Young Monday: Google invests in the world of crypto, Gordon Ramsay on The Sandbox and Dogechain

Google invests more than 1.5 billion in the world of crypto, Hell’s Kitchen and Gordon Ramsey enter The Sandbox metaverse and Dogechain makes an appearance

Google is the leading company when it comes to investments in the world of crypto! Thanks to its parent company Alphabet, it has invested some 1.5 billion USD in Web3 projects from September 2021 to June 2022. Speaking of The Sandbox, after having ended their collaboration with Paris Hilton last week, now it is Gordon Ramsey’s turn. If you ever wondered how many restaurants Gordon Ramsey has, he will soon have one more, but in The Sandbox metaverse! Finally, what is Dogechain? A network on Polygon Edge created in honour of the Web3’s most famous doggo!

Google’s investments in the crypto world

Google is the leading investor in the Web3 sector. According to a report published on the 17th of August 2022 by Blockdata, Alphabet, Google’s holding company, has invested USD 1.5 billion in the world of blockchain. The investments focused on four Web3 companies. The companies are custody provider Fireblocks, NFT company Dapper Labs, a scalability solution for Bitcoin called Voltage, and venture capital firm Digital Currency Group. If you don’t recognise these companies, don’t worry, among the brands they have invested in are some names that will sound familiar. For example Dapper Labs is the platform that has spawned successful projects such as CryptoKitties or NBA Top Shot. While the venture capital firm Digital Currency Group has financed famous realities within the Web3 such as The Graph, Decentraland, Brave and Etherscan. Beyond Google, other companies are also continuously increasing their investments in the crypto sector. Among the big names, which rank right behind the US giant, are other iconic brands such as Samsung, Paypal and Microsoft.

Gordon Ramsay is the first Chef in The Sandbox metaverse

If you want to learn how to make Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington, forget about YouTube videos, you can do it in the metaverse of The Sandbox! Hell’s Kitchen and TV chef king Gordon Ramsay have teamed up with ITV’s The Sandbox. The goal?  To open the first digital restaurant in history. It will not, however, be ‘just’ a digital restaurant. A special LAND based on Hell’s Kitchen, will be built by the metaverse’s development team. There will be not only avatars of chef Gordon Ramsey, but also other virtual tools for those who want to build culinary experiences in the spirit of Web3. Gordon Ramsay said, “There is nothing more exciting for me than to venture into new territory, whether it’s creating an iconic dish, a new restaurant concept, a new show, and now a virtual experience in The Sandbox,” the chef continued, “I have been fascinated by The Sandbox and its offering in the metaverse. I couldn’t think of a better platform to convey the great energy that characterises my Hell’s Kitchen brand.” To answer the question in the introduction, how many restaurants has Gordon Ramsay actually opened in his career? Twenty-six if you count the in on The Sandbox too. Who knows, maybe he will be able to earn Michelin stars in Web3 as well.

Dogechain, what is it and how does it work?

There has been a lot of talk lately about the new blockchain platform that allows users to use their Dogecoin on DeFi platforms and to buy NFTs. This platform is called Dogechain, but what is it and how exactly does it work? Many thought that Dogechain was a Layer 2 built on Doge’s blockchain. Wrong! It is not a Layer 2, but a simple network built on Polygon Edge. Polygon Edge is a Polygon framework that can be used to build Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks. In addition, it should be specified that this is not an ‘official’ Dogecoin product: the team has tweeted about it, declaring itself to be completely uninvolved in the project.

To use the blockchain, you simply have to move your WDOGE onto the network via a Bridge, and in doing so you will receive WDOGE Wrapped Dogecoins in return. Thanks to these tokens it will be possible to interact with DeFi applications, NFT marketplaces, and perhaps some games in the future. In the first days since its inception, the blockchain recorded a very high amount of transactions, around 500,000. The platform’s main DEX, DogeSwap, has exchanged almost 20 million dollars worth. Beware though! Roc Zacharias, co-founder of one of the most widely used DEXs on Polygon, QuickSwap, who collaborated on the Dogechain project, expressly stated to be very careful when interacting with the network. He called it a wild ‘place’ where risks are always around the corner! The tokens that have been launched on Dogechain already number more than 600 and the names are practically all memes, e.g. DogeEat Doge and Doge Shrek. We will see if Dogechain will have the strength to establish itself, and be recognised by the Doge team, or if it will remain merely the realm of meme coins.