small group of Bitcoiners centered in the Serbian capital city of Belgrade recently opened a Bitcoin hub where we want to welcome visitors from around the world.

A New Chapter For A Historic City

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View the 2 images of this gallery on the original article

Belgrade is a city that lies at the confluence of two great European rivers, the Danube and Sava, the apex of which is marked by the great Kalemegdan Fortress. This defensive fortress has withstood the test of time for over 15 centuries, bearing witness to battles too numerous to count. The history of Belgrade and the Serbian people as a whole has been a turbulent one.

Having the (mis)fortune of being located at the center of the geopolitically-important Balkan Peninsula, often on the border of two rivaling Eurasian empires, its people have been fighting for their independence from foreign influence throughout their history. Although it’s hard to estimate, history suggests that Belgrade has been destroyed and rebuilt over 40 times throughout its 17-century existence. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Belgrade has always been the economic and artistic center of the region, as well as a home to people of all races, faiths and denominations.

Today, Belgrade is once again undergoing an important historical transition period. During the 1990s, civil wars took place in Croatia and Bosnia, republics of former Yugoslavia, culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia and its capital city in 1999 and about 15 years of economic isolation from the western world.

Although the transformation is not fully complete, Belgrade is re-emerging as a vibrant cultural epicenter of the region. Much like the mosaic of architectural styles visible in the city's buildings, ranging from Communist-style, soulless heaps of gray concrete intermingled with wonderful old Secessionist buildings adorned with ornamental facades, its streetfronts are a collage of mom-and-pop-owned, modest businesses clashing with modern boutiques and glass-clad office buildings. Gone are the days when food options in the city's restaurants were limited solely to Balkan traditional cuisine. Now, poke, sushi, Chinese and Indian food, burger joints and American-style diners are all on the menu for the city's residents.

Contributing to the metamorphosis of the city's cultural fabric is also a noticeable shift in the residents who make up its population. Perhaps due to the relatively low cost of living compared to other world capitals, or Serbia's generally lax pandemic restrictions, or the political uncertainty that seems to have gripped the western world as of late, I have seen that a once heavily-emigrating city has been welcoming back a large segment of its old population and a sizeable inpouring of digital nomads that now call this place home.

Bitcoin Resilience, Despite Obstacles

In Serbian, the term "inat," a historically-defining characteristic of its people, can be loosely translated as "resilience." This mindset is ingrained in its population which, time and time again, rebuilds its homes on the heels of destructive periods to their former glory, to the dismay of invading armies, occupiers and detractors, because: inat.

As a result of years of unfulfilled promises from regional politicians, people of the Balkans are hard to convince about the long-term benefits that can be realized by adopting Bitcoin in one's life. A low time preference way of life to most people in this region is associated with disappointment and the lowered standards of living that have happened many times before.

Promises of quick riches (especially ones that suggest there is no associated risk whatsoever) is much more preferable for many and, thus, the power of the shitcoin narrative has sadly thrived in this region as "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain" marketing schemes gripped the world at large. To those of us who grew up in this part of the world, it is a dark comedy that, for instance, the Celsius bankruptcy affected our country as well. Like an exaggerated piece of irony from an Emir Kusturica movie, when the dust around this company's disastrous financial collapse finally settled, legal documents revealed that several entities associated with the Serbian government were listed as creditors to this well-known Ponzi scheme.

In general, Bitcoin-only companies and projects are hard to find here, but a growing community of Balkan Bitcoiners are imagining a different world of financial freedom to their compatriots.

And, much like Belgrade many times before, my personal life is undergoing a restructuring period. On my travels through the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I have met many people who are redesigning their lives around this paradigm-shifting technological discovery. With my recent move back from Canada to the city where I grew up, as I look around, it is easy to draw many parallels between the Bitcoin network architecture and the somewhat chaotic organization of Belgrade that just somehow seems to work — tick tock, next block.

A live DvadesetJedan podcast stream from Rab, Croatia.

