“Asset managers, from Ark Invest and Valkyrie see crypto as having hit bottom, meaning it can go no lower in price, at a time when the Federal Reserve’s “tug-of-war” with the global macro environment could lead to continued interest rate hikes. According to Downing, bitcoin (BTC) is showing signs of “constructive developments.”

Whether the Federal Reserve oversteps and makes a policy mistake, we’re essentially pricing in a recession. The markets are clearly in a downward trajectory at the moment, but crypto is probably closer to the bottom than the S&P [500] or Nasdaq.

Prices will continue to go down across all risk assets until there’s a pivot from the Federal Reserve.

On Friday the Labor Department reported U.S. job growth rose by 263,000 during September, which was better than expected but still lower than August’s 315,000 additional jobs. The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Markets Committee is likely to raise interest rates by 75 basis points at its next meeting in November, followed by a 50 bps rise in December.”

See Also: Morgan Stanley Says Crypto ETPs Continue to Grow Despite Bear Market
See Also: Bitcoin, Other Risk Assets Fall Again Following Disappointing Jobs Data
See Also: Large Investors’ Pathway to Crypto Just Got a Bit Easier This Week

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“The partnership will see the exchange release crypto debit cards in 40 countries with a focus on Latin America, Europe and Asia. FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told CNBC that crypto debit cards can disrupt traditional payment networks.

Crypto payments have been a slow burner since the inception of digital assets more than 10 years ago. Price volatility and a lack of desire to use scaling solutions like the Lightning Network has perturbed retailers, but accountancy firm Deloitte believes that is soon to change with a prediction that 75% of merchants will accept crypto within the next two years.“

---

“The BNB Smart Chain (BSC) resumed operations at around 06:40 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as chain validators adopted a software update that would close the exploit used by hackers to drain funds off-chain.

The BNB Chain was halted earlier after an exploit was discovered that drained $100 million in crypto from the platform. BNB Chain announced that it will hold a series of on-chain governance votes that will decide whether the hacked funds should be frozen.“

See Also: Solana Co-Founder Says ‘Long-Term Fix’ to Network Outages Is in the Works
See Also: Zcash May Be Getting Spammed but the Blockchain Is Doing Just Fine, the Company Behind It Says
See Also: LFG Slow-Walks Plan to Repay Small-Time Terra Holders, Citing Legal Threats

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“Malaysia’s blockchain Infrastructure will be jointly created and operated by Zetrix, a Malaysia-based layer 1 blockchain structure and MIMOS Technology Solutions, a tech consultancy. Zetrix launched its Mainnet on April 15.

Malaysia’s national blockchain infrastructure will be for all levels of government and commercial sectors, the announcement said. Malaysia has shown promise as a future crypto hub for Asia by remaining free of capital gains tax, having a British common law system and a bilingual workforce.

Earlier this year, Zetrix was revealed as the international supernode to Xinghuo BIF, the national blockchain infrastructure of China, to facilitate trade between China and international parties using blockchain technology.“

See Also: India’s Central Bank Crystalizes CBDC Vision in Concept Note

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“Celsius has revealed the names and transaction history of hundreds of thousands of its customers in a court filing.

The 14,500-page long document contained information such as customer names, crypto wallet IDs, transaction types and amounts, which services the customer had used, and the types and quantities of tokens held. Celsius has not provided any explanation as of yet as to why this level of information was revealed.

This Celsius leak may go down as one of the greatest breaches of customer information ever.

The court filing also provides more detail regarding how key executives may have pulled money out of the platform prior to its implosion.

It was widely reported that Celsius’s chief executive Alex Mashinsky withdrew $10 million before the firm’s liquidity issues became publicly known. The latest court filing revealed that chief strategy officer Daniel Leon withdrew $7 million from the platform before it shuttered user withdrawals.

In addition, Mashinsky’s wife Kristine withdrew 2 million Celsius tokens (CEL) before the platform closed its withdrawals, while current chief technology officer Nuke Goldstein withdrew roughly $550,000 across a variety of different cryptocurrencies.”

---

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“Binance Smart Chain hit the brakes Thursday after the blockchain with ties to the world’s largest crypto exchange suffered what it called a “potential exploit” that on-chain evidence suggested could have targeted hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto.

