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LimeWire Is About To Make A Comeback As An NFT Marketplace
LimeWire has launched an invite-only private token sale as the last major milestone before officially launching the marketplace itself in May 2022.
If you were on the internet between 2000 and 2010, the chances are that you have experience with using LimeWire to download content of a questionable legal status.
Now, the name of the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application is making a comeback as an NFT marketplace powered by the Algorand blockchain, which is also home to ZestBloom, Abrist, Dartroom, Blocsport, Asolp, and other NFT and digital art marketplaces.
“LimeWire is back to bring digital collectibles to everybody” states the official website, which currently features a waitlist for early access. LimeWire’s unexpected resurrection as an NFT marketplace can be traced to the 2021 purchase of intellectual property rights to LimeWire by Austrian brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr.
“The issue with the NFT market is that most platforms are decentralized” Julian told CNBC. “If you look at Bitcoin, all the exchanges are making it really easy to buy, trade, and sell Bitcoin. There’s no one really doing the same in the NFT space”.
Determined to fill the hole in the market, Julian and Paul established a core team in Q3 2021, and they’re now ready to launch an invite-only private token sale as the last major milestone before officially launching the marketplace itself in May 2022.
Also Read: 5 Gaming Cryptos That Will Explode In 2023
To be as user-friendly as possible, the LimeWire NFT marketplace will show prices in US dollars, instead of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Even the choice of the Algorand blockchain is meant to increase the project’s mainstream appeal because Algorand relies on a low-energy consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Stake to address major concerns around the energy consumed by cryptocurrencies.
It will be interesting to see how many of the millennials who remember LimeWire from their childhood years will react positively to the platform’s comeback when it launches in the near future.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push
Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