Introducing DvadesetJedan

A group of us Bitcoiners from the countries of former Yugoslavia began to organize regular meetups about a year ago. Our group, called DvadesetJedan is an offshoot of the German Einundzwanzig initiative that was started to bring plebs together in meatspace so that enthusiasts can socialize, share ideas and formulate business ventures together in an informal atmosphere.

The idea behind Einundzwanzig is that geographically-distributed, independent Bitcoin communities can form across the world and eventually collaborate on their ongoing projects and offer traveling Bitcoiners a home, wherever they happen to be. In the Balkans, DvadesetJedan records a weekly podcast in the Serbian/Croatian language to cover Bitcoin news, philosophy and the technical architecture of the network. We are very proud to be the first Bitcoin-only podcast in the region and it is a great way for people that are too far from the city's urban centers, where our meetups take place, to receive high-signal Bitcoin content on a regular basis. This podcast is also complemented by our active Telegram channel and while our core group is made up of vehement shitcoin minimalists, a fair-sized part of the group is made up of noobs. We take special joy in guiding them through their journey toward understanding Bitcoin.

Since four of the six former Yugoslav republics that are now independent countries speak the same language, our initiative is multinational in nature. We collaborate with members from Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro and our group has been steadily growing over the past year. We have a mixture of Bitcoin builders, content creators, developers and Bitcoin enthusiasts in the group who all come together on a regular basis for bar hopping, barbecues and road trips to Bitcoin events in the region.

While trendy breweries and coffee shops for our meetups are aplenty in Belgrade, a Bitcoin-dedicated space did not exist here nor in the wider Balkan peninsula. A small group of us decided to undertake the mission of finding and equipping a space where more serious discussions and presentations can take place.

Since Bitcoin professionals here are somewhat isolated compared to more-established regions such as Germany and the U.S., we also wanted the space to serve as a co-working environment for locals to bounce ideas off of other experts in the field. As we plan on partnering with local developers to build Bitcoin-focused businesses, this office space would also serve as the physical location for new startups to work with their teams.

Meetup in Belgrade: R0ckstarDev and Johns Beharry displaying Bitko Yinowski’s famous Bitcoin jam made from Serbian apricots.

View the 2 images of this gallery on the original article

The hunt was on and we scoured Belgrade in search of an ideal location. We focused our search to the center of the city so that future visitors can not only work in a comfortable space but can also easily access the museums, galleries, music venues, bars and restaurants that make up Belgrade's exciting social scene. We eventually found a duplex on the top floor of an old, mixed-use building next to the University of Belgrade’s philosophy faculty and it is perhaps fitting that the fort of Kalemegdan is within a two-minute walk from our new Belgrade Bitcoin Hub.

Welcome To The Belgrade Bitcoin Hub

Elevator control board to the top floor of the building where the hub is located. Source: Author.

View the 3 images of this gallery on the original article

The hub features a large, communal, co-working/presentation room where most of the action will be taking place, with two additional rooms that we will outfit into a recording studio and a more private office space.

At our disposal for visitors we have a variety of hardware wallets, a point-of-sale unit powered by BTCPay Server, a Bitcoin node and an Antminer S9 to experiment with the newest software being developed by the tenants of the space. For educational purposes, or to get extra inspiration, the hub has a small collection of Bitcoin literature for visitors to read.

During the early days of activity in the hub, it has been populated by drop-in visitors that prefer working in group settings. As we grow, we will develop the hub to be a venue for cultural events, art exhibits/auctions, hackathons, as well as a small-scale presentation center for Bitcoiners. While advanced users will be working at the hub, novices will benefit from presentations and hands-on demonstrations that will take place in the evenings and weekends. Inspired by many ventures around the world with similar goals in mind, we are especially proud that we made this hub a reality using our own funds to finance these initial steps.

In one of the first public presentations at the hub, Pavlenex described the history of the BTCPay Server project along with a live demo to an audience. Source: Author.

View the 2 images of this gallery on the original article

We want this space to be a permanent Bitcoin home in Belgrade and we hope that organizing such events will enable the space to finance itself for many years to come. While locals will be able to purchase annual memberships, we also have a structure in place so that Bitcoiners who do not live in Belgrade can come and work from the hub during their visits to Serbia. We are especially excited to welcome foreigners to the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub to build and help us build, however, the space will be limited.