Initial token movements suggested that up to two million BSC tokens were targeted by an attacker late Thursday, but the true losses may be much lower. BNB Chain estimated $100 to $110 million in assets were moved off chain but said in a tweet that $7 million was already frozen.

That such a small (comparatively speaking) sum of assets were at risk underscored the upside of BNB’s gamble to halt the chain. [However], Blockchains are purportedly decentralized beasts designed to operate beyond the whim of singular entities: you aren’t supposed to just flip an off switch.

Due to irregular activity we’re temporarily pausing BSC.”

---

“MakerDAO’s community voted in favor of the allocation proposal, with 80% going toward U.S. short-term Treasurys and 20% to investment-grade corporate bonds.

The move by Maker is aimed at diversifying its balance sheet into ‘scalable legacy finance investments, limiting exposure to any one asset and expanding revenue streams‘ and will be initiated by decentralized-finance (DeFi) asset adviser Monetalis. Signum said it is working with BlackRock Switzerland to allocate $250 million in the first phase of the plan.”

See Also: Lido’s stETH Token Expands to Layer 2 Networks Optimism and Arbitrum

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“Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, stated that October has historically been the best month for Bitcoin (BTC) since 2014, averaging gains of about 20% for the month, and that commodities appearing to peak could imply that Bitcoin has reached its bottom.

In an Oct. 5 Bloomberg Crypto Outlook report, McGlone says that while the rise of interest rates globally is putting downward pressure on most assets, Bitcoin is gaining the upper hand when compared with commodities and tech stocks.

When the ebbing economic tide turns, we see the propensity resuming for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index to outperform most major assets.

McGlone suggested the second half of 2022 could see Bitcoin ‘shift toward becoming a risk-off asset, like gold and US Treasury’s,’ following low volatility throughout September.”

See Also: ‘Violent’ Bitcoin breakout due as BTC open interest nears all-time high
See Also: Ethereum open interest hits $7.7B, raising the chance of a short squeeze above $1.5K

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“Holding decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) accountable is “tough” when there isn’t one figure at the helm and the rules need to be set by Congress, said Summer K. Mersinger, a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Mersinger said the CFTC could have used a “public forum” instead of jumping straight to an enforcement action to discuss how to hold DAOs accountable.

Before we do that, we need to have some notice to the public and encourage some public input.

It could be useful to have a regime in place that would essentially help DAOs register with the CFTC, Mersinger said. More broadly, she said, Congress must set some rules on regulation.”

---

“ArDrive Mobile is a decentralized permanent storage app offering users an alternative to popular data storage apps and letting them permanently store their data with no size limit. The mobile app will use the ArWeave storage network.

Arweave is a blockchain-based decentralized file storage service, similar to Filecoin and Storj. Users will need Arweave’s native token AR to pay for data upload. Credit card payment facility and cross-application support are a planned upgrade.”

---

“After studying a variety of CBDC system designs, we believe it is useful to organize the possible CBDC designs according to a few archetypes that are independent of vendor, platform and technology.

The archetypes are ranked by eight criteria, with centralized topping the rankings and direct coming in last. Privacy was the most problematic criterion, one for which only the direct archetype received high score.

Darbha stated that the archetypes enable central banks to express their policy goals and ‘focus their efforts on classes of systems that fit those archetypes.’ The rankings pointed to areas for future research.”

See Also: Atlantic Council Director Sees ‘Splintering’ Financial System if US Falls Behind on CBDCs

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“The European Union has confirmed a sweeping ban on providing crypto services to Russians as it tightens sanctions in the wake of what it calls “sham” secession votes in four Ukrainian regions.

The crypto clampdown, which took effect later Thursday, forbids services being offered by European crypto providers to Russian residents and entities, unless they live in the bloc. It appears to be motivated by fears that the existing 10,000 euro cap was not doing enough to curb payments from Russia.”

See Also: Judge Dismisses Arrest Warrant for Terra’s Head of General Affairs Yu: Report

“MiCA introduces the first-ever licensing regime for crypto wallets and exchanges to operate across the bloc and imposes reserve requirements on stablecoins that are intended to avoid Terra-style collapses. A separate law on funds transfers requires wallet providers to check their customer’s identity, in a bid to cut money laundering.

