Decentralized finance, commonly referred to as DeFi, has grabbed the attention of mainstream financial and technology audiences alike. While the sector has been applauded for bringing about innovative digital finance solutions from lending to payments, progress has been overshadowed by high profile security breaches. Adhering to these security guidelines will ensure that DeFi solutions will be better equipped to offer users a more instant, safe and secure network than traditional banking services. New DeFi market opportunities overshadowed by security threats When governments enforced lockdowns to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the mainstream financial and banking system buckled under the …

Cointelegraph’s weekly newsletter on the latest in law, policy and regulation for the crypto and fintech industry. Editor’s note A lockdown spring is giving way to a protest summer in the U.S., and this will be an especially U.S.-focused edition of Law Decoded. Washington’s focus has shifted from the novel coronavirus over to the mass demonstrations around the country as well as near the White House. The world watches the combined police and military response that has met the protests. Policymakers are still working to clean up the mess that COVID-19 has made, with the House only recently returning to …

Revolut fired a number of employees since the coronavirus outbreak began, according to a story from Wired. The European fintech company responded with a statement on the numbers and rationale. “As in many companies, COVID-19 necessitated cost cutting across our business and, in the last resort, we made 62 redundancies globally, representing less than 3% of our staff," a Revolut spokesperson told Cointelegraph on June 5. Revolut allegedly asked staff to quit Job redundancy refers to a certain title or position that companies determine as obsolete or no longer necessary, Market Business News explained. Claiming COVID-19 had taken a toll …

While great attention has been paid to the recent enormous accumulation activities of the Grayscale’s Bitcoin Investment Trust, or BIT, the crypto fund manager has also been aggressively growing its Ether (ETH) stash. Speaking on a recent episode of the Coinscrum markets podcast, Grayscale’s director of investor relations, Ray Sharif-Askary, revealed that $110 million worth of ETH has been purchased by the firm during 2020 so far. Institutional investors diversify with ETH As such, Grayscale’s purchases are equal to 0.4% of Ethereum's total market cap in the past five months. Sharif-Askary noted that over 38% of Grayscale’s current clients now …

In an effort to trim expenses, European fintech outfit Revolut has allegedly urged employees to leave, according to staff interviewed by Wired. "Some of the employees allegedly pressured to leave have been left stranded in a foreign country without a job or health insurance in the middle of a pandemic," describes author Emiliano Mellino, collecting stories from multiple Revolut employees. The company reportedly staffed a great number of employees at multiple locations around the world — Krakow, Poland in particular. The Wired report also notes: "While the Polish government has expanded residency permits until the 'emergency period' ends, people from …

Another day, another trillion dollars — the European Central Bank (ECB) has announced it will double its coronavirus purchase program to €1.35 trillion to the dismay of Bitcoin (BTC) proponents. In a press release on June 4, the ECB became the latest central bank to up its controversial response to coronavirus, adding €600 billion to the so-called pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP). ECB: “flexible” asset purchases will continue Launched in March and originally worth €750 billion, PEPP is a mass buy-up of public and private sector securities. Similar to the actions of the Federal Reserve, the scheme has so far …

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has upended businesses around the world, forcing companies to retool their organizations to weather one of the worst disruptions to the global economy in decades. In the face of unpredictability, both decentralization in the workplace and system architectures have taken center stage as methods to combat ever-changing circumstances. While each company faces its own set of challenges, decentralized organizations are inherently better equipped to take on today’s inclement business environment. Decentralization via microservices Binance’s system architecture is a good case study when it comes to decentralization. Over the past two years, our core development team …

EOS-based blockchain platform Telos has announced a partnership with virtual card provider All_EBT to scale the firm’s service for food assistance programs. The partnership will see Telos’ blockchain used to facilitate payments between All_EBT’s stakeholders in food assistance and public welfare. All_EBT is backed by Draper Associates, EOS, and Facebook, and allows recipients of electronic benefit transfers — or EBT — to spend those benefits online. The firm's website currently prompts users to join a waitlist. The firm previously won hackathons organized by Facebook and Y Combinator, and received the EOSIO Hackathon’s social impact award in 2018. All_EBT also provides …

In a seminal blog post by Blockchain Capital, Bitcoin (BTC) was described as a “demographic mega-trend.” And while new technology tends to follow a path of diffusion from younger to older generations, there is another thing driving crypto adoption among Millennials: The fiat-based economy has failed them. The demographic megatrend An online Harris poll conducted in April 2019 found that people aged 18–34 were three times as likely to be familiar with Bitcoin as those over 65, and twice as likely as those aged 50–64. They outgunned all age groups in terms of familiarity. Even more striking, 59% of millennials …

Blockchains reached a feverish level of hype following the ICO mania of 2017. Peddled as the panacea to the world’s ills, many of such promises ill-intentioned, initial coin offerings raised enormous sums of funds within minutes as the public’s focus shifted to the wild world of cryptocurrencies. Once the hype faded, the emerging narrative surrounded enterprise blockchains and the vast potential of the nascent technology to lead businesses into the next generation of the internet. However, much of the original vision of blockchain technology and crypto was lost amid the hysteria. Consortium-backed chains, enterprise blockchain research projects and delegated proof-of-stake …

One of the core narratives of Bitcoin (BTC) since inception is the oft-stated goal of separating money and state. While this has certainly been a powerful creed in the currency’s early adoption by the crypto-anarchist and techno-libertarian communities, what does this actually mean? It’s quite simply a call for a neutral form of money. When stripped of the more political messaging, Bitcoin is fundamentally the introduction of a credibly neutral, global system of value transfer that is open and permissionless yet cryptographically secure and verifiable. This burgeoning crypto economy is still relatively early in its development, yet in the ten-plus …

Before 2009, cryptocurrency and blockchain were not popular terms. However, since their release as open-source software that year, the underlying technology has become a crucial driver for various industries, including finance, gaming, health care, engineering and agriculture. The size of the blockchain industry is expected to reach a stunning $23.3 billion in 2023. Blockchain technology is a decentralized, digitized ledger or database for storing “blocks” of information. It allows for the transfer of ownership of units using an encryption system without requiring control by the government or a central bank. In this article, we will discuss how blockchain will revolutionize …