Connect with us

Press Release

The importance of sustainability: Why eco-friendly blockchains are the future

Published

on

As more and more decentralized applications (DApps), such as GameFi, DeFi, NFTs, and more, are being developed, heated discussions about the environmental impact of blockchain and cryptocurrency have reignited once more. Especially after China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency mining activities, public debates about blockchain and crypto-related energy consumption rates have reached a climax.

Proof of Work’s environmental impact

Since the birth of Bitcoin, the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism has always been fundamental to the security of blockchain networks. This consensus is reached through computing power, commonly referred to as hash rate.

Over time as blockchain technology is being adopted by the world, the energy consumption rate of the entire blockchain network has skyrocketed, leading to significant environmental costs. The University of Cambridge estimates that Bitcoin mining consumes about 130 TWh per year, accounting for about 0.1% of the world’s total primary energy consumption.

As far as DApp development is concerned, energy consumption-related environmental issues are mostly derived from Ethereum mining, since Ethereum is a PoW blockchain with the largest ecosystem full of projects in varying sizes. With the recent London hard fork, the transition to Ethereum 2.0-a complete Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain, will be completed as early as 2022. As a result, the current energy consumption per transaction on Ethereum is about 35 kWh, which is equivalent to the energy consumption of a single person in developing countries for 3 days.

The true cost of DApp transactions

While mass crypto adoption is happening around the world, DApps and their applicability will eventually catch up. New projects such as wealth management applications, lending platforms, decentralized exchanges (DEX), NFT-inspired metaverses, and more, that are gradually taking over social media and our lives are the ultimate proof. If you have been paying attention to what’s happening around you, the crypto community’s passion and loyalty towards decentralized, immutable technology are clearly reflected in the real world.

That is certainly good news for crypto enthusiasts, but for the environment, it’s an entirely different story. Take NFTs for example. Memo Atken, a digital artist and engineer, estimates that the true cost of an NFT is much higher than a typical energy consumption of a transaction on Ethereum (35 kWh). He believes that NFT-related transactions will cost much more because all NFTs have to be minted and exchanged multiple times on the blockchain.

He is certainly correct. In fact, an NFT’s creation and distribution do not only consist of a simple mint and sale process. There will be many subsequent transactions made by collectors and traders, which makes the average carbon footprint of each NFT close to 340kWh (an average of 211 kg of CO2), equivalent to a single person’s energy consumption in a developed country for more than a month.

Why eco-friendly blockchains are favored by developers

In early 2021, several public blockchains underwent considerable ecosystem expansion, such as ThunderCore, Solana, Polkadot, and Binance Smart Chain. These blockchains’ ecosystems are in full bloom, as decentralized projects like DAOs, Oracles, Token Bridges, DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, blockchain games, and more, are being deployed consistently. There are many reasons for the expansion of these networks, but one thing they all have in common is that none of them utilize a PoW consensus mechanism (meaning zero physical mining facilities are used). Instead, novel mechanisms, such as PoS, that allow on-chain staking and other models to replace PoW are applied.

Among them, the ThunderCore blockchain uses the state-of-the-art PoS consensus mechanism, PaLa, which not only solves the “scalability trilemma”, but also supports the chain’s entire ecosystem with cheap renewable energy. ThunderCore is an eco-friendly public blockchain, and its CO2 emissions, resulting from on-chain transactions, are reduced by more than 10,000x. For example, its block creation does not require the support of large amounts of energy resources like Bitcoin and Ethereum do. ThunderCore is also EVM compatible, which allows the rapid migration and deployment of Ethereum projects. With low gas fees (<$0.00001), sub-second confirmations, and 4,000+ TPS, ThunderCore has become a platform favored by developers from the world over.

About Author

Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Digi Observer journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.

Continue Reading

Press Release

Velocity Capital Group’s Jay Avigdor Announces Book Pre-Orders and Upcoming Podcast “Chewing Glass”

Published

on

New York, New York, October 28th, 2026, FinanceWire

Need It, Don’t Want It, a business memoir told in reverse, publishes December 8, 2026, and the podcast will feature founders on the setbacks behind their companies.

Jay Avigdor, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Velocity Capital Group, today announced that his book, Need It, Don’t Want It: The Business Lessons No One Asks for, No One Tells You, but Everyone Needs, is available for pre-order on Amazon ahead of its December 8, 2026 publication by Advantage Books. Avigdor also announced Chewing Glass, an upcoming podcast about the challenges of being an entrepreneur, premiering in November, 2026. Both projects focus on the hard, gritty side of building a business.