The text must also be formally agreed to by lawmakers at the European Parliament and is expected to be published in the EU’s official journal in the early part of next year before taking effect in 2024.”

---

“SWIFT, a key part of the conventional financial system that helps make cross-border payments between banks, has presented a framework for a global CBDC system, claiming to have solved the challenge of interoperability between different networks. SWIFT said it has carried out transactions between different blockchain networks, using both CBDCs and fiat currencies.

Blockchain networks could be interlinked for cross-border payments through a single gateway. SWIFT’s new transaction management capabilities could orchestrate all inter-network communication.

There have been suggestions, however, that digital currencies in the form of crypto, stablecoins or CBDCs could turn SWIFT into an also-ran.”

---

“Cybercriminals have been using cross-chain bridges, DEXs and coin swaps to obfuscate at least $4 billion worth of illicit crypto proceeds since the beginning of 2020, Elliptic researchers reported.

Around a third of all stolen crypto, or roughly $1.2 billion, has been laundered using coin swap services that allow users to swap assets within and across different networks without having an account. The Ren bridge was mentioned as a top choice for crypto laundering with the vast majority of illicit assets, or more than $540 million, passing through it.

Wallets connected to groups eventually sanctioned by the United States — including those used by North Korea to perpetrate multi-million-dollar cyberattacks — have laundered more than $1.8 billion through such techniques.”

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“Hamilton Lane plans to give qualified U.S.-based investors access to funds providing exposure to direct equities, private credit and secondary transactions, which will be tokenized via Securitize’s digital transfer agency.

The aim of tokenization is to make private market investment available to a broader set of investors. Private-equity investments are generally accessible only to institutional or ultra-high-net worth investors.”

---

“The council is made up of seven notable Bored Ape collectors tasked with providing feedback to Yuga Labs and uplifting community-driven projects. Yuga mentions commercial products, meetups and charitable endeavors as some potential use cases for the council to boost.

The council, and future councils to come, puts a more formal, efficient and consistent process in place for Yuga leadership to get community feedback and advice on an ongoing basis.”

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“The new Ethereum fund is the second launched by Fidelity Digital Assets’ digital asset management business, following the 2020 launch of the Wise Origin Bitcoin Index Fund I. The Fidelity Ethereum Index Fund is only available to accredited investors and will track the performance of the Fidelity Ethereum Index PR benchmark through passive, direct ownership of ether.

We have continued to see client demand for exposure to digital assets beyond bitcoin.

Last month, news broke that Fidelity was considering offering crypto trading to its retail brokerage clients.”

See Also: Coinbase ‘Very Supportive’ of Giving CFTC Exclusive Jurisdiction Over Bitcoin, Ethereum

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“Valkyrie is now the third asset manager to announce crypto SMA plans after Ark Invest and Franklin Templeton, a sign of the maturing crypto product industry with Wall Street involvement. SMAs are investment products that offer its investors direct ownership over the underlying asset, even though the positions are managed by a firm – in this case Valkyrie.

The new SMA service will initially support three active strategies: bitcoin (BTC) alone, bitcoin and ether (BTC), as well as bitcoin, ether, SOL and MATIC. Valkyrie will offer its SMAs to financial advisors, family offices and other financial institutions that can then pitch their clients.

The market has not previously seen crypto SMAs because crypto remains “a fairly new asset class,” with only a few firms building traditional products with crypto exposure. There is a growing section of crypto-curious traditional investors who are hesitant to make direct investments, which means there is a market for SMAs.”

See Also: Mastercard Looks to Make Buying Crypto Safer With Risk Assessment Tool

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“Unexpectedly poor data on U.S. job creation spurs speculation the worst of the bear market may be over. Crypto markets traded higher on Tuesday on what appears to be expectations the U.S. Federal Reserve will pivot to a more accommodative monetary policy, lowering interest rates instead of raising them.

The Bank of England’s (BOE) announcement last week that it will begin to purchase bonds in unlimited quantities, injecting money into the economy rather than removing it, raised the possibility that the U.S. will follow suit.

