“‘At first I just want to try its legitimacy, and after a week of playing I was amazed with my first income,’ said Inton, who is currently earning around 10,000 PHP ($206) per week from playing the game around the clock.

Inton soon invited his family to play, too, and after a few weeks, he also started telling his neighbors. Now, there are more than 100 people in his local community playing to earn on Axie, including a 66-year-old grandmother.

To a crypto investor, gaining $300 or $400 a month might not mean that much, but for these people it means the world.

It’s food on the table, it’s money for their families and it’s saving them when they cannot even leave the house during this pandemic.

The COVID-19 crisis, which has confined people to their homes and limited the usual opportunities to earn an income, combined with the compelling nature of the Axie game itself, has encouraged people who might not usually play with dapps to do just that.

There are a number of ways to make money with Axies. For new players, the most common method is by earning the utility token, small love potion (SLP), and selling it via a liquidity pool at the decentralized trading platform, Uniswap. Issued as a reward when Axies win battles, SLP is in demand because it’s required to get a couple of Axies in the mood to breed.

For more seasoned players, or those with greater risk appetite, higher returns can be made by trading the Axies themselves.”

See Also: Decentraland, Dragon City and the rise of NFTs in China

---

“Oasis Pay is a decentralized payments system that uses a layer-2 scaling solution (one that moves transactions off-chain from the layer-1 Ethereum network) to make fast Dai transfers, easily.

Think of it as a type of decentralized PayPal that allows fast, trustless, and safe Dai payments. It’s even possible to lock funds in the DSR with Oasis Pay.”

See Also: ARC to bring Decentralized Bonds (Video)

---

“Nazarov said DECO can be used as a foundation for a few crypto wish list items, such as permissionless credit or decentralized identification. DECO could one day allow a smart contract to query off-chain credit information such as banking records without overreaching into personal data.

For example, he said DECO can prove a person is over 18 by pulling data from a DMV while hiding the individual’s birth date.

DECO is also useful for users who want to monetize their own data (and therefore prove that they are indeed providing correct data) without giving away anything but the data that they are selling.

This privacy is possible through DECO’s incorporation of zero-knowledge proofs. Moreover, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and Juels have begun drafting a second Chainlink white paper.

DECO is the way a lot of collateral will make its way to DeFi.”

See Also: Oasis Network Announces Chainlink Oracle Integration to Enable Privacy-Focused DeFi Applications

---

“With Upfiring 1.2.2, seamless decentralized P2P file-sharing is now possible on the Ethereum blockchain.

With our product ready for user adoption, the project’s focus will be shifting towards towards community growth and marketing for the second half of 2020. Upfiring 1.2.2’s release will ensure the dapp is ready for a growing userbase of downloaders and seeders in the coming weeks.”

---

“Although RenVM says it is “powered by decentralized virtual machines,” all of the user funds for the project—more than 9,000 Bitcoin—sit in a single wallet controlled by the RenVM team. Moreover, the company currently controls all the nodes to its network, as it is still transitioning away from a centralized system.

The Ren team responded today with a Medium post of their own, outlining the path laid out for achieving decentralization while navigating the risks and challenges of setting up brand-new technology responsible for hundreds of millions in crypto value.

Ren says it is strongly incentivized to operate in good faith until it can transition to the more decentralized structure it’s planned all along.”

---

“Inspired by fair launch capital we have developed a new kind of tooling, Delegated Funding DAO Vaults.

Funders provide YFI into the fair launch Vault. Teams wishing to apply for funding need to setup a gitcoin grants page, and apply via gov.yearn.finance. If approved governance can set a weekly/monthly/yearly credit limit that the applicant can draw from via yborrow.finance. This is achieved with credit delegation.”

See Also: YFI price soars to $38.8K hitting $1B market cap — can it go higher?
See Also: The Bear Case for Yield Farming

---

“A step by step guide on how to become an Eth2 validator on the Medalla testnet. Here’s what this guide covers:

1. Recommended hardware
2. Choosing & Installing Your Client
3. Setting up an Eth1 Node
4. Using the Eth2 Launch Pad
5. Bonus content and resources”

---

“The brief availability of the wallet shows the Chinese commercial bank has been working towards adoption for the digital yuan initiative.

The wallet’s interface showed each user that had activated the service was assigned to a specific wallet ID, which could be used to make transactions between the wallet and users’ CCB bank accounts. In addition, users could also send and receive digital yuan to each other by putting in either their unique wallet ID addresses or an associated mobile phone number.

It remains to be seen when these banks will officially open up the services to the public and whether the wallets will enable more applications that can use the digital currency.”

---

“For the first time ever, more money is being traded on decentralized exchange Uniswap than on Coinbase Pro.

Decentralized ERC20 exchange Uniswap today hit new highs—with a 24 hour trading volume of over $441 million. That’s nearly 20% higher than Coinbase Pro’s trading volume, which stood at over $373 million today.”

See Also: 0x’s new Request for Quote system
See Also: Uniswap Rival Sushiswap Hits $30m Daily Volume with Yield Farming Play

---

“The attack reorganized over 7,000 blocks, or two days’ worth of mining. The first two attacks reorganized 3,693 and 4,000 blocks.

Notably, a leading organization behind the Ethereum Classic network, ETC Labs, announced its strategy to protect the network from additional attacks last week.

Following the latest attack, leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX will reconsider its ETC perpetual futures contracts. OKEx responded by saying it will consider delisting the asset due to the network’s severe lack of security.”

---

“KR1 plc (KR1:AQSE), a leading digital asset investment company, is pleased to announce that the Company has become a member of the MetaCartel Ventures Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (“MCV” or “MCV DAO”), by contributing US $199,119.54 into the entity and receiving 4,938 MCV shares in return, representing an interest of 7.85% in the MCV DAO.

The MCV is a for-profit DAO, created by Ethereum’s ‘MetaCartel’ community for the purposes of making investments into early stage decentralized applications, being an exciting new development in blockchain venture funding.

This project is a new way for individuals and entities to coordinate funding, labour, time and social capital through an on-chain managed organisation. MCV is formed as a hybrid organisation made up of blockchain smart contract code and a traditional corporate structure.”

See Also: Zapper Closes $1.5M Seed Round

---

“Who controls our data? The capture of so much information placed in the hands of so few is the most pressing technological issue of our age. The problem gives rise to weekly privacy scandals, has super-charged the growth of trillion dollar tech oligopolies and plays one of the most decisive roles in democratic outcomes.

But if it’s control of data you are worried about, then the privacy movement suffers from a strategic flaw. The reason we have a data economy is because data is valuable. Not just in an overtly comercial way but, as we’ve seen with COVID-19, it is socially valuable, too. The generation and distribution of information benefits us all.

