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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.“
“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
“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.”
“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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“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.”
“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
The Disrupt 