Still, the CME FedWatch tool doesn’t really reflect that, assigning a 59% probability to 75 basis points, in November.

The U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) shows the dollar recently weakening. BTC and the DXY have maintained an inverse relationship since July. BTC traders must determine whether a lower DXY resulted from a shift in Fed expectations, or is a response to perceptions that the dollar is overbought, irrespective of the FOMC’s actions.”

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“SushiSwap, whose DAO token holders decide on everything from leadership to artist grants, was advised this month to divvy itself up into a trio of legal entities based in Panama and the Cayman Islands. The new structure proposed by law firm Fenwick & West LLP would “mitigate risk.”

Simply calling an unregistered group of individuals voting on governance a DAO isn’t going to fly, and that’s what the newest lawsuits target. Currently, Sushi is unregistered and needs legal entity protection asap.

Fenwick has proposed slicing SushiSwap into three entities: a Cayman Islands foundation to administer DAO assets, including its treasury and governance procedures; a Panamanian foundation to manage the on-chain trading infrastructure; and a Panamanian corporation to operate SushiSwap’s front end. This could take about a month to implement if and when the community votes to approve it.

That’s hardly a given. Some were wary of disrupting “the crypto ethos” of unmitigated decentralized governance by introducing state-based legal entities subject to local laws. That debate is one that rages across decentralized finance (DeFi).”

---

“The resolution recommended authorities in its 27 member states consider a “simplified tax treatment” for crypto users involved in occasional or small transactions and have national tax administrations use blockchain technology “to facilitate efficient tax collection.”

Blockchain’s unique features could offer a new way to automate tax collection.”

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“Major video game publishers Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive are digging deeper into the NFT gaming space with today’s announcement of a $40 million Series A round raised by Horizon, the developer behind NFT-driven competitive card game, Skyweaver.

Skyweaver is a digital trading card game akin to Blizzard’s popular Hearthstone, albeit with the cards represented as Ethereum NFT assets that can be sold and traded—similar to rival NFT game Gods Unchained.

In addition to publishing the game, Horizon has turned the tech behind it into Sequence, an Ethereum-based development platform and wallet for other creators to tap to create their own Web3 games and apps. Horizon wrote that it will use the $40 million to further push Sequence, as well as continue to enhance and grow Skyweaver. It will also soon launch Niftyswap, a decentralized marketplace focused on Ethereum and Polygon ERC-1155 NFTs—also called semi-fungible tokens (SFTs)—used for games and collectibles.

Horizon also attracted some notable individual investors with the round, including Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, Lolli co-founder and CEO Alex Adelman, and a pair of co-creators from notable NFT games: The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget and Axie Infinity co-founder and Sky Mavis COO Aleksander Larsen. Take-Two, meanwhile, recently acquired mobile and casual game maker Zynga, which is currently working on NFT-driven games.“

See Also: VeeFriends Toys Coming to Macy’s, Toys’R’Us as Ethereum NFT Brand Expands
See Also: Japan to Invest in Metaverse and NFT Expansion

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“Musk’s attorneys sent a letter late last night to Twitter, according to Bloomberg, proposing to buy the social media company for his original offer price of $54.20 per share. Within minutes of the news breaking, DOGE shot up 8.1%.

Days after initially proposing to buy Twitter in April, Musk mused that he could foresee adding DOGE as a payment method on the social media platform.”

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“The 125-page Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) document concluded that potential fraud and manipulation in crypto trading begs for a spot market watchdog.

These latest recommendations from the group, which is led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, effectively bolster the two leading efforts in crypto legislation: a bill that would put the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in charge of overseeing that spot market, and another that would establish rules for stablecoin issuers.

The FSOC – whose members include the heads of financial agencies, including the Federal Reserve and both the SEC and CFTC – is also preparing to recommend that U.S. regulators need to be able to reach into all corners of digital businesses. They not only need to be able to supervise a crypto firm, but also all of its affiliates and key service providers – as the Fed can do when it oversees Wall Street banks, the report will argue.

Innovation without adequate regulation could result in significant disruptions.”

