Within the Quad Cities, a metropolitan space that incorporates 5 cities and spans the Iowa-Illinois border, people can get their information from the Quad Cities Occasions, The Dispatch Argus (beneath widespread possession with the Quad Cities Occasions), WQAD (the native ABC affiliate), KWQC (the native NBC affiliate), and WVIK (the native NPR affiliate).
Nevertheless, the Quad-Metropolis Occasions on Fb has 76,000 followers, whereas the What’s Happening Quad Cities Fb group began by Harold DeFrieze has 106,000.
This implies that many individuals’s first engagement with information on this group comes not from a newspaper or a information program, however from a Fb group.
Together with Dig-A-Hash co-founder Ryan Segura, DeFrieze additionally based the brand new web site for What’s Happening QC (typically described as What’s Happening Quad Cities) that grew out of his Fb group.
Learn extra: The NFT market bubble has popped and we’ve obtained the charts to show it
Dig-a-Hash describes itself as a “Decentralized Utility (Dapp) specializing in Dynamic NFT Meta-Knowledge.”
It claims, “We additionally supply distinctive freelance internet improvement from our design studio, paired with budget-friendly website hosting.”
Based on his LinkedIn, Segura, the technical director for What’s Happening QC, has earlier expertise within the crypto business after serving as a “senior backend internet 3 developer” for Blockchains, Inc. This agency supposed to construct a blockchain sensible metropolis within the desert of Nevada.
Joshua DeDecker, the opposite government behind Dig-a-Hash, has much less expertise with cryptocurrency, focusing extra on actual property, in keeping with his LinkedIn.
He describes Dig-a-Hash as a agency that “focuses on fixing challenges in actual property operations and property administration” and builds “options for an business with archaic processes by leveraging rising applied sciences to reconstruct beforehand outlined standing quos.”
Nevertheless, in an interview with Protos, Segura famous that he believes this know-how has functions throughout many industries; at the moment, they aren’t working considerably on actual property, as an alternative focusing extra intensely on the power for NFTs for use in internet improvement.
Learn extra: Lawsuit accuses ‘harmful’ Character AI bot of inflicting teen’s dying
What’s Happening QC purports to make use of Synthetic Intelligence (AI) alongside Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as elementary elements of its infrastructure.
Segura advised Protos that they use Synthetic Intelligence throughout a large swath of the web site. It’s used to assist right grammar and spelling, generate cowl photos, and is even used to assist confirm claims, with Segura noting that “the robotic can exit and do deep internet searches.”
AI can also be necessary for sensible contract improvement, with Segura noting that the know-how has turn into “stellar at Solidity,” the principal coding language used for chains that use the Ethereum Digital Machine.
This use of synthetic intelligence just isn’t famous on the web site however was described within the earlier Quad Metropolis Occasions interview that Segura and DeFrieze gave.
Additionally not talked about wherever on the web site is the truth that each single article posted there may be additionally an NFT on the Polygon layer-2 community.
Learn extra: Simply 5% of NFT merchants make the overwhelming majority of income on OpenSea
Nevertheless, a detailed evaluation of Dig-a-Hash’s web site notes beneath its Buyer Case Research part that What’s Going On Quad Cities was “created utilizing NFTS as constructing blocks.” It moreover notes that DeFrieze’s enterprise, The Canine Plex, additionally makes use of NFTs; particularly, it’s “tokenizing canine in NFT format.”
Moreover, Segura demonstrated to Protos how he creates every entry, including an entry for “Putnam GIANT Display” whereas we watched and mentioned the varied attributes that may be added and later up to date.
All of those NFTs related to What’s Happening QC have been transferred to a single tackle, 0x18582f2CA048ac5f22E5a64F92E8a7d7b1F806a4.
Why NFTs?
Maybe the most important query that we had been left with when reviewing What’s Happening QC is “Why NFTs?”
The tokens aren’t at the moment getting used to fundraise, aren’t talked about on the web site, and Dig-a-Hash particularly mentions how its instruments make it doable to replace the metadata of NFTs, which means these initiatives are usually not counting on the relative immutability of the blockchain, besides as an index of when this particular object was created.
Moreover, Segura said that there was no quick plan to make use of NFTs for fundraising, stating that he couldn’t determine why somebody would need to purchase considered one of them.
Segura, in his interview with Protos, defined that he believes that storing these objects on Polygon is cheaper than having to run particular person Amazon Internet Service (AWS) databases, and that doing it this fashion helps maintain the internet hosting prices low.
He said that the benefit of those articles being NFTs on Polygon is that he’s capable of “create a whole lot of information for 25 cents that might be there… till the blockchain dies.”
This can be a very compelling providing for the website hosting they provide, even with what he described as among the limitations of Polygon, together with its relative slowness.
Moreover, Segura famous that the precise metadata for these NFTs isn’t saved on-chain and is as an alternative saved in S3, as a result of companies like Arweave are way more expensive.
Whether or not or not this low value for storing these NFTs on Polygon will stay will depend upon the relative demand for Polygon, and Segura himself believes that “adoption” is without doubt one of the largest issues that crypto has left to unravel.
He additionally famous that he believes the overwhelming majority of chains, together with Ethereum, are overpriced.