Indeed, matching Bitcoiners from around the world with the immense talent that exists in Serbia is one of our top priorities. After all, everything our small group of believers has done to date has culminated into the Belgrade Hub genesis block.

This is a guest post by Plumski. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Metaverse investments: Opportunities and risks of the trillion-dollar VR market

What are the best metaverse projects that investors should keep on their radar? Cointelegraph Research Metaverse Ranking Awards the top projects

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What are the best metaverse projects that investors should keep on their radar? Cointelegraph Research Metaverse Ranking Awards the top projects

The metaverse continues to expand, with industry giants and upcoming players racing to seize a slice of the potentially trillion-dollar pie. Close to $2 billion was invested in blockchain-based metaverse deals in 2022, according to Cointelegraph Research’s VC database

A 2022 report by McKinsey estimated the metaverse industry to potentially generate up to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030, an estimate overtaken by Citi's forecast of $8 to $13 trillion. These estimations reflect significant growth from the global metaverse market of $65.5 billion recorded in 2022. To realize these optimistic forecasts, the metaverse industry would need to sustain an impressive 85% compound average growth rate.

VC metaverse funding in 2022. Source: Source: Cointelegraph Research.

Investors will never guess which metaverse won Cointelegraph’s 2023 Ranking of Metaverses. This blockchain-based metaverse has over $61 million in value locked in its smart contracts and over 8,000 monthly users. To learn more about the project that enables true ownership of in-game assets and has a deflationary token model, read the report now. 

Download the report on the Cointelegraph Research Terminal.

Stronger than ever

Yet, the metaverse landscape is not without its difficulties. Market cap losses have plagued industry leaders, with Meta, formerly known as Facebook, losing 77% of its market cap equivalent to $800 billion between late 2021 and 2022. As a result, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, plans to eliminate 21,000 jobs in 2023.

Despite setbacks, industry titans like Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all developing their metaverse strategies. Apple's entry into the metaverse is highly anticipated with its AR/VR headset launch slated for June 2023. Similarly, gaming firms like Epic and Roblox utilized the pandemic lockdown to their advantage, successfully launching metaverse concerts that reached millions worldwide.

In 2022, mergers, acquisitions, and financing in the metaverse realm rose from $13 billion in 2021 to over $120 billion, bolstered by Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision. This deal had a 7.6x EV/Sales multiple and a 20.2x EV/EBITDA multiple. Although valuation multiples are expected to decrease in line with higher interest rates, investment activities remain robust.

Metaverse marketing efforts. Source: Cointelegraph Research.

Top blockchain metaverse projects are also attracting significant capital. Leading blockchain metaverses measured by market cap include The Sandbox ($1.02 billion), Decentraland ($905 million), and Axie Infinity ($830 million). Year to date (YTD) performance of The Sandbox is 44%. Decentraland’s YTD is 62%. Neither of them surpasses Bitcoin’s YTD retu of 68%.

For investors seeking exposure to the metaverse, ETFs like the Fidelity Metaverse ETF (FMET) and Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF (METV) offer viable options. However, the new Cointelegraph Research study reveals that a majority of token transactions in metaverse projects result from speculation rather than actual in-metaverse usage, a trend that calls for cautious investment.

The Cointelegraph Research team

Cointelegraph’s Research department comprises some of the best talents in the blockchain industry. The research team comprises subject matter experts from across the fields of finance, economics and technology to bring the premier source for industry reports and insightful analysis to the market. The team utilizes APIs from a variety of sources in order to provide accurate, useful information and analyses.

The opinions expressed in the article are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security or investment product.

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How a neighborhood-focused Baltimore initiative is employing patience, partnership, and resident leadership to drive long-term change

At the corner of North and Cecil Avenues in Central Baltimore sits the newly constructed home of a community-based organization, Roberta’s House, which…

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By Darius Graham

At the corner of North and Cecil Avenues in Central Baltimore sits the newly constructed home of a community-based organization, Roberta’s House, which provides mental health and grief counseling services to residents who may not otherwise get these much-needed services. The building represents a transformational investment designed to bring new life to a vacant block that was previously occupied by rowhomes.