See Also: Even ‘Safe’ Stablecoins Might Pose Financial Stability Risk, New York Fed Says
See Also: Kim Kardashian Pays $1.26M Fine to SEC for Promoting EthereumMax Without Disclosing Reimbursement

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“DEXs have grown faster than centralized exchanges (CEXs) over the past two years, Citigroup said in a research report Thursday. One of the main differences between DEXs and CEXs is the custody of funds, the bank said, as there is a risk in storing assets with CEXs.

One potential driver for DEX volumes in the near term is an increase in regulation, the note said. As crypto regulation develops more broadly, with expanded reporting requirements, users could begin to migrate to DEXs from “KYC-heavy CEXs,” it said.

DEXs offer distributed revenue, like dividends, to token holders and the ability to self-custody funds, the report said. Once the trading rewards are included, these exchanges have comparatively lower fees than platforms such as Coinbase Pro, Citi added.

Citi says DEXs are responsible for 18.2% of spot-trading volume, noting that volumes have remained resilient at over $50 billion a month, with total revenue of $3.6 billion in the last year. Uniswap continues to dominate, accounting for around 70% of total DEX volume, and could distribute up to $250 million to token holders if a recent governance proposal is passed.

This could mark a key pivot for a foundational DEX within the DeFi space.”

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“Cathie Wood’s investment firm, ARK Investment, is making its two actively managed crypto strategies available to registered investment advisors. The ARK Cryptocurrency Strategy aims to capitalize on the monetary revolution, said the companies in the statement, claiming that it ‘could serve as a strategic allocation in well-diversified portfolios.‘

The strategies will be separately managed accounts (SMAs) designed to meet the needs of financial advisors, wealth managers, and their clients by offering direct ownership, low minimums, and portfolio reporting integration among other benefits.

ARK’s crypto asset analyst, said in the statement that ‘much of the speculative behavior has died down. The moment presents an attractive entry point for investors.'”

See Also: NYDIG raises $720M as Bitcoin balance hits all-time high

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“Stablecoin issuer Tether has cut its commercial paper holding to less than $50 million. As of Sept. 30, the company increased its holding of U.S. Treasury bonds to 58.1% of its total portfolio from 43.5% of its total portfolio as of June 30.

Tether had earlier said that it will bring its commercial paper holdings to zero by the end of the year. In May, the company held $20.1 billion of commercial papers, which it reduced to $8.5 billion by June 30.”

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“YPF, Argentina’s state-owned energy company, is supplying power to an undisclosed international crypto mining company. YPF is currently supplying power for a 1 megawatt operation and plans to launch a second project eight times larger before the end of the year.

We started to develop this generation pilot for cryptocurrency mining with a vision of sustainability and business from flare natural gas, which cannot be harnessed during exploration.”

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“When Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts asked Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire at a press conference on Wednesday to clarify what he meant by USDC as a “platform,” his two-part answer was instructive.

The first part focused on USDC’s application programming interface (API), which provides outside programmers open access to coding tools and data to ingest into their programs. But then Allaire turned to the dollar itself, describing it as the established value “standard” for the internet. His idea was that the U.S. currency, now expressed in “programmable” form via USDC and other dollar-based stablecoins, can become its own “extensible platform.”

It’s one [view] U.S. lawmakers should seriously consider. When weighing competing proposals for regulating stablecoins, they must recognize that if they leave the development of digital dollars up to government, via a central bank digital currency (CBDC), they will get nowhere near the innovation and value creation that a global community of open-source developers will unleash with stablecoins. With the U.S. worried about losing a digital arms race to a Chinese-Russian alliance, it can spread U.S. interests by encouraging such an ecosystem.

But something that’s in the U.S. government’s interests is not necessarily in the world’s interest. Foreign local populations will lose control over their money supply, with credit conditions instead determined by Washington. One could argue that a hyper-dollarized financial internet is a form of U.S. digital colonialism.

And, while I agree with Allaire’s analysis of how to align U.S. interests with the latest financial innovations, we must be careful of putting too much power in the hands of a few private corporations like Circle. We made that mistake once with Web2.

