Blockchain

Russia’s recent ban on crypto has drawn criticism from a number of big names, including Alexei Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov, and Telegram founder Pavel Durov. On Jan. 20, Russia’s Central Bank published a report proposing a blanket ban on domestic crypto trading and mining. The report stated that the risks of crypto are

There was so much Nifty News this week that a second round-up was necessary to catch up on the latest nonfungible token (NFT)-related news. FLUF World and Snoop Dog partner for charity  FLUF World, Beyond VR studio and Snoop Dogg teamed up to raised over $1 million via a one-day charity NFT auction on behalf

The first computer games were developed in the late 20th century with the sole purpose of entertaining their audience. One of the first goals was to distract players from their routine work and provide them access to a fantasy world. Very soon, games began to compete for users’ time against traditional forms of entertainment, such

Decentral Park Capital, an early-stage investment firm, now with $140 million in assets under management, has launched a brand new $75 million fund to invest in DeFi initiatives. This fund aims to deploy funds to invest in decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, derivatives, structured products, oracles, staking, and middleware infrastructure. The money pouring into decentralized finance

On Thursday, Metaco, an enterprise cryptocurrency platform for securing, trading, issuing, and managing digital assets, announced the addition of UnionBank as its latest client. Founded in 1982, UnionBank is one of the largest banks in the Philippines, with a collective $15 billion in assets under management. UnionBank will be also be deploying its digital asset

Decentralized technologies are about to revolutionize the global financial system and its institutions. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) offers interesting potential to reduce costs and increase the speed of payments by eliminating friction in terms of technology, contracting and coordination between several parties. DeFi delivers on the promise of faster, better, and cheaper payments, but a number

The percentage of the global Bitcoin mining industry running on renewable power increased by 1% to 58.5% in the fourth quarter of 2021 according to new data. The Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) announced the findings of its fourth quarter survey on Jan. 18. The survey focused on three metrics: sustainable power mix, technological efficiency and

Global trading platform Structure, which aims to facilitate crypto-based lending and investing for mobile users, just raised $20 million from investors and from a private sale of its digital currency $STXR. The company will offer decentralized finance (DeFi) crypto-denominated lending outside of traditional banking, as well as investing in tokenized assets, digital versions of assets

The Ethereum upgrade that introduced a partial network fee burning mechanism in August last year has launched on the layer-two scaling network Polygon.  Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade shipped with its London hard fork last summer and has been a success in terms of gas price predictability and network fee burning. The upgrade has now launched on

It appears that retail giant Walmart Inc. is getting ready to enter the Metaverse with patent filings indicating that it plans to create its own cryptocurrency and NFT collection. The multinational retailer filed several new trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Dec. 30, however, they remained unnoticed until a Jan. 16 report

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. Despite the market printing bearish numbers for a second consecutive week, the industry is not short of bullish fundamental news. Read on to hear about the most impactful DeFi stories of the last seven days. What you’re about to read is a shorter, more succinct

The ICON Foundation announced plans to launch an interoperability incentive program for 200 million ICX, or approximately $200 million at the time of publication. The foundation supports the development of the ICON network, South Korea’s largest public aggregator chain. The foundation said that it hopes this program will incentivize the ICON community and its partner networks

Terra’s native staking token, LUNA, was one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies of 2021, with gains north of 13,000%. Terra has also surpassed Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in total locked value with $17.62 billion, making it the second-biggest DeFi chain just after Ethereum.  Much of this growth is due to Terra’s ecosystem, with a community of

dYdX, the layer-two derivates protocol, has published the fourth iteration of its roadmap detailing its intentions to evolve into an open-source, community-governed and fully decentralized exchange by the end of this calendar year. The platform currently runs on a hybrid model whereby a portion of operations are decentralized, most notably staking and governance, while other

Binance Labs, the venture capital (VC) arm of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, announced Tuesday that it will contribute to Oasis Foundation’s $200 million ecosystem development fund, sending a strong signal that major investors were still keen to back emerging projects on alternative blockchain networks.  With the investment, Binance Labs joins other prominent VC firms in

While many countries are inclined to simply ban the use of Bitcoin (BTC) and virtual assets, regulators in the United Arab Emirates are taking a different approach.  The country has been consistently enacting its vision of becoming a blockchain capital by providing frameworks to guide crypto businesses on how to operate in accordance with the

After the popularity of DeFi, came the rise of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and to the surprise of many, NFTs took the spotlight and remain front and center with the highest volume in sales, occuring at the start of January 2022.  While 2021 became the year of NFTs, GameFi applications did surpass DeFi in terms of

Stablecoins have emerged as a foundational part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem over the past couple of years due to their ability to provide crypto traders with an offramp during times of volatility and their widespread integration with decentralized finance (DeFi). These are necessary for the health of the ecosystem as a whole.  Currently, Tether (USDT)