“The next weapons upgrade for central bankers is the ability to go negative on interest rates. It costs you to keep money in the bank. This is the ultimate spending stimulant to some central bankers. Liquidity is forced. So what prevents central bankers from doing this today? Physical cash does.
Each economic power will want a separate money network—their own separate version of FedWire. Because none will trust the other to control the settlement network for something as important as their sovereign currency.
But what happens when they want to trade? What happens when they want to settle transactions in a neutral network? To interoperate? To do global finance? For that they need a network that isn’t controlled by nation state, that cannot be censored. A credibly neutral settlement layer.
Ethereum is the only poly-asset settlement network that doesn’t require the trust of a competing nation-state. It’s the only network they can all use without giving up their sovereignty. Central bank digital currencies will end up as sidechains for the public asset blockchain—sidechains to Ethereum.”
“LSAT leverages the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) status code 402, meant to warn the user’s web browser that payment is required to access the service. The implementation of such a system could create a seamless way to pay for and immediately access web services without needing accounts.
In this new web, email addresses and passwords are a thing of the past. Instead cryptographic bearer credentials are purchased and presented by users to access services and resources.”
See Also: Blockstack Wins Patent for Its Dapp Single Sign-on Product
“The latest move by Coinbase is a vote of confidence in DeFi. Coinbase is putting $1 million into the liquidity pool for USDC/ETH on Uniswap [and] has contributed $100,000 to the sponsored pool backing PoolTogether’s USDC daily prize.
With USDC, we hope to provide critical infrastructure that will enable DeFi to grow and increasingly compete with existing financial products.”
“Telegram’s claim it could issue its tokens to investors but ensure these tokens did not end up in U.S. investors’ hands was unconvincing. Telegram did not actually explain how it could prevent secondary sales or how it could lawfully modify the Gram Purchase Agreements to to create this restriction.
[F]undamentally, the TON Blockchain was designed and is intended to grant anonymity to those who purchase or sell Grams.”
“More than a third (37 percent) of rural Americans don’t have broadband internet at home.
Cryptocurrency project Althea is powering internet connections in a novel way. It uses cryptocurrency as a payment method for internet connections brought about by community-powered mesh networks. The network devices accept payment in ether (ETH) or DAI.
They’re starting to spread, with networks of various sizes up and running in Tacoma, Washington; Denver, Colorado; and Abuja, Nigeria. And they’re planning to expand to Haiti, Ghana, North Carolina and Philadelphia.
I am happy to be a relay because I can make money and I feel at home with the Althea network.”
“Backed by global agribusiness giants like Cargill and Bunge, Covantis has been officially established as a legal entity in Geneva after receiving all necessary regulatory approval.
The upcoming platform is going to be based on the Ethereum blockchain and will initially focus on automating grain and oilseed post-trade execution processes.
The platform is currently in development. We will start users testing in May and will be planning to launch the 1st release in the second part of 2020.”
“The key motivation for exchanges to get into the bitcoin mining game is liquidity: Mining is the cheapest way to add liquidity to exchanges. The exchange is following the lead of its peers, OKex and Huobi.
The company has already hired some professionals for this purpose, some of them former Bitmain employees. The launch is planned for the Q2 2020.”
“While Bitcoin Core is featured, most cryptocurrency projects stored on GitHub will also be included, including bitcoin’s forward-looking Lightning Network, and the code behind other cryptocurrencies, such as ethereum and dogecoin.
As a part of an archiving program for safeguarding an important part of technological history, a “snapshot” of all this code will be copied onto film reels and stored in a steel container, all done in an effort to keep the data alive and unscathed for 1,000 years.
Organizations like the non-profit digital library Internet Archive and the future-looking cultural non-profit Long Now Foundation are backing the effort, and historians, anthropologists and other scientists are advising it.”
The Disrupt 