The amount of BTC locked in decentralized finance projects increased by more than 30% in the past week, despite falls in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). The total USD value locked (TVL) can go up and down with markets, even in the absence of a change in the number of tokens locked. In the past week, the TVL dropped from the ATH of $9.6 billion on Sep 2 to $6.11 billion on Sep 10 before climbing back to $7.82 billion. According to DeFi tracking platform DefiPulse, the…
Day: September 11, 2020
Yearn Finance shuns governance token with new stablecoin lending protocol
Popular decentralized finance platform Yearn Finance has announced a new lending protocol dubbed StableCredit. StableCredit combines tokenized debt stablecoins, lending and single-sided automated market makers to offer what it describes as “a completely decentralized lending protocol” reminiscent of MakerDAO (MKR). Introducing StableCredit, a new protocol for decentralized lending, stablecoins, and AMMs. https://t.co/Cuoo2OMi5H — yearn.finance (@iearnfinance) September 10, 2020 Users can deposit USD Coin (USDC) to mint StableCredit USD at a ratio of up to 75%, which can then be then exchanged for other crypto assets. To release the locked USDC,…
DeFi is a ‘once in a decade investment opportunity’ — True or false?
Former Messari Head of Product and well known crypto trader Qiao Wang believes the nascent DeFi sector has enormous growth potential. DeFi has been on a tear this year, with the total value locked growing from under $1 billion to just under $8 billion today. Since the beginning of 2020, TVL across all DeFi platforms in dollar terms has increased over 1000% and it does not look like slowing down anytime soon. Wang compared this year’s DeFi boom to pre-2013 Bitcoin and pre-2015 Ethereum which, he stated, were “once-in-a-lifetime asymmetric…
The IRS offers a $625,000 bounty to anyone who can break Monero and Lightning
The United States Internal Revenue Services (IRS) has offered a bounty of up to $625,000 to anyone who can break purportedly untraceable privacy coins like Monero (XMR) as well as trace transactions on Bitcoin’s (BTC) Lightning Network. The official proposal, published last week, says the IRS will accept submissions in the form of working prototypes until September 16. If accepted, applicants will receive an initial payment of $500,000. This grant will allow applicants to develop their prototype into a working concept over the next eight months. Once the pilot test…
ERC-20 market cap differential over Ethereum hits all-time high
Ethereum’s economic metrics are strengthening as transfer value and ERC-20 market capitalization continue to build momentum. Research by on-chain analytics platform Santiment has revealed that the market capitalization for all ERC-20 based tokens has flipped that of Ethereum itself. It added that it is currently the all-time highest market cap differential of ERC-20 coins over Ethereum. The total market cap for all current ERC-20 assets is $46.7 billion whereas that for Ethereum is currently just over $41 billion at the time of writing. There have been a couple of similar,…
Stablecoins post triple-digit growth in 2020, but institutional rivals loom
The supply of the Coinbase-backed stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) has grown by 250% since the start of 2020, including an 80% expansion in just the past two months. After starting the year with a nearly $520 million market cap, USDC now ranks as the 16th-largest crypto asset with a $1.86 billion capitalization — beating out all other major stablecoins except for the $14.5 billion Tether (USDT) by at least four times. Meanwhile, other stablecoins (most of which are pegged to the value of $1 US) have also seen significant growth…
Pandemic has accelerated adoption of digital currency: ECB President
The pandemic has seen consumers adopt digital payments in increasing numbers and the trend was accelerating, said the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) Christine Lagarde. She also indicated a panel of euro-zone central bank officials is set to reveal a verdict on a European central bank digital currency (CBDC) imminently. Speaking at an online conference hosted by Deutsche Bundesbank on Sept. 10, Lagarde, stated that EU residents had embraced digitalization, with e-commerce sales increasing roughly 20% between February and June, even as total retail sales declined 1.2%. She…