What the movement has been unable to facilitate is to allow ordinary individuals to actively share their data with others and, most importantly, share in the proceeds of an economy already valued in the hundreds of billions.

We shouldn’t demand a tithe, we should take back control of our data. In fact, a handful of (mainly) crypto organizations are doing just this.”

---

“A new strategic partnership will see the firm implement Denver, Colo.-based Crusoe Energy Systems’ digital flare mitigation technology. This converts waste natural gas that would be otherwise released into the atmosphere into electricity at the well site.

Mining cryptocurrency requires a lot of electricity to power computers, while a valuable commodity is wasted, and carbon emissions are created when we flare. Crusoe’s digital flare mitigation offers a win-win alternative for producers and investors alike.“

See Also: Telos will tokenize $35 million of Croatian seafront real estate

---

“Already live on its foreign exchange trading platform, SBI FX Trade, the contracts come in bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and XRP flavors. CFDs are very short-term contracts that pay the difference in price between the open and closing trades.

Orders can be placed around the clock on any day of the week.”

---

“The DeFi community is now banding together to help support public goods funding, a problem that has plagued open source development since inception.

Yam Finance, a yield farmers paradise which aggregated $600M in TVL in less than 48 hours, will direct 1% of its future treasury to Gitcoin Grants’s public goods funding upon its forthcoming V3 migration.

By properly funding the infrastructure, the YAM/YFI stakeholders are contributing to the public good of the Ethereum ecosystem.”

---

“On Aug. 28, the money market protocol Aave (LEND) listed YFI. Aave is the largest DeFi protocol in the global market with more than $1.52 billion in total value locked.

Atop the new listing, yearn.finance developer Andre Cronje said he is collaborating with FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Guess the cat is out of the bag, but just so that there is some expectation management, this is a long roadmap that we are working on, so it won’t be anything anytime soon. But there will be something very sexy in the future.

Throughout the past month, yearn.finance and its main developer Cronje has pushed out many products ranging from vaults to decentralized insurance.”

See Also: ‘Irrational, even by crypto standards’: KSM moons as Kusama looks to Mars
See Also: The Robonomics token is trading for $95,000 each on Uniswap

---

“Total value locked is often considered a measure of the popularity of a DeFi protocol and the sector as a whole. However, measuring it in U.S. dollars means that any token price increase will also drive TVL up — even though no new assets were committed to the protocol.

DappRadar’s adjusted TVL fixes all assets in a protocol at their price from 90 days before. Any growth or loss in this adjusted value in a 90 day period can thus only come from net flows of assets and not their price change.

Adjusted TVL paints a slightly less optimistic picture than a face-value reading would suggest. Out of the $7.3 billion in nominal TVL, adjusted TVL only accounts for $3.9 billion. This suggests that the remaining $3.4 billion simply came from price rallies of existing assets in the last three months.”

---

“The transaction, which occurred on OpenSea’s token marketplace, was completed by a user named Maxstealth. Currently, he owns 196 .crypto domains in total.

The buyer most likely believes in the future of decentralized domains and is betting big on the price appreciation. This may pay serious dividends if its traditional DNS counterpart is anything to go by — sex.com is worth over $12 million according to some estimates.”

---

“The new model introduces Oracle Pools, which are capable of incentivizing good and disincentivizing bad behavior.

The idea involves major players in the DeFi ecosystem donating funds to the oracle pools that they find useful. Then, the data providers get compensated with the funds from the pool. If a data provider feeds low-quality data, his stake can get ‘slashed.'”

“Messaging giant LINE has launched a wallet for users to manage digital assets and a blockchain platform where developers can issue their own tokens, tokenize digital assets, and run decentralized applications (dapps).

LINE’s development platform aims to allow companies to easily introduce blockchain technology. The wallet services are now only available in Japan, where LINE is particularly well-known.”

---

“Dubbed USDC 2.0, USD Coin (USDC) has integrated what are called “meta transactions.” Now, users do not have to pre-fund their USDC-bearing wallets with ether (ETH) in order to send a transaction.

Meta transactions allow USDC wallets and compatible applications to act as virtual “gas stations” by paying the associated mining fee that accompanies every Ethereum blockchain transaction.”

---

“Filecoin has been testing EIP 1559 which aims to tackle high network fees on Ethereum. The proposal introduces the ‘base fee’ mechanism that dynamically adjusts fees based on the current network congestion levels. All of the fees in ETH that are paid via the base fee are burnt and only the ‘tip’ is paid to miners.

Filecoin software engineer, Jeromy Johnson, said the EIP code ‘appears to be doing its job’ on an ongoing test on the network. He added that there had been a couple of spikes in “base fee”, which is the new network fee architecture, but there was very little delay in messages making it into the chain.

Two Ethereum clients are [also] currently privately testing the code, Vulcanize’s geth fork and Besu.”

---

“‘Protocol of protocols’ Polkadot is weeks away from the release of the first viable bridge to the Ethereum blockchain. The bridge will roll out in phases and should be production-ready by March 2021.

Phase one of three slated for release mid-September will include ‘a working demo of two-way transfer of assets [and] state from Ethereum to our testnet chain.'”

See Also: Polkadot-Based Acala Raises $7M as DeFi Grabs Land on Another Blockchain

---

“As the rate of token issuance accelerates, it has become increasingly difficult for users to filter out high quality, legitimate tokens from scams, fakes, and duplicates.

Today, we are excited to announce Token Lists, a new standard for creating lists of ERC20 tokens. This is a community-led initiative to improve discoverability and trust in ERC20 token lists in a manner that is inclusive, transparent, and decentralized.

Token Lists can be used right now in the Uniswap Interface, removing the need for a default list.”

See Also: TokenLists

---

“Bitcoin whipsawed on Thursday after the Federal Reserve’s chairman signaled tolerance for high inflation, as expected.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, while speaking at central bank’s annual Jackson Hole event, said that the central bank will now be willing to allow inflation to run higher than the 2% target before raising interest rates.“

See Also: WATCH: Fed Chair Powell Lays Out Plan to Let Inflation Rise Above 2%

---

---

“Because of how widely derivatives products vary among exchanges, BVV predicts there will be several acquisitions in the crypto exchange market in the next few months.

BVV also predicts that the most likely acquisition targets are LedgerX, BitFlyer and ErisX; the firm ID’d Coinbase, Bitstamp, Huobi and Binance as the most likely acquirers.

Derivatives are the gateway for institutional investors.”

See Also: Non event? Why Friday’s $272M CME Bitcoin futures expiry is irrelevant

---

“The first regulated stablecoin in Switzerland is entering e-commerce. Galaxus, the largest online retailer in Switzerland, could start accepting payments in a stablecoin issued by local cryptocurrency bank Sygnum.

Launched in March 2020, Sygnum’s DCHF stablecoin is pegged one-to-one to with the Swiss franc, and intends to eliminate the need for card systems, reduce settlement costs and fraud, as well as provide instant transactions.”

