See Also: The State of Eth2, Jan 2021 (Recommended read)
“Today, Yield Protocol is releasing RateLock, a new tool to permit Dai borrowers on Maker to lock-in a low interest rate with as little as one click. RateLock lets you migrate your entire loan at a fixed rate, or just a portion of the loan by specifying the amount of collateral and debt to migrate.
In the Yield Protocol, fixed rate loans are created by borrowing “fixed yield Dai” (“fyDai”) tokens using ETH collateral. fyDai tokens are Ethereum-based tokens (ERC20) that may be redeemed one-for-one for Dai after a predetermined maturity date. fyDai are analogous to zero-coupon bonds. Borrowers mint fyDai and sell it to lock-in a fixed rate loan.
RateLock migrates a Maker loan to Yield by flash-minting fyDai and selling it for Dai to pay off your existing Maker loan and free up collateral. The collateral is then transferred to Yield, and new fyDai is minted to pay off the flash loan.”
“Credit markets are essential fuel for innovation. But today, they don’t exist in DeFi. If entrepreneurs cannot readily access and borrow capital, innovation is hampered.
Over-collateralized DeFi loans are trust-minimized. But they’re also capital inefficient. A large portion of the global market for loans can’t operate under this architecture—they need actual credit lines. That’s where decentralized credit markets come into play.
It’s obvious that there’s a demand for credit in crypto. Centralized lenders are demonstrating that the market is currently worth billions—and it’s only getting warmed up.
On-chain credit introduces significant improvements over its centralized counterparts.
Decentralized credit markets massively expand the potential supply of lenders, creating more competitive markets. With open architecture, anyone, anywhere can become a lender if they’re willing to take on the risk. Just like anyone can become an LP on Uniswap, anyone will eventually be able to pool capital and earn an interest rate by providing credit to verified corporate borrowers. On-chain credit markets also introduce significant efficiency gains because borrowers have a direct feed into the capital market instead of going through gatekeepers.
Creating efficient credit markets that serve professional borrowers will help create a more sustainable source of yield for liquidity providers.
While ‘DeFi Degens’ are happy to bounce between flash-in-the-pan yield farms, it remains challenging for long-term focused lenders to earn a competitive yield on their assets. Lending to premium crypto-native institutions like funds, market makers and miners represents a more sustainable source of yield than “coin pumps” in yield farms.
Given the skyrocketing demand for credit and a huge pool of potential lenders, decentralized credit markets could easily grow bigger than the $25B locked in DeFi today.”
“The world of Cyberpunk 2077 is a world ruled by corporations. This is the kingdom of aggressive capitalism in its worst possible form.
The closed hierarchical structure of corporations, their excessive centralization, the lack of transparency in their activities and the emergence of huge monopolies led to wealth and benefits being distributed unevenly. Being focused mostly on achieving profits, large conglomerates could often afford to act not in the interests of society but solely in the interests of their own.
Their beneficiaries were a narrow circle of top managers and large stockholders, while the majority of the population only lost from high prices for low-quality products produced by monopolies, as well as suffering from collateral environmental damage.
Today, “new technological startups” have become the so-called Big Tech, which controls most of the world’s data and media. And these companies are not just market monopolists — as we can see, now Big Tech considers it possible and advisable to interfere in the democratic processes of economically developed countries. Big Tech is also known for its censoring of information it does not consider appropriate or politically correct. You can see a certain political agenda even in Google search results.
Blockchain technology should help rethink the very essence of companies’ work and make it much more transparent. When every action of managers is displayed on a general ledger that is independent and not controlled by any narrow group of people, the temptation to conduct dubious transactions and cheat with accounting data is much lower. Access to the register can be provided to all interested groups — primarily, to the society and regulatory bodies, but also to the employees of the company.
The use of blockchain makes it possible to create a new, transparent, open company structure as opposed to the current rigid hierarchies of corporations. Thus, social responsibility will be distributed among a large number of people and will be transparent for society.
The use of blockchain makes it technically possible to create more responsible, transparent business structures — which, in turn, can save us from the centralized hell that is shown in Cyberpunk 2077 and similar works.”
See Also: Why secure data tokenization should scare the hell out of Big Data
See Also: We don’t need immunity passports, we need verifiable credentials
“While some countries are putting pressure on investors and levying taxes on income and capital gains from Bitcoin transactions, many are taking a different approach—often with the aim of promoting better adoption and innovation within the crypto industry.
Here’s our list of the most crypto-friendly tax jurisdictions, updated for 2021.”
“The Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund would be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC would serve as the custodian for the proposed ETF.
With a new administration causing a changing of the guard at the SEC, it is widely hoped by crypto advocates that such an ETF will be approved in 2021. Clayton stepped down officially last month and was replaced by Gary Gensler, who is widely seen as being more pro-crypto than is his predecessor.”
“FlamingoDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for investing in digital collectibles, is behind Saturday’s eye-popping CryptoPunk sale. Only nine such “Alien” punks exist in the CryptoPunks universe, which pioneered non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in 2017 and are the “Holy Grail” for an emerging class of Ethereum-based art collectors.
Flamingo is a fund with roughly 40 members and 4,800 ETH in pooled capital, Desai said. It has “hundreds” of NFTs in its growing collection including rare Autoglyphs, NBA Top Shot cards and land plots in various metaverses.
It’s understandable for folks to be skeptical about NFTs, but in our view, NFTs are the future of not just digital art, but all digital property.”
“China’s biggest cities are planning to hold pilots to promote the use of the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) this year.
The report cites “industry observers” as saying the announcements mark a bigger push to promote the digital currency before a launch in the “near future.”“
The Disrupt 