The book tells the story of Velocity Capital Group in reverse. It opens in Chapter 12, with the company established, and works back through setbacks with financing, staff and the pandemic to the company’s first days. The frame is a teenager who asks Avigdor to mentor him and is taught the lessons from the end to the beginning. Each chapter closes with takeaways and “Need It Notes” that ask readers to apply the ideas to their own businesses.

“If you can take a faster punch, and you can take more punches than the other guy, that’s who’s going to win,” said Jay Avigdor, Chairman and CEO of Velocity Capital Group.

In the book, Avigdor writes about “the days when I had to question whether I could turn my ambitions into reality.”

In an early trade review, BookLife by Publishers Weekly wrote: “Avigdor’s stories and enthusiasm give Need It, Don’t Want It welcome heart and humanity. This high-energy account cleverly lays bare the lessons founders learn when facing uncomfortable problems.” IndieReader called the book “an honest, structurally inventive account of building a business from the ground up that proves most persuasive in the chapters where the lessons come from various setbacks and failures.”

Chewing Glass takes its name from Avigdor’s description of what running a company feels like: being a CEO, he says, is mostly chewing glass. Rather than asking guests how they succeeded, the show will ask founders and business owners about what nearly ended their businesses, including missed payroll, bad hires, bad investors, and the setbacks founders usually keep private, and how they got through them.

“If you’ve gone through a world of pain and you’re still standing, I want to hear your story and how you got through it,” Avigdor said. “We’re going to talk about the pain, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the hardship.”

For Avigdor, the measure of a founder is what the business did for its people, not cars or money.

“Show me you emptied your personal bank account to make sure your employees got food on the table,” he said.

Need It, Don’t Want It will be published in hardcover and Kindle editions. 

About Jay Avigdor

Jay Avigdor is Chairman and CEO of Velocity Capital Group, which he founded in 2018 from a folding table in a spare bedroom on Long Island. He entered alternative business finance as a teenager and has spent nearly two decades in the field. He is the author of Need It, Don’t Want It and the host of the upcoming podcast Chewing Glass.

About Velocity Capital Group

Velocity Capital Group is a financial services company focused on providing revenue-based financing solutions to businesses. The company uses technology, data-driven underwriting, and institutional operating practices to evaluate and provide business capital. 

Website: https://www.velocitycg.com

Contact

Head of Communications
Bogdan Klubuk
Velocity Capital Group
bogdan@velocitycg.com

About Author

Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Digi Observer journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.

Continue Reading

Press Release

Velaris Markets: an MT5 broker and a prop service, live since July 2026

Published

on

Each service has its own terms; the prop service uses demo accounts and is not a brokerage service.

Castries, Saint Lucia, October 28th, 2026 – Velaris Markets operates two services under one brand. Its brokerage offers CFDs on forex, indices, commodities and crypto on MetaTrader 5. Its prop service runs trading challenges on simulated accounts of up to $100,000: traders who pass and verify their identity receive a funded simulated account and 80% of the profit on that account, paid as a reward. Both services launched in July 2026.

Brokerage: two account types, no minimum deposit

The Standard account has spreads from 1.2 pips and no commission. The ECN account has spreads from 0.0 pips plus a commission of $7 per lot round turn on forex and metals. There is no minimum deposit. Leverage goes up to 1:200 on FX pairs and is lower on other asset classes. Clients deposit by card or in crypto (BTC, ETH, USDT, USDC). The client portal also offers copy trading, where a client’s own account follows a strategy provider, and Money Management (PAMM) pools run by pool managers.

Prop service: simulated accounts from $2,500 to $100,000

The prop service runs 1-Step challenges with account sizes from $2,500 to $25,000 and 2-Step challenges from $2,500 to $100,000, all on MT5, for a one-time fee starting at $29. There is no time limit to pass. A trader who passes and completes identity verification receives a funded account of the same size. Payouts run in 14-day cycles, and each payout request receives a decision within 48 hours. On the 2-Step challenge, the fee is returned with the first payout.

“Our experience in the industry shows that established firms in this business run both a brokerage and a prop structure, because together they build more trust in the brand,” said Yasen Dimitrov, Director of Velaris Markets. “A trader with a few hundred dollars has two options: trade that money directly, or pay a fee to prove a strategy on a larger simulated account. At Velaris the same trader can open a broker account with no minimum deposit, or start a $2,500 2-Step challenge for $29, where the most they can lose is the fee.”