See Also: Is This the Blockchain Firm That Will Get Enterprise to Finally Embrace Open Networks?

---

“Faced with a food safety crisis on an island nation that imports more than 90% of its food from other countries, the Singapore Food Agency has teamed up with veriTAG and ST Engineering to develop a blockchain-based system for tracking food from creation up to point of sale.

veriTAG’s system is based on the NULS blockchain, an open-source and adaptive blockchain network designed for app developers. The NULS Foundation is also based out of Singapore, and earlier this year it announced the Nerve Network, a cross-chain initiative that can bridge to Bitcoin or Ethereum.“

---

“Fair Launch Capital’s business model may help prevent future YAM DeFi debacles. FLC said it is not a venture capital fund and will make a “no-strings-attached grant” to cover a project’s initial audit and launch costs.

Some high-risk DeFi projects — with and without tokens — have quickly attracted large amounts of capital despite launching without a proper code audit.

After launching, the project’s community would take a governance vote to decide whether to forward the grant money they received to the next founders that wanted to try a Fair Launch. FLC stated that the core team would be choosing a single project for the first experiment with this new model soon.”

See Also: Fair Launch Capital

---

“BestChange.ru, an aggregator of over-the-counter (OTC) cryptocurrency providers in Russia, is one of a number of websites being blocked by the country’s internet censorship agency.

The lawsuit also targeted cryptocurrency news websites and even an online flower shop, all of which, according to Roskomnadzor, were offering bitcoin for sale or goods in exchange for bitcoin.

The issuance and usage of bitcoin is decentralized and can’t be controlled by the state, which violates Russian laws.”

See Also: Chainalysis Report Shows Healthy Crypto Usage in Venezuela

---

“Baseline Protocol, where corporates can use the Ethereum public mainnet as a common frame of reference among different systems of record, has released its Version 1.0.

The protocol has seen prolific adoption since its launch in March of this year. Wolpert said some 20 or so companies a week are joining the 600-plus firms now using the protocol, with big names like Coca-Cola bottling group.

Thus far, several proofs-of-concept have been released to showcase how to baseline systems such as SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Google Sheets.

The release of Baseline Protocol v1 represents a significant milestone because it provides a set of standard interfaces for developers to implement solutions easily and for vendors to provide their own modules that comply with the specification.

The protocol is at a stage where it is going into professional standards development.”

---

“A new Compound governance proposal from Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra would see all future COMP token distributions locked in a vesting schedule. Adding vesting would discourage ‘purely capitalist yield farmers.’

With no vesting, yield farmers can simply pool their liquidity to earn COMP and immediately sell it on the market. This has resulted in a somewhat perverted incentive that goes against the stated purpose of the COMP distribution.

If the proposal were to pass, however, it could have a powerful effect on the current DeFi ecosystem. The decision would significantly limit a major portion of total liquidity mining revenue, most likely affecting all other protocols in some way.”

See Also: Ethereum whale’s uniswap token briefly hit $100K — but there’s a catch

---

“Following six months of rapid growth, USDT average daily transfer value has finally flipped Bitcoin’s as it continues to take more and more of the market share of on-chain transfers. The recent surge in Tether usage has been driven by DeFi and token swapping protocols such as Uniswap.

Tether’s 7-day average adjusted transfer value reached over $3.55 billion as of August 20. This is around 20% more than that for Bitcoin. Economist John Paul Koning also observed that, according to PayPal’s Q2 report, the daily average transfer value of the online payments giant was also less than Tether’s at $2.94 billion.”

---

“Wise Origin Bitcoin Index Fund I, LP has a $100,000 minimum buy-in and a high-ranking executive officer to boot: Peter Jubber, head of strategy and planning for the increasingly crypto-friendly investments giant Fidelity.

The fund is the latest example of Wall Street veterans warming up to bitcoin.

Wise Origin links back to Fidelity Investments via Jubber and Fidelity’s brokerage service and distribution subsidiaries, both of which are set to receive sales compensation from the new fund.”

---

“The company launched its “Filecoin Space Race” on August 24 as a “collaborative competition” intended to stress test the network. Miners from around the world are being incentivized to participate as Filecoin (FIL) promised to hand out up to 4 million FIL tokens as rewards.

It took the @Filecoin Space Race just 30 hours to reach 10 Petabytes of storage!

Currently, the capacity of Filecoin’s testnet hovers just over 12 pebibytes that are split between 280 miners. Filecoin’s “Space Race” is scheduled to run for three weeks and will conclude in mid-September.”

---

“DOT has seen meteoric growth in recent weeks in terms of both valuation and projects. Data from PolkaProject shows there are 197 projects in the Polkadot ecosystem already.

There are several favorable factors buoying the sentiment around DOT. The protocol does not directly compete against the Ethereum Network, it scales rapidly, and as a result, could offset the issue of high fees on Ethereum.

Blockchains, like Polkadot and Cosmos, which enable multiple blockchain networks to exist on their protocols, are structurally different from Ethereum. If Polkadot, along with other smart contracts protocols, can co-exist with Ethereum, it raises the chances for long-term survivability.

I believe in a multi-chain world interconnected by bridges. Polkadot and Cosmos will not replace Ethereum.”

---

“Powell’s return to Jackson Hole comes at a time when ‘people are just starting to ask questions about the intrinsic value of money.‘

There is this danger of the U.S. [dollar] in the future no longer being the world’s reserve currency. We are in a much worse position than we were in a year ago.

U.S. authorities have just taken on an inordinate amount of debt, more than they could possibly ever hope to pay back. So the only viable option is to decrease the value of that debt by way of monetary debasement. It’s despicable and dangerous, but the only other option is austerity, which is too unpopular for any public servant to mention at this time.”

---

See Also: Private Equity Eyes Blockchain (Video)

---

“FTX has acquired Blockfolio, the market’s leading mobile news and portfolio tracking app, for $150 million. The deal is a strategic play for FTX, whose clientele consists largely of quants and professional traders, to attract more retail customers.

The combined company aims to build a new standard for quality in retail trading experiences.”

---

“Now, the big centralized crypto exchanges are finding a way to cash in on the mania, introducing indexes tied to the fate of “DeFi” tokens and new futures contracts and other types of derivatives.

The fully synthetic derivative product enables greater access to decentralized finance.

Ahem. Never underestimate crypto exchanges’ creativity when it comes to adapting Wall Street-style financial engineering for use on the so-called digital rails.”

---

“The SEC has formally adopted new accredited investor rules, expanding the group of Americans who can invest in private securities [and] compliantly invest in token sales.

Still, the move isn’t broadly expanding the list of individuals who can take part in the private markets.

We do not expect that number of newly eligible individual accredited investors to be significant compared to the number of individual investors that currently are eligible to participate in private offerings.”

