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Uniswap, the SEC and Regulatory Riptide – What DeFi Must Do Next
DeFi (decentralized finance) has been nothing short of a revolution. Its startling promise – to upend traditional financial systems and usher in an era of unprecedented accessibility, transparency and autonomy.
From humble beginnings, this new ecosystem has undergone explosive growth, now boasting a fervent global following and billions in investment.
Naturally, as the DeFi juggernaut has gained momentum, it has also drawn both the watchful eye of regulators and the attention of nefarious actors.
The U.S. SEC’s (Securities and Exchange Commission) recent decision to issue a Wells notice to Uniswap, one of the industry’s pioneering decentralized exchanges – alleging violations of securities laws – has sent shockwaves through the DeFi community. Read More
Coinbase Adds Support for Bitcoin Lightning Network
Coinbase has joined Binance, OKX, Kraken, and Bitfinex to enable cheaper and faster BTC transactions on their platforms.
Coinbase’s Lightning Network integration was spearheaded by Lightspark, a lightning infrastructure provider led by David Marcus, the co-founder of payments giant PayPal. The crypto exchange entered a partnership with Lightspark earlier this month when it announced plans to move forward with the Lightning integration.
The high cost and delay of traditional payment systems propelled Coinbase’s plans to enhance its blockchain payment offerings. The firm revealed that U.S. consumers spent roughly $75 billion on credit card transaction fees in 2022, and worse still, most of those were delayed for days.
Since the future of payments is crypto, Coinbase said it is committed to enabling faster, cheaper, and more secure payments through blockchain technology with the integration of the Lightning Network. Customers can now execute BTC transfers instantly, rather than the ten minutes to two hours it took for on-chain transactions to be processed in the past. Read More
Chainalysis will help Tether monitor secondary market for illicit activity
The blockchain analytics firm will provide tools to spot sanctioned and illicit activity and provide market information.
Tether will have the ability to monitor the secondary market for its stablecoin, thanks to a solution created by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. The new capabilities will allow Tether to gain market insights and identify wallets that may be tied to illicit or sanctioned addresses.
The new solution will consist of several tools. Tether listed four of them in an announcement on its website. Sanctions Monitoring will provide a list of addresses and transactions that involve sanctioned entities. Illicit Transfer Detector will spot transactions that are potentially associated with activities such as terrorism financing.
Categorization will classify Tether holders by type, such as exchange or darknet market. Largest Wallet Analysis will focus on “significant” USDT holders and their activities. Read More
Ethereum Blogging Protocol Mirror Embraces Farcaster in Social Media Pivot
Mirror's team is now building a Farcaster-based social app called Kiosk, while Paragraph will take over Mirror. Collectively, they've raised $15 million.
Mirror, the Ethereum-based decentralized blogging protocol, announced today that it is merging with once-rival Paragraph, the tokenized publishing and newsletter platform.
The combined Mirror/Paragraph entity will live on Farcaster, the decentralized social media protocol that Paragraph has been built upon for years. The company will be led by Paragraph’s founder, Colin Armstrong, and supported in part by a new $5 million fundraising round led by Union Square Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.
Meanwhile, Mirror’s founder Denis Nazarov plans to take the Mirror team, and with it, launch a new entity called Kiosk. Kiosk, which is also built on Farcaster, will allow users of the crypto-backed social media ecosystem to more easily discover, collect, and trade crypto assets and NFTs within a social media feed. It will also allow users to observe the crypto and NFT-related habits of fellow users. Read More
Markethive Leading The Way In Web 3 Social & Market Media
Web 3.0 is the next generation of the internet, which people envision will be more decentralized and permissionless. One that's built on decentralized protocols, where users help with content creation and the governance of the web itself. They also have the ability to own a part of the network, so you can think of it as a Read-Write-Own Internet.
There are already several technologies that could serve as the backbone for a Web 3 world. Most point to blockchains like Elrond, Cardano, or Ethereum, for example, but other distributed technologies like IPFS can also be used to decentralize networks.