Both services use the same support model. Live chat is open at any hour: an AI assistant answers first and hands over to the support team, which works Monday to Friday. The aim is to resolve the issue during the chat rather than open a ticket and reply later.

The brokerage is available at velarismarkets.com and the prop service at prop.velarismarkets.com. Neither service is available to citizens or residents of the United States or of sanctioned jurisdictions; the full lists are in each service’s terms.

About Velaris Markets

Velaris Markets Limited is a company incorporated in Saint Lucia in January 2026 under company number 2026-00083. It is not licensed by a financial regulator. Client funds at the brokerage are held separately from the company’s operating funds. The prop service is not a brokerage service and is not a regulated financial service; it is an evaluation program run on demo accounts.

About Author

Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Digi Observer journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.

Continue Reading

Press Release

FinSight Ventures Launches $100 Million Physical AI Index Fund

Published

on

San Francisco, US, October 28th, 2026, FinanceWire

FinSight Ventures Launches $100 Million Physical AI Index Fund, Targeting the Third Wave of Artificial Intelligence

FinSight Ventures, a global technology investment fund with $1B+ AUM and a portfolio of 13 unicorns, announced the formation of the FinSight Physical AI Index Fund — its second thematic index fund and the first institutional vehicle dedicated exclusively to the Physical AI segment that interacts with the physical world.

The Fund targets a concentrated portfolio of 10–12 leading companies across four Physical AI segments — Robotics, AI for Science, Foundation Layer, and Hardware & Infrastructure — with an aggregate target capitalization of $5.7T by 2031.

“Physical AI is not a trend, but the third structural wave of artificial intelligence,” said Alexey Garyunov, Founder and General Partner of FinSight Ventures. “Perception AI gave machines eyes and ears. Generative AI gave them language. Physical AI gives them agency in the real world. We are now at the same inflection point that defined OpenAI and Anthropic in 2019 — except what is being built is an order of magnitude larger.”

The Fund’s investment thesis rests on a structural labor shortage that no conventional policy instrument can address at scale. According to UN projections, the working-age population across East Asia, Europe, and the United States will contract by 342 million people by 2050 — a cohort representing approximately 55% of global GDP. Migration flows are slowing down. Labor participation rates in advanced economies have reached their effective ceiling.

“We modeled every mechanism available to close a 342-million-person labor gap,” said Garyunov. “Offshoring runs against reshoring policy — the CHIPS Act, the IRA, the EU Chips Act. Migration is contracting, not expanding. Labor participation in developed markets is already at 74–80%. The only channel with growing capacity is automation through Physical AI. This represents a demographic inevitability rather than a simple technology bet.”

Market Context

According to PitchBook data, Physical AI’s share of global venture financing has grown from 0.8% in 2016 to 12% in 2025, with investment volume rising from $2.0B to $64.7B over the same period and reaching $72.2B in the first half of 2026 alone. The top 20 global venture funds have completed 345 transactions in the segment since 2022, two-thirds of them after January 2024.

The humanoid robot fleet is projected to reach between 330 million and 1 billion units by 2050, displacing an estimated $19.8T in annual labor value. At a 15–20% revenue capture rate and a 7.5–10x P/S multiple, the Physical AI sector is projected to carry a market capitalization of $22–40T by 2050.

“The enabling technologies converged in 2023–2025,” said Garyunov. “NVIDIA’s Cosmos world models solved the data problem — robots can now train millions of times faster in simulation than in the physical world. VLA models solved the intelligence problem — a single model sees, understands natural language, and acts. The EV supply chain solved the cost problem. The infrastructure for a Physical AI industry is in place. What follows is deployment at scale.”

About FinSight Ventures

FinSight Ventures is a global technology investment firm founded in 2012, with offices in the United States, India, and Cyprus. The fund manages $1B+ in assets across a portfolio that includes 13 unicorns. Portfolio companies comprise Klarna, Uzum, Razorpay, Cashea, Rappi, Punto Pago, and more than 80 other companies. Last year, FinSight launched the FinSight Gen AI Index Fund, which invested in 13 companies that represent the American AI Sector including Together AI, Fin AI, Crusoe, Glean among others.

Contact

PR manager
Eugene Medvedev
FinSight Ventures
em@finsightvc.com
+48515264291

About Author

Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Digi Observer journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.

Continue Reading

LATEST POST