See Also: IRS, Ignoring Its Own Watchdog, Sends Letters About Crypto Taxes Once Again

---

“The system seeks to use blockchain to propagate data between networking satellites, increasing their communication efficacy, coordination and “overall awareness.” If one node cuts out, the rest will quickly and dynamically adapt.

Quadcopter swarms need to stay nimble in inhospitable environments, where communication is spotty but operational awareness remains paramount. They told NASA that blockchain could be just the ticket.”

See Also: MasterCard Asia files patent for Tangle-based device billing system
See Also: Russia’s Sberbank and S7 Airlines to sell flight tickets for tokens

---

“Crypto exchange Shakepay, which describes itself as “Canada’s fastest-growing bitcoin platform,” conducted a “proof-of-reserves” audit and acquired an insurance policy to reinforce its security, perhaps learning a lesson from fellow Canadian platforms QuadrigaCX, Einstein and Coinsquare, which all lost customer funds or have otherwise been involved in scandals over the past 20 months.

Shakepay’s new insurance covers all funds held in cold storage, meaning it covers ‘physical theft of the media where the private keys are held.‘”

“Additionally, JPMorgan has made an undisclosed strategic investment in ConsenSys, the companies said in a statement. Neither ConsenSys nor JPMorgan would confirm the size of the investment made by the bank.

All enterprise work being done at ConsenSys will now fall under the new “ConsenSys Quorum” brand.

As more projects began building on Quorum, a privacy-centric fork of Ethereum, it became obvious to many in the blockchain world that a bank isn’t the right place to maintain a large scale open-source software project.

Other high-profile initiatives within the bank include the Interbank Information Network, which has over 200 other banks as members, and Dromaius, a debt issuance platform on Quorum.

We’ll be able to leverage a lot of the work that JPMorgan has done that’s been internal for a long time, and support the ecosystem as other people want to use that technology.

Anyone building on Quorum will get a proper software vendor behind their technology.

Another important factor for ConsenSys is locking down interoperability between Quorum and Hyperlegder Besu. The latter is an enterprise Ethereum client built by ConsenSys engineers from the ground up to be compatible with the Ethereum public mainnet.

When we sell an enterprise Ethereum stack, we’re going to be calling it ConsenSys Quorum, and it will have two options: the Go Quorum–based version, or the Hyperledger Besu–based version.

The acquisition should make it easy for enterprises that prefer Java, or prefer the Apache 2.0 license, or even prefer to work with other Besu-based vendors, to join the various Quorum-based networks that have emerged.

This is textbook open-source ‘co-opetition’ at its finest, where competitors can realize they’re actually stronger working together than trying to divide a market.”

---

“Non-custodial lending and borrowing protocol Aave has been given the green light in the United Kingdom to offer services such as issuing ‘electronic money (e-money) and [providing] payment services.’

The objective was to help Aave Ecosystem to access payment accounts and on-board users into DeFi. Electronic Money Institution is the same authorization that Coinbase and Revolut has in Europe.

Data from Santiment reveals that alongside prices, on-chain and social volume also spiked. Taken together, these are positive signs.”

See Also: Aave Becomes Second DeFi Project to Overtake MakerDAO for Most Crypto Deposited
See Also: Despite a $13K+ price tag, YFI is one of the cheapest DeFi tokens by price-to-sales
See Also: Gnosis Safe now stores more than $1 billion in ETH and ERC20s

---

“U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is expected to bolster expectations of inflation during his keynote speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on Thursday.

The Fed chief is expected to signal tolerance for higher inflation during the speech.

Powell has previously stated that he doesn’t think inflation is a significant risk and is prepared to see it overshoot to meet his objectives.

The major impact for crypto out of this symposium would be a change in monetary policy and further depreciation of the U.S. dollar, which could propel bitcoin higher.”

See Also: US money velocity crash in Q2 boosts $288K Bitcoin prediction: analyst

---

“Global banks have suffered a $2 trillion drop in equity valuations this year. The drop came as the coronavirus pandemic led to a weakened outlook among investors. US banks were hit the worst, followed by Chinese players.

Among all global banks, US-based JP Morgan Chase saw the most significant decrease in value. Bank of America, another influential US bank and the second-largest financial institution in the world, came next on the list. However, in terms of percentage, US bank Wells Fargo took the largest hit. Statistics showed its market cap value suffered a 55% fall since January this year.”

See Also: Central banks are into digital currencies more than ever

---

“Last month, Bitcoin Lightning startup Strike announced it would be working with the world payment giant Visa. Now, another startup in the same vein, LastBit, which just launched its app in beta, will be going through the same Visa Fast Track program.

This partnership will eventually make it possible for users to pay for items priced in U.S. dollars – but using bitcoin (BTC).

The user pulls up the LastBit app, loads bitcoin into it, then has instant access to a digital debit card for sending bitcoin payments. When the user sends a bitcoin payment, the vendor gets euros or dollars on the other side.”

---

“Buterin explained that, while what Chinese entities were doing would help them grow the use of blockchain within China, the technology’s best use cases are meant to be implemented on an international level. And for that purpose, it would be difficult for them to gain the trust of other countries to use their private blockchains.

In an international context, you cannot assume that there is even a single government that everyone trusts, whereas public blockchains are more easily perceived as being neutral.“

See Also: China plans to use its digital yuan at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games
See Also: China’s Communist Party eyes blockchain for ‘decentralizing’ social services

---

“Food industry – The decentralized ledger system will provide easy access to vital information about the food product you are buying, from when it was grown to when it reached the market and how long it has been stored.

Voting – With elliptical curve cryptography, voters can create two keys — private and public — to cast their votes. The public key is revealed to a verifier that certifies it, while the private key is registered anonymously and used to pass ballots and sign off during elections. Once this is done, anyone can determine if the signature is right or wrong using the public key.

Data Sharing – Blockchain boasts of a tightly secure peer-to-peer exchange of information that is independent of a third party. For example, Ideaology, an open-source blockchain project on Ethereum, is a platform for entrepreneurs, engineers, artists and scientists to exchange, review and monetize ideas freely.

Medicine – Up to $200 billion is lost annually due to fake drugs and other misdoings in the pharmaceutical industry. Blockchain technology can potentially revolutionize pharmacies the world over by taking over supply chains.

Cybersecurity – A blockchain system can help prevent these attacks using cryptography — a sophisticated security network that uses a set of algorithms to encrypt and decrypt data.”

See Also: Starbucks to let customers trace their coffee’s provenance from bean to brew

---

“An REC is a market-based instrument designed to provide organizations with an economic incentive for electricity generation and consumption from green energy sources.

The International REC Standard provides a global standard for energy attribute tracking: each REC issued represents proof that 1 megawatt of renewable energy has been produced. Crucial to the buying and selling of RECs is confidence about the certificates’ circulation and transaction history.