I think both of those problems can be addressed if U.S. lawmakers apply both an international approach and competition-promoting principles. Is there a model, for example, that allows communities outside the U.S. – be they national or local – to forge new tokenized expressions of value that give them agency over their resources and economic futures?

Also, to truly unleash the power of platform innovation with digital dollars, we must loosen the access constraints created by Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules and reduce U.S. banks’ transaction surveillance powers. Create freer access to dollars among the world’s financially excluded and amazing things will happen.“

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“Hundreds of millions of people use Ethereum today. How can you use your Ethereum wallet for private, end-to-end encrypted email? Every Skiff user can now send and receive email via their Ethereum addresses – securely, privately, and for free.

All of your verified wallet addresses – and their associated ENS names – can now send and receive mail using <wallet>@ethereum.email. You can also sign into Skiff’s mobile and desktop apps using this account to receive notifications and compose on the go.”

See Also: Skiff App

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“I think what the crypto ecosystem wants is rules that fit its technology, that are fit for purpose, that allow for the innovation to actually reach its full potential. You’re not getting that out of the SEC.

If the SEC was serious, it could do things that allowed for a kind of securities-like regulatory structure to exist, without threatening the entire ecosystem.

If you have well-tailored, appropriately-calibrated legislation, the ultimate result could be … large, liquid markets with very strong integrity.”

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“Last week Maple Finance, a credit-facility-as-a-service platform, announced that it had spun up a new $300 million lending facility for troubled Bitcoin miners. But what’s interesting about Maple Finance is not that it’s helping miners get liquidity, but how it does so.

Maple looks like a bank, walks like a bank, and behaves like a bank, but it is not a bank. Instead, Maple is a lending-specific web service with which companies can pool money and find borrowers. It’s a technology platform rather than a financial institution. That $300 million lending pool for miners was funded by another firm named Icebreaker Finance, for example.

In this scenario, Icebreaker is called a pool delegate, and their job is to 1) fund the pool with capital and 2) vet any potential borrowers (much like what a bank does). It’s the pool delegate’s job to assess the risk of lending to these borrowers, not Maple’s. And because the delegate performs hefty due diligence on the market makers, these loans are also undercollateralized, a rarity in the DeFi space.

I often use the analogy of Shopify, where they gave tooling for e-commerce companies just to set up and run their businesses online. We’re giving you the tooling to run a lending business online.

Powell and his team have found some serious traction. Prior to the Icebreaker pool, Maple had serviced $1.8 billion in loans.”

See Also: How to lend & borrow NFTs

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(1/23) @ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Ethereum is the World Computer, the future's internet-native global settlement layer. The EVM is the core of Ethereum; it provides the world in which settlement and decentralized computation happens.

Read on to learn about core $ETH tech! pic.twitter.com/w8NzKJvJon

— Haym (@SalomonCrypto) September 27, 2022

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“While established names often dominate New York Fashion Week (NYFW) and set the season’s trends, this year’s event embraced new players who showcased not only physical designs, but also digital expressions of creativity played out across mediums.

At NYFW’s Nolcha Shows, blockchain gaming ecosystem Chain Guardians took up space next to traditional designers, displaying their “phygital” (physical and digital) take on classic designs. In their collection, a colorful, anime-style bodysuit included an NFC chip that, when scanned, linked to a non-fungible token (NFT) that is wearable in the Chain Guardians metaverse.

Kaspar defines digital fashion as having five major use cases at present.

First, there are digital-only garments sold as NFTs that are meant to be worn in the metaverse. This form of digital fashion was embraced by Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce & Gabbana, Forever 21 and dozens more designers who released full collections on metaverse platform Decentraland during the first-ever Metaverse Fashion Week in March.

The next is AR photo filters, often used to create overlays on social media platforms. The third example is digital tailoring, meaning that after a real-life photo is taken, digital garments can be fixed onto a user’s photo. Lastly, Kaspar notes that people can also view digital fashion as investable assets.

Kaspar says that while many people view digital fashion as speculative investments for now, she believes that a “pretty viable solution” for mass adoption of these technologies will be created within five years.”

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“A misconfigured node caused the Solana network to stop processing transactions and go offline on Friday, the fourth major outage for the popular blockchain since January.

