When the history books are written about cryptocurrency, 2020 will be remembered as the year decentralized finance exploded in popularity. A powerful illustration of how this young, often misunderstood space has grown comes from DeFi Pulse. At the start of January, the total value locked in DeFi protocols stood at $675 million. Since then, records have continued to be smashed — and at one point in December, this figure hit a staggering $15 billion. That’s a surge of 2,100% in less than 12 months. Even though there have been signs of a bubble, crypto heavyweights such as Binance CEO Changpeng …
While China now has more billionaires than the United States and India combined, Binance CEO might have more money than any crypto person, a new report says. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has overtaken a co-founder of cryptocurrency mining giant Bitmain in the latest Hurun Global Rich List, an annual ranking of the world's biggest billionaires published Chinese media Hurun Report. Issued on Feb. 26, the new Hurun Report’s list of 2,816 global billionaires includes six individuals who made their fortune from blockchain and crypto industry. Bitmain’s ousted co-founder lost over one billion dollars in a year Similarly to previous compilations …
From the outside looking in, the United States seems to present a host of amazing financial opportunities. However, when it comes to launching cryptocurrency exchanges or altcoin trading platforms, these possibilities start to dwindle and fade quite rapidly. In this regard, over the past few years, the U.S. regulatory landscape has seemed so hostile toward the crypto industry that a number of prominent exchange operators have preferred not to serve U.S. citizens at all — a case in point being Bancor, a decentralized liquidity network, that recently decided to block American citizens from using its website to convert its tokens. …
Following the liquidity crisis and acquisition of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said his exchange will soon start a Proof-of-Reserves audit system to allow verification of its digital asset holdings. In a Nov. 8 Twitter post, Zhao pledged to implement a Proof-of-Reserve mechanism at Binance to provide “full transparency” through the use of Merkle Trees — a data structure used to encode blockchain data more efficiently and securely. All crypto exchanges should do merkle-tree proof-of-reserves. Banks run on fractional reserves. Crypto exchanges should not.@Binance will start to do proof-of-reserves soon. Full transparency. — CZ Binance (@cz_binance) November …
Two weeks after Binance initially pledged to develop a proof-of-reserve (PoR) mechanism in response to the FTX liquidity and bankruptcy fiasco, it published its official response. In an announcement on the Binance website, the exchange outlined how users can use the mechanism to verify its holdings. Currently, the only token available to verify through the Merkle Tree-based system is Bitcoin (BTC), though the announcement says additional coins will be added in the coming weeks. It also highlighted upcoming transparency updates which include the involvement of third-party auditors to audit its PoR results and implementation of ZK-SNARKs in its PoR methods, …