Organizations want to ensure any REC purchased hasn’t already been used.”

---

“The FCA said under the expanded scope of its financial crime reporting obligation it would require crypto exchanges and wallet providers to provide detailed information annually on systems and controls put in place to tackle crimes such as money laundering.

Aside from crypto firms, the extended measure would include entities such as all companies regulated by the Financial Services and Markets Authority, payment providers, electric money institutions and multilateral and organized trading facilities.”

“The demo scenario imagines using a smart contract on mainnet that matches buyers and sellers of raw materials. Doing this in smart contracts on mainnet means that no central party needs to be in control of the process, and no central party needs to have the power to shut the smart contract down. The smart contracts can be deployed and left to run autonomously.

Mainnet has lots of potential overlap with the permissioned chain use-cases, but without the side effect of generating silos. The limitation of mainnet in this context is privacy.

There is an open source project that seeks to allow enterprises to collaborate over mainnet without revealing sensitive information. It is called the Baseline Protocol. Founding members include Microsoft, AMD and Ernst & Young.”

---

“The Boston Fed announced earlier this month it was actively testing a digital dollar – a tokenized version of the U.S. dollar – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative. The collaboration builds on previous research efforts, and is intended to establish how a digital dollar might complement the existing greenback.

As the work proceeds, the researchers hope to answer questions about scalability, throughput, privacy, resiliency and resistance to cyber attacks.

What we’re doing now really is much more thorough, much more building a platform to see whether distributed ledger can meet the needs of a U.S.-based central bank digital currency.

I would think we’re probably looking at 30 to 40 different either open source or private solutions at a very high level first, and then doing a deeper dive into a few of them.

The goal is to publish joint research over the next two years. These are questions that may take years to resolve. Cunha said he does not expect to see anything come to production within the next two or three years.“

---

“FTX announced Monday a futures index for the top 100 liquidity pools on Uniswap. The futures index allows traders to use a traditional cryptocurrency exchange to access markets native to the new decentralized trading platform, while using leverage.

We’ve seen large demand from customers to get exposure to a broad base of DeFi products.”

See Also: Cosmos (ATOM) adds 10% as it smashes its all-time high
See Also: Augur swept up in DeFi craze as crypto hits highest price since January 2018
See Also: Binance Taps DeFi Excitement to ‘Fuel’ Expansion Strategy in India

---

“Egorov, who in the hours since holds about 60% of the voting power as the community edges him out, has full control over the outcome of any proposals submitted to the DAO.

The move appears to be an overreaction to Yearn.finance attaining close to 58% of the voting power. The Curve team is optimistic that the balance of power will even out in the days ahead.

Terribly sorry. Let’s fix that. I mean, I can abstain from voting but better to fix it in a proper way.

Right now, looks like everyone else [is trying] to add some more voting power. Which is… the eventual intent.”

---

“The report’s key findings are that most CBDCs originate in innovative countries, and all of these initiatives seek to offer a digital complement to cash rather than a direct replacement to it. In addition, proofs-of-concept are more often than not based on distributed ledger technology, further indicating the modernization of CBDCs.

The report also found that most central banks are considering “Hybrid” setups, where CBDCs make a direct claim on a central bank, but customer-facing activity is dealt with in the private sector.”

See Also: Brazil’s Central Bank Tasks Group With Laying Out Road Map to Digital Currency Issuance
See Also: China’s Blockchain Service Network to launch stablecoin support in 2021

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“Huawei has set up a blockchain-based platform for the Beijing government to better track and manage its citizens’ data in everything from medical records and property registration to real-time vehicle parking status.

The Beijing government project is part of China’s “New Infrastructure Initiative” to transform digital governance with blockchain so data can be immutable and shared among different government agencies.”

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“An Ottawa-based graphics software firm, Snappa, announced Monday its decision to move a significant amount of its cash reserves into bitcoin, citing concerns of inflation and global economic uncertainty.

I believe we now have a far superior savings technology available to us.”

See Also: Crypto Derivatives Exchange BitMEX to Block Ontario Traders

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“The tech branch of Moscow’s city hall plans to broadcast on the internet videos from cameras in public spaces and may also sell those videos to third parties.

Video from the cameras will be accumulated on a central server, and there will be an option to provide access to the data for purchase, according to documents. Journalists found similar terms in other contracts for surveillance cameras already operating in Moscow.

Russian publication MBK Media wrote in December that access to footage from Moscow street cameras was on sale on the dark market, with an option to get access to individual cameras or to the entire system.”

See Also: Five Defining Features to Build the New Generation Internet

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“VeChain said the tool provides immutable proof of a green supply chain and can cover different stages of manufacturing. It can also store information on recycling, processing, reusing and inspection, allowing brands to trace original sources of goods and raw materials.

Research from the World Economic Forum showed companies face higher risks as demands grow for transparency on sustainable activities as well as the direct impact of climate change.”

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“Apple, particularly its App Store, has been under fire lately for unfair terms it gives to app developers and publishers.

Apple has been very restrictive and hostile to cryptocurrency over the years. They’re still blocking some functionality right now, including the ability to earn money with cryptocurrency by completing tasks, and unrestricted dapp browsers.”

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“If Lerner’s conclusions are correct that would lend more credence to the hypothesis that Satoshi Nakamoto was a single person and not a team. This would also put another nail into Craig Wright’s claims of being a Bitcoin creator as he has indicated numerous times that he used dozens of computers to mine the early blocks.

This contradicts a theory that Patoshi deployed the first mining farm of 50 independent computers (or any other highly decoupled system) and supports the theory that Patoshi was simply multi-threading in a high-end CPU.”

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“TrustNodes reported on Aug. 21 it was likely because of an increased chance of a “no deal” Brexit between the European Union and the U.K.

This does not involve any relocation or change in operations, staff or offices.”

Recommended read.

“Amid the chaos, keystone global institutions and bureaucrats have openly discussed the present day as an opportunity to remake the world. “The Great Reset,” as the plan has been called, represents a radical initiative by world leaders — many of whom are unelected — to transform the global economy.

At a WEF meeting in early June, the world’s most powerful business leaders, government officials and activists first announced the proposal to reset the global economy in the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdown.

The Great Reset will inform the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of the global commons. We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis — its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change.

Many details of the Great Reset won’t be rolled out until the WEF meets at Davos, Switzerland, in January 2021. It is clear, however, that world leaders have big plans of a new world order and, contrary to the founding principles of Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto, centralization appears to be a big part of it.

The cryptocurrency industry has been planning its own “Great Reset” as well — one based on decentralization. While global governments want to put the world on a distributed ledger in order to digitize finance so governments can have more control, there are very smart people on this planet who have their own plans.