It appears a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network.

Developers restarted the Solana mainnet network at the last confirmed slot, 153139220. At the time of publishing, the reboot was 49% completed, and Solana had been down for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Meanwhile, the crushing crypto winter has sent SOL, the No. 9 coin by market cap, down 81% in 2022.”

See Also: Crypto Exchange Coinbase Temporarily Halts Payments and Withdrawals From US Bank Accounts

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“Telecom giant Deutsche Telekom, parent company of T-Mobile, has announced that it will run a validator to support Ethereum staking. The German company said Thursday that it is working with StakeWise to operate a pool, allowing customers to take part in validating transactions.

As a node operator, our entry into liquid staking and the close collaboration with a DAO is a novelty for Deutsche Telekom.”

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“Ernst & Young’s global blockchain leader Paul Brody told Decrypt the company is “all-in” on public blockchains, particularly Ethereum.

EY’s in-house arsenal currently contains a smart contract testing tool developed by its security team in Israel, a system called EY Ops Chain which uses tokenization for traceability and transparency within supply chains, and a Zero Knowledge (ZK) Optimistic Layer 2 Rollup for affordable transaction privacy for enterprises. Brody also said the company is building a carbon offset marketplace and carbon tracking tools.

This will be the future path for most business-to-business transactions and we need to not just know a little bit about it. We need to be all in.

We made a very strategic decision to only build on Ethereum. I have a limited engineering budget. I want us to be the best on earth at Ethereum—which is the largest market—not pretty good at 20 other things.”

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“The development team behind DeFi’s largest exchange Uniswap is reportedly on track to become the next crypto unicorn.

TechCrunch reports that the round could fall between $100 million and $200 million, with a Singapore-based sovereign investment fund and Polychain tied to the deal. The deal would give Uniswap a $1 billion valuation. The exchange currently commands a TVL over $5 billion across its various pools.”

See Also: BlackRock’s newest ETF invests in 35 blockchain-related companies

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“Bitcoin has put in a positive performance in October in eight out of the past 12 years, with an average return of around 30%. However, one indicator tracking the U.S. dollar liquidity calls for caution.

The so-called USD Liquidity Condition Index has slipped to a 19-month low of $5.7 trillion. Since 2021, major bitcoin price tops and bottoms have coincided with local peaks and troughs in the dollar liquidity index.

The Fed net [dollar] liquidity is falling off a cliff, a clear headwind for crypto asset prices.

The index assesses the degree of dollar liquidity based on the interaction of three factors – the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, the Treasury General Account (TGA) and the reverse repo balance held at the New York Fed.”

See Also: 5 important BTC price indicators are in multi-year “buy zones”
See Also: Mainstream media sentiment shifts in favor of Bitcoin amid fiat currency woes

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“User activity on blockchain gaming decentralized applications (DApps) surged in September, with a host of games posting significant increases in the number of active users. DappRadar noted that eight of the current top 10 blockchain games are mobile-first, which could eventually ‘bring millions of users to the blockchain.’

Dapp games like Gameta, Benji Bananas, Upland, and Trickshot Blitz let anyone with a mobile device earn crypto with little prior knowledge, investment, or risk.

The biggest uptick in users came from Animoca Brands’ Benji Bananas (Polygon), which saw a 2016.54% increase over the past 30 days. Meanwhile, NFT-based card battle game Gods Unchained has seen its NFT sales volume creep into the top 10 in NFT sales volume.”

See Also: Double Jump Tokyo to Build Blockchain-Based Games Using Sega’s IP

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“Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can work well with decentralized finance (DeFi), and they have a lot of potential to boost DeFi adoption, according to a Swiss central bank official. Despite being polar opposites, centralization and decentralization in digital currencies can actually work together.

He noted that major stablecoins like Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) are the most widely used stablecoins in DeFi. Unlike Tether or USD Coin, a CBDC would entail lower risks for DeFi than a redeemable stablecoin because central bank money ‘does not entail counterparty risk.’

With CBDC used in DeFi, we can expect hundreds and trillions of dollars of liquidity brought into this market, big institutions getting in this space and real-world assets moving on-chain.”

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