“There are simply too many questions left unanswered regarding why Facebook is even developing a cryptocurrency and how it will affect the global economy and consumers.
Garcia’s comments suggest libra’s roots as a Facebook initiative remain a political liability despite the consortium’s steps to appease critics.
I will continue to work to make sure that the SEC regulates any such asset as the security that it is under current securities laws.”
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“European researchers have published a paper detailing an attack that can be used to deanonymize channel balances on the Lightning Network.
The academics claim to have used transfer routing to ‘probe’ Lightning channels and discover the sum of Bitcoin held in balances. The ‘probe attack’ takes “under a minute per channel” and requires “moderate capital commitment and no expenditures”.
The team proposes several potential solutions to the probing attack, however, emphasize that each possible fix requires a trade-off between privacy and efficiency.”
“Rocket LP DAO, a 4-month-old loan provider that uses non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as collateral, issued a $1,000 loan this week, backed by only one Ethereum domain name — brantly.eth. The loan was issued for 90 days with a 15% interest rate and is the first loan to ever be issued with only an Ethereum name service domain name for collateral.
This raises the question of whether we can accurately tokenize or value sentiment. Although the transaction is recorded on the blockchain, some users suggest the valuation was too high or that it has little correlation to an NFT.
[At any rate], the cryptocurrency community continues to push the boundaries set in place by the traditional financial system.”
“The company saw the number of Circle Business Accounts – introduced last month for corporate clients to conduct business using USDC – grow 700 percent over the past few weeks, with more than two-thirds of these businesses coming from outside the crypto space.
Allaire’s explanation for the surge suggests the crisis is accelerating mainstream adoption of blockchain technology, albeit a relatively tame variant.
We believe we are seeing a real turning point in the adoption of digital currency.”
“A recent report claims that the representatives of nearly 80% of crypto valley’s firms said they will most likely go bankrupt over the next six months. Furthermore, 56.9% already had to lay off employees and 90.7% expect to do so in the future.
The report is based on the answers from 203 crypto valley firm representatives. Unfortunately, the report also notes that 68.3% of the crypto valley startups that requested a Covid-19 loan did not receive one.
Given that many were just emerging from the effects of a long crypto winter, this double punch will be hard for many to emerge from.”
“Consulting firm Advantage Blockchain is teaming with Vertalo and alternative trading system tZERO to tokenize the portfolio of Class A properties owned by a boutique firm.
Hotels in Pennsylvania and Costa Rica will be the first to be tokenized in the deal.
Through Vertalo, Advantage will use the Tezos blockchain to tokenize the real estate. On tZERO, investors can sign up to trade tokens through Dinosaur Financial Group.”
“Developers working on Baseline, an enterprise smart contract and tokenization platform developed by Microsoft, Ernst & Young, and ConsenSys, are working to solve several flaws identified with Apple and Google’s proposal for coronavirus tracking initiatives.
Baseline can be used to deliver a contact monitoring system with greater privacy and security than the plan articulated by Google and Facebook.
The system prevents the collection of ‘a group of ‘anonymous’ IDs […] that would permit, say, a government with some friends that are really good at AI to generate ‘interesting’ classifiers on populations.‘”
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“The cryptocurrency exchange said Friday the new Binance Smart Chain (BSC) would work as a smart contract layer running parallel to its existing Binance Chain.
Its consensus mechanism is a hybrid of EOS’ delegated proof of stake (dPoS) system and a proof of authority (PoA) system. Binance also wants to make BSC fully compatible with Ethereum.”
“With the XRP price down 95% from its peak, the XRP Army has largely packed up its bags and gone home. During the last two years, Ripple has lost over 63% of its active community, according to data collected from Telegram chat groups.
XRP was the worst-performing crypto asset in the top 25 coins by market capitalization within the first quarter of 2020. Worse still, Ripple, the company dedicated to the coin, has been adding to the downwards pressure on the price.
Besides Ripple, a large number of users have apparently lost their interest in Litecoin too, as the project lost over 67% of its Telegram following since 2018.”
“The network — which is launching today — allows shippers or freight forwarders to instantly book and confirm any of AirAsia’s 247 aircraft to carry cargo.
Agile software platforms like Freightchain help to connect uneven supply and demand amidst a rapidly evolving environment. Trust and transparency are needed now more than ever.”
The Disrupt 