Instead of social credit systems and centralized fiat currencies, we want each individual to be in control of their own money, to be less dependent on banks, and to be in control of defining what money and real value is.

Satoshi Nakamoto saw an economic dislocation like the Great Reset coming. He etched the now famous line into the Bitcoin network’s genesis block: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” While world leaders openly announce the Great Reset, imploring the world to trust their vision, they paint a picture of a future, more centralized world.

For how many years we can hold this “new territory of freedom” depends entirely on how well the cryptocurrency industry adapts to the Great Reset. The Great Reset might come down to central bank digital currencies versus the cryptocurrencies of the people — centralization versus decentralization.”

See Also: Bitcoin Has Lost Its Way: Here’s How to Return to Crypto’s Subversive Roots

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“While tax avoidance has been around since the first tax was levied, the crypto-rich – empowered by a technology that pays no heed to borders and driven by an ideology critical of all centralized authorities – are bringing it to the next level.

Ananina is the founder of Plan B Passport, a business that works primarily with Bitcoiners to obtain legal residency status in their choice of six tax-haven nations. Plan B offers information on “how to legally optimize” one’s tax strategies by moving lives, possessions or assets to the “best jurisdictions.” This open approach to tax avoidance is perfectly legal.

These businesses work with government’s “citizenship by investment” units, so people can pay a fee, fill out a few forms and claim their benefits. While the process varies by nation, in most cases, citizenship can be bought for six figures. It’s not cheap.

Wealthy individuals, you find they have three houses, three domiciles, to ensure they are never in one country sufficiently long to become a tax resident.

Proponents get as many passports as necessary or obtain legal permanent residence status in tax haven nations, offering them the chance to shuffle capital and business documentation around. They become citizens of the world, or perpetual travelers, to maximize their profits and minimize their obligations to the state. You can have one foot in New York and one in the Cayman Islands and have responsibilities to no one but yourself.

The ideal “haven nation” will enable visa-free travel with a number of countries, and have limitations on taxing income earned outside their borders. Many have low, or non-existent, tax policies on wealth and capital gains.

You go to the butcher that has the best meat, and farmer for the best fruits and vegetables, so do you shop for the lifestyle that you want? Countries are literally competing for your wealth.”

See Also: Plan B Passport

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“Despite the fact that Pomp believes Ethereum will succeed in the future, he doesn’t think any of the value will accrue to ETH beyond pure investor speculation. In 2015 people said Blockchain not Bitcoin. In 2020 people said Ethereum not Ether. Both wrong.

Three reasons. I’ll keep it simple.

1. If there’s demand for blockspace on Ethereum, there’s demand for ETH. Any transaction that leverages Ethereum as a settlement layer must pay a fee denominated in ETH. There’s virtually an endless amount of use cases for Ethereum’s blockspace. All of it drives a demand for ether.
2. Paying transaction fees in ETH is only part of the story today. The other part comes from the proliferation of decentralized finance (DeFi) and the need for trust-minimized collateral. ETH is the most trust-minimized asset on Ethereum. Any other asset on Ethereum requires some other protocol or custodian to exist, forcing a higher degree of trust than the network’s native asset. Ether as a source of capital holds priority in the Ethereum economy.
3. While fees don’t accrue to ETH holders today, they will in the future. Ether represents the right to Ethereum’s future cash flows. A productive asset! And those cash flows are hitting all time highs as we speak. Equally important, ether has rights to Ethereum’s cash flows via both active participation (validation) and passive participation (holding). This is done through two mechanisms:
   1. ETH becomes a productive asset via Proof of Stake in Ethereum 2.0. Users deposit ETH in order to secure the network and in return receive a claim to its cash flows. Ether effectively becomes a crypto bond.
   2. EIP 1559 introduces a burn whenever there’s a significant demand for Ethereum. What results is a universal dividend to all ETH holders as everyone’s percentage share of the network rises equally. In theory, if Ethereum is used enough, EIP 1559 can actually create a deflationary environment despite ETH having perpetual issuance and no supply cap.

Ethereum is becoming an invaluable global settlement layer for the internet of value. When you understand how ETH accrues value from that success, it actually becomes irresponsible to not have any exposure to that asset.”

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“I claim that yield farming will bring about DeFi protocols that not only can attract & create more value more efficiently than the likes of Google and Facebook, but also is capable of voluntarily spending a considerable portion of that value on doing good.

DeFi will be a money vortex, sucking in massive amounts of value from the wealthy.

DeFi protocols are insanely cost-efficient. First of all, once developed and deployed, DeFi protocols require next to no technical maintenance or continuous expenditures. Given these advantages, DeFi protocols can provide better financial products at much lower costs. Moreover, yield farming rewards allow DeFi protocols to provide fundamentally higher returns to investors and liquidity providers.

Because of this low competitive pressure, DeFi protocols can feasibly spend a significant portion of their income on doing good, rather than being forced to spend the money on some silly arms race and falling into the Malthusian trap. This property, combined with being zero-expenditures and zero-margins, makes DeFi protocols a radically new kind of entity, one that’s almost infinitely scalable in income, and at the same time blessed with the freedom to use that income at will.

If we want to ensure that DeFi protocols become engines for doing good, we must first pull our heads out of the corporate paradigm. We must start treating DeFi protocols not as corporations but as nations.

Governance power should not be distributed solely based on the amount of liquidity provided. There should be multiple ways of being rewarded governance power, such as making code contributions, organizing community events, writing analyses of governance proposals and so on. Governance systems should have a clear purpose or ideology regarding what it hopes to achieve in the wider world.

The governance system should never make nurturing the protocol the ultimate end, but a means to achieve its purpose, for a system focused solely on its own perpetuation will never amount to anything great.

If we are able to build a DeFi protocol with a democratic rather than plutocratic governance system, we will unleash a force for good.”

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“INX’s sale would mark a milestone for the blockchain industry. It would be the first security token offering (STO) registered with the SEC, and thus legally marketable to mom-and-pop investors. Previous STOs were unregistered and limited to wealthy investors.

INX has priced its 130 million tokens, which are to run on the Ethereum blockchain, at $0.90 each, totaling $117 million in gross proceeds.

The net proceeds would be used to build INX Trading Solutions, a regulated exchange for cryptocurrencies, security tokens and derivatives. The instruments on offer are a hybrid of utility and security tokens. Investors could use them to pay trading fees on INX’s platform. The tokens would also entitle holders to a share of company profits.”

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“Even after growing 100-fold in the past five years, the entirety of the cryptocurrency asset class, which has a total market valuation of $372 billion, is just fraction of the $35 trillion U.S. stock market.

What’s surprising is that still-fledgling digital-asset markets might be more rational and functional these days than Wall Street: The various ups and downs of token prices are sending out bona fide market signals that point to projects and opportunities where capital is warranted, and investors are responding.