When construction on Roberta’s House broke ground in 2018, the two sides of Cecil Avenue at this corner were divided, both physically and symbolically. The juxtaposition of abandoned rowhomes on one side and hope rising from the ground on the other side, sparked a thought among staff at Baltimore’s Weinberg Foundation: What if this building were to be the start of a ripple of redevelopment and opportunity in the neighborhood?

And so, the revitalization of this one building on this one corner would soon become part of something bigger—a philanthropic-funded effort to improve the health and life trajectory of Central Baltimore residents. This piece tells the story of lessons from the Greenmount Life, Opportunity, and Wellness (GLOW) Initiative, a new effort to concentrate financial and social investment in select neighborhoods that have long experienced underinvestment.

Developing a hyper-local strategy rooted in strength

Created in 1990, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation had been funding Baltimore-based nonprofits for 30 years when, beginning in 2018 and following many conversations with stakeholders, the foundation adopted a hyperlocal, place-based strategy (while continuing to provide grants across the Baltimore region). The premise was that by focusing some of the foundation’s financial and social capital in a compact geographic area, it could drive positive outcomes in an even more targeted way. Out of this decision came GLOW.

We knew that one of the most important factors in getting GLOW off the ground was choosing the right area on which to focus our efforts. Several factors led to our selection of four Central Baltimore neighborhoods, Midway, Barclay, Harwood, and Greenmount West, including:

  • Need: Many residents of our target neighborhoods had limited economic opportunity and poor health. Midway, for example, had the highest unemployment rate of any neighborhood in the city, the sixth lowest life expectancy, and one of the city’s highest concentrations of children living in poverty.
  • Concurrent investment: While Baltimore City, despite decades of disinvestment, had designated the area as one of its “Impact Investment Areas,” other major developments, including a large nonprofit makerspace, were already underway or forthcoming in the area. Meanwhile, a coalition of funders had also recently launched the Central Baltimore Future Fund to catalyze commercial redevelopment. We recognized that GLOW would be more successful if it aligned with those efforts.
  • Partners: The area also is home to four public schools and many nonprofits, including Central Baltimore Partnership (CBP), a nonprofit collaborative of over 100 organizations dedicated to the revitalization of Central Baltimore neighborhoods. These partners already had meaningful relationships and capacity that if brought together could help achieve more positive outcomes for the neighborhoods around GLOW’s goals.

With all of this in mind, Weinberg Foundation saw an opportunity to improve Central Baltimore’s economic and public health outcomes by working with CBP to physically transform the four neighborhoods, while placing special emphasis on health and educational outcomes for their residents. In this way, the Foundation was able to tap into existing organizational infrastructure—essentially building from strength instead of building from scratch.

Strong and glowing: From an idea to implementation

The central purpose of GLOW is to mobilize and coordinate an array of organizations to improve the health and life trajectory of Central Baltimore residents by improving access to, and utilization of, primary health care, nutritious food, and enriching educational or career opportunities for youth. While the long-term goal is to make an impact on key indicators like unemployment and life expectancy, we know that those will take years. In the interim, we are squarely focused on supporting the initiative as a platform for aligning multiple organizations, sourcing and advancing residents’ goals and desire, lifting up residents as leaders, and attracting additional resources to the neighborhood.

We’ve had some early wins. For example, GLOW has established a network of more than 30 service providers, including a national organization it recruited to the neighborhood, which will connect 125 families with housing, employment, financial, and supportive services that help increase economic mobility. Other wins include expanding paid summer youth opportunities in the neighborhood by partnering with Banner Neighborhoods to operate a YouthWorks site, and catalyzing the development of several key capital projects including an outdoor education and community health hub along with a teaching kitchen. Along the way, we’ve also learned a lot of lessons relevant for any equity-focused place-based initiative, including:

