“Back in the ’90s many of us intuitively understood the Internet was a powerful new infrastructure but it took Marc Andreeseen with Mosaic and then Netscape to make this powerful new infrastructure accessible to a broader audience,” he said in the statement. “DeFi, or decentralized finance, feels just as profoundly transformative today as the Internet did then, but it is still too hard to use.” Source
A Danish court has ruled that Scandinavian financial services giant Nordea can bar its employees from owning Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital currencies. As BNN Bloomberg reported on Dec. 3, the court justified the restriction by citing the purported risks associated with cryptocurrencies. However, the ruling did not apply to financial instruments associated with digital currencies Nordea had sold to customers, as well as to any cryptocurrency that employees might have invested in before the restriction. Denmark’s union for financial industry employees had filed suit against Nordea, claiming that the…
This time we’re talking winners and losers in China’s increasingly top-down crypto industry, the implications behind former CFTC chairman Giancarlo’s just-announced move to white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and more. Source
As prices slowly recover following a rough November, metrics for bitcoin and Ethereum illustrate positive industry sentiment moving forward. These metrics include measures related to active addresses, fees, movement, mining, and more, as outlined in Coin Metrics’ State of the Network: Issue 28. Ethereum Activity In the past 24 hours, over 70,000 new addresses were created on the Ethereum network, with 245,000 active addresses, a sign that things are still moving forward for the second largest cryptocurrency despite the coin facing flack as of late over failed projects and disappointed…
Blockchain startup LifeLabs announced that it is developing a digital currency dubbed BVI~LIFE in partnership with the British Virgin Islands (BVI). According to a press release on Dec. 3, the currency is part of a broader initiative to grow the local fintech sector and will be presented during the BVI Digital Economy symposium. The coin will be a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar — which the BVI have used since 1959 — and its use is expected to reduce transactional fees, increase transaction speed and be accessible to…
“Putting our members’ interests first is our top priority at SoFi,” he said. “That includes both offering individuals the products they want, like cryptocurrency within SoFi Invest, as well as protecting them, through a solid regulatory framework like that created by the New York State Department of Financial Services.” Source
In the last week of November, the saga of an alleged crypto Ponzi scheme that has been lingering for more than half a year took a new turn. A hobbyist blockchain researcher reported on Twitter that he’d tracked almost 200,000 BTC that had gone missing over the summer, when several million people invested in PlusToken — a South Korea-based exchange and a high-yield investment program — found themselves unable to withdraw their money. The researcher suggested that the embezzled funds have been gradually dumped on crypto exchanges, potentially suppressing Bitcoin market…
The Credits open-source decentralized blockchain solutions provider and Alibaba Cloud have announced the joint launch of operations in the Chinese logistics market. The solution being launched jointly by the Credits platform and Alibaba Cloud is aimed at solving the multiple issues in the logistics market using blockchain technologies. The approach will be implemented through several business models involving 3PL. The business model being employed under the 3PL approach includes the use of low-cost and versatile frequency sensors that would be installed inside Shipping Containers to monitor their movements and status…
China’s Great Firewall, used by the government to regulate access to foreign internet sites, has blocked one of the most popular sources of ethereum blockchain data. Source
On December 2nd, the Reddit user webb32503 posted a screenshot from a research by the blockchain security firm PeckShield and the software company BitUniverse on a Bitcoin subreddit of Bitcoin(BTC)trade holdings that various crypto exchanges possess. At the top of the list is Coinbase with a total of 966,230 BTC, which is worth over $7 billion in the current Bitcoin price. The leading crypto exchange based in the United States is significantly ahead of other cryptocurrency exchanges in terms of Bitcoin holdings. The second place for the higher number of…