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Hive Digital Eyes Paraguay As Next Bitcoin Mining Hub
Top Canadian mining firm Hive has plans to open a green Bitcoin mining operation in the South American country.
Paraguay is continuing its push to be a crypto hotspot as Canadian mining giant Hive Digital announced Monday that it plans to open a Bitcoin operation in the South American country.
In a Monday announcement, the company said that it had met with the country’s President Santiago Peña for the planned project: a 100-megawatt operation using green energy from the Itaipu hydroelectric dam.
Hive said the operation would add 6.5 exahashes per second to their mining operations and generate over $100 million in revenue for state power company Ande over the next three years. An exahash is a measure of a Bitcoin mining machine’s processing power. Read More
Ripple Working To Bridge Gap Between TradFi and Web3, According to President Monica Long
The president of payments firm Ripple says the company is aiming to be the number one digital asset infrastructure provider for financial services.
In a new company blog post, Ripple president Monica Long says the firm is looking at more opportunities to move the traditional finance (TradFi) world over to more modern financial tools.
Long says that Ripple sees an opportunity to integrate more of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) features directly in the company’s business, which could bring “the benefits of decentralized finance to our customers around the world in a secure and compliant fashion.”
Long also says that Ripple is looking to bridge the gap between TradFi and Web3, using the firm’s “credibility, reputation, trust” plus its technological capabilities like liquidity, custody and compliance. Read More
DePIN Could Be the Next Trillion-Dollar Sector – Here’s What You Need To Know
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about DePINs (decentralized physical infrastructure networks).
This sector is attracting a lot of attention because it has a massive potential user base and a unique way to expand infrastructure networks from the ground up – without needing a central authority.
As a report by Messari suggests, DePIN could add $10 trillion to the global GDP (gross domestic product) in the next decade and $100 trillion the decade after.
DePINs are seen by some as a game-changer for how we distribute resources around the world – not just physical things but digital ones too.
They also hold promise as a brand new way to build large-scale infrastructure projects.
Put simply, DePINs are the decentralized version of traditional infrastructure and services we humans use. Read More
AT&T's latest massive breach shows the peril of data centralization
A 24-year-old hacker infiltrated AT&T systems — and accessed data on more than 100 million people. Decentralizing data could limit similar risks in the future.
When a 24-year old U.S. citizen living in Turkey can infiltrate not one but two of America’s largest communication networks while the rest of the world sleeps, something in the world of data security is amiss.
The latest AT&T hack involved the theft of calls and texts of over 100 million AT&T customers. Although the stolen files contained no personal data or text content, the hacker demonstrated how a reverse-lookup program could easily connect the call and text message metadata to the names of family members, colleagues, and, in some cases, a user’s general location and movements. Stopping short of issuing an apology, AT&T simply acknowledged regret for the incident and casually slipped in the fact that disclosure of the data breach was delayed for two months by the FBI and Department of Justice.
AT&T is one of many organizations that tout “cyber resilience” — a buzzword strategy that shows how well a company or government agency can anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber-attacks. With cyber-attacks rising dramatically in the past year — as the AT&T debacle illustrates — the term is now synonymous with embarrassing system vulnerabilities. Read More
BRICS Countries Advancing with a New Payment System. A Breakthrough for Global Commerce Potentially Disrupting the Dominance of the US Dollar
Recent headlines suggested that the longstanding 50-year agreement between the United States to exclusively price oil in US dollars had expired, sparking concerns that the era of the Petrodollar may end. Despite initial fears, it was later confirmed that this information was inaccurate. Nevertheless, significant developments occurred during this period as BRICS introduced a new payment system, and Saudi Arabia subsequently became a participant in this initiative.
A potentially game-changing development is on the horizon as a consortium of emerging nations, known as BRICS, prepares to unveil a new payment system, which it has been working on for years and is based on the Ethereum blockchain. This innovation, with its potential to disrupt the US dollar's dominance, could signal a long-awaited breakthrough for global commerce and provide relief to countries struggling with crippling economic sanctions and the exploitative petrodollar system. Read More
Galaxy Digital acquires CryptoManufaktur
Crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital Holdings has acquired CryptoManufaktur LLC (CMF), a blockchain node operator.
Galaxy is getting its hands on about $1 billion in Ethereum assets under stake, bumping its total to a whopping $3.3 billion. But in the volatile world of crypto, where fortunes evaporate faster than spilled coffee, today’s billion-dollar asset could be tomorrow’s digital dust.
As part of the deal, CryptoManufaktur’s three-person engineering team, including founder Thorsten Behrens, is joining Galaxy’s blockchain infrastructure team. Together they aim to develop the company’s staking and blockchain validator services for qualified investors, protocols and digital asset platforms.
Behrens said: “We believe that Galaxy is uniquely positioned to serve as the go-to blockchain infrastructure provider and a leading validator across high-performing blockchains. We look forward to joining the team and scaling our combined operations.” Read More
Decentralized finance is growing up: How DeFi is becoming ‘NewFi’
Traditional institutional giants like BlackRock, which has $10.6 trillion under management, have entered the cryptocurrency space.
As institutional interest in crypto grows, fueled by the introduction of Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States, investors and industry participants are hotly debating the future of decentralized finance and its relationship to traditional finance, or TradFi.
At the heart of the debate is whether or not institutional involvement in crypto is a net positive or a net negative for the space. In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, James Toledano, chief operating officer of self-custodial wallet platform Savl, shared his thoughts on the future of finance.
The executive argued that institutional involvement in crypto would be positive for the long-term growth of cryptocurrencies, giving an air of legitimacy to the nascent asset class and the underlying technology in the minds of apprehensive individuals, particularly in older demographics.
Toledano addressed the elephant in the room, acknowledging the potential for these large institutions to take over the crypto space by controlling all or a majority of a digital asset’s supply. However, he said that such a scheme was unlikely, since “if they did that, they would shoot themselves in the foot because most people wouldn’t want to own it.” Read More
Ethereum's future rests on 10,000 blockchains
Ethereum layer-2s are proliferating, which means Ethereum will start looking like a much better prospect for new projects in the year ahead.
A major topic in crypto in 2024 is the number of layer-2 (L2) blockchains created on top of the Ethereum network. Major nonfungible token (NFT) collections such as Pudgy Penguins, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Azuki have announced their own L2s — in addition to numerous traditional companies such as Fox Corporations and Flipkart.
This sudden surge in L2s has been treated as a joke by many who believe it to simply be hype. Nonetheless, it is very likely that we will have thousands of L2s within the next year. This will be great for the success of the Ethereum ecosystem.
By way of background: The Ethereum network is a first-layer blockchain (L1). Ethereum prioritizes decentralization and security, but it lacks scalability — a problem known as the blockchain trilemma, where only two of those three things can be achieved.
Thus, the Ethereum network ends up being less scalable, and executions on it are extremely expensive. To solve this, L2s — which are also known as rollups — were created. They process transactions off the Ethereum network more cheaply by consolidating them into batches and sending those batches to the Ethereum network. Read More
Privacy-Focused Proton Launches Self-Custody Bitcoin Wallet
The inspiration for Proton Wallet came from a company “near-death experience,” its CEO tells Decrypt.
Swiss privacy software developer Proton AG is entering the cryptocurrency space with the launch of a self-custody Bitcoin wallet named Proton Wallet, the company announced on X (aka Twitter) on Wednesday. The announcement comes as the Bitcoin faithful flock to Nashville, Tennesse, for Bitcoin 2024.
The new Proton Wallet, Proton said, is open source, and automatically uses a different Bitcoin address from a pool of addresses generated for each user, making it more difficult to connect the transactions and improving privacy.
The wallet also offers “Bitcoin via Email” feature that only requires the user to verify their email address instead of having to copy-and-paste a 26-character Bitcoin address. Read More
Disclaimer: These articles are provided for informational purposes only. They are not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or any other advice.