Mainstream investment analysts and Wall Street Journal columnists now assert matter-of-factly that the stock market is merely propped up by this year’s $3 trillion of money-printing by the Federal Reserve.

It might all just be speculative hype, but that might actually be preferable to global foreign exchange markets that are heavily influenced if not controlled by central bank officials.

Every derivatives trader that was looking for incremental yield and levered returns has been besotted by the magnitude of moves in DeFi.”

See Also: DeFi Meets CryptoKitties: Axie Infinity to Introduce Governance Token
See Also: Open-Source DeFi Data Platform DIA Raises $15M Through Token Sale
See Also: 0x Price Hits Two-Year High on Hopes Falling Ethereum Fees Will Spur DEX Trading
See Also: Looks Like DeFi is Coming to Prediction Markets

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“Since Beijing’s 2017 ban on direct conversions of yuan for cryptocurrency, the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether has served as a popular stand-in for fiat for traders in the Chinese market.

Over $18 billion worth of Tether was moved to addresses based in foreign jurisdictions over the past year. How much of this reflects capital flight remains difficult to conclusively establish.

Analysts claim that the yuan’s fluctuating valuation over this year and tensions amid the ongoing U.S.–China trade war could be spurring local investors to evade capital controls.

The government has meanwhile cracked down on routes for offshoring capital via foreign real estate investments and other assets, leaving cryptocurrency as a possible alternative.”

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“EIP-2878 proposes that block rewards be reduced by 75%, from 2 ETH per block down to 0.5 ETH. The rationale behind this EIP is to bring Ethereum’s inflation rate closer into line with Bitcoin’s (BTC) and to preserve ETH’s purchasing power.

The majority were not opposed in principle to a block reward drop, but most suggested a drop to 1.5 or 1 ETH was more reasonable.

The biggest consideration, in my opinion, should be the security of the network (i.e. how do we ensure the likelihood of 51% attacks remains low, how do we keep a diverse set of miners on the network, etc.).”

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“Tax authorities like the IRS might be tempted to regard these rewards as income, as if those rewards were returns on a stock investment. That, however, assumes a lot about the stability of token prices on a PoS network.

The creation of new cryptocurrency units results in dilution. Unlike random fluctuations in network value, which can give rise to both capital gains and losses, this dilution is sure to happen and sure to be detrimental to the taxpayer’s wealth.

The simple model is what if everybody stakes their tokens? Then you basically have the same thing as a pro-rata stock dividend or even just a stock split, which, of course, is not taxed because there’s no gain there.

Rather than the stock market, some people say the best analogy for staking is produce. If you have an apple tree on your property, the IRS can’t tax you for apples growing on it, nor can they demand a slice out of every apple pie you make for personal consumption. They can, however, tax you if you bring your apples to market to sell.

In the absence of IRS guidance, what taxpayers can do is take the most conservative approach, which is recognizing income at the time you receive it.”

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“Ethereum Classic’s current hashrate of roughly 3.2 terahash per second is down 74% from Jan. 1 and down 84% from its all-time high of 20.4 terahash per second set in late January.

Regardless of how the defensive mining is implemented, however, protecting the Ethereum Classic ecosystem appears to be an uphill battle after the Coinbase exchange extended ethereum classic (ETC) confirmation times to roughly two weeks after the attacks and OKEx publicly said it will consider delisting the cryptocurrency.

‘Profitability is the only angle miners care about,’ he added, noting that whether Ethereum Classic Labs has the funds to sustain the profitability of defensive mining is an important question. Miners would simply choose to mine ether if it’s more profitable than defensive mining for ethereum classic.”

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“The scientists said their new AI sniffs out malicious code injections that can turn vulnerable supercomputers into zombie cryptocurrency mining operations.

This type of software watchdog will soon be crucial to prevent cryptocurrency miners from hacking into high-performance computing facilities and stealing precious computing resources.”

“The European Commission, the legislative body of the European Union, is in the final stages of a proposal for the region’s first cryptocurrency and digital finance framework.

The new legislation will provide legal certainty, which is needed both for crypto-assets that are not covered by existing EU financial services legislation and for the application of DLT in financial services and the tokenization of traditional financial instruments.

The legislation also detailed a plan to create a single market for cryptocurrencies so they can be sold across all European countries. The current proposal is targeting a rollout in the third quarter of this year.”

See Also: China expands DCEP testing to high-volume commercial transactions
See Also: Thailand Is Prepping to Move Judicial System Records to a Blockchain

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“The Automated Verification team on ConsenSys R&D have managed to develop a solid and formally verified kernel of the Beacon Chain. In other words, we have mathematically verified the absence of bugs.

We used the award-winning verification-aware programming language Dafny to write a formal (functional and logical) specification of each Beacon Chain function, an implementation of each function, and a proof that the implementation conforms to its specification.“

See Also: VDF Alliance Taps ZenGo to Secure Key Element of Eth 2.0 Design

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“Over the next few weeks we will systematically be releasing yinsure.finance, a prototype for a new kind of tokenized insurance.

The design of this system allows any asset that has a financial primitive to be insured, be it a base asset such as DAI, or a composite asset such as aDAI or yDAI.

LPs are rewarded with initiation fees and weekly fees, however, they are responsible for claim management. Should LPs largely decline valid claims, insurees will simply move their funds out, making it unprofitable for LPs and thus aligning incentives.”

See Also: RADAR enables Ethereum margin trading on DEXs with a single click
See Also: The Alpha Reveal (TNM) of New Golem is Here!
See Also: Ethereum-Based MadNetwork Aims to Clean Up Advertising’s ‘Programmatic Cesspool’

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“Stablecoin issuer Tether shifted 1 billion in USDT from the Tron blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain in an early morning chain swap Thursday.

The token transfer drains 23% of TRON’s USDT reserves. It also pumps up Ethereum’s reserves, where well over half of the nearly $13 billion circulating USDT already reside.”

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“A Canada-based Middle Eastern restaurant chain just converted their entire fiat cash reserves into Bitcoin. Hamam said he was concerned that the handouts and money printing would devalue fiat currency.

It was apparent to us that cash didn’t have the same appeal. That eventually with all the excess cash circulating the economy that cash would be worth less.”

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“Aragon will launch the Phoenix upgrade in the next few weeks, transferring control of the protocol to ANT holders. Aragon DAOs power household names within the DeFi community, including lending protocol Aave and stablecoin swap platform Curve.

The transition to Phoenix will give ANT holders control over the Aragon Network constitution via the Aragon Court, a system that uses financial incentives to motivate jurors to accurately decide between opposing arguments. ANT holders will also gain the power to amend the governance framework for the Aragon DAO itself and control the network’s community funding pool.

It has been almost four years of hard work in getting the Aragon Network to this stage. We couldn’t be more excited.”