Thousands of dApps (decentralized applications) are already being built in the Web 3 environment. These often include native tokens to add value to the application to those who hold the tokens. These native crypto assets allow those who participate in the network to share in the value generated from it.
Web 3 promises a decentralized alternative where we are all users, owners, and developers. This quote from Fabric Ventures sums it up beautifully,
“Web 3.0 enables a future where distributed users and machines are able to interact with data, value, and other counterparties via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks without the need for third parties—the result: a composable human-centric & privacy-preserving computing fabric for the next wave of the web.” Read More
Solana GameShift Adds Google Cloud Integration for Crypto Games
Creators building blockchain games with Solana Labs’ GameShift platform will be able to tap into Google Cloud features via the integration.
GameShift abstracts away blockchain complexity by providing game developers an easy-to-use API for seamless user onboarding on Solana, along with in-game digital asset minting, branded in-game NFT marketplaces, credit card payments and payouts, and more.
With Google Cloud integration, Solana developers will more easily be able to use GameShift to deploy their blockchain games using the tech giant’s cloud infrastructure. A Google Cloud representative confirmed to Decrypt's GG that Solana GameShift is "now part of Google Cloud's partner network."
"Many game studios built on Google Cloud want to tap into the creative potential of Web3 technology, but the inherent technical complexities have been a major barrier to broader adoption," said Google Cloud Director of Games Jack Buser, in a release. Read More
Binance Wallet announces support for Bitcoin Atomical ARC-20 assets
The Atomicals protocol provides a transparent, secure record of ownership and history for Bitcoin NFTs.
Crypto exchange Binance has integrated Bitcoin ARC-20 atomical assets into its native Web3 wallet through its Inscriptions Marketplace.
“ARC-20 is a token standard that makes it possible to create fungible tokens that can be held and transferred on the Bitcoin blockchain,” Binance wrote on May 2. “To celebrate this new integration, we’re offering zero-fee trading on ARC-20 tokens until June 2, 2024.”
Invented in January, the Atomicals protocol, mirrored after Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard, allows for the minting, transferring and updating of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain.
“Even if an Atomical is updated or exchanges hands 10,000 times – that amounts to only about 2.5 MB of data (250 bytes x 10,000),” Atomicals explained. “Any client, wallet, marketplace, game, and service can rapidly verify the Atomical by processing the history according to the very simple rules.” Read More
What are tokenized commodities?
Tokenized commodities, which include energy resources, agricultural products, precious metals and other tangible things, are digital representations of real-world assets.
These assets go through a process known as “tokenization,” in which their ownership rights are converted into blockchain-based cryptographic tokens. Partially owned and accessible, each token usually represents a portion or entirety of the underlying commodity.
Tokenization offers efficiency, divisibility and liquidity, transforming the asset ownership structure. An example of this would be the tokenization of a $10,000 gold bar into 10,000 tokens, which would allow investors to transact smaller units easily without the logistical burden of physical storage of gold or delivery. Read More
MicroStrategy Orange: Everything You Need to Know About Decentralized ID on Bitcoin
The largest institutional holder of Bitcoin is getting into decentralized identity. But how does MicroStrategy Orange work?
Following through on hints that MicroStrategy would get into Bitcoin software development as the Ordinals craze took off last summer, the company this week announced MicroStrategy Orange, a decentralized identity (DID) platform. The sprawling concept has applications for combating social media bots and spam, authenticating documents, and securing medical records.
As the proposed specification for Orange went public on GitHub, it received a mixed reaction from Crypto Twitter, in part due to its technical complexity of the plans. Here’s a basic primer on the proposed digital ID system, and how it ties into Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy Orange is an attempt to facilitate immutable, or permanently fixed, decentralized identities. These identifiers would then provide a way for individuals to control and verify their identity without relying on a central authority. 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.