  1. The lead organization for a place-based initiative—CBP in the case of GLOW—must be adept at navigating a range of efforts and stakeholders. Specifically, it must be capable of both strategic and tactical efforts and have trust and relationships with a range of stakeholders, including funders, government leaders, and residents. The organization must focus on strategy at all levels and not get bogged down in the day-to-day of providing services and activities in the neighborhood.
  2. Genuine partnership means more than ‘partners on paper’. Partnership, like collaboration, is a term that gets used a lot and can mean different things to different people. With GLOW, we have found that true partnership requires more than regular meetings or information sharing. It demands building trusting relationships rooted in an “if you win, I win” mentality instead of in the scarcity mindset that often pervades the nonprofit sector, especially when it comes to working with foundations. It means jointly applying for funding, being clear about expectations and roles, and navigating conflict.
  3. Community leadership is as important as community engagement. For place-based initiatives like GLOW, it’s critical that residents not just be engaged in typical ways like surveys or public meetings. Instead, residents should have genuine leadership and decision-making authority— meaning equal or greater representation on the committee overseeing the initiative, with compensation for their time and insights.
  4. Planning takes time and resources. Place-based initiatives require coordinating across city agencies, nonprofit organizations, and resident leaders—as well as including visible wins in early months to build trust and buy-in with residents and partners. This took us two years and required flexibility as the COVID-19 pandemic extended timelines and shifted our attention. Even under normal circumstances planning requires significant staff time to thoughtfully engage residents and stakeholders in small group and one-on-one conversations.
  5. Patience is essential. Place-based initiatives require a long-term commitment due to the nature of developing the infrastructure across sectors to create systemic, long-term change. Phases include understanding the challenges and opportunities in the community, building the infrastructure across multiple partners, and capacity building for anchor institutions—all before achieving neighborhood-level outcomes.

With these lessons in mind, we are continuing to invest in and build GLOW so it can serve as a platform for convening resident and stakeholders to drive change in Central Baltimore for many years to come. By focusing on strategy, building true partnerships, centering residents as leaders, investing in planning, and operating with a sense of flexibility and patience, we believe other funders and community-based organizations can build similar initiatives to help transform underinvested neighborhoods.

Photo credit: Banner Neighborhoods, Inc.

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Insilico Medicine Founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD presents at Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company,…

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Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, will present on the latest company milestones at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference on June 8, 4:30pm ET at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. The conference brings together hundreds of public and private healthcare companies and thousands of executives, as well as institutional investors, private equity investors, and VCs discussing trends and investment opportunities in healthcare in the US.

Credit: Insilico Medicine

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, will present on the latest company milestones at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference on June 8, 4:30pm ET at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. The conference brings together hundreds of public and private healthcare companies and thousands of executives, as well as institutional investors, private equity investors, and VCs discussing trends and investment opportunities in healthcare in the US.

Zhavoronkov will share updates on Insilico’s rapidly progressing pipeline of novel therapeutics available for partnering and licensing, and showcase its new AI-driven fully robotic target discovery and validation platform, and end-to-end drug discovery platform, Pharma.AI, which includes target identification (PandaOmics), drug design (Chemistry42), and clinical trial outcome prediction (InClinico). The platform has produced three drugs that have reached clinical trials. Insilico’s lead drug for the devastating chronic lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), the first AI-discovered and AI-designed drug to advance to clinical trials, will soon be entering Phase 2 trials with patients. Insilico’s generative AI-designed drug for COVID-19 and related variants has been approved for clinical trials and has a number of design advantages over existing COVID-19 drugs. Most recently, the company announced that its USP1 synthetic lethality inhibitor received FDA IND approval for the treatment of solid tumors. 

There are 31 drugs in Insilico’s pipeline available for partnering and licensing for indications including cancer, fibrosis, and central nervous system diseases, and the Company has nominated 12 preclinical candidates in the past two years, most recently a potentially best-in-class preclinical candidate targeting ENPP1 for cancer immunotherapy and the potential treatment of Hypophosphatasia (HPP).

Insilico has partnered with leading pharma companies, including Fosun Pharma and Sanofi, to accelerate their programs. The Company has raised over $400m in funding to date from notable biotech and tech investors.

 

About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, connects biology, chemistry, and clinical trials analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques to discover novel targets and design novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is delivering breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system (CNS) diseases, and aging-related diseases.

For more information, visit www.insilico.com

 


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