See Also: How DeFi is ushering in the age of ‘cypherpunk governance’

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“The network has achieved its high transaction speed by doubling the number of “braided chains” on its network to 20. This refers to the interconnectedness of the Kadena network. The team claims that it could one day reach 1,000 chains, or ‘an ever-increasing number of chains.’

Launching Kadena, and now expanding to 20 chains, proves that we can scale a layer-1 blockchain to the point where digital assets can go mainstream.”

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“There are two parts to wumbo. The first part removes the limit to the total amount of bitcoin that can be held in a channel: This limit is currently capped at 0.16777215 BTC, worth about $1,988 at press time. The second strips away the limit to how large an individual payment can be: That limit has been 0.04294967 BTC, worth about $508 at press time.

We view shipping wumbo in LND as a sign that the software has progressed to a certain point where advanced users, companies, and node operators can open larger channels. That said, we do not encourage people to go all ‘DeFi’ on Lightning.”

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“For now, the blockchain-supporting organization will move to stabilize Ethereum Classic’s plummeting hashrate, increase network monitoring, coordinate closely with exchanges and deploy a finality arbitration system.

These immediate fixes will shore up Ethereum Classic in the short-term, ETC Labs said. More wide-ranging patches that all require community consensus are now in development and thus will take more time.”

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“A Bitcoin Cash upgrade that would mandate all newly minted blocks donate 8% to development is threatening to drive a hard fork in November.

Bitcoin Cash’s most high-profile proponent Roger Ver, has expressed opposition to the coinbase rule.

We are in communication with mining pools in China and it’s pretty clear they are also against this unilateral modification to the coinbase reward.”

“By migrating USDt value transfers to the OMG Network we save costs, drive performance improvements and relieve pressure on the root chain network. This is good for Bitfinex and our customers, and the whole Ethereum ecosystem.

By processing USDt transactions on the OMG Network, users benefit from transaction validation times as low as a few seconds and transaction fees of a few cents — all at the same level of resilience as the Ethereum Network.

USDt is one of the most transacted assets and commands a high portion of transaction fees on the Ethereum network. According to Ethereum Gas Station, USDt gas fees amounted to US$6.39 million over the past 30 days.”

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“This is an important step that can inspire confidence in the global digital securities market. It will now be possible for digital issuances around the world to trade on a secondary market authorised by a globally recognised regulatory body.

This move can also help mainstream blockchain technology, which digital securities use to tokenise real world assets. The FCA license covers trading, as well as custody and brokerage permissions.”

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“To provide the best user experience for traders, we have decided to transition to Layer 2. Traders can expect significantly lower gas costs, and in turn, lower trading fees and minimum trade sizes.

Our engineering teams are collaborating on a Layer 2 scaling solution for Perpetual Contracts, based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine and dYdX’s Perpetual smart contracts. Our Perpetual Contracts will be powered by StarkEx by the end of this year.

StarkWare is developing software to dramatically improve blockchain scalability by allowing any type of computation to move off-chain, using the Ethereum blockchain as a public immutable commitment layer. StarkWare’s dYdX integration combines STARK proofs for data integrity with on-chain data availability to ensure a fully non-custodial protocol.”

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“Wrapped Bitcoin competitor, renBTC, has made massive gains over the past week as the project’s token’s price, and the total amount of Bitcoin tokenized using the protocol surges.

In less than a week, the total value locked (TVL) on the RenVM platform, surged more than 210% to hit a new high of $175 million according to Defipulse.com.

renVM’s native token, Ren, has also seen a parabolic increase in prices surging by 245% from $0.16 at the beginning of August to $0.55 on August 19.”

See Also: $200M Staked in ‘Spaghetti Money’ Meme DeFi Protocol in Under 12 Hours

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See Also: Global Monetary Inflation (Video)

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“Data provider Chainlink will provide decentralized weather data for insurance startup Arbol. Arbol provides crop insurance for small to medium-sized farmers or enterprises.

Smart contracts pay claims to subscribers when a preset value – such as the average monthly temperature or rainfall – turns out different than the contract specifies.

Users are able to create derivatives on the blockchain that pay out based on weather outcomes. This allows weather-exposed entities like farmers to hedge their weather risk.”

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“The eth2 public testnet, Medalla, spiraled into a series of cascading failures this past weekend which exposed several vulnerabilities and process faults in how to best handle critical scenarios.

We believe this incident does not inherently affect the launch date. The Prysmatic Labs team recommends ETH2 launch schedule to continue with no delay. The incident from this weekend was a good stress test for many clients. We believe the expected launch target of 2 to 3 months from Medalla genesis is still an ideal timeline.”

See Also: Medalla Resumes Finalizing Blocks

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“The Chinese iron ore sector is shifting towards blockchain-powered cross-border platforms to conduct trade deals in the national currency yuan (RMB), rather than the more usual USD transactions, as importers begin to adopt the technology.

The report suggests importers also want to adopt the upcoming digital yuan as soon as it’s launched officially in the country, in order to make transactions less dependent on American currency.

Recently, Ansteel Group International Economic and Trade Co., Ltd. and Rio Tinto Group completed an RMB 100 million ($14.44 million) cross-border settlement transaction powered by blockchain.”

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“Despite the coronavirus pandemic’s continued onslaught on the global economy, China’s blockchain sector has exploded, with over 10,000 blockchain-related companies being created in the first seven months of 2020.

Shenzhen—hosts the largest number of blockchain companies in the country, at 26,196.”

See Also: Colombian Technology Ministry Endorses Blockchain and Crypto
See Also: Hawaii Welcomes Crypto Exchanges Back With New Regulatory Sandbox

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“Lower profitability and a mature market are forcing the Bitcoin industry’s biggest players to shift their focus to new technologies.

Newer rig makers such as WhatsMiner and the advent of proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies—which do not rely on mining pools—are further challenging the profitability of the bigger firms.

Mining firms have both the technological prowess and the finances to pivot to AI chip making. AI chips are specialized processors that conduct millions of calculations per second to run software, similar to how mining chips operate.”

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“There will be two blockchain voting pilots in different regions of the country next month. One will be run by Rostelecom, the state-owned major telecom provider, and the other by the Department of Information Technologies, a branch of the Moscow city hall that ran the previous blockchain voting pilots.

The system will be based on the private enterprise version of the Waves blockchain. Nodes of the blockchain will be located on Rostelecom servers exclusively.

The system will allow for control by all authorized participants of the elections, including independent observers.”

See Also: Waves Powers Russia’s First Reported Crypto-Backed Bank Loan

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“According to a Reuters report on Aug. 14, locals are dumping lira, converting it to dollars and buying gold.

Locals expect more panic-selling of the lira if the government can not boost confidence in the currency, which has dropped by almost 20% in 2020. Inflation is currently at